Governance, Roles, and Knowledge Culture
This domain tests governance, roles, and culture that make knowledge management sustainable. Governance sets direction, decision rights, standards, and metrics; culture determines whether people contribute and reuse.
Rules
- Roles: project manager integrates knowledge management; knowledge manager or PMO facilitates; content owners curate; subject experts contribute; records manager governs retention; leadership models behavior.
- Use a RACI for repositories, the lessons process, communities of practice, and data ownership.
- Policies cover classification, confidentiality, intellectual property, retention, and acceptable use.
- Metrics: contribution quality, retrieval success, reuse evidence, time saved, reduced rework-not page views alone.
- Culture: psychological safety, blameless learning, recognition, time for sharing, leadership questioning.
- Mandates without enablement create compliance theater.
Worked example
A wiki has low contribution. Audit shows no recognition and unclear ownership. Fix: name content owners, make curation part of role expectations, recognize useful contributions in team reviews, and simplify templates. Reasoning: behavior follows incentives and clarity, not a policy statement. Track reuse stories and reduced queries.
Traps
- Mandating sharing without safety or incentives.
- Measuring volume instead of value.
- Assigning knowledge management to one person with no authority.
- Ignoring confidentiality and intellectual property.
- Letting leaders skip the behavior they expect.