Building the business case.

Knowledge management needs to be understood by senior executives as a strategic initiative that is part of the overall future strategy of the organisation.  This must be a key ingredient to the success of a knowledge management endeavour, as is the case for many IT projects, but even more so in the case of KM.

Therefore a clearly defined up front business case is a must.

A report by Intellect UK makes some interesting observations / cite research regarding the field of knowledge / document management and why organisations need to get serious about it.

• The average organisation loses half its knowledge base every 5-10 years through turnover of staff, customers and investors, this greatly affects its competitiveness and value.
• 80% of knowledge workers’ activities are crucially supported by documents, yet they spend up to 50% of their time searching fro relevant information and data, a drain on valuable staff time that impacts on business-critical activities.
• An organisation of 1,000 staff will waste on average £2.6m a year in staff time that has been spent looking for information, as well as wasting resources.  This greatly impacts on an organisation’s agility and ability to respond quickly and effectively.
• Most managers believe that, apart from database support, systems support for information management is poor.  Access controls are weak, search facilities are ineffective, compliance is patchy and risk is likewise high.  Consequently organisations do not know what information assets they own, where to find them, who has responsibility for them, what value they have, and whether they should be kept or deleted.
• On average staff spend 9.6 hours a week searching for information.
• New information created on paper is growing at an average of 36% per year.
• 38% of staff admit to being caught out by not having the correct version of a document.
• 67% of managers believe that information is so easy to steal, it is impractical for employers to protect it.
• An organisation of 1,000 staff will lose on average £2.8m per year on wasted staff time used for converting information from one format to another.
• 42% of an organisation’s knowledge is held in the heads of its staff.
• A company’s paper filing doubles in size every five years.
• 22% of staff have lost an important email attachment.
• Email generates 400,000 terabytes of new information every year.  41% of staff spend up to fours hours  a day on email.
• At any given time, 3-5% of an organisations’ files are lost or misplaced, replacing these costs on average £100 per document.

Now if we can address some of the above we are addressing real business issues, delivering tangible, measurable benefit and should be able to get some executive buy-in !!!