Measuring Knowledge Usage as an Encourager of Cultural Change
- Dr. Moria Levy
- Jun 1, 2002
- 2 min read
One of the components of any project, including knowledge management projects, is metrics. Their importance stems from the need to present ROI (Return on Investment). Metrics are categorized into various types, including quality metrics, quantity/activity metrics, and outcome metrics. Defining metrics is not an easy task - some support the reliability of metrics, while others oppose them. Take quantity metrics as an example - we are often required to question the significance of measuring the usage of a knowledge repository.
Proponents of measurement would say that measuring the level of usage of a knowledge repository is important for the following reasons:
Examining the process itself helps determine whether the process we defined is indeed feasible and encourages the use of the repository.
As a component in measuring ROI, measuring return on investment consists of several metrics, one of which could be the level of repository usage as an example of a quantitative metric.
As a metric for rewards, from this metric, one can know whom to reward, who contributed more to the repository.
As a management tool to encourage usage, measurement motivates employees to utilize the repository, knowing they are being evaluated on it.
Critics, on the other hand, have their reservations:
Viewing a knowledge item from the repository does not necessarily indicate its quality, but it may suggest that its title was effective. In other words, there could be a situation where the number of times a certain item was viewed was small, but the added value that using this item contributed was much higher than that of an item with a higher number of views.
Reward metric - rewarding employees according to the number of views of items each contributed is not a reliable metric. Such a measurement could prompt everyone to access their items to increase the number of views. This can, of course, be circumvented by measuring the number of views of an item, excluding the item contributor themselves; however, this might lead to trading, and everyone will then ask their colleagues to access their items.
This ultimately results in the knowledge manager dedicating considerable time to creating control measures for metrics, rather than focusing on knowledge management. If we examine metrics from a different perspective, we will be convinced of another important advantage, no less significant, of measuring the quantity of knowledge repository usage.
This perspective relates to information consumers, rather than information providers. From experiments conducted, it became clear that the very act of measuring usage quantity accustoms information consumers to use the knowledge repository. In other words, cultural change comes as a result of measurement. Information consumers initially enter the repository due to the measurement of repository usage.
Still, in this way, they become accustomed to entering the knowledge repository and begin to use it in a manner that provides added value, oriented toward both content and need. In conclusion, this is another complementary approach to addressing the challenging problem of encouraging people to share knowledge and utilize knowledge repositories, one that fosters change in work habits and culture.
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