Posted by Fanuel Dewever on April 14, 2000 at 09:22:50:

In Reply to: incentives for sharing knowledge? posted by Tom Weathington on April 05, 2000 at 15:45:56:

Tom,

why would you only give incentives for sharing knowledge? This may create the same problem that has existed for over 30 years with databases: you can keep pumping data in them, but the original idea was to get information out, no?

I would suggest the following approach:

let everyone participate in a knowledge scoring programme, where you let the users of the captured and shared knowledge 'score' the usefullness of the information they used. Just like the book reviews at Amazon, you can do this with a combination of voting mechanism and comments (how was the info usefull). It has to be technically feasable to track that information back to the submitter.

As a criterium you could use for example the number of good or excellent ratings of people within the department, accross the company even from partners or customers.

Try to link your reward system to the added value generated from the knowledge sharing. By 'mining' the comments you can also create a tracking mechanism of who put what information into value and how? This gives you a basis for rewarding the use of internal knowledge?

Benefits:

- your rewards are based on quality AND quantity
- you stimulate sharing aswell as use and reuse
- you can split-up your incentives programme knowledge area, because not all department are equally knowledge intensive

Downside:

it is hard to capture the use of knowledge thats not 'in' the system, so you may have do some kind of elections.

Practice:

A leading Industrial enzymes producer here in Belgiul (with its own research facilities) has introduced The Golden Ademar Awards. (Ademar is a little professor /genius in a Belgian comic). Every employee (researchers, floormanagers but also maintenance, factory workers, ...) are stmulated to share knowledge and deas that could benefit the company). Once a year the award is nominated to the employee that has made a contribution to changing the way the company works. At the nomination all employees are invited to a gala evening where the winner receives his award and prices (holiday, cash, books, ...)

As a reward, you may concider a 'blank cheque' for education. Let your employee choose a seminar, training or conference of his interest. And I mean ANYTHING he wants. Another company I know pays every employee one course the may be interested in, and it goes from an aerobics class to a Visual Basic training.

I hope this gives you some ideas you can use. Be sure to let me now OK? BTW, any comments are welcome.

Fanuel Dewever
Associate Consultant Knowledge Management.

NEWCOM INFORMATION SYSTEMS N.V.
From Data To Information To Knowledge™
Durletstraat 1
B-2018 Antwerp
Belgium
Tel.: +32 (03) 248.67.70
Fax.: +32 (03) 248.70.04
fanuel.dewever@newcom.be

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