Metric of the Month, November, Knowledge Management
Hello again all! I’m sure it’s been quite a busy time of year for us here in the IT world and the vendor world. So, it took me until the last day of the month to get that Metric of the Month out. In any case, Knowledge Management is the process that has captured my fancy this month due to an interesting company & story that has grabbed my attention for a number of years.
Back in 2001, when I was on an engagement with Genuine Parts here in Atlanta, I learned what I still believe to be a “Best Practice” in Knowledge Management. There was a gentleman named Dave Cockerill (VP of Accounting and Information Systems at the time) who described to me a little bit about how they handled knowledge management at GPC. We were replacing their exiting mainframe-based solution with Remedy Knowledge Management and Dave wanted to import all of their existing knowledge management articles into the new system. My position was… “What? You want to take a bunch of EBCDIC mainframe text and pump it into our fancy new HTML-based Natural Language Knowledge System? “Uh… NO, BAD IDEA.” I was still thinking a bit like a technologist in those days (I still do sometimes!). Anyway, Dave proceeded to explain to me that they paid their IT analysts .50 every time an article was used. This was possible because the stores were paying for support. But, essentially, these articles were VERY well-written and valuable because of this incentive that GPC provided, even if the articles weren’t in the nicest format. We did improve their system a little bit since we gave them the capability to see which articles has been viewed as well as used, but that’s a story for another day…
As a result of this story, maybe I should have chosen # of articles used, but… this month, the metric is:
Average # of Days to Create Published Solution Article
The time in days from the ‘Create Date’ of the Article to the ‘Published Date’ for Articles with a Status of ‘Published’
Purpose: Measure the productivity of your end to end process for creating Knowledge Articles.
External: Not really, since this is the measurement of the full process, there are many fingers in the cookie jar potentially. You have the knowledge author, approver and editor roles at a minimum.
Context: This metric is most effective when focused on content initiated due to the resolution of problems (from the problem management process that is) around critical business services.
Objective?: Yes, this metric can be used objectively for comparison purposes against publish times for other articles (helping to prioritize time based on importance of solution).