Literature review: Measuring KM Initiatives

A Knowledge Management (KM) initiative:

• may have a fuzzy beginning and could perpetuate indefinitely;
• attracts varying degrees of legitimacy and leadership support, and;
• comprises both mechanistic and organic dimensions.

Measuring a KM initiative drives from:

• an economic front (i.e. return on investment);
• an strategic front (i.e. further developments organisation-wide, such as growth in market share), and;
• an political front (i.e. positioning as champions of leveraging organisational knowledge).

Elements to measure are:

• measuring activities;
  • System metrics (seek to approximate the usefulness and responsiveness of supporting technologies - number of downloads, site accesses and so on)
  • Output metrics (measure characteristics such as the effectiveness of lessons learned, user ratings, frequency of being rewarded, number of problems solved and so on)

• measuring knowledge assets (also known as intellectual capital);
  • Tools:
    • Skandia Navigator;
    • Intellectual Capital Index;
    • Technology Broker, and;
    • Intangible Asset Monitor.
  • Methods:
    • Direct Intellectual Capital (DIC) attempts to identify various components of intangible assets (is on organisational level)
    • Market Capitalization (MC) assumes that the value of intellectual capital is the difference between and organisation's market value and the book value of its net assets (is on organisational level)
    • Return on Assets (ROA) seek to estimate the value of an organisation's intangible assets on the basis of the organisation's average profits, average tangible assets and the industry's average ROA over a fixed period of time (is on organisational level)
    • Scorecard (SC) is similar to DIC except that they do not assign monetary terms to the intangible assets (is on project level)

• measuring impact on organisational processes (deployed in time-series design);
  • Knowledge Management Assessment Tool (KMAT) - examines leadership, technology, culture, and measurement.

• measuring impact on business objectives (by collecting systemic anecdotal evidence).

Source: Alton Y.K. Chua, Dion H. Goh. Untying the knot of knowledge management measurement: a study of six public service agencies in Singapore. Journal of Information Science, Volume 34, Number 3 (June 2008), pp. 259-274