The first AOK STAR Series of 2005 is with Michael Behounek of Halliburton, discussing What Makes KM Sustainable. As always, preparatory materials are at AOK: Preparing for Conversations with Michael Behounek, and the discussion is via email (yahoo groups) - join AOK for free. The discussion started this week and runs for another (through the 28th). Yes, I am behind the gun.
The preparatory materials suggest a number of modes in which sustainability happens within an organization: creating, ensuring, maintaining, and helping. Behounek describes a number of aspects of each of these modes and says that they all need to be active, or the project will get bogged down. One item that interests me is the need to focus on delivering value (and its opposite, "don't be a hammer looking for a nail"). It is clear that any project needs to tie to providing business value to succeed over the long term. Yes, it needs to have many of the other components that Behounek lists, but without a good connection to value it will never become a sustained effort.
How do you make the connection to value? Well, that is where Behounek's other components come in: executive sponsorship, dedication, measurements, what's-in-it-for-me, etc. They are highly inter-related.