KM incentives - not about the money

On the topic of Knowledge Management incentives, there are some interesting observations in this article from HR magazine in 2004

The article is a high level overview of KM, which although warning that KM is not about technology, still talks mostly about technology solutions. However there is this interesting couple of paragraphs on incentives.

Why incentives don't work in education, by opensource.com on Flickr

Incentives must be used prudently. One international high-tech firm used contributions [to a knowledge base] to determine raises. Just before year-end evaluations, the system broke down with an overload of hastily composed submissions, many of them meaningless. 

There are less expensive and more effective ways to encourage information sharing. For example, 25,000 Xerox field service technicians around the world contribute to the company’s Eureka database of maintenance tips. The incentive is “to become known as a thought leader” or expert in the field, says [Carol Kinsey Goman, president of Kinsey Consulting Services, a human capital consulting firm in Berkeley, Calif]

Sandy Mauceli, a spokesman for Xerox, says: “Although financial rewards were tried by various organizations early in the Eureka program, that generally did not drive the intended result. The motivation for employees to submit Eureka tips is really the recognition by their peers of being able to solve the really difficult problems.”

This reinforces the message that linking financial rewards directly to knowledge publication results in an overload of poor quality material.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago, where someone from a large company told me of the effect of including the target of "contribute 10 items to the knowledge base" in each employees appraisal. In a company of over 100,000 staff this has led to the publication of a million items every year. With no system of knowledge synthesis, this surge of (usually irrelevant) material has totally swamped the system, with the result that nobody can find anything useful.

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