Government KM Case Study: Building KM Tools and Processes

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

Anne Speca, USAID Knowledge Technical Director, described how Feed the Future, the U.S. Government's Global Hunger and Food Initiative, is approaching KM during her presentation at KMWorld Connect 2020.  

There were a few main steps the initiative took to building its KM tools, she explained. The first step included taking an inventory of inherited legacy tools. 

"The central challenge that we faced was we had to transfer over a lot of these tools to be able to maintain continuity of service. But at the same time, we had to maintain openness to the new context that we were operating," Speca said. 

The second step the organization took included looking at how its needs were different now, and also consider what the future state will look like. 

"We did a holistic review of our needs and what the gaps were and created a process for tool acquisition," Speca said. 

The organization put a process in place to evaluate its tools with a team of 25 people. They wanted people to encourage people to be more flexible with looking at tools and also recognize that leadership needs to demonstrate their willingness to adopt new tools, but then also drop tools. 

"Staff needed to understand that we couldn't take on every tool that seemed cool and interesting," she said. "We were balancing these different factors around value, cost, complexity, suitability training, the relative advantages and trade-offs, and that decisions needed to be made about balancing all of these factors. So some of our lessons learned at this point were that you needed to strike a balance between having this openness to new tools, but also the fact that there were some constraints."