Page 24 - Service Delivery Review

Knowledge Management

Update on the implementation of KM plans

Knowledge

Management Road Map

– How far are we?

By Sebenzile Zibani - DPSA KM specialist

As KM practitioners, we are already familiar with the KM Roadmap towards
reviewing and evaluating the KM Strategy in 2025. The Roadmap describes
our journey through a series of milestones, from creating awareness of the
current KM Strategy to setting up systems for its implementation.

Where it all started?

The KM Roadmap starts with the Knowledge Management Maturity Assessments (KMMA) of national and provincial
departments. These were undertaken between 2018 and 2021 to achieve the following:

§ Assess the level of knowledge management practices understanding and application within the relevant
public service organisations.

§ Assist the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) in identifying those departments whose
KM maturity levels could be used to benchmark best practices and lessons learned on implementing KM
in the Public Service.
§ The Benchmarking of lessons learned will help ensure comparable maturity levels are attained throughout
the Public Service.

Getting started – KM Implementation Plan Template

As stipulated in the DPSA’s communication, the KM planning process requires that departments submit approved
three-year KM implementation plans to the DPSA, which kicked-started in mid-June 2022. The communication
instructed each department to fill in their respective electronic implementation plan templates using appropriate
fields per the guidelines. Moreover, the planning had to be supplemented by the outcomes of extensive (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analyses, with an indication of a way forward in terms of the
“High/Low” Scenarios.

The KMMA process has helped departments focus on the seven dimensions of the National Knowledge Management
Strategy Framework (NKMSF) of 2019. It is hoped that this approach could potentially help in foregrounding the
necessary KM interventions of departments in terms of the following seven KM Maturity Assessment areas:

§ Leadership and Governance
§ Business Alignment
§ People and Culture
§ Technology
§ Knowledge Processes
§ Learning and Innovation, and
§ Monitoring and Evaluation.

24 SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW | Volume 15 • No. 2 of 2022/2023