T4-2 An Inexpensive Tool for On-line Meetings and Follow-thru M&E

Do you need to conduct a meeting between people who are located at different cities in the world?

As CCLFI principals are spread around the globe (Jasmin Suminstrado in Africa and Europe, Alwin Sta. Rosa in Pacific countries, Daan Boom in Nepal, me hip-hopping across Asia and new member Ron Young in U.K. and France), we had to find and practice an inexpensive method of conducting on-line meetings. Former CCLFI Director for Operations Leslie Gopalan from Malaysia had introduced us to this tool. And of course, before we teach a KM tool to our clients, as a matter of policy, we first practice the KM tool ourselves.

Our simple formula:

1. Create an Agenda (topics or issues for discussion or decision, lead person or responsible person, dates, any background information) in Excel file, upload it to Google docs (a free service by Google), invite members who will attend the meeting to view/edit it, and email the exact time of start of the meeting.
2. Before the meeting time, any member can edit or add new materials onto the Google doc file.
3. At the appointed time, members go on-line and conduct the meeting using Skype conference call (of course, every member must have Skype accounts – it is free; use of headphone is advisable to minimize audio feedbacks and ambient noise).
4. During the meeting, each member accesses the agenda worksheet in Google docs, and anyone can edit or add new materials to record the points being raised and the decisions reached (any cell being edited by one person is temporarily locked out from the others; but once he is finished editing, the result is visible and editable by the others; members can edit different cells simultaneously).
5. There is no need to write a Minutes of the Meeting; the Minutes is being written by everyone as the meeting progresses!
6. The decisions reached and the actions to be taken are recorded, together with the person responsible and the deadline date for finishing the action.
7. In other words, at the end of the meeting, the Agenda morphs into the Minutes of the Meeting.
8. Days and weeks after the meeting, the people responsible for the different actions agreed upon must report on his progress (or problems met) by making corresponding entries on the Google docs file at any time. At any time too, any member of the team can check the progress of the others by accessing the same file. In other words, the Minutes of the Meeting next morphs into a team Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) tool!
9. Once all the actions are done, the file can be part of the team’s work archives.

Does your team use any similar tool? If so, please describe it too using the “Leave a Comment” link below. Let us learn from each other.

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Paper on “Monitoring and Evaluation in KM for Development” Now Available for Free

IKM Emergent has released for publication and has made available for free to the development community my paper on “Monitoring and Evaluation in KM for Development”. You can access it by pressing “Ctrl” while clicking HERE and saving the PDF file.

Cheers!

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D10- KM Tools: Qualitative to Quantitative

The span of attention in KM ranges from explicit, concrete and quantifiable objects to tacit, subtle and qualitative processes, and many others in between:

Similarly, tools for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of KM range from the (mostly) quantitative to the qualitative. In the “KM Framework or F Series” I have discussed the issues surrounding measurement of KM impacts. An adaptation of these discussions for M&E of KM for development will be published in early 2009 by IKM Emergent Research Programme and EADI (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes).

Here is an inventory of M&E tools, classified by stages in value creation and by various user groups. The brown entries are largely quantitative; the blue italics entries are largely qualitative; and the rest are mixed.

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F14- M&E of KM for Development

“KM for Development” or KM4D can be seen from different viewpoints.

Level 1. Community viewpoint

We saw earlier in “Unconscious KM and Conscious KM” that successful anti-poverty projects are those that leveraged well the intangible assets owned by or accessible to the community, and that the broader concept of “intangible assets” and the even broader construct of “metacapital” are preferable units of management than the more limited “knowledge assets” or “knowledge”. From this community or “insider” viewpoint, the concerns are:

• Identify and leverage on strong intangible assets of the community
• Identify and neutralize weaknesses and risks in community intangible assets
• Identify, select and design projects that address priority community needs and leverages on community intangible assets
• With whom and how to best link up with stakeholders who can best support their projects
• Embed self-learning processes in community projects.

M&E of KM4D at this level refers to tracking and evaluating community intangible assets: existing before a development project, those leveraged or used in the project, and what the project brings in from or enables access to the outside. It is M&E of community KM, or better, it is M&E of community tangible and intangible assets and their management.

A special case is KM by MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises); this is a new frontier, where the main issue is how to translate the successful KM practices in the larger corporate sectors to the MSME level. Note that “KM by MSMEs” is not the same as “KM for MSMEs” which is a concern of development workers and institutions (Level 2). MicroLINKS is an example of the latter.

Level 2. Development workers and development institutions’ viewpoints

From our studies of successful local development projects in the Philippines, facilitating information/knowledge flows to/from various development actors did not emerge as a success factor. Yet, this is the common framework in most KM4D discourse. Knowledge sharing is an issue more at this level than at the community level. One sees this assumption cutting across various concerns voiced in KM4D communities:

• Provide the development worker the right information/knowledge at the right time
• Facilitate cross-project learning
• Collect and share good/best practices and tools
• Provide local communities with the information, knowledge and technologies they need
• Set up knowledge-sharing communities
• Facilitate organizational learning
• Learn from project successes/failures to design/innovate better development projects and programs

These basically “outsider” concerns are patently different from community or “insider” concerns in Level 1.

