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Roundtable Announcement
Agenda
Participants
Organization List
Show Me The Money PPT
(Please contact to ICASIT for slide Presentations)
George Mason University's School of Public Policy hosted the eleventh event in the Washington DC region's Knowledge Management Roundtable (KM RT) series at its Arlington Campus on November 15, 2001.
Held in conjunction with the School of Public Policy's International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology (ICASIT) and Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), the KM RT seeks to broaden the application and advance the effectiveness of KM practice in organizations in the region. CIT seeks to increase the Commonwealth's economic competitiveness and quality of life by advancing the development of Virginia as a technology state and by creating and retaining technology-based jobs and businesses.
As part of its efforts to achieve these results, CIT provided a grant to ICASIT to help initiate a shared KM culture among organizations in Virginia by identifying organizations interested in KM and convening the first KM Roundtable that was held in March 1999 (KM Roundtable, March 1999). Subsequently, a KM RT has been convened nearly every quarter: KM Roundtable, June 1999, KM Roundtable, September 1999, KM Roundtable, February 2000, KM Roundtable, May 2000, KM Roundtable, August 2000, KM Roundtable, November 2000, KM Roundtable, February 2001, KM Roundtable, May 2001 and KM Roundtable, August 2001.
With this event, eleven meetings have been held since initiation of the KM RT three years ago; an average of 52 individuals have participated in each event. While 58 participants attended the November 15 meeting (Agenda) by count at the meeting, some 60 CDROMs were distributed, and some 56 practitioners had expressed an intention to participate, only 41 verified their presence by initialing the participants list (Participants); 15 practitioners participated for the first time. Based upon attendance at this meeting on GMU's Arlington Campus, more than 290 practitioners representing some 140 organizations have become involved in the KM RT program. (Organization List).
Dr. Stephen Ruth, Professor of Decision Sciences in the School of Public Policy and Director of ICASIT, welcomed the KM RT to GMU's Arlington Campus and announced a new Masters degree in KM that GMU will offer jointly with the National Defense University (NDU) Information Resources Management College (IRMC).
The Master of Science in New Professional Studies: Knowledge Management, a 36 credit hour program, is intended primarily for holders of NDU certificates, although other applicants will be considered for a graduate certificate in Knowledge Management. Masters degree applicants in this innovative program must have completed either the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Program or Advanced Management Program (AMP) offered by the NDU IRMC or its equivalent. These applicants will generally be eligible to transfer in 15 hours of graduate credit towards their Masters degree.
Courses offered by GMU comprise the additional 21 hours required for the Masters degree and focus on the social-organizational aspects of knowledge management which complements the strong technology focus in the NDU certificates. For additional information, please send inquiries to spp@gmu.edu.
Susan Hanley and Geoffrey Malafsky presented a talk entitled "Show Me the Money: A Practical Framework for KM Metrics," an overview of their "Metrics Guide for KM Initiatives" that they prepared for, and that is being distributed and used widely by, the Department of the Navy.
The Department of Navy KM Metrics Guide can be found at www.don-imit.navy.mil under Tools & Downloads, then click Knowledge Sharing. The guide is also available on "Knowledge-Centric Organization Toolkit" and "C-port: Building Communities of Practice" (in the Library and in Resources, respectively), two CDs prepared for DON. Copies of these CDs may be obtained by sending your name, request, and complete mailing address to Frank Sowa, the new KM lead for the DON CIO, at sowa.frank@hq.navy.mil. A moderately revised version of the materials will comprise a chapter in the Springer-Verlag Handbook of KM that will be released next summer.
Ms. Susan S. Hanley, serves as a Managing Director at Plural (www.plural.com), an eBusiness consulting and development firm, where she leads the Enterprise Collaboration and Content Management practice, a national consulting practice focused on helping clients improve the way they leverage intellectual capital and expertise to achieve their business objectives. She joined Plural with more than 18 years of consulting experience at American Management Systems, Inc., where, in 1995, she became the first Director of Knowledge Management for AMS.
