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Back in May 2013, we held a Roundtable on Knowledge Retention Techniques. Carla Newman, Shaharudin Mohd Ishak and Ashad Ahmed very graciously shared with us their journey and experiences in Knowledge Retention.


Carla Newman – ROCK (Retention of Critical Knowledge)

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here


Shaharudin Mohd Ishak on IE Singapore’s RACK (Retention of All Critical Knowledge)

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here


Arshad Ahmed on Knowledge Retention

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here

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Our friend Maish Nichani has done it again with this elegantly stated piece on breaking the curse of “automagical” search. It contains my quote of the week: “When thinking about search, it is better to think of ROI not as return-on-investment but return-on-information.”


The piece reminded me of a video podcast Matt Moore and I did a while back on “taxonomy fairy tales” – since then, Google (one of our targets) has come out of the taxonomy closet – however much of what we said then remains true. Maish’s piece does a nice job of pointing to the practical steps to get beyond the curse of magical thinking among executives.

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We encounter four major forms of knowledge risk in organizations:

  • Knowledge continuity risks
  • Knowledge acquisition risks
  • Knowledge outsourcing risks
  • Knowledge articulation risks

To read more about these risks, download the article here

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I’ve always been wary of KPIs in knowledge management, because they appeal to a tangible measurement mindset that is easily distracted from the intangible and hard-to-pin down outcomes of KM efforts. I can’t tell you how may implementations I’ve seen where the measurements are diligently gathered and presented as tokens of success (number of documents, number of contributions, number of sharing sessions) when behind the metrics facade, the KM culture and rich sharing habits are as dead as a doornail.


But KPIs, used intelligently alongside “softer” evaluation techniques, do enable you to monitor progress and health in relation to your expectations as you move along your KM journey. And changes or spikes in activity or output trends can signal a need to investigate deeper. So if you take the KPIs with a big pinch of salt and remember you always have to interpret them, they can be a perfectly legitimate tool. So I sat down and wrote this guide to using KPIs.


The paper is in three sections: the first sets out some guidelines for how to use KPIs smartly. The second section gives ideas for sample sets of KPIs covering KM activities and tools as diverse as communities of practice, KM roles, and use of wikis and blogs. The third section is a template for drawing up your own sets of KPIs. The document is in Word format so you can cut and paste whatever takes your fancy (please acknowledge your source). A last word of caution: if you take the whole set of KPIs in this document, you’re taking too many! Leave some time and effort to actually do the work you’re trying to monitor.


Read the guide

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It’s often difficult to approach KM in any large scale way in an organisation without bumping into the policy infrastructure. The organisation will need to make decisions and give clear guidance about how knowledge and information sharing is to be balanced with information security, for example. The requirements for a knowledge sharing system, including taxonomy and metadata requirements, will need to be balanced with the need to manage records according to legislative and regulatory requirements. Knowledge, information and records form a continuum that needs to be managed holistically, and an integrated policy framework helps to support this. In this paper by Patrick Lambe and Marita Keenan we spell out a framework and process for information and records management policy development, in support of knowledge management goals.


Read the guide