Welcome to The Source for KM Professionals, March 2007.

"There's a lot of buzz around KM in the business world today and your company is probably not immune," wrote Chris Rivinus in a recent article for KM Review.

"The key to demonstrating the value of your KM program is filtering out the buzz and focusing on the business," added Rivinus.

Here are five top tips for doing just that.

Best regards,

Alex Manchester, Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

Five steps to maintaining a business-focused KM program
By Chris Rivinus, Parsons Brinckerhoff

Companies have been managing knowledge for as long as business has been around. Most of what KM consists of isn’t new. However, today’s business environment requires an intensive focus on how knowledge gets exchanged across geographic, cultural and behavioral barriers.

There’s clear business value in doing KM well, but if you don’t weed out the hype early, it’s difficult for the value to show through. To do this:

1. Focus on problems characterized by intersections of behavior and information. Just focusing on deploying KM technologies won’t produce adequate results.
2. Pick problems to solve that will have as direct an impact on the company’s bottom line as possible.
3. Assemble a KM team that is equally savvy in the areas of IT, business strategy and people smarts. Achieving the right balance of system upgrades and behavior upgrades is critical.
4. Focus on demonstrating KM value to front-line managers. They are the keys to sustained behavior changes for the company.
5. Work for the firm support of more than one senior executive. The more back-up you have the better.

Excerpted from the January/February issue of KM Review.

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