Ms. Hanley is a frequent writer and speaker on building communities of practice and on measuring the value of investments in knowledge management. In September 1997, she was recognized by Consultants News as one of the key "knowledge leaders" at major consulting firms. She has presented top-rated presentations at many conferences in the U.S. and Europe. Her byline articles have appeared in Knowledge Management Review, Management Consultant International, DM Review, and Information Week. Her most recent article is a White Paper in the March 2001 issue of Knowledge Management Magazine: "Don't Build Your e-Business Without KM." She is also a featured author in the books Knowledge Management and Virtual Organizations (2000) and Knowledge Management: The Foundation for Electronic Government (2001).
Ms. Hanley earned an MBA from the University of Maryland at College Park and a BA in Psychology from the Johns Hopkins University. She is a founding member of the Knowledge Management Roundtable and serves on the KM RT Working Group, as a member of the Queen's University KM Forum, and on the advisory board of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. This presentation is the third she has made to the KM RT.
Dr. Geoffrey P. Malafsky serves as President and Chief Scientist of Technology Intelligence International LLC (www.techi2.com), which he formed in 2000 to provide clients with seamlessly integrated systems of advanced technology, business processes, and intuitive user workflow balanced by metrics of operational effectiveness. He brought 22 years of experience in laboratory research, new product development, technology analysis, and program management in several fields, including knowledge management and specializes in identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and applying advanced IT to KM processes and systems. Dr. Malafsky served as a research scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. Subsequently, he worked at Science Applications International Corporation, where he led a variety of programs in knowledge management, technology transition strategic planning, and development of search engine and portal techniques.
A recognized expert in the use of advanced IT for knowledge management, Dr. Malafsky serves as lead technical architect on several enterprise KM system projects. In particular, he concentrates on ensuring that IT tools are used to facilitate people's effective work flow, rather than simply being poorly used systems. His work in KM technologies bridges the fields of human factors, cognitive science, IT, and organizational dynamics. With Ms. Hanley, he wrote Metrics Guide for KM Initiatives. He has written a detailed review of using IT for KM and developed KM Taxonomies incorporating dynamic XML schema and ontological frameworks.
Dr. Malafsky earned a PhD in surface science from The Pennsylvania State University and a B.A. in chemistry from Cornell University. He is a long time member of the KM RT and serves on the KM RT Working Group. This presentation is the third he has made to the KM RT.
Ms. Hanley started the program with a philosophical statement about KM that
provides important guidance for us and all other KM practitioners, for it
presents the very essence of KM. She stated that she and Geoffrey Malafsky
were comfortable about sharing their framework for metrics and KM, essentially
part of the intellectual property that they use in their respective practices,
with others. She encouraged us to use ("steal it, even," she said)
and adapt the concepts to our own organizational needs, but asked that we
honor this offer by sharing what we learn when we use it.
Using the first 15 slides of their PowerPoint presentation (Metrics KM RT), Susan summarized a significant portion of the 95-page article that she and Geoffrey wrote for the DON CIO. In the face of statements by others concerning the demise of KM, Susan cited 1999 and 2001 studies that indicate very positive responses (in the 70 to 90 percent range) from leaders of hundreds of firms in the UK, Europe, the US, and Canada when asked about expectations for, or efficacy of, KM in their businesses. With such expectations, she stated, practitioners should be able to demonstrate value through measurement programs.
Four "F" words provide guidance concerning why we must measure: feedback, funding, follow-on, and focus. These words lead to answers to such questions as: Are we on the right track? Are we doing something wrong or measuring the wrong thing? How does return on this investment compare to other infrastructure investments? Are we focused on the right thing? What behaviors or results are the most important to us? Should we focus on qualitative or quantitative measures? among many other interesting questions.
Measurement programs should be viewed as tools to provide feedback as the organization becomes more knowledge centric. Hanley enumerated nine different types of business problems that KM might solve and addressed six objectives for KM performance measures. The former range from avoidance of reinventing the wheel to creating more value for stakeholders, and the latter range from making the case for implementation of a measurement program to facilitate developing reports on lessons learned.
Using an illustration adapted from an APQC study, Hanley showed that KM initiatives have a lifecycle; they mature from early start-up and pilot project phases and to growth and expansion phases. The study found that the need for metrics differ significantly throughout the lifecycle.
Starting with the organization's business objective and an initial understanding about appropriate KM methods and tools, a seven-box flow diagram depicts the measurement process and shows iterative processes that enable an organization to enhance decision making and understanding, modify the measurement processes, and improve the KM processes.
