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Abstract: When the question of measuring the effectiveness of Knowledge Management is addressed it is most often in the context of discrete initiatives. These initiatives invariably focus on a specific aspect of Knowledge Management, such as the creation of Knowledge Directories, capturing knowledge from older soon-to-retire employees. Measuring effectiveness then becomes a matter of recording and analysing the extent to which employees participate in these initiatives, how much output is produced, and the impact of the initiative on revenue compared with the initiative's costs to calculate a Return On Investment. While these initiatives are laudable and valuable in their own right they are essentially ad-hoc or supplementary to an organisation's mainstream activities. This paper puts forward the view that managing knowledge is integral to all an organisation's core activities and how effectively it is carried out directly affects overall organisational performance. To measure Knowledge Management effectiveness, however, it is first necessary to decide what needs to be measured. To do this a framework is developed that draws on two seminal concepts in management theory: Michael E Porter's 'Value Chain' (1985), and Douglas C Engelbart's 'CoDIAK' concept (Concurrent Development Integration and Application of Knowledge)(1995). The framework has three dimensions - Knowledge Scope, Knowledge Dynamic, and Knowledge Resources. These dimensions are used to put forward measures of effectiveness that can be applied on an ongoing basis by organisations to assess and monitor how well knowledge is being managed. Finally, to explore their practical application, the measures developed using the framework are applied to two organisations as case studies to evaluate how well they manage their knowledge.
Keywords: knowledge management, value chain, CoDIAK, KM Measurement, KM Framework, case study, knowledge scope, knowledge dynamic, knowledge resource, knowledge taxonomy
1.Introduction
When organisations undertake programs to improve their Knowledge Management, they typically find themselves implementing one or more discrete initiatives, such as:
* Schemes for identifying employees' skills, expertise, and experience and cataloguing them in a way that facilitates better connections and collaboration - so called Knowledge Directories (APQC 2015).
* Programmes to capture knowledge from older, more-experienced employees (held tacitly) and make it available in explicit form ( an example is Shariff 2015)
* Programmes to encourage employees to share personal information online (via a network connection or...