Preparing
for Conversation with Doug Madgic
Metrics,
Metrics, Metrics
Doug
Madgic
KM
Program Lead, Cisco Systems
San Jose, California, US
 Introduction
Doug Madgic is featured
in the current (May 2006) issue of Inside Knowledge magazine
because he was my source for the story. He is the program lead
and he deserves every bit of the credit he is given for putting
the people in the process at Cisco where KM is making the transition
from an informal process to a planned, strategic one.
Just the same, there
are-and have been-many others who have played key roles in the
evolution of KM at Cisco over the past 20 years, including its
founders (who developed a way to connect two computers between
two buildings at Stanford University; its two successive CEOs;
and, those who preceded Doug with the responsibility of developing
a formal KM program: Jim Keyes, program director, Cisco Knowledge
Connection (CKC); Bob Lavin, who worked with Doug while Lavin
was senior director, Technology and Operations in HR; and Gary
Borella, solutions architect for CKC. As always, KM is a collaborative
process and it would be great if we could have some of these
guys involved in this discussion. I'll send some 'free passes'
just in case!
I am pleased to
be able to include a PDF of the IK report as part of Doug's
page. See the link below. Incidentally, I'm not the only writer
at IK and I highly recommend you subscribe. It does carry
a substantial price tag, but it is an advertising-free professional
journal and well worth the price. It ought to be in your corporate
library!
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Biography
Doug Madgic is currently
the program lead for knowledge management within the Consulting
Services organization at Cisco Systems. His work includes c reating a framework and
structure for managing organizational intellectual capital to
enable employees to more effectively find what they need to do
their jobs. He has designed and implemented a series of culture
initiatives including aligning knowledge behaviors into performance
assessment processes, recognizing enthusiastic adopters of knowledge
reuse, surveying employees on knowledge strategies, and embedding
the capture, share and reuse of intellectual capital into existing
work flow. He is currently implementing a balanced scorecard
of measures for the purpose of maximizing performance and results.
His prior work at
Cisco includes organizational design, change management, talent
acquisition and leadership development as a human resources leader
within the technology and services organizations at Cisco. He
has worked at Cisco for 10+ years and in over 20 countries. Prior
to Cisco, Doug worked at AMD and Management Associates in the
areas of HR consulting, project management and technical recruitment.
He is also involved in academia and has also worked as an Adjunct
Professor of International Management in the business school
at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.
He holds a B.A.
in Economics from Occidental College and an MBA in international
business from Thunderbird, the Garvin School of International
Management.
Doug spends his
free time with his family including two daughters, ages 5 and
4.
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Pre-Dialogue
Remarks
Metrics, metrics
and metrics: Or for those like me who are fatigued with those
terms: Storytelling with Data.
I'm guessing that
I'm not the only one who frequently hears vocabulary in our organizations
that includes words or phrases such as "metrics," "measures,"
"success factors," "benchmarks," "key
performance indicators" and other similar expressions. We're
probably all guilty to some extent of using these terms loosely.
They are language that through such recurrent and habitual use
generates less understanding and meaning rather than more.
My goal for this
dialogue is an enhanced understanding of the processes, language
and mechanisms associated with delivering business value and
importance. We can benefit from having a lucid sense of how value
and importance are created and how one appraises them, and of
course how they become clear to those stakeholders who sponsor
and fund our efforts. Those of us in the field of managing knowledge
should be concerned about value - that is demonstrating tangible
relevant impact - to our internal organizations, external customers,
partners or other constituents. We hear the term "shareholder
value" frequently, but are we in tune daily with how our
actions, activities, programs and initiatives are creating this
kind of impact? Operating with business significance of course
can mean influencing the obvious indicators - those lagging indicators
such as economic returns, reduced costs, or perhaps customer
loyalty. But are there other, more subtle, expressions of value?
And how can we more credibly correlate our daily tasks - those
leading indicators perhaps - to concerns deemed important and
of value to our organizations?
I have more questions
than answers to the questions above, but I suspect that part
of the answer resides in another word we also hear and read about
frequently-data.
But it's not just
any kind of data that is important. It's the right kind of data.
It's business relevant data that is provided in context to what's
important for an organization. The information age, as we've
heard, has us drowning in information but starving for knowledge.
I couldn't agree more. Companies need more than ever to link
the information and data 'trees' to the strategy 'forest'. We
need to see how all those dots we're consumed by connect to the
big picture. Can this be done directly? In many cases the answer
is no.
For example, tying
your efforts at managing knowledge directly to increased revenue
in your organization might be difficult under the best circumstances
and impossible in the others. But creating linkages, bonds and
relationships between organizational activities (the day to day
heavy lifting of a knowledge worker such as content creation,
intellectual capital reuse, etc.) and organizational imperatives
such as economic returns, customer loyalty and time to market
can provide an easier route to getting the executive sponsors
to stand up and take notice. Telling stories with credible data
is critical and that is where a solid metrics and measurement
strategy fits in.
Of course, there
isn't one way to demonstrate importance to organizations. All
organizations have their specific culture, values and approaches
to assigning value. And given that knowledge as a company resource
and asset tends towards intangibility, the assigning of value
gets even more interesting. Knowledge doesn't lend itself towards
industrial, mechanistic and six sigma-like defined processes.
But some organizations employ outstanding narratives to ascribe
importance to activities and their impact on organizational imperatives.
One that I'm particularly
interested in hearing more about is the 'balanced scorecard'
of measures. It's a concept that has been around awhile, but
it seems to capture the idea that value can be realized through
a variety of means, and that it's not only through traditional
financial measures that one creates importance. Using this approach,
there are other measures - Employee learning, Customer experiences,
etc. - that get captured in a report card that is both quantitative
as well as qualitative. How are you demonstrating your program's
impact or the value of your consulting work? Are any of you using
a balanced scorecard to showcase performance and results? There
are other related ideas out there of course such as the Triple
Value proposition (the concept that companies create shareholder
value by balancing the interest of all shareholders) among others
-that I'm curious to see to what level they have been implemented
and/or successfully institutionalized as well.
I'm sure that you
have fresh thinking and an interesting perspective to add here,
and I look forward to a fruitful exploration of how best to connect
our work to value and meaning in our organizations.
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IK
Feature -- Catching Up
Cisco
Adds Knowledge Management to Knowledge Business
Copyright: Inside
Knowledge, The ARK Group
In the fall of 2004,
Jim Keyes, program director of Cisco Knowledge
Connection (CKC) in Cisco's Customer Advocacy division, was concerned.
Feedback suggested that creating a culture where knowledge is
created, codified and transferred was not going to come easily.
Keyes' early ventures into KM involved content management and
the sponsorship of forums in which people could collaborate.
A sense of the business imperative and strategic importance of
KM led Keyes to take on the KM effort. With all the emphasis
on the tool, however, Keyes realized previous KM solutions were
unstructured and undisciplined with not a lot of knowledge sharing
occurring outside of immediate peers. Nothing short of business
productivity, profitability and value creation for Cisco's customers
were at stake, and Keyes needed fresh ideas.
For
the complete story, download the PDF.
Subscribe now
to Inside
Knowledge magazine.
http://www.kmmagazine.com/subscribe.asp
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