Immediate Visibility of Benefit

The knowledge management process in an organization must navigate the delicate space between the individual and the organization as a whole. On one side of the process stands the long-term organizational benefit. We believe that knowledge management can help leverage the organization, improving the quality and efficiency of its performance on the path to achieving its goals. On the other side of the process stands the individual.

The knowledge management process can never exist without them. The individual is essentially the key to initiating and driving the process, and their success lies within them. Here, we face an interesting challenge: on one hand, we want to work toward achieving long-term organizational benefits; on the other hand, to do so, we must harness the individual to the process today and ensure there is a benefit for them as well. The visibility of benefit is also important - it's not enough to tell the individual "you have a benefit," but the benefit must also be visible to them. And last but not least, immediacy. If we want to harness the individual, the proposed solution must address their needs immediately, not next week or next year, otherwise they will always postpone their entry.

The concept of Quickly-Visible Benefit offers a technique that helps us address the challenge mentioned above: to initiate the process, we must convince the individual to participate; we must prove and emphasize the personal benefits that will accrue to them from the process. The benefit presented to them must be very specific and practical, suited to the content world of the knowledge they manage. In this case, proving the benefit alone is not sufficient. The benefit must be immediate; otherwise, the individual will become attached to the process, maybe tomorrow or maybe in a week, and those benefits will never materialize. Emphasizing the immediacy of the benefit will encourage the individual to engage with the knowledge management process today.

Creating immediate visibility of benefit for the individual can be achieved, for example, by incorporating fixed formulas into the work template that would usually be calculated manually each time anew.

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