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| Home - Industry Article - May 06 Issue |
How to Evaluate Knowledge Management Technology
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Alignment With Key Business Processes:
KM technology choice must be articulated in terms of the business context. For companies to maintain agility, growth, and competitiveness, technology goals must be aligned not only with internal business processes, but also with those of diverse partners, customers, suppliers, and distributors. Hence, understanding the business strategy and processes is very crucial to the selection process. The alignment of KM technology with the business vision and objectives is critical for the success of any KM initiative and requires a pragmatic use of KM technology solutions across the company. The ultimate goal is to reach a state where the company's intellectual assets are systematically managed in alignment with the business process requirements. The effective alignment of KM technologies with business goals and the need to connect these technologies with actionable KM strategy is needed to:
- Align KM strategy with business strategy encompassing the many relationships between strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology. This kind of alignment may require implementation of specific ontology-based reasoning to describe the vocabulary, relationships, and constraints of these relationships. These relationships must remain dynamic and any change must lead to improvement without negative impact i.e. sub-optimization
- Identify KM technologies and where they can support and add-value to business processes, increase efficiencies, and effectiveness of operations as measured by performance models. This may require the implementation of semantic intelligence to add more meaning to information. Addition of value is related to how KM technology assists in developing new insights and creativity
- Identify the critical alignment areas and suggest the required changes in processes, structure, resources, technology, etc., to cause alignment to develop and to maintain sustainability in such alignment. This is where critical intellectual asset needs to be defined and used to result in an enhanced competitive advantage
- Target the critical areas with specific KM tool functionalities such as cost reduction, cost avoidance, minimization of risk and leverage of available resources. This is very dynamic and may change according to knowledge need in specific period
Deployment Strategy:
The deployment strategy depends on the results of the selection process. However, there are certain controllable parameters within the selection process such as the capability of the tool for interoperability and customization that will have direct impact on the deployment efforts. Such techniques typically emphasize the need for suitable ways to represent knowledge, and to build tools that manipulate that knowledge in support of human design activities that may include the following activities:
- Streamline the system to carry out typical knowledge management processes such as capturing, synthesizing, discovering, integrating, applying, and reporting. In addition, define the intrinsic efficiency of the system apart from the operational context (correctness of the knowledge base, appropriateness of the reasoning, etc.)
- Design techniques that make use of semantic protocols to facilitate interoperability, relationships and semantics i.e. XML and web services protocols
- Develop knowledge representational framework that consists of models, languages, concepts and ontologies
- Determine the impact of the system on the progress of business provision (priorities, cost-benefit analysis, share of tasks among different tools, etc.)
The KM technology must be customizable for special needs beyond the standard offering. For instance, there might be a need to add functionalities to account for the lack of business requirements in the selected system(s), and interoperate it with other KM technologies. Significant customization may be needed in areas such as Expert Space where the metadata of this space will consist of the regular community member profile with addition of subscription capabilities and slightly different workflows.
Finally, testing is an important step before the rollout. The purpose of testing strategy is to verify that the selected knowledge technology conforms to the key business requirements gathered during the survey phase. KM technology must pass rigorous testing before production. The testing must involve representation from all users i.e. communities of practices, cross-functional teams and communities of interest. Testing strategy can be summarized in the following:
- Align test results with business goals and key business process
- Prioritize testing activities according to the weights assigned in evaluation criteria
- Test for performance and availability problems prior to production by simulating full loads
- Test for interoperability and search capabilities i.e. ontological effects on search results as related to other modules
- Test interorganization and intraorganization communication including simulated community of practice
The implementation plan must comprise social features and requires participation of all stakeholders. The following tasks are important for deployment, but related to the selection process as well:
I. Training: This section should include:
- Determine how the tool will be rolled out to the user i.e. "Train the Trainer"
- Transfer of vendor knowledge to the owners
- Provide documentation and procedures for new hires
- Make sure that your agreement with the vendor and/or the consultant remains active until you develop your necessary in-house expertise.
II. Maintenance Support: This section should include the following:
- Helpdesk preparation for KM tools
- Ability of the vendor to dispatch support on time
- Ability to provide support in geographically distributed organization
- The vendor's track record
III. Establishing Communities of Practice to use the system immediately after its release for production
There is no management without measurement; in fact, measurement is the nuclei of the performance process. Therefore, develop metrics to determine the impact of the selected technologies on the overall performance of the business process. In many companies, KM is considered strategically critical for decision-making that directly affects organizational effectiveness and competitiveness. Hence, its measurement is a key for productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. The problem of most performance measurements in KM initiatives is that they are always prone to measure or incorporate the confounded effects of various factors. KM initiative performance should be defined before the commencement of KM activities with a clear plan on how to eliminate the confounding effects to measure the value-added or ROI.
Mirghani Mohamed is Assistant Director for the Data Center at The George Washington University, DC. He also serves as the Director of the Knowledge Management (KM) Technology Center, KM Institute at the same university. Mirghani holds MSc and PhD degrees in Agronomy/Statistics and an MSc in Computer Science. He has wealth of operational experience in ICT Roadmapping, Technology Operations, Change Management, Content Management, and Technology Strategy and Capacity Planning. Mirghani has experience as a technical lead for deployments of complex ERP and many other enterprise-wide systems. For article feedback, contact Mirghani at mirghani@gwu.edu
 
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