Patrick Walsh, who writes the blog, ManIA posted an article that is worth reading on an approach for measuring the value of intranet pages called "Content Value Analysis"  This approach allows benchmarking of sites for parts of sites against each other:

"Each page would be examined and scored for its value against a set of heuristics e.g. if content is obsolete, outside of a review date, incorrect, incomplete or irrelevant the score would be 0. If there is some value on the page it could be marked as 0.5 and if the page content generally has value the score would be 1."

The objective is to provide intranet managers with a tool to assess the value of the portal or intranet that they manage.  The page or section scores can be displayed graphically and can be used to motivate people to keep their sites up to date.

I have found Nouriel Roubini's comments on the economy insightful and on target.  Sometimes called "Dr. Doom" for his gloomy predictions about the world financial markets, Roubini has been exactly on target with his analysis of the timing and depth of the financial crisis.  His latest analysis about the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac solution exposes the flaws in the governments approach to the bailout.In addition to the article linked to above, Roubini was the academic lead on the World Economic Forum's Financial Development Report 2008. The report provides a rigorous analysis of the world's financial systems and capital markets.

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The Financial Development Index captures measures of financial stability related to financial turmoil in the US, UK and other countries. The Index puts these measures in the context of a broader assessment of financial development which we hope will promote a balanced agenda with respect to reform."

 James Bilodeau, Project Manager, Financial Institutions Community

Building a knowledge sharing culture requires that you involve business users in development of your knowledge management solution early and often.  Here are some suggestions based on my experience:

You can  begin to get your business users involved in the building the knowledge management solution by having them  help to identify the documents or other content that has the most value to the business. I recommend that you have business users participate in creating and applying the metadata or taxonomy that will apply to the documents. The more precise you get in describing content, the easier it will be to find later.  By getting the community of users involved early you can begin to explain knowledge management to them.  The early participants and adopters can act as evangelists later. With user feedback you can identify and tag the most valuable material so that when users perform a search it appears at the top of the results list.

There are other ways to begin to build the culture of sharing.  You will need to explain to your business users:  "What is in it for me".  They need to understand in a profoundly personal way how they will benefit from the KM initiative and how their work will change.  This is usually done with anecdotes about a success that resulted from sharing knowledge.  You can find examples of when your company performed the best; when everything worked just right, and ask people how it felt when that happens.  Most of the time, the best practice involves collaboration, working as a team, and sharing knowledge to win new business or deliver a high quality product.  The KM solution will enable the company to function like this more often.  The objective is to find a story you can tell about knowledge sharing that is very positive and attractive. People can then begin to imagine how knowledge sharing will help them with their work.

In addition to working with the business users, it's critical to have visible top management support.  This will not require much of top management's time, but they will need to demonstrate their enthusiasm for knowledge management frequently.  They need to be convinced that this is an initiative that will create meaningful results in the business and they need to lead in that direction.

I recommend communicating frequently to business users, explaining the KM planning and rollout and how it will benefit their work.  Don't overpromise, but keep them well informed.  Show them example screen shots of the search page, or other functionality that will make their lives easier.  You can use "use cases" or scenarios to demonstrate how people will use the new tools.  This process of building actual scenarios that explain how users will search and apply content is very powerful.   

IBM's Enterprise Tagging Service social software saves $4.6 million a year

Tagging content in a company's intranet has becoming an increasingly important functionality, although the return on investment has not been clear.  IBM's case study suggests that tagging has already yield some monetary benefit.  Here are the results that IBM reports:

• "The Enterprise Tagging Service in IBM aims to provide an alternative approach to helping people find information compared to traditional search engines. Search based on keyword analysis often relies on a taxonomy that is rigid due to the way the software performs its structural analysis of web pages, identifying and classifying the keywords. Social tagging allows people to add human semantics to keywords that they define that sometimes can amount to finding a resource faster based on what people think is relevant.

