Each year the e-Gov Knowledge Management Conference provides us business intelligence (BI) mavens with the opportunity to take the pulse of business intelligence in the Federal government. I have chaired this event from its inception—we held the very first one in April of 2000—and just last month we celebrated the sixth consecutive one.

 

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This year’s conference was perhaps the most successful one ever. Stellar keynote speakers included the first Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) of the Army Gary Winkler, SAIC’s CKO Kent Greenes and Entovation CEO Debra Amidon. Technical leaders delivered tutorials to highlight cutting-edge knowledge management (KM) practices like “Fitting KM into Enterprise Architectures,” “Knowledge Retention: Capturing Critical Knowledge for Workforce Transformation” and “A Workbench for Knowledge Exploration,” along with a data warehousing workshop by top guru Diogenes Torres. Almost 50 vendors showed their wares during exhibit day, and a major extravaganza was put on by Oracle as part of their display. About one-half of the attendees were from defense organizations and the other half worked for civilian agencies, with a small sprinkling of state, local and international public sector representation.

One of the most important and exciting e-Gov KM Conference traditions is, in my eyes, our annual survey of conference attendees. This is one of the few opportunities for the federal knowledge management industry to understand what disciplines, projects and technologies its federal practitioners currently pursue. The responses give us a glimpse of how the relatively young field continues to change, develop and grow.

Now, let’s be candid. This is not a rigorous survey conducted by a commercial market research organization using a scientifically selected sample of representative participants. No. This is purely a one-pager that is distributed to conference attendees who are then asked to fill them out. While it is by no means a scientific survey, it is basically the only game in town, and the conference is one of but a few opportunities where knowledge management leaders gather. With several years of surveys at our fingertips, we can glean some useful business intelligence.

So, what were the findings?

One important theme that has emerged since the first survey was done has to do with portals. These seemed to be the most significant component in any knowledge management initiative. It’s as if, at least in the public sector, portals were the poster child of knowledge management. With one exception, the year before last, portals were always the most frequently mentioned activity. And that year it came in second.

Our questionnaire asked: “Indicate all the disciplines involved in your knowledge management initiative.” This was followed by a multiple choice list that included: communities of practice, document management, storytelling, data warehousing and data mining, portals, E-Learning, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), content management, collaboration, and other disciplines. Respondents were allowed to mark as many as applied to their initiative.

Well, this year, we seem to have finally broken into what can only be characterized as a maturing of the knowledge management space. Portals ranked a distant fifth with only 11 percent of respondents indicating that they were actively developing portals as part of their knowledge management initiatives. This placed them after content management (14 percent), collaboration (14 percent), document management (13 percent) and communities of practice (12 percent).

Further to the maturing theme, this year more than one-third (33 percent) of all participants indicated that their organization had been involved with knowledge management for more than four years. That compares with scarcely a quarter (25 percent) the year before and 5 percent (5 percent) the one before that.

In terms of what stage of an initiative they were currently at, the largest grouping seems to be in the midst of implementation (26 percent) followed by deployment (23 percent). These numbers compared with implementation (19 percent) and planning (17 percent) as the top two in last year’s survey.

Our questionnaire asked: “What stage is your KM initiative in?” With the options then listed as: considering, planning, designing, implementing, deploying or production. Respondents generally marked only one, though occasionally more than one stage was indicated.

The general response to the survey followed the profile of conference attendance, which in turn probably reflects somewhat the profile of knowledge management activity throughout the federal government. About 43 percent were from civilian agencies and 41 percent from defense agencies with the rest representing state, local or foreign governments.

So all in all what did we learn from this survey that we did not know before? I’d focus on two things. First, there is still a significant amount of activity and enthusiasm in federal knowledge management. Second, it is clearly a more mature environment that we’re now encountering. Both these factors are positive indicators for our ability to produce business intelligence from the government’s bits and bytes.

Along with the other members of the team that worked so hard to plan a successful conference, I eagerly anticipate next year’s meeting, and the opportunity to see what progress business intelligence has made in the federal government. 

Recent articles by Dr. Ramon Barquin

• What the Healthcare Reform Effort Needs is Better Business Intelligence
• Dashboards, Dashboards Everywhere
• Knowledge Management in the Federal Government: What’s Happening?
• Business Intelligence, the Cloud and the Government