In an environment of rigid budgets and high expectations, metrics are an appropriate next step for an industry that prides itself on delivering big profit.
Metrics are an actual way of defining what a knowledge management or
content management project will accomplish.
In an environment of rigid budgets and high expectations, metrics are an
appropriate next step for an industry that prides itself on delivering big
profit. Defining metrics is not easy, however, and much study and further
practical experience will be needed before implementing such measures
becomes simple or every day.
Benefits of metrics
Targets to be set
Metrics provide clearly defined goals and scope for projects, allowing for
more concrete design, planning and implementation. Metrics state “this is
what we plan to do, and this is the benefit it will have”.
Success to be judge
Metrics provide very specific ‘success criteria’ for projects, allowing the
outcomes to be assessed at the end of implementation.
ROI to be estimated
In the existing times of tight IT budgets, there is an expectation that
projects will deliver quantifiable benefits. This is often defined in terms
of ‘return on investment’ (ROI). Without strong metrics, estimating ROI is
little more than guesswork.
Ongoing capability to be tracked
Metrics maintain to provide value beyond original implementation.
Appropriate measures will rapidly highlight issues, allowing them to be
determined before they grow or spread.
Lessons to be learnt
By providing an actual way of assessing the success, a diversity of
approaches, a better understanding can be gained. This can then be applied
when establishing new scheme.
User rankings
Subject matter experts or other reviewers can directly assess the quality
of material in the content management system platform.
Edits necessary
A content management system typically provides various form of workflow
capacity. Audit trails generated by this can be analyzed to settle on how
many edits or reviews were essential for every piece of content. If the
unique material is of a high quality, it should involve little editing.
Usability testing
This provides a realistic way of determining whether the information, and
the way it is structured, can be understood by end users. Usability testing
can be qualitative, with the goal of classify problems, in which the same
tests are run each time and timed.
Links created
A popular page with functional information will be additional frequently
linked to from other parts of the system. By measuring the number of links,
the efficiency of individual pages can be determined. (Google, for example,
uses this to rank its search results