Keith April 7th, 2009
How do you define what you do? Particularly when the main thing you do is something as potentially nebulous as “Knowledge Management”?
In order to clarify the consultancy services that AcKnowledge Consulting is offering to the market, I have drafted a collection of Capability Statements. A Capability Statement is normally a fairly straightforward document, outlining a technical function that can be delivered by an organisation - particularly one operating in an area like IT outsourcing. This is fine where the technical capability is readily understood by all concerned.
The main area of this consultancy service is Optimising organisational efficiency by effectively managing and delivering the knowledge required to meet business demands - with a particular focus on meeting the demands of a sales force. This could be summarised as “Knowledge Management for Sales”, but the term “Knowledge Management” can mean many different things. Accordingly, I have developed a slightly different format for my Capability Statements, as follows:
- The Business Situation - an outline of the needs of a particular function or group within an organisation.
- The Challenge - some specific issues in this area that require attention, or that are presenting a problem.
- Where AcKnowledge Consulting can help - an outline of some of the specific ways that AcKnowledge Consulting can address these issues.
- Why AcKnowledge Consulting? - some supporting information on relevant experience that can be brought to bear in this situation, including testimonials from clients as appropriate.
These documents are written on a single page for each capability. For an example, see the Knowledge Transfer Capability Statement. The current list of capabilities and statements is available on the About page on this site.
I welcome any feedback or comments on these statements, and how useful you may find them for understanding the services described.
Keith November 3rd, 2008
I have just been along to a reunion at my old school - Colac High School, in western Victoria. I have only ever been to one of these before, and that was a long time ago. All the more interesting this time, as this will be the last reunion at that campus, after something like 96 years of a school on that site. A new, single campus is now taking over from the two original government schools - once the High and Tech schools.
It was an interesting experience. Trying to recognise people after all these years was particularly interesting. Some of the school-ground and buildings seemed almost identical to what I remember. Some of the buildings do seem much smaller than I remember, too! The old back-stage lighting control room in the hall was boarded up! I spent many happy hours there… Some of the locations brought back poignant memories, one of which I have written about here.
I met a few of my classmates. It was interesting comparing notes on the events of the intervening years. I didn’t really ever engage with school much, or with many of the people there. It was great to be able to effectively start off all over again with the people that I did meet. I may be in touch with some of them again. I even met an old family friend, who had apparently once been a student there.
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Keith October 25th, 2008
Problogger has asked for readers to write about their own blogs - in the character limit of a Twitter message. This is running as an experiment over this weekend, and the messages are being posted as comments on the post.
Here’s mine:
Knowledge, communication, storytelling, language, learning, social media; with a dash of Zen. Oh, and consultancy and a big black cat.
If you are here because you read this, then you can read about the big black cat here.
You’ll find the Zen posts here.
Keith September 25th, 2008
I wrote earlier this year about “Practice, Communities and Technology“. This post stressed the importance of the “practice”:
For a CoP to be successful, the community must become part of the practice itself… the community needs to become part of how they do their job.
People in an organisation will just not do things that aren’t part of their job accountability and that they see no point in doing.
Just today I hit on a really neat metaphor to illustrate this…
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Keith August 28th, 2008
I know that there was a bit of a hiatus here after my exit from Telstra (two posts in April and only one in May), but I have just done a quick check of my Archive list, and it appears that I am currently averaging around 7 posts per month - which is around one post every four days.
It is very tempting to put off posting - particularly when you are incredibly busy - but for all aspiring bloggers out there, the secret is to post when something is on your mind, even just a few words. A blog post doesn’t have to be a magnum opus, although when you have the time and inspiration that can be good, too.
The most important thing is to keep up with a fairly steady stream, and keep your network engaged and building as much as possible!
One thing that I now find invaluable is Google Toolbar, which includes a spell checker - this is a lot easier that copying and pasting between Word and WordPress. Of course, when I do finally get around to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, it’s all built in!
So, any other bloggers out there, what is your posting average?
Keith July 31st, 2008
Apologies if you have visited this site any time in the last 12 hours or so, and noticed that it didn’t look quite right. Something caused complete chaos…
I realised that I hadn’t checked for dead links for ages, and ran LinkSleuth. In fact, I may never have used it since setting up the WordPress blog. This is a great little program that has always worked very nicely in the past, but this time it apparently caused complete chaos. Half the posts on the site vanished, the theme changed back to the basic old WordPress look, and all the Categories vanished.
I am still not quite sure what happened. I may have entered the URL into LinkSleuth in such a way that it behaved incorrectly; the way I have my site set up with redirects may have upset LinkSleuth; or LinkSleuth may just be a bit dangerous with WordPress for some reason. I’m not sure about this, but I can’t find anyone else complaining about it on Google.
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Keith May 1st, 2008
So - today is my first day post-Telstra!
I have spent the day in Sydney delivering a half-day workshop at the Data Quality conference, and spent some time catching up with Matt Moore in the evening over a refreshing drink or two - and a $10 steak. We had a very small group for the workshop, but everyone seemed to get something useful from it. It was actually quite fun having the small group - we only needed one table, so I came and sat at the table as well, and delivered the session from there. More fun in the city tomorrow.
By odd coincidence, last night was also my first night at a Creative Writing course at CAE, which I am attending with my daughter Renée. One of the exercises at the course was to write continuously - about anythng - for ten minutes. You can imagine what was the first thing that came to mind. So, just for fun, here it is - completely unedited:
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Keith April 7th, 2008
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” - J. R. R. Tolkien
Where does the KM function ideally belong in an organisation? This is the topic of a recent discussion on actKM. I have been working in KM in Telstra for about eight years. The role of my team is to make it easy for our business sales people to access the knowledge they need to sell our products, services and solutions. Over this time, the migration of the team through the organisation has been as follows:
- Sales (in a specialist sales/technical area)
- Marketing
- Sales (in “Sales Programs”, with the communication group)
- Marketing (with the Campaign Build function)
- Business Operations (for six months, where I was the only member of the original team remaining)
- Sales Excellence (with the Sales communications, training and other support groups)
- Enterprise Learning (over the last six months or so)
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Keith January 8th, 2008
Things are a bit quiet around here while I am on holiday. I am currently sitting at our tent in Tathra, on the south coast of New South Wales.
One thing I have discovered in my brief online forays is the “My Blogs” application on Facebook. I was hoping that there was something like this available. I find it slightly annoying that there are few connections between various social networking sites, and (as a Knowledge Manager) I abhor duplicated effort.
If it works as promoted, My Blogs will put blog posts from this site up on my Facebook profile. So far, it seems to have only posted two entries from late November last year - it will be interesting to see if this one goes up…
I had previously had an app on Facebook pointed out to me that lets me look at my LinkedIn contacts via Facebook, but both of these still seem a little limited. May there be many more improvements in this space!
Keith December 28th, 2007
Thank you all for your support over this year, and all the best for the season - however you celebrate it!