M&E of KM4D at this level refers to tracking and evaluating the management of knowledge deployed by development workers and development institutions. It is M&E of organizational KM, program KM or project KM. An on-going task here is to borrow and adapt workable M&E of KM approaches from the corporate sector to the development sector.

3. Local and national government viewpoints

At the national-level, the KM4D discourse centers around the search for appropriate government strategies, policies and programs to enhance national intellectual capital/assets and to use these assets for national development including to capture opportunities in the emerging global knowledge economy. The most well-known effort in this direction is led by the World Bank using its Knowledge-Based Economy or KBE model, and its accompanying quantitative M&E system of indicators, namely, the Knowledge Assessment Methodology or KAM. The Asian Development Bank attempted to improve on the KBE model, which is focused only on the economic dimension, by proposed a Knowledge-Based Development or KBD model which seeks to marry the intellectual capital framework from KM with the sustainable development framework spearheaded by the UN primarily via the 1992 Rio Summit. Similar M&E indicators under ADB’s KBD model has not yet been developed.

KM4D among local governments is another new level of discourse and programmatic attention. In the Philippines, this is taking the form of KM slowly being adopted within and across local governments, as well as by the Local Government Academy, the training and R&D arm of the Department of Interior and Local Governments. The World Bank had supported a successful knowledge-sharing program across Philippine cities and among city mayors, called the City Development Strategies (CDS) project.

In places where sub-national and trans-national political factions are engaged in conflict (e.g. Congo in Africa, Mindanao in the Philippines, Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal border areas), “peace and development” is the dominant discourse. Using KM language, their main task is how to create or strengthen inclusive “bridging social capital” across warring social groups, and how to reduce the type of “bonding social capital” within each group that cultivate exclusively internal social cohesion at the expense of social cohesion across the wider national system. Here, development can hardly proceed until after a minimum threshold of peace (e.g. ceasefire and political negotiations/agreements) had been set in place.

Note that power — the power to influence what eventually happens at the local level and the power to set the agenda for development discourse — is least at Level 1 and greater at Levels 2 and/or 3. Note, too, that “KM4D” comes from the language of Level 2 discourse.

In an earlier post entitled “Proposed M&E Framework”, I have given illustrative examples of M&E at three stages: knowledge available (supply), action or user of knowledge (demand), and results of application of knowledge (output and outcomes). Those examples can be broken down further according to the three levels above plus two categories: networks and corporate sector, as follows:

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F5- A Proposed KM Framework

A source of confusion in the field of KM stems from the use of the very common word “knowledge.” Let us discern how KM gurus use this word, starting with the guru of all management gurus, Peter Drucker:

“Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody — either by becoming grounds for action, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action” – Drucker

“Justified belief that increases an entity’s capacity for effective action” – Nonaka

“Knowledge… should be evaluated by the decisions or actions to which it leads.” – Davenport and Prusak

“Knowledge is the understanding of relations and causalities, and is therefore essential in making operations effective, building business process, or predicting the outcomes of business models.” – McKinsey & Company

“I define knowledge as a capacity to act” – Sveiby

“Knowledge is information in action” – O’Dell and Grayson

In KM, “knowledge” is capacity for effective action, which includes belief, understanding of cause-and-effect and information useful for effective action. It encompasses whatever helps you do your job well. Thus, information that is not actionable is not knowledge. “Effective action” is the operational, empirical or behavioral indicator of the result of applying knowledge well in a particular context.

The model we showed earlier (where, following the previous post, I expanded “knowledge assets” to “intangible including knowledge assets”) provides a simple KM framework. Because this framework links knowledge assets to results of KM, it also provides the foundation for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of KM, or better, M&E in the management of intangible assets.

This cause-and-effect model simply aims to highlight the fundamental link between knowledge and action, and between action and value creation. In actual practice and in specific work contexts, there are many factors that are in play: (a) effectiveness of an action is very dependent on context including relationships (discussed in blogpost entitled “F7- Interactivity and Context”), (b) value creation is dependent on users’ definition of what is valuable to them (discussed in blogpost entitled “F13- KM is for value creation: WHOSE value?”. Check also the ugly and messy “flies in the ointment” I pointed out in “F3- KM is for value creation”), (c) knowledge workers’ behavior depends on their personal values and inner motivation, support from peers or boss, incentive system, etc. (discussed in blogpost “F1- KM is Not Enough!”), and (d) learning and knowledge transfer depend much on power relations among many actors involved (discussed in blogpost “F14- M&E of KM for development”). I thank Charlie Dibsdale for reminding me to point these out.

1
M&E tools in use to track and assess Box 1 include: various intellectual capital accounting methods, knowledge mapping/inventory, social network analysis (SNA), blogs, completely unstructured story telling/listening, lessons-learned session (LLS), corporate knowledge taxonomies, number of uploads to a portal, World Bank’s KAM, etc. These are tools of “supply-driven KM”.

