What knowledge management trends did we see develop last year, and what predictions can we make for the future? Yesterday morning, Carla O’Dell and I hosted APQC’s January KM community call to share our thoughts and find out about your top priorities for 2013.
As part of prepping for the call, I did some analysis of the top-downloaded content from 2012. Some of the content is member-only, but starred items are available to everyone.
Top 10 Knowledge Management Articles, Case Studies, and Presentations
- How Mature Is Your KM Program? Using APQC's KM Capability Assessment Tool *
- Knowledge Analytics: A Fresh Way of Thinking About an Old Problem *
- Building a SharePoint Repository for Standard Processes and Related Knowledge
- SharePoint 2010 for Enterprise Content, Records, and Knowledge Management
- Knowledge Management Design Principles
- Three Trends and a Prediction for the Future: Carla O'Dell Discusses the State of KM in 2012 *
- Using APQC's Levels of Knowledge Management Maturity *
- Knowledge Sharing in the Flow: Survey Results *
- How to Transfer Internal Best Practices *
- Where Are You Now? A KM Program Self-Assessment *
Looking at this list, one of the trends I see is an increasing focus on knowledge management measurement and analytics, both for proving the KM business case and for predicting user needs. In particular, our audience seems interested in assessing their current level of KM maturity and how they can get to the next level.
Content management and SharePoint also remain hot topics. Of the KM practitioners on yesterday’s call, 65 percent reported that their organizations use SharePoint for KM, so it’s not surprising that our audience is hungry for SharePoint advice and case studies. (We are planning a major research project on content management in 2013, so if this is your focus, stay tuned.)
I also did some analysis of frequently asked knowledge management questions from the past year. These questions come to us through calls, emails, and the Ask Us feature on our Web site.
Some of the trends here mirror those I mentioned above: We received many questions on content management (including SharePoint), measures, and maturity. However, the largest percentage of questions related to the transfer of knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned. Knowledge transfer approaches have been around for a while, but as the Baby Boomers start to retire en masse, many organizations are taking the risk of knowledge loss more seriously. This sentiment was echoed by the audience on yesterday’s call, 46 percent of whom said knowledge capture and transfer is their top-trending priority for 2013.
In line with this trend, APQC’s major 2013 Best Practices Study will focus on the documentation, transfer, and reuse of critical knowledge. Stay tuned to learn more over the next month!