Measurement process and multi-dimensional metric model for evaluating KM systems

Knowledge Management (KM) System plays a crucial role in every industry as well as Higher Learning Institutions where capturing, sharing, managing & archiving knowledge assets are important for increasing knowledge workers or users productivity at the same token utilizing the available KM infrastructure effectively. Based on the research works, we have identified that there are challenges in measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of the Knowledge Management Systems. The primary goal of this research paper is to design and develop a domain-independent multi-dimensional metric model which can be helpful to build a metric database or toolset for evaluating the effectiveness of the Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). In this proposed work, we first list out some of the ways to conduct the evaluation of KMS and describe a suitable measurement process which can be helpful to conduct an evaluation experiment against the knowledge management systems. Secondly we describe the importance of the prime quality factors, key attributes and outcome metrics for designing and developing a metric model. Based on the in-depth study and comparison with various software quality models, we have come up with a design of multi-dimensional metric model for evaluating any KMS. Finally, we discuss how this process and model will be helpful to map to mathematical model and also to build the metric database for generating metric report for analyzing the gaps, effectiveness and benefits of the knowledge management systems.