2
M&E tools in use that pertains to Box 2 include: key performance indicators (KPI), various productivity measures, activity checklists, number of hits of a webpage, action indicators in a project logframe, indicators in a Balanced Scorecard, Malcolm Baldridge measures of performance, etc. At the activity level, it is easy to attribute the action to whichever specific knowledge assets were used, but attribution gets more difficult at the project and especially at the program or organizational levels.

3
M&E tools in use to monitor and evaluate Box 3 include: number of problems solved, satisfaction scores by internal/external customers, value adding (vs. non-value adding), impact of training on workplace performance, post-project success stories by project beneficiaries, gross sales of a product/service, statistical correlations between knowledge assets and organizational performance measures, key result areas (KRAs), market value of a corporation, satisfaction survey among project stakeholders, etc.

Disaggregation and attribution of organizational results to specific factors is often difficult here. However, if the choice and design of a KM initiative is demand-driven (e.g. to solve a specific problem, to enhance a particular capability, to assist in making a particular type of decision or policy, to increase efficiency of a work process, etc.) then it is easy to devise a measure or indicator to check if indeed that demand or objective was met.

Please note that this framework is suited for M&E of KM. It focuses on the outputs or results of KM. Building upon my previous blog post F1, I also proposed an expanded KM framework that focuses on the inputs, the most important of which are motivated, loyal, curious and innovative knowledge workers (thanks to Daan Boom for pointing this out). See the blog “Practical exercise #15: ingredients of effective group action” I posted last February 28, 2009).

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F4- Unconscious KM and Conscious KM

We have seen from two previous posts that (a) intangible assets generally contribute more than tangible assets in producing the results that organizations value, and (b) knowledge assets are only a subset of intangible assets.

M&E of KM in development is therefore embedded in the larger issue of M&E of intangibles.

In late 1995, World Bank President Wolfensohn announced before the world’s finance ministers that the World Bank is not only a lending bank but also a “Knowledge Bank”. Of course, knowledge assets had always been creating value for the Bank even before 1995; but World Bank managers formally recognized this fact only after Wolfensohn’s announcement.

Organizations and projects are creating value from their intangible assets with or without any conscious or formal KM strategy/program. Their managers are managing their knowledge assets but they do not call what they are doing “knowledge management”. They use other terms such as “human resource management”, “succession planning”, “replication of best practice”, “role-based portal”, “work templates”, “mentoring”, “customer relations management”, etc. They are doing what we may call “unconscious KM” or management without a knowledge-based framework.

Various M&E tools for tracking intangible assets are in use in the corporate sector: KPIs (key performance indicators), Balanced Scorecard, Malcolm Baldridge criteria, ROI of training (Accenture model, Covey model, etc.), Sveiby’s Intangible Assets Monitor and Edvinsson’s Scandia Framework. (see: “KM Tools: Qualitative to Quantitative”)

Similarly, successful performance of a development project is attributable to the effective use of knowledge assets, even if its project managers were unaware of KM or were not consciously applying a KM framework. If a project manager formally adopts KM or hires a project KM officer, what does “M&E of KM” mean? The KM officer would likely want to justify his/her job by tracking only the incremental improvements as a result of the new KM program (value added by “conscious KM” over “unconscious KM”). But if a project manager is aware that intangible knowledge assets are creating value, he/she would prefer to track how ALL knowledge and other intangible assets are deployed and how they could ALL TOGETHER be managed more effectively. “M&E of intangibles” makes more management sense than just “M&E of KM”!

Let me tell two stories from our experiences in applying KM in development — stories about how “conscious KM” enables the manager to have “new eyes”.

1
In the Philippines, we scanned and studied 10 best practices from more than 950 anti-poverty projects. Why were they successful?

The answer surprised us: the communities concerned were successful because the projects leveraged on the wealth of intangibles that the “poor” communities already had: network of relationships (social capital), access to natural resources (natural capital + social sanction), dedicated leaders (human capital), useful linkages outside (stakeholder capital), collaborative practices (cultural capital), indigenous knowledge (intellectual capital), etc. The greater contribution of intangible assets is true both for community development as well as for corporate profit-making!  All these are described in our freely-downloadable e-book: “Community Wealth Rediscovered: Knowledge for Poverty Alleviation” from our website.

Many local communities are “poor” only in tangible assets — they are wealthy in intangible assets. People who call them “poor” are people whose development paradigm is based solely on financial or material (i.e. tangible) mental models.

Our research also opened our eyes in another way: KM for development is not just a matter of facilitating information/knowledge flows — this is a mental model that belies a development practitioner mindset, which is basically an outsider perspective. If we take an insider or community perspective, KM for development is suddenly different: it is now a process of recognizing, appreciating and leveraging on the wealth of intangible assets that a community usually already has.

2
A manager of one of our development partners once remarked, “I see no difference between a Lessons-Learned Session and the project evaluation that we already do.” We formulated the simple table below to help him see the difference. A project may be a “failure” (project objectives were not met) but it may have generated useful knowledge! Such knowledge should be captured via LLS to benefit next similar projects.

Traditional Project Evaluation versus Lessons-Learned Session

See an expanded version of this table in “Vertical versus Horizontal Learning”.

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