Keeping the Flame Alive 321Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenlevel consultants, who found ready reference for their project needs and routine
questions about the firm. Managers and partners used the system to locate experts for
use in proposals and to fill staffing gaps for projects. This was particularly valuable when
there were few available resources, and there seemed to be a constant scramble to match
client needs with experienced consultants.
Of all the various facets, Ms. Johnson was proudest of the Knowledge Colleagues
program. Here, more than 800 members of the professional staff, almost 10% of the firm’s
employees, were volunteering time to share their experience with others around the firm.
This was the essence of the cultural change that SMSI needed to leverage its knowledge
capital. The program’s participants were eager to add new materials to the collections
available across the firm, as their contributions were noted in their annual performance
reviews as an important contribution to the culture of the firm. While not a large measure,
there was clearly some recognition in the review process that was felt to factor into raises
and promotions.
Now that the program is in place, Ms. Johnson’s challenge is to establish that
SMSI’s KM can continue to provide value. Will the KM system continue to provide
useful information? She considered the primary driver of the KM program’s success to
date: the perceived positive effect on users and the firm.
User value is subjective, resting in how the user applies the knowledge to the
problem at hand. A KM system may provide a specific answer to a direct question, or it
may provide some insights into an issue that add value in a new context. In a knowledge-
intensive industry, the results of answers may be easy to measure (such as the foregone
cost for work that could be borrowed, rather than repeated), or may be very difficult to
quantify (as with the value of a confirming perspective prior to taking a decision).
To facilitate the acceptance of the KM program, there was no cost to using the
system. It was hoped that a free system to share knowledge would demonstrate its value
organically, rather than through a pricing mechanism. It was expected that the free system
would demonstrate particular deliverables (i.e., training courses) that might be subject
to internal development charges.
With KM systems, as with other types of decision support tools, users who do not
like the tool may choose to ignore it or not contribute to it. Thus one measure of user value
is the level of participation. In traditional transaction-oriented IT systems, users have
little choice about using the technology. They may love it, or they may hate it, but the
computer is still integral to performing their jobs, and users are compelled to make do with
the system. Thus continued participation and inquiry of a KM system may be used as
a surrogate for satisfaction.
In turn, satisfaction with a KM system often generates additional demands for
knowledge. The more value users found with the information contained in the system,
the more likely staff were to come back with additional requests and inquiries (and the
higher the costs of the system to develop new materials). The evidence that requests were
growing was the major justification for continued funding of KM efforts at SMSI.
A more formal measure of effect was still elusive. In manufacturing environments,
it is possible to identify the value of knowledge through reductions in defects, worker
productivity, or other production-based metrics. In consulting, the results of learning
and transferred experience through the use of KM tools tended to be a better quality of
ideas, rather than simply finishing work more quickly. One consultant noted, tongue-in-