It feels like everything has changed in the past few years, and knowledge management is no exception. KM is generating renewed interest, and KM teams are taking on more strategic and varied roles as they capitalize on technology innovations and address emerging business needs.
APQC is currently running our 2022 KM Benchmarks and Metrics survey to understand all these shifts and how they affect KM staffing, program structure, budgets, approaches, and measures of success. (I encourage you to submit your data by the March 10 deadline if you haven’t already—it’s a fantastic opportunity to get a customized benchmarking report at no cost.)
As data comes in, I’ve been thinking about how the results might compare to the last time we analyzed these benchmarks four years ago. Here are my top predictions.
1. We’ll get data from a different mix of industries.
Services (including consulting and legal) were the most common participating industry in 2018, and I don’t expect that to change. But several industries have been very “hot” in terms of expanding their KM initiatives. These include software, healthcare, pharmaceutical, finance, and nonprofit.
Each sector has its own reasons for turning to KM. Some are managing increasing complexity and becoming more knowledge-driven businesses, whereas others are documenting knowledge to support automation and AI. Nonprofits use KM to make donor dollars go further and show that they are good stewards of the funds entrusted to them. Regardless of the drivers, I’m excited to see new industries engaged in KM. Diverse perspectives bring innovative ideas and an expanded vision of what KM can do.
2. Spending on KM will be way up, especially on technology.
I suspect KM budgets will have outpaced inflation, given that the number of organizations that have doubled down on KM investments since the pandemic. The change will be biggest in costs allocated to applications, platforms, and other technology, which represented only 11% of median KM spending in 2018.
While cloud computing can generate some savings, a significant number of KM programs are embracing specialized tools for autoclassification, automatic translation, knowledge modeling, enterprise search, and AI-driven recommendations. In a survey last year, 52 percent of KM leaders whose organizations did not have enterprise search said they were in the process of developing or implementing one. All of this costs money, not just for the software itself but for implementation support and change management.
3. KM teams will be more geographically dispersed.
Virtual work allows HR to seek out talented candidates wherever they are, and this flexibility is particularly important in the current tight labor market (in the U.S. at least). As a result, fewer KM teams will be co-located in a single office. Since KM is often responsible for championing virtual collaboration tools and approaches, virtual KM teams are well-positioned to role-model the work practices they promote and encourage.
4. Content management will be a bigger part of KM strategies.
The digital workplace has led to a proliferation of content inside organizations, while at the same time making that content more disorganized and harder to find. There are too many places to store things, few rules for what goes where, and it’s easy to store multiple copies in different hidey-holes. Employees have become frustrated with this chaos, and seeking information and expertise is taking up too much of their time. Many organizations have taken note and are engaged in earnest, large-scale efforts to make content easier to find while purging ROT (redundant, outdated, and trivial material). We should see more KM programs focused on content and more KM roles allocated to managing the content lifecycle.
5. KM programs will have better metrics on their business impact.
One of my biggest disappointments in 2018 was how few participating KM programs had moved beyond activity measures to show how their tools and approaches were affecting business KPIs like revenue, costs, cycle times, and innovation. At that time, only 36% were directly measuring KM’s impact on business outcomes, and 24% were calculating ROI.
But enterprises have become more data-driven over the past four years. KM software provides better data outputs, organizations have invested in data lakes and centers of excellence to centralize access to consistent business metrics, and analytics and reporting tools like PowerBI make it easier to connect the dots. I fully expect more KM programs to be actively tracking business value measures—which is great news, since doing so is correlated with increased leadership buy-in and sustained success.
I’ll report back on what I got right and wrong once we publish the new data this spring. In the meantime, make sure your experience is included in our data set by completing APQC’s 2022 KM Benchmarks and Metrics survey. You can download a full preview of the survey from the introduction page, if you want to see everything that’s included.