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Investment and returns from Knowledge Management

The returns on investment in KM reflects in many areas of engagement of an organization. Since in most cases it is not tangible, management assumes that there are no benefits and hence brings down its focus on management of knowledge.

Sharing an example of possible returns from KM. This was prepared for an IT Service company with around 1000 employees. I am sharing the returns first and then the investments involved. Only knowledge and information reuse based benefits are covered here.

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The current global situation has upended nearly everything across the globe, and the professional world has not been immune. People are adapting to remote work across industries, dramatically shifting how they conduct business and go about their days as professionals. It can be even more difficult to adapt to new working situations when you are unfamiliar with your job or your organization. This being the case, remote work has put new hires and their mentors in new and often challenging positions.

KM is a core function of organizations. It is practices by all organizations irrespective of whether they have a formal KM function or not.

There is a need for Leadership to appreciate what KM can do so that they can benefit from it.

I am highlighting a few aspects of KM that are important:

1. Ability to safeguard and grow core competencies (Know-how and Know-why): Typically done through collation, categorizing & storing key contents

Over the past decade, digital transformation has been a key focus for many organizations. Yet, it wasn’t until the recent months when many have been forced to become fully digital that we’ve seen how critical knowledge management is to an organization’s ability to adapt to unexpected circumstances.

Organizations irrespective of whether they have a formal KM function or not, will have to manage knowledge for the four following reasons:

1. Safeguarding & institutionalizing knowledge: Knowledge that an organization has at its disposal decides its competitiveness. The ability to safeguard this critical knowledge and ensure it is institutionalized determines both long term survival and competitiveness of organizations.

COVID-19 has transformed the global workforce. Many organizations, including DAI, have transitioned to almost wholly remote working. And while collaborating across locations has always been necessary at DAI—we work in more than 100 countries—the scale of remote collaboration, with so many staff working from home, has never been this great.

This blog is part of a 4-part series aimed at giving you the language to build a compelling case for change management in your organization.

A quick online search of the question “When do we implement change management?” surfaces the age-old response of “the sooner the better.” It’s common advice that change management efforts should run in tandem with the kickoff of any initiative (or technology launch) to ensure sustainability and return on investment. But in the early stages of a knowledge management project, what does change management look like?

We are going through a disruption in the way we work and manage our work. While the current pandemic has pushed most companies to take work to home, this change is going to last with many companies planning to adopt a new way of working. To make virtual work more productive, one of the key elements is Knowledge Management. This means a lot of coordination with team members and decisions to be made, usually involving information and knowledge. In a physical space, these activities happen without any challenge.

Check out the full video and more at our KM Showcase 2020 Recap Page...

(https://www.kminstitute.org/content/km-showcase-2020-recap) 

The field of knowledge management continues to evolve quickly, embracing new disciplines including semantic technologies and artificial intelligence as core parts of the growing field. Based on our experience as the largest Knowledge Management Consulting company globally, I’ve once again defined the trends that I believe we can expect to see increasing over the next year and beyond. 

For full article, click here...