Measuring the Value of Knowledge Management Practices at Government Research and Development Centers

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1526
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• Date: 01 January 2017
• Author: John Bischoff,Christopher Willy,Cynthia Mendoza

■Research Article

Measuring the Value of Knowledge

Management Practices at Government

Research and Development Centers

Cynthia Mendoza*, John Bischoff and Christopher Willy

Washington, District of Columbia USA

During the last decade, many US government research and development centers adopted some type of knowledge

management (KM) practice, either as a formal requirement or as part of a KM strategy to drive efficiency and remain

competitive in the technology and intellectual capital marketplace. Many of these organizations implemented KM

practices within their KM strategies, and many of these KM practices required similar tools and processes. However,

KM implementation within the government sector has faced challenges. Some of the KM strategies provided

integration of analytics and records management (explicit knowledge), and others addressed values-based

observations, culture change, and sharing of information (tacit knowledge). This paper evaluated productivity as

measured by publication rates at selected research and development centers. These rates were evaluated before and

after implementation of KM practices to determine if a statistically measurable relationship exists between the adop-

tion of KM practices and comparative productivity values. Results showed that the three centers studied, even with

governmental formalities, experienced increases in publication rates in the post-KM period. Copyright © 2016 John

Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

In 1997, Davenport defined knowledge manage-

ment (KM) as the process of capturing, developing,

sharing, and effectively using organizational knowl-

edge, but today, it is much more. Gartner Research

(2016) further defined KM as “a discipline that

promotes an integrated approach to identifying,

capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of

an enterprise’s information assets”(p. 1). However,

KM is a hybrid of discipline and process, and when

put in motion, KM is a practice. It is well recognized

within the KM community that KM is highly inte-

grative. It promotes collaboration and the creation,

capture, organization, access, and use of informa-

tion assets, including the tacit, uncaptured

knowledge of its community. Although discipline

and process are very important, with today’s fast-

paced technology cycles and evolving social media

applications, KM involves more than discipline

and process. It requires advocacy by the organiza-

tion’s constituents and the iterative qualities of prac-

tice to be fully effective.

United States government research and develop-

ment centers and national laboratories, referred to

as centers in this study, provide products and ser-

vices to customers such as the military services,

the intelligence and academic communities, other

federal agencies, and external customers such as in-

dustry partners and international organizations. For

this study, the number of publications was selected

as the productivity measure (Hossain et al., 2015).

Using statistical analysis, conclusions were made

about the relationship between KM practices and

productivity and its consequence on the manage-

ment of assets.

A robust KM program has many valuable charac-

teristics, and they are often unique. They can be

identified by organizations that have successfully

incorporated, adopted, and embraced KM practices.

At least six of these characteristics are often cited by

successful KM practicing organizations throughout

their communication documents, such as vision

and mission statements, strategy documents, gover-

nance and policy processes, training documents and

programs, and formal and informal memoranda.

*Correspondence to: Cynthia Mendoza, School of Engineering

Management and Systems Engineering, George Washington

University, 2121 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20552, USA.

E-mail: cjc@gwu.edu

Knowledge and Process Management

Volume 24 Number 1 pp 14–22 (2017)

Published online 20 November 2016 in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1526

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.