Evaluation of KM processes

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Discussion on Evaluation of KM processes

Summarized by Charles Dhewa

Kemly Camacho: Hello everyone, we are confronting the challenge to evaluate the changes produced for KM and KS integration in networks. If someone have some references (experiences, methodologies, ideas, etc) useful in this specific area we will appreciate a lot your references.

Joitske Hulsebosch

Hi Kemly, I'm not 100% sure what you mean with changes for KM integration in networks. Can you explain this a little further? Give an example?

I've done quite some reading around evaluation of KM strategies. What's clear is that you need to know where the effects are going to surface- might be at unexpected places. You can then count what can be counted (for instance, increase in messages that receive helpful answers, nr of people attended meetings, nr of people getting connected offline) and interview people to understand how the KM has changed their practices and what the patterns of the change are. Furthermore, you have to make sure that you get the major stakeholders to talk about their interpretation of the changes, as changes may look different for people from different angles.

Is that helpful? An article that explains clearly how you might structure interviews is by Richard McDermott: measuring the impact of communities http://www.kunnskapsnettverk.no/C14/C10/CoP/Document%20Library/Measuring%20the%20Impact%20of%20Communities.pdf. That could work for you if you see your network as a community of practice?

Johannes Schunter: One of the tools for assessing an organization's state regarding KM is the "Learning NGO" questionnaire (see http://www.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/What_is_the_Learning_NGO_Questionnaire%3F). If you do that questionnaire periodically, you can - in theory - track and assess the evolution of an organization's KM culture over time. However, in practice there is the problem that results of such questionnaires tend to get worse the more after KM is rolled out strategically in an organization. This might be due to several reasons, one of them being that the more people in an organization learn about KM, the more they realize how deficient their current KM practices might be. There was an interesting thread about this last year initiated by Marc Steinlin, maybe you want to have a look: http://www.dgroups.org/groups/km4dev/index.cfm?op=dsp_showmsg&listname=km4dev-l&msgid=740450&cat_id=11846 (sorry, there were much more contributions of KM4Dev members on this thread, but I don't know how to post them in one link).

Lucie Lamoureux:

Hi Johannes,

I think that the thread you are referring to was called the "Miracle of the Spider". The list archives are a bit problematic but if you type "spider" in the search box, you'll get to it. There is also the excellent summary on the wiki here: http://www.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/The_Miracle_of_the_Spider