KM Awards
The UN has a Public Service Award with knowledge management (you have three more days to submit a nomination!), presented as a separate category from:
- Fostering participation in policy-making decisions through innovative mechanisms
- Improving the delivery of services
- Improving transparency, accountability, and responsiveness in the public service
I like the structure of this award, it is impact and not checklist based similar to the actKM Awards and the iKMS KM Excellence Awards. But does it make sense to treat KM as a distinct category from policy participation, service delivery and accountability? Surely that’s what KM should deliver, if it’s not to be an end in itself?
Thanks to Graham for pointing me to this.
3 Comments so far
- Luke Naismith
Patrick
I find that the categories overlap quite significantly. The main difference with the KM one is that it covers more criteria than the others (7 as compared with 6 for the first category and 4 criteria for the other two categories).
Stephen - introducing a new concept is one of the criteria for the KM category. So I think that the KM category is being used here to cover all of the other bits and pieces to be awarded that don’t quite fit specifically into one of the other categories.
I do like how they have not attempted to define knowledge management!
Luke: Yes, all four criteria include the idea of “introducing a new concept”.
However, if you look at that “new concept”, you will see that the KM criterion specifically requires “the application of new knowledge
management techniques, or unique policy or implementation
design”.So although the criteria are superficially similar, the KM criterion requires quite a different approach.
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Great link Patrick.
My 2c—yes, KM should be a separate category from the other three.
My justification is that all of the others require a “unique idea or distinctively new approach to problem solution”.
However, these problem solutions will fall under what Joe Firestone would call “Business Processing” activities. That is, the gap between current state and desired outcomes is identified, and a solution is developed to close the gap.
On the other hand, a solution which demonstrated KM excellence would target the *processes* that close the gap rather than the actual gap closing.
So, for example, implementing a new auditing process might demonstrate improved transparency. However, if the improved auditing came out of a change process which successfully broke down a culture of blame-shifting and implemented a collaborative approach to continuous improvement, then arguably the KM change process is what deserves to be recognised in this case.
It’s unfortunate that the UN award seems to conflate KM with “e-participation” (surely only a subset of KM), but other than that I think the idea is sound.
Posted on January 12, 2009 at 07:28 PM | Comment permalink