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brought in to measure the effectiveness of KM. Benchmarking is essentially a com-
parison that is undertaken with key leaders in the industry in order to identify any
best practices that the company can emulate in order to improve their own organiza-
tional effectiveness. Carla O ’ Dell at the American Productivity and Quality Center
(APQC, http://www.apqc.org) pioneered this technique. Benchmarking is a good way
of avoiding reinventing the wheel by looking at what has worked and what has not
worked for other companies operating in comparable environments or industrial
sectors.
The benefi ts of benchmarking are not limited to improvements in process or the
promotion of reuse. Tiwana (2000) lists the following potential benefi ts:
• Overall productivity of knowledge investments
• Service quality
• Customer satisfaction and the operational level of customer service
• Time to market in relation to other competitors
• Costs, profi ts, and margins
• Distribution
• Relationships and relationship management
Benchmarking can help an organization evolve to higher maturity levels to become
a learning organization by identifying where they stand with respect to KM in relation
to the competition.
Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) developed a knowledge management assess-
ment tool (KMAT) that is essentially a benchmarking questionnaire where responses
by a given company can easily be compared against industry standards in order to
come up with a relative standing or ranking for the company on specifi c indicators.
The KMAT was developed by the American Productivity & Quality Center and Arthur
Andersen in 1995 to help organizations self-assess where their strengths and oppor-
tunities lie in managing knowledge. The tool is divided into fi ve sections: the KM
process, leadership, culture, technology, and measurement. A subset of the items and
information in the KMAT, with a simplifi ed scoring system is available (see http://
www.kwork.org/White%20Papers/KMAT_BOK_DOC.pdf).
The fi rst step in benchmarking is to identify the companies that you will be com-
paring. Recent trends toward globalization indicate that international companies
should not be automatically excluded from your short list. In the end, it is a fairly
subjective decision as to which companies and which criteria you will be bench-
marking against. Some typical targets include: innovation metrics (How fast are new