KM Strategy

Benchmarking

Iknow’s benchmarking services highlight the approaches of other organizations that have successfully implemented knowledge management programs with the lessons learned from their experiences. Our benchmarking services assess our clients’ KM strategies, policies, practices, and systems against comparable organizations in their industry sector and against recognized leaders in the KM field to identify performance gaps and opportunities for improvement. 

Business Value

Iknow’s benchmarking services benefit greatly from our senior team’s KM leadership and operational experience—we know where to look for the most relevant ideas and insights that can improve our clients’ KM programs and initiatives, and that will work best in practice. Effective benchmarking can significantly accelerate KM strategy development and avoid wasted effort on implementing policies and practices that won’t translate well to a different organizational setting.

Deliverables

Iknow provides benchmarking results either as a stand-alone report or as part of a larger deliverable, such as a current-state assessment, strategy, or roadmap.

Strategy and Roadmap

Iknow consultants have years of collective experience working with executives and managers to develop customized KM strategies, KM mission and vision statements, and implementation roadmaps for client organizations. We help clients ensure that their KM strategy is consistent with other business priorities and will help the whole organization pursue its goals.

Business Value

The KM Strategy and Roadmap documents are critical in ensuring that knowledge management initiatives have clear and meaningful goals, align with other business priorities, and include the appropriate actions to drive rapid progress and guarantee effective execution.

Deliverables

Iknow’s primary deliverable is a KM Strategy document that summarizes the key business goals of knowledge management, the key organizational and process challenges to be overcome, and how success will be measured. The final document is often preceded by interactive workshops to discuss interim hypotheses and conclusions. 

A separate KM Roadmap document, also prepared following interim review sessions, describes each implementation initiative, together with its rationale, relative importance, timeline, and costs. The document includes a prioritization framework and options for sequencing the overall implementation effort.

Iknow also offers assistance for implementing the KM Roadmap.

Business Requirements Collection and Confirmation

Iknow conducts business requirements collection, analysis, and confirmation projects to identify clients’ top priorities for the types of knowledge that should be collected and managed, and the capabilities and tools that should be developed to support KM in the future. Some clients already have strong beliefs about these priorities, in which case the analysis is streamlined and focused on validating the set of initial requirements.

Business Value

The Business Requirements Document is a key input into the KM Strategy, which defines the organization’s overall plan for knowledge management and how it will support business objectives, and the development of KM technical requirements.

Deliverables

Iknow’s primary deliverable from this work is a Business Requirements Document that summarizes the organization’s priorities for KM content and capabilities development. Iknow often supplements this document with detailed interview summaries and survey compilations, providing a more detailed view of the source data. Other deliverables could include business use cases and business process and knowledge flow maps.

Current-State Assessment

A thorough understanding of our client’s current-state environment is essential for ensuring a successful KM assignment. We typically begin our consulting engagements with a Current-State Assessment that captures and documents a current-state baseline. The scope of this initial assignment can be narrow or broad, and depends on the size and complexity of the client’s business issues and the desired future-state vision.

Business Value

Iknow’s Current State-Assessment defines the “size of the prize” by identifying and defining the opportunities as well as highlighting where the current KM programs and tools fall short. The assessment categorizes the specific issues and opportunities into the eight focus areas of Iknow’s diagnostic framework. In addition, the Current-State Assessment provides the foundation that supports the implementation activities in the KM Roadmap.

Deliverables

Iknow’s deliverables typically include a detailed Current-State Assessment final report, which includes detailed assessments for each of the eight focus areas. The report addresses the client’s central business issues.

Knowledge Audit

 

Business Value

Iknow’s Knowledge Audit provides a strong foundation for developing a knowledge management strategy. The Knowledge Audit identifies the organization’s critical knowledge assets, how the knowledge assets are being used today, the importance of each asset in making key decisions, and how the flow of knowledge could be improved.

Deliverables

Iknow’s deliverables typically include a comprehensive inventory of each organization’s existing knowledge assets by type, information channel, topic area, originator or source, and end user. Knowledge maps augment this information by depicting the major flows of knowledge from originators to users and the gaps or restrictions on this flow.

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