Susan asserts that selection of an appropriate framework is critical. Selecting the correct framework helps ensure that the metrics will be aligned to the project objectives and the organization's strategic goals. Such a framework can show how actions contribute to overall goals, the mechanisms by which actions produce benefits, the rationale for conducting the KM project, and, in some cases, provide an analytical tool for making investment trade-offs.
Using a modified Balanced Scorecard (with financial, participant, operations, and capabilities and culture perspectives), Hanley and Malafsky show how objectives lead to critical success factors and thence to metrics, values, and variance from the target values. While a measurement program should include both quantitative and qualitative metrics, no more than a dozen or so measures should be investigated.
Susan concluded her remarks by presenting three tables summarizing KM performance measures. These tables show three directions that might be measured in any KM initiative: key system, key output, and key outcome measures. Examples of metrics for each key measure are presented for nine different types of KM initiative, ranging from best practices directory to portal.
Susan passed the laser pointer to Geoffrey Malafsky, who presented a few of the Navy-centric case studies documented in their report. In the time remaining, Geoffrey elaborated on some of the comments that Susan presented while he presented the results and insight gained from the measurement programs which address three different types of organizational activities: personnel and training, program and project management, and program execution and operations.
Geoffrey stressed the iterative, learning, and adaptive nature of the metrics programs. We are not striving for perfection in these measurement initiatives, he asserts, but inferring from qualitative data and looking for the leverage points of performance measurement. Numbers are used, but they are just tools, not the goal. We seek to determine what the process we are measuring does for the organization or for the individual, and how we might improve the process. We seek insight into the organization's core functions.
While many IT systems are open looped, with the content providers often apparently not worried about actual use, good KM systems require closed loops. The KM content provider is very concerned about use and time. This certainly was the case with the Virtual Naval Hospital. The KM goal was to exploit and harness work group interaction on a global scale by providing authoritative point-of-care medical information to deployed providers, medical corpsmen and officers at-sea and in-field. The VNH compiled, pruned, and edited selected topics on 80 primary medical problems to create a symptom-based, user-centered digital library. Redundancy in KM is beautiful, especially in a medical context. For users deployed in remote stations, low bandwidth networks link to servers that supplement and update CDROM distribution.
In response to changes in the manner its customers manage and fund their development needs, the SPAWAR Systems Center Charleston, a fee for service engineering center that markets its services to DON sponsors, needed to improve coordination of its marketing quality and efficiency. The business and KM objective was to develop consistent knowledge and understanding of business development Best Practices and Command capabilities. The approach evolved to collecting synopses of projects and expertise from all branches and making them easily accessible from anywhere using a simple web site, including tacit knowledge of business development experts using videos. This has been an iterative, time intensive, hands on process with a steep learning curve. Though the program is still evolving, system, output, and outcome measures are being used to monitor change and enhance improvement.
A measurement program on KM efforts in the Geographic Information Systems Office at the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune demonstrated improvements for the following two programs, among others. Timber Tool, a specialized ArcView extension that aids the camp's Forestry Division create their annual prescription master plan report, resulted in preparation of the report in a week instead of six months. The Surface Danger Zone (SDZ) Writer Extension provides the capability to determine the spatial extent of an SDZ for a variety of weapons and ammunition types; this new system reduced a four-hour process to five minutes.
Thus, the Susan and Geoffrey led production of a practical framework for measuring the value of investments in KM initiatives. Their work is not a cookbook, but an aid to help us identify and apply measures to our initiatives. If these measurement programs produce meaningful results for you, please communicate your lessons learned to these two practitioners as well as to the rest of us.
Please reserve February 6, 2002 on your calendars for the next KM RT meeting (N.B.: this date is different than that noted in the agenda for the November meeting). A panel of KM leaders at NASA will present an overview of their Knowledge Sharing Initiative. Details to follow.
Please send suggestions for topics, speakers, and venues for this and other future KM RT events to Virgil Frizzell, Consultant for KM with the School of Public Policy's International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology (ICASIT) at George Mason University: vfrizzel@osf1.gmu.edu.
Please also send comments on this report format, as well as suggestions for improvements to the KM RT.