In February, I talked about the ROI of blogs – and how it’s often difficult to measure the time or effort that you put into them. While reading an article in the Special Libraries Association monthly publication, Information Outlook, I was reminded of the fact that’s it not only blogs that are tough measure a return on — knowledge management fits the same category.

According to the article by Gretta Rusanow, head of Curve Consulting in Sydney, 84% of law firms describe themselves as “having a culture that supports knowledge management”. However, only 13% of the responding firms actually measure any returns on that investment.

These responding firms also describe the goal of their knowledge management activities to be improved client service delivery, with leveraging expertise, gaining competitive advantage and speeding up service delivery times coming in second.

There seems to be a correlation however, between the difficulty in measuring the return on blogs and the difficulty in measuring return on knowledge management. The commonality? Again, it comes back to time. Part of measuring your success has to ultimately come down to: what would the potential effects be if we weren’t doing this (be that knowledge management or a corporate blog)?

The article also points out that knowledge management is often built into the planning structure of a firm, but very rarely into the reporting structure — “suggesting a gap in accountability”. While building knowledge sharing into things like performance appraisals is a good start to getting people to share knowledge, I don’t know that it’s necessarily accountability that’s lacking.

Getting people to share knowledge is kind of like getting them to share anything else — they’re more willing to do it when they feel like they’ll get something in return. But the funny thing is about knowledge sharing is that it’s already happening, whether it’s documented, reported on, accounted for or not.

I don’t really want to get into the methods of cost recovery or cost precedents and how they impact a law firm’s knowledge management strategy, because other people have already done that far better than I ever could. Instead, I’d like to suggest that part of the positioning of a knowledge management strategy should be letting people know that they’re already doing a good job at knowledge sharing.

For people who don’t work in knowledge management, the sense is often that knowledge management is quite literally an exercise in ‘managing’ what people know. Instead, I would argue that knowledge management is really about supporting and nurturing existing knowledge sharing structures and relationships, as well as expanding on those structures and relationships.