I was pulled into a conversation a few months back on whether Knowledge Management was just another corporate fad that had passed over into the third sector. The very topic of discussion was pretty annoying, not just because it indirectly questioned some of the roles I had held in the past but how people get hung up on what something is called rather than looking deeper into its meaning and implications.

Knowledge Management is not a fad, like most management principles it may get rebranded but every so often but in its essence it is the principles, tools and practice that allow your team to create, share and apply what they know to do better. It is NOT the same as organisational development (OD) or learning but the enabling building blocks that helps organisations build strategic knowledge assets. I cannot emphasise enough why this is ever so important in the charity sector, effective KM, or whatever you wish to call it, allows for better quality programs, reduced transactional costs, evidence based decision making and impact through learning. I also agree with the opinion that knowledge based NGOs will be essential to the future of civil society surviving in the west (see WEF, BOND, Oxfam, DFID)

Before we discuss where we should start, lets also distinguish between what is considered in knowledge versus information and data in an organisation as this will also help you make the relevant business cases for moving this work along internally. In a sentence, knowledge allows you to take the relevant information and data to take action. Information and data can be derived from any number of internal and external sources; meeting minutes, programme information, training courses, human resource tools and so on. It is only when we can use this information and data to take effective action do we start to refer to it as knowledge. Doing this consistently with experience thus builds wisdom.                                     

Complete a Knowledge Management & Learning self-assessment. I have found that doing this exercise helps for a number of reasons, especially if you are trying to build a business case to senior management. It is even more useful to try and compare your results to others in the industry. Depending on your resources, you can make this as thorough as you would like it to be. My friends at the INGO Knowledge Management & Learning network created a nice simple assessment tool, available for free download if you sign-up. You can search for others or pay someone to come in and complete it for you. Either way, would be good if you can compare with others that have used the same tool.

This can be based on the gap those areas that you have scored particularly low on as a team or organisation or your corporate strategy. Assign where that area of work sits in the organisation and invite them to join a working group chaired by your executive champion. If you don’t have an executive champion, do that first by presenting how badly you have done compared to others in the sector on #1J.

There are two ways you can go about this; try to first come up with the questions you are trying to answer, list the data sources that will help you answer those questions and make note of the information that is missing. The other way is make a list of ALL your sources of information and work back towards where you would like to make the connections. Don’t be concerned about how to make those connections, just identify them for now. You can draw this out as a network or group like the example below.

Ideally you do not want your KM strategy to be a standalone piece of work but integrated into existing work streams of the various functions you are trying to impact. If that is not possible, develop an ongoing change process rather than a project plan as the cultural implications and behaviours required for success will take some time to embed and sustain.

Like any investment, we should ensure we can demonstrate the usefulness of our strategy in reducing costs, increasing impact or any other benefit we had outlined at the beginning. At the very least you should be able to re-run the self-assessment in #1 and report on areas of improvement. In larger organisations, the aim should be to integrate the KM scorecard into the corporate dashboard and strategy that is discussed and debated in line with the HR, IT, Finance and Fundraising strategy. A competent knowledge based organisation will only benefit from KM by embedding the new ways of working in their culture and there is no better way to do that then leadership showcasing and recognising them at the highest levels.