Share your story! Participate in the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge to help identify the measures that matter for Knowledge Management

Measuring the impact of knowledge management is a hot topic in international development circles and many of us are trying to find ways to effectively measure and demonstrate the results of our investments in knowledge and learning to understand how these investments help us achieve our development objectives faster, more effectively, more efficiently, and/or with greater impact. We all know that there are no simple answers or one-size-fits-all approaches but there is increasing consensus that we need to work together to address these challenges by asking ourselves difficult questions and exploring the context of emerging solutions.

IKM-convergent? Annual programme meeting, Wageningen, day 1

A while back I blogged about the IKM-Emergent programme and its tendency to dispersion.

The programme has evolved since then and a number of things are coalescing on this first day of the all-peeps IKM-Emergent  workshop (which brings together the three working groups, but also a number of new guests that are working on issues related to IKM-E and/or that will be working for the programme from now on).

IKM participants getting their heads around common issues

Around the MandE table: a cooking lesson?

Much has happened since Simon and I started working on this paper about the monitoring and evaluation of knowledge management (M&E of KM, see original post here) and the cooking lesson continues, for us anyway and hopefully for you too, as in this case there are not too many cooks!

At the M&E cooking class, there's never too many cooks (Photo credits: vår resa)

On the KM4DEV mailing list, there has been a useful exchange on this topic of M&E of KM and this has triggered more reflections on our side to approach this paper. By the way, special thanks for Sarah Cummings, Roxane Samii and Patrick Lambe for getting this discussion going!

Simon just introduced in a blogpost one of our suggested theoretical models to address the different paradigms (what I profanely refer to as ‘world views’) on knowledge management, offering a spectrum from positivist to constructionist and from cognitivist to social learning).

In this post I’d like to share a refined version of the framework that we would like to offer to your scrutiny. This framework will eventually include a series of questions helping to crack the nuts for the M&E recipe, but for now let’s focus on the recipe itself.

Managing “le savoir”

The date is set: 5 October 2009, in back to back with the annual KM4DEV event, the first cobbles on the road to a francophone community of practice on learning for development will be paved, in Brussels the modern Babel tower!

9- Estimating the Benefit from Organizational Learning

One of the poll questions I often ask participants in my KM workshops is “Estimate what percent of your total knowledge (now) came from your formal schooling.” Almost all answers are below 50%. The average hovers around 20%, depending on the ages of the participants. Then I ask “Where did the 80% come from?” Their answers reveal three major sources: learning from doing/working, learning from study/reflection and learning from interaction/sharing with others.

Measuring the impact of KM

How to monitor and evaluate the impact of knowledge management initiatives? This is the central question of the study for Working Group 3. An intriguing and important question worth further research. On this blog we will share our insights and thoughts on this subject with you. Where to start? It appears important to be clear from the outset on what we mean with monitoring and evaluation on the one hand, and knowledge management initiatives on the other. And how do we see the context, the development paradigm we are working in?