There are many measures that can help your organization understand both the adoption and benefits of knowledge-sharing practices. The five measures presented below represent the ones that I believe are most helpful for all organizations, regardless of size or function. If you're sharing knowledge, these measures will report progress and reinforce behaviors.

But why five? To effectively measure progress and adoption, you need more than one measure, because focusing on one to the exclusion of the others can lead to disaster. The quality of your knowledge-sharing program shares a similar characteristic. If you only focus on one of the areas below, you won’t have a healthy program. You're just trading off success in a single metric for poor performance in another. So use several of these metrics together to gauge your success.