More data on the global KM market?
Here is some more data on the global interest in KM. The question is, how we interpret this data.
I am always looking for data on the state of the KM market, as a counter to the people who tell us “KM is dead”, or “KM is all about AI nowadays”, based on their personal hunches.
Here are some more potential datapoints, but it may be difficult to interpret them.
A couple of weeks ago Knoco opened the results of our Knowledge Management survey to the public, and I thought it would be interesting to see where the demand for this survey came from. So after the 100th copy had been ordered, I did a quick review to see where these orders came from.
The results are shown above.
- 46 requests from the USA/Canada
- 23 from Europe
- 10 from Africa
- 8 from Asia
- 6 from Australasia
- 5 from Middle east and North Africa
- 1 from S America.
These results, dominated by the US and Europe, could just reflect the readership of this blog, and the fact that the blog is an English-language blog.
But see how much the American requests come from their legal market, and how much the African requests from the non-commercial (public and development) sector. There’s something else at work here. Let’s look at these results through a different lens – that of industry (below).
Here we see
- 29 requests from commercial organisations excluding legal
- 18 from non commercial (public sector, aid and development)
- 36 from the legal industry
- 8 from students
- 9 from consultants
These results are less likely to be biased by the readership of this blog, because we are no looking at geography.
But geography comes into this as well – look how the legal requests almost all come from the US, and how half the public/development sector requests from from Africa.
Requests from other sectors are pretty well spread across the regions.
Conclusions
If (and it is a big if) these requests represent the state of the global interest in KM, then there is
- An interest in KM in commercial firms across the world
- A large interest in KM in US legal firms
- An interest from development and public sector organisations, which is best developed in Africa
The caveat, of course, is that the distribution of the announcement of the release of this survey may not represent the global market, and that the results are skewed by the way the announcement was forwarded. Perhaps a community of US legal KM folk circulated the announcement?
I will gather more data over time, and refine the picture.
Shared by: Nick Milton
July 25, 2018
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