Intangibles as Cost Justification

On LLRX there is an article on Cost, Value and ROI for Knowledge Management in Law Firms by Stuart Kay, Knowledge Manager for Australian firm Gilbert & Tobin. He argues that "measurement of intangible benefits can only be done qualitatively by undertaking partner and lawyer surveys" which is something I dont agree on at all and his costing model is a rather simple A+B+C cost exercise but the chapter "The Easy Bit: Intangibles as Cost Justification" is really worth reading through as it is a good summary of arguments for KM in a law firm.

And I am pretty certain all of the mentioned benefits can be measured (beyond surveys), some with more some with less effort...

But before you get too carried away with the idea of measuring everything, read Joy London's comments from yesterday:Don't Eat Red Hot Chili Peppers and Don't Skate on Thin Ice!

United Nations & KM

Recently there has been a big rise in governmental efforts to measure KM for various purposes:

1. To instigate discussion towards common accounting standards (which inevitably will lead to the taxation of intellectual capital in the future)
2. To enable technology and know-how tranfer between countries and organisations
3. To improve their own KM (including external know-how and current awareness, e.g. the US government's huge investments in current awareness (= Big Brother) on the internet.)

In August this year Dr. Yogesh Malhotra gave an invited keynote presentation to the UN Advisory Meeting of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs on Measuring Knowledge Assets of a Nation: Knowledge Systems for Development which again gives the basic overview on measures for KM but beyond that also gives some valuable insights in how the knowledge of a nation could be measured. Have a look at e.g. the table on page 25 to find out more about this.

Also I would like to thank Joy London for mentioning my new weblog on exited utterances . It is the first mentioning I know of and I been a regular reader of exited utterances for quite a while myself now. Thanks a lot.

The missing chain...

I found some interesting articles by the "usual suspects", (Strassmann, Bontis,etc.) on KM metrics. In the article by Bontis, one of the very important basics of the balanced scorcard approach is emphasised: "To this end, all measures should be linked through a cause and effect chain, that culminates in a relation to financial results.".

This is something that tends to be forgotten. When I started my PhD programme at Cranfield University earlier this year, one of my supervisors, Mike Bourne was surprised that the scorecard approach taken in the example I presented to him really has a cause-effect chain. He found this unusal as most organisations seem to forget that part of it and just use it as a set of inidicators.

Information overload

Chris Hermann, who is running a non-public weblog encouraged me to have a look at Bloglines, and now I am seriously afraid of information overload. There are plenty of resources on knowledge management and performance measurement out there, the only question left is when to read them and how to digest all that information.

I will however have a look into blogrolls and rss sometime soon. I guess running a blog means quite some effort and time in some cases but I guess I wont go down that road too far even though it is tempting.

I am also very impressed with the ease of use of the tool I use to allow comments, BlogSpeak. It took me about 5 minutes to get it up and running and I am not a techi person...

Mopsos - "It is the privilege of the powerful to see catastrophies from a terrace"

Mopsos - "It is the privilege of the powerful to see catastrophies from a terrace" Another nice comment on Mopsos about the unease felt at a corporate self celebration event on the occasion of the progress of communities of practice.