Aligning your KM strategy with your organisational goalsMany organisations are active nowadays with KM, but creating a clear focus and ensuring the coherent orchestration of all initiatives appears to be difficult. Many initiatives get off the ground with a diversity of disciplines involved, yet there is often no clear view on how these initiatives are linked, what priorities should be formulated and how effort should be prioritised and focused. It is evident that formulating clear objectives of what you would like to achieve is of the utmost importance.
After conducting several similar audits with clients and in order to support the quest for focus and alignment in KM activities, we developed the DNV-CIBIT KM Navigator™, a model in which we bring together our 15 years of experience in reviewing existing KM practices and developing KM strategies and action plans.
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 The DNV-CIBIT KM Navigator™ has been piloted and enhanced and has found to be robust across all sectors of organisations. It is a simple but powerful model that helps you to address the most relevant issues and to ask the right questions. The model has been adopted by one of our clients who has subsequently been a regular finalist in the annual survey of the world’s most admired knowledge-based enterprises.
This model has many advantages:- it is possible to focus audit activities within a short period of time;
- it covers all relevant audit questions systematically while at the same time it engages people in building and sharing the vision underpinning knowledge management; and
- it allows you to report clearly to all relevant actors involved.
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The DNV-CIBIT KM Navigator™ addresses six issues, which have proven to be crucial in creating focus for knowledge management and are thus key ingredients of any KM audit and KM future planning.
What is important to note is that no one aspect is really more important than another, although we feel that the people aspect is the basis for any successful knowledge management practice. The commitment and competence of your people will be major success factors for realising proposed improvements.
Nevertheless, all of the issues are related and each issue represents a unique set of challenges that need to be encountered to both audit existing KM practices as well as to create a well-balanced and focused knowledge management strategy (based on a review of existing practices). |
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All of the challenges are translated into questions, models and solution strategies. Using the DNV-CIBIT KM Navigator™ allows you to review existing KM practices and create a robust KM strategy in an efficient and effective way.
Depending on the purpose of deploying the DNV-CIBIT KM Navigator™ (reviewing, inventory, plan) the questions seek normative (what should (have) happen(ed)) or descriptive (what happen(ed)) answers.
Using the DNV-CIBIT KM Navigator™, the following elements are of special importance and will be constantly checked during the audit:- Alignment with the organisational strategy:
Knowledge management is not a goal in itself as Gene Bellinger points out in this fascinating article. It should be aligned with business ambitions and objectives within specific areas. - Formulated priorities to make choices and select projects:
We strongly believe that knowledge management should be based upon a knowledge strategy in which is identified which knowledge areas are crucial for the operations. Choices create focus and emphasise the importance of specific processes. - Identified risks and selected ways of dealing with them:
We will look at what risks have been identified and how the organisation chose to deal with them, in each of the six areas of attention of the Navigator. - Integration of relevant disciplines:
Effective knowledge management is all about sharing knowledge across borders (functional, divisional, organisational, regional and cultural). Therefore, learning across borders before, during and after activities to increase efficiency and effectiveness is an important issue. The key issue here is to how all relevant disciplines in your organisation have been integrated into knowledge management practices with internal synergy, but also with other parties involved. - Looking at the future, while reviewing today:
The Navigator is a tool to review current and past knowledge management practices, as well as to plan knowledge management practices for the future, based on opportunities and problems we face today and trends we foresee for tomorrow. Ambitions will be set for the future and these will determine what needs to be done today.
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| For more information about the DNV-CIBIT KM Navigator™ please contact Principal Consultant Eelco Kruizinga by e-mail or telephone +31-30 230 89 00. |
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