• IBM's ETS cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties: traditional search engine results, top content pages, and web applications like the IBM internal social brainstorming tool, Thinkplace. As a service it can really be added to any internal page. Readers can tag any page with the widget, look up tags they contributed, find others who have used the same tag, and certainly find other relevant resources by that same tag. The ETS tool was based on the Lotus Connections Dogear software.

• The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain. The reusability of this page widget also resulted in $2.4 million in cost avoidance (reimplementing this for each site)".

It is hard to show a causal relationship between investment in knowledge management and increased returns. That said, there are some ways that you can demonstrate positive contribution to business results. First, you have to understand the performance that needs to be changed in order to demonstrate a return. In fact, you will need to know the metrics that the business uses to measure results in the business process.

Say, for example, the business wants to improve sales performance and the key metric is win rate. Knowledge management can have a profound impact on win rate by helping the sales people understand their clients and sales prospects better and by helping them prepare for sales calls. The KM function can help the sales person understand what the customer has bought in the past and what other analogous solutions other companies in the same industry are buying. The KM function may be able to find information on the customer buying team and specific individuals in the company. If expertise in the company is mapped and searchable, the sales team can access subject matter specialists in the company to help with proposals. If you have a shared bookmarking capability in the company, the sales team can research sites that have been useful to others in the past. To make sales easier, there may be boiler plate language or certain valuable slides that are put in every sales presentation and the KM function can make this content visible to the entire sales community. So you can see there are many interventions that you can make to improve win rate.

Armed with the facts and the details about what the KM function did specifically to enable the sales process you can demonstrate the causal relationship between specific actions and increased sales performance. It is likely that you can even show that teams that took advantage of KM resources were more successful than teams that did not.

To make the business case for knowledge management and to demonstrate a return on investment, this type of detailed analysis is required. The depth of your analysis and your passion can be very convincing to management.

Making decisions about a knowledge management strategy that will deliver improved sales, innovation or delivery performance requires an appreciation of the value that can be created by this kind of improvement initiative.  Companies frequently diminish the value by arguing about what knowledge managment is or is not.  Knowledge sharing that produces business results is ineluctably tied to business process.  In fact, I would assert that knowledge management has no real relevance outside of business process.

To improve the performance of a process you need to understand the individual worksteps plus the information and skills that are required to be execute effectively.  Ask yourself: Is all the information required to do the job provisioned to the employee or do they have to do research in order to complete the task?  If research is required, are their job aids that can help them accomplish the task?  Is training available for people who don't have enough experience.  Knowledge Management seeks to provision the employee with all the information, content, perspective, and learning required to create value.  Mapping critical content to a business process enables knowledge workers to increase productivity and improve the quality of their work.

At Coherence Group we combine access to knowledge, learning and methods  to enable knowledge workers.  This requires adjustment to some business processes. It also requires an implementation of electronic support systems that help get employees find and apply the information they need to effectively execute their jobs.

Most of my clients use SharePoint as their enterprise platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing.  Tonight I discovered an interesting site that provides an encyclopedic resouce for SharePoint: SharePoint Pedia  There are lots of good articles and examples of SharePoint best practices.

 

I have created a new page on the site that highlights and links to the service partners that I work with to deliver high value solutions to clients.  Each of the firms has a unique service offering that complements the capabilities of Coherence Group and allows us to provide a broad range of services, from market research to bespoke software development.  The objective for these alliance relationships is to provide a process and technology platform for knowledge, learning, and methods in your company. 

Coherence Group has partnered with SigmaFlow to sell and deliver their Best Practice Execution System to our clients in Professional Services, Financial Services, and Oil and Gas. This capability allows companies to identify, distill and transfer knowledge, best practices and lessons learned. Knowledge gained from serving clients, or from supporting internal functions can be captured, prioritized, categorized and turned into actionable strategies to improve process performance.

The service offering includes the methodology for identifying and capturing best practices, training for teams so they can effectively implement the solution and an software application that enables best practice transfer and application.