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82 The McKinsey Mind

EXERCISES
• Perform a KM audit. Using the KM schematic shown in
Figure 3-3 (page 77), analyze your firm’s performance in:
culture, infrastructure, and technology. For example, is
there a strong KM culture that is well understood, sup-
ported by top management, with incentives for use and
active interaction of all employees? After assessing your
performance on a scale of 1 to 5 (worst to best) in each
area, try to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Write a memo to the key KM person in your organization.
The starting point in this exercise is to identify the person
with responsibility for KM. This may be an actual chief
knowledge officer (CKO), the CEO, the IT director, or the
human resources director. Once you have identified the
person, draft a brief memo requesting information related
to the questions mentioned in the previous exercise. Hold
off on your assessment and recommendation until you get
a response. Every organization has a need for KM, and
everyone in the organization should understand it, but
these things take time (and sensitivity in some cases).

CONCLUSION

So there you have it—the wild, wonderful world of data gathering.
Our goal in this chapter is to help you use data gathering to add
value. In many organizations, too much energy is spent gathering
the wrong data, and too many decisions are made without ade-
quate data support. In this chapter, we hope you learned how to
design more effective data-gathering efforts and picked up some
specific tools that will help you. Happy hunting.