(This post was originally posted on my LinkedIn Profile and has been edited slightly.)
I’ve been reflecting on this question through the lens of the Global MIKE Award — the international benchmark that’s recognised organisations like Infosys, Wärtsilä, and Bangchak for excellence in knowledge and innovation management. As a member of the judging panel since 2022, I’ve had the privilege of reviewing submissions from organisations across sectors and geographies, and patterns emerge.
What strikes me is what doesn’t appear in the assessment criteria.
There’s no category for “most sophisticated technology stack.” No points awarded for the slickest search interface or the largest content repository.
Instead, the eight criteria centre on distinctly human concerns: empowering knowledge workers, transformative leadership, cultivating innovation culture, developing networks and connectivity.
The technology is assumed. The differentiator is everything else.
This resonates with something the Consortium for Service Innovation discovered when developing Knowledge-Centered Service methodology in the 1990s. They started by focusing on tools — and then realised that success “was more about people and their behaviours than it was about the tool.”
Three decades later, we’re still learning this lesson.
World-class KM isn’t a system you install. It’s a set of organisational capabilities you cultivate:
Knowledge created in the flow of work, not in isolation from it. Governance that enables rather than restricts. Frontline workers trusted as authors, not just consumers. Contribution recognised and celebrated. Learning embedded in daily practice.
In contact centres I see organisations investing heavily in AI-powered knowledge tools while neglecting the fundamentals: governance, culture, content quality, feedback loops. The technology can’t compensate for these gaps. It amplifies them.
The MIKE framework reminds us that intellectual capital has three dimensions: human, relational, and structural. Most technology investments target structural capital alone. World-class organisations invest across all three.