The document discusses ways to measure maturity and success in knowledge sharing platforms. It suggests measuring engagement, roles, and patterns that lead to successful answers rather than just clicks or numbers. Improving search and knowledge success involves asking questions to groups, finding and refinding information, and identifying answers that work through voting, sharing, and increasing search relevance.

1. Measuring What Matters for Maturity
Thomas Vander Wal, Independent Consultant
9 November 2017 :: KM World

2. Designing, developing, and / or
managing social platforms since
1996
Model of Attraction (2002)
Come to Me Web (2004)
Folksonomy (2004)
70+ Social Lenses (2008)
Connected
Company (2010)

3. Understanding Need

4. Understanding Need
• Measurement has multiple purposes:
- Measuring the finding and reuse of successful knowledge related to
questions and searches
- Assessing practices and patterns that build to knowledge capture and
reuse
- Seeing patterns around growth, maturity, and role types
- Identifying change and adaption

5. Understanding What Matters
• Depth of use / engagement
• Most systems and platforms focus on pure numbers, as in clicks
• Identify different social patterns and roles
• Finding answers that fit is important
- Identify patterns that lead to successful answers
- Identify and build healthy patterns that lead to finding answers, and measure
success of the patterns
• Identifying when change in what is known is needed and how the change is made

6. Keep In Mind…
• Not all organizations are the same
• Departments, location, and other contexts create differences
• Not all people are the same
- Personality traits
- Mental models
- Cultures

7. Improving Search and
Knowledge Success

8. How to Improve Search and Knowledge Success
• Pair search with the ability to ask a question to a group or community
• A focus on finding and refinding information and knowledge
- A community with groups that can help point others to existing knowledge builds value
(look at time to response and percent answered)
- A community with groups can also answer unanswered questions or point to previously
unshared resources
• Providing answers and pointing to previously unshared resources can have strong lasting
value
• Valuable knowledge formalized into learning modules - measure to identify and then results

9. https://communityroundtable.com/best-practices/thecrs-work-out-loud-framework/

10. How to Improve Search and Knowledge Success
• Working out Loud
- Questions asked in the open
- Potential answers shared
- Identifying answers that work
- People sharing answer that works by voting it up and / or linking to it
- Pointing to an answer that works build patterns that most search engines use to
increase that answer’s search relevance
- Use depth of use ladders, with measurement of progress and plateaus

11. Roles and Support

12. Focus on Roles and Support
• Ladders are helpful for building maturity, but understanding roles and
related activities is a different focus to also track and measure
• Select a few roles that have value and identify their activity patterns that
are valuable for those roles
- Build analytics and measurement models to see roles in action, so to
better support them

13. • Sharer
• Lurker
• Writer / Creator
• Editor
• Curator
• Connector
• Synthesizer
• Theorizer
• Mitigator
• Negotiator
• Contextualizer
• Interloper
• Infovore
• Learner
• Monitor
• Councilor
• Gossip
• Critic
• Expert
• Broadcaster /
Rebroadcaster
Social Roles

14. Open Measurement as a Game

15. Gamification Realities
• Gamification can move the needle, but it only goes so far
• Understanding the three high level segments helps frame how it can
work or not
- Those whom are receptive
- Those not moved by the gamification and it doesn’t matter
- Those who are turned off by it

16. Gamification User Impact Type Ratios
Percentage
0
33
67
100
Balanced Not Moved Don’t Like Moved By
Moved User %
Not Moved %
Dislike User %

17. Gamification Realities
• Gamification will positively move the needle up to the point of saturation
of those who are receptive to it
• The 2 categories of people not receptive to gamification look to the
patterns of use by those who are moved forward by gamification
- What is rewarded is important as it sets patterns for others to follow
• It is difficult to measuring receptivity to gamification to understand the size
of each category prior to rolling it out
- If testing it, keep in mind those likely to opt into a trial of a service are
likely going to be receptive to gamification

18. Use Flow Models to Identify Points
of Measurement

19. Team
Subject Matter Group 1 Subject Matter Group 2
Community in Organization
Question Answer Question
Answer
Where work happens
Relevant Info
Shared

20. Keys to Success

21. Key to Measurement
• Access to the data
- This is often the most difficult part
- Platforms with open data APIs enable getting to that data
• Measure to see trends and patterns, that lead to success and frame
success
• Measure to see gaps and pain points as well as to watch them get
resolved

22. Thank you!

23. URL: www.vanderwal.net
Blog: www.personalinfocloud.com
E-mail: thomas@vanderwal.net
Twitter: @infocloud