Which Knowledge Management technologies add most value?

Interesting results are coming through from the Knoco 2017 Knowledge Management survey, including this plot of comparative KM technology value.

We asked the survey participants to rate these different types of technology by the value they have added to their KM program, including in the question the option to choose “we do not use this technology” or “it’s too early to tell”.

The chart above shows these technologies in order of value from left to right, as a stacked area chart, with the weighted value shown as a blue line (this line would be at 100% if all the participants that used this technology claimed it had “high value” and at 0 they all claimed it had no value).

The top of the grey area represents the usage percentage for these technologies, as the light grey area above represents people who do not use this technology. The top of the green area represents the percentage of people who said this technology had added “large value”.

288 people answered this question.

The technology types are listed below in order of usage, and in order of value.

Comparison of usage and value

Even with this interpretation, we could still look for “Good performing” technologies which deliver more value than their popularity would imply, and “Poor performing technologies” which deliver less value than their popularity would imply.

Under this interpretation, the best performing technologies are Enterprise Search and Expert Systems (both of them 6 places higher in the Value list than the Usage list) and the worst performing technologies in terms of value per use are Blogs.

This does not necessarily mean Blogs are a bad technology; it probably means they are not being used in ways that add KM value.

Changes since the 2014 survey

We saw very similar results in the 2014 survey, again with Blogs being the poorest performing technology given their usage figures, and again with the best performing technologies in terms of value vs use being Enterprise Search and Expert Systems.

Those technologies which have most increased in use between 2014 and 2017 are Microblogs and video publication, and not surprisingly these have also seen the greatest increase in value delivery as well. The technology which has decreased in use the most over the last 3 years is the innovation funnel technology.