Development of Knowledge Management Measurement Metrics and Their Importance in Performance Measurement

Performance measurement has become a crucial part in knowledge management (KM) to measure how well KM is actually being pursued which ultimately leads to organizational improvements. In order to have an effective evaluation and monitoring of KM performance, it is necessary to identify and generate a proper set of KM measurement metrics in the early stage. However, there is a lack of efforts in developing a collective set of these metrics among researchers in the respective areas. Hence, this paper attempts to formulate a set of KM measurement metrics based on three categories of KM measures (knowledge resources, KM processes and KM factors). The importance of each metric in performance measurement is also further discussed in this paper. After a thorough review, metrics obtained from previous literature are then compiled, analyzed and synthesized to propose a collective set of metrics for knowledge management performance measurement (KMPM). It is believed that the proposed measurement metrics can act as a reference or guideline for further development in KMPM. This helps to ensure that the essential issues and factors are covered during the evaluation process. Besides that, it can also assist researchers in identifying future research needs towards utilizing the three aspects of KM measures jointly to evaluate KM performance.