Dear Zweli;

In the forthcoming g KM4Dev journal an article will appear on measuring the value of KM in an organization. The article went though a peer process and was approved for publication in January. I expect the journal to be released this month. KM4Dev journal is open access. 

Daan

On May 3, 2020, at 11:09 AM, Zweli Ndayi <zweli.ndayi@...> wrote:

Good morning
Many organizations in SA are only starting now to embrace the concept of Knowledge Management. Now there is still a big confusion to understand the key role of knowledge management and impact it can have in an organization. Can you give me practical examples to demonstrate the value of KM. In your response can you be clear on the HOW part?

Thank you

My blog has a series of quantified Value Delivery examples

 

http://www.nickmilton.com/search/label/quantified

 

Nick Milton

 

 

From: SIKM@groups.io <SIKM@groups.io> On Behalf Of Zweli Ndayi
Sent: 03 May 2020 04:09
To: SIKM@groups.io
Subject: [SIKM] Key examples to demonstrate value of KM in an organization #Biz_Dev

 

Good morning
Many organizations in SA are only starting now to embrace the concept of Knowledge Management. Now there is still a big confusion to understand the key role of knowledge management and impact it can have in an organization. Can you give me practical examples to demonstrate the value of KM. In your response can you be clear on the HOW part?

Thank you

In his book, Post-Capitalist Society, management guru Peter Drucker wrote that knowledge contributes value to a firm in two ways: increase revenue, and reduce costs. 

If you think about KM in terms of ultimately affecting one of those two things, it then becomes a matter of identifying what business issue KM is being applied to and understanding in advance what intended benefit KM is expected to bring. You identify your measures and metrics and create a baseline before you roll out your initiative, and then you measure and report and adjust. 

Example: The Commodity Trading Desk for a global agricultural products company
A group of commodity traders was set up in trading offices around the world to permit 24/5 trading of ag commodities. As one market closed the trader there would send an email of their open positions, trades, and notes to the rest of the traders. This one message, plus dozens of others through the trading day to report trading activities, meant that on any given day a trader would be deluged with 200-300 emails, which they would spend a couple hours in total reading throughout the day to make sure they didn’t miss an important signal that might affect their trading decisions. When asked what they’d do with an extra hour of time in their day they said, without hesitation, “We’d turn it into money.” 

After studying their activities and confirming the above statements, we worked with the department head to reorganize the whole trading department. We re-allocated tasks and activities in a way that would permit automatic filtering of email, thereby reducing by 40% the amount of email hitting the trader inboxes - and the amount of time they spent dealing with it. We also inventoried expertise required for the trading activity and identified three distinct knowledge domain areas that were involved in the trading activities. This formed the basis for the above re-allocation, and allowed us to better leverage the expertise of the traders by better focusing them on a narrower set of tasks. 

As a result of our KM work this client realized a significant productivity improvement gain among their global trading group that drove increased trading revenue worth millions of dollars per year. It reduced email volume reduced worries about missing an important message, contributing to increased job satisfaction among the traders. This is an example of a soft benefit, which one would expect to show up in an employee engagement survey. 
--
-Tom
--

Tom Short Consulting
TSC

+1 415 300 7457

All of my previous SIKM Posts

Hi,

during my time in the role of Knowledge Networking Officer for Roche Diagnostics we have developed two workshop designs to accelerate project in research. We did not talk about concepts, but instead we interacted with the organization as embedded consultants on the shop floor. One single workshop devoted to a fast start of a project delivered a concrete result, namely to move a projected milestone from November back to May. The 1.5 day workshop took place in January.

So if you ask about the impact - there was a time to market acceleration of 6 months. There was no additional time investment, because a kick-off workshop was planed anyway. The difference was the way how this workshop was conducted and this is what I call workshop design.
To measure the impact, we used the classical metrics with which projects have always been measured by: time, cost etc. This was perceived by the team and management as something very tangible and practical.

Some details about this projects were published in 2002: https://www.aht.ch/publications/
Regards, Pavel
 

Good morning
Many organizations in SA are only starting now to embrace the concept of Knowledge Management. Now there is still a big confusion to understand the key role of knowledge management and impact it can have in an organization. Can you give me practical examples to demonstrate the value of KM. In your response can you be clear on the HOW part?

Thank you

to back up what Tom says, my 2016 conference paper presented a set of 4 statistically validated key areas that demonstrate KM success.  The first area is a direct impact on business processes such as improved roi, reduced cycle times, improved efficiencies, etc.  that are all areas directly tied to measurable value to the organization.  My 2008 paper actually showed how this measurable value was calculated for the case of a nuclear generating station.  I created a couple of value models in that paper.  The two papers are:

Jennex, M., Smolnik, S., and Croasdell, D., (2016). “The Search for Knowledge Management Success,” 49^th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS49, IEEE Computer Society, January 2016.

Jennex, M.E., (2008).  “Impacts From Using Knowledge: A Longitudinal Study From A Nuclear Power Plant,” International Journal of Knowledge Management, 4(1), pp. 51-64.

I've shared these papers before and am willing to share with anyone who wants them.....murray jennex

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Short <tshortconsulting@...>
To: SIKM@groups.io
Sent: Sun, May 3, 2020 8:34 am
Subject: Re: [SIKM] Key examples to demonstrate value of KM in an organization #Biz_Dev

In his book, Post-Capitalist Society, management guru Peter Drucker wrote that knowledge contributes value to a firm in two ways: increase revenue, and reduce costs. 

If you think about KM in terms of ultimately affecting one of those two things, it then becomes a matter of identifying what business issue KM is being applied to and understanding in advance what intended benefit KM is expected to bring. You identify your measures and metrics and create a baseline before you roll out your initiative, and then you measure and report and adjust. 

Example: The Commodity Trading Desk for a global agricultural products company
A group of commodity traders was set up in trading offices around the world to permit 24/5 trading of ag commodities. As one market closed the trader there would send an email of their open positions, trades, and notes to the rest of the traders. This one message, plus dozens of others through the trading day to report trading activities, meant that on any given day a trader would be deluged with 200-300 emails, which they would spend a couple hours in total reading throughout the day to make sure they didn’t miss an important signal that might affect their trading decisions. When asked what they’d do with an extra hour of time in their day they said, without hesitation, “We’d turn it into money.” 

After studying their activities and confirming the above statements, we worked with the department head to reorganize the whole trading department. We re-allocated tasks and activities in a way that would permit automatic filtering of email, thereby reducing by 40% the amount of email hitting the trader inboxes - and the amount of time they spent dealing with it. We also inventoried expertise required for the trading activity and identified three distinct knowledge domain areas that were involved in the trading activities. This formed the basis for the above re-allocation, and allowed us to better leverage the expertise of the traders by better focusing them on a narrower set of tasks. 

As a result of our KM work this client realized a significant productivity improvement gain among their global trading group that drove increased trading revenue worth millions of dollars per year. It reduced email volume reduced worries about missing an important message, contributing to increased job satisfaction among the traders. This is an example of a soft benefit, which one would expect to show up in an employee engagement survey. 
--
-Tom
--

Tom Short Consulting
TSC

+1 415 300 7457

All of my previous SIKM Posts

Hi Zweli,

Loads of best practices and KM excellence can be found out on the APQC website for non-members too. Highly recommend you to check them out!

Regards,
Rahul
India