Keith April 3rd, 2009
How are companies dealing with the KM challenge in the Web 20.era? … Reports of the demise of knowledge management sound somewhat exaggerated to the large number of Australian professionals working to implement KM strategies at large and small organizations across the country.
I contributed to an article in IDM Magazine some time ago; I have now been able to load a copy of the full article on this site.
The article includes interviews with a number of Knowledge Managers: Margaret Williams, Knowledge Manager at Gadens Lawyers; Linda Bevin, Information and Knowledge Manager at the Australian Wine Research Institute; Nerida Hart, Director of Knowledge at Land and Water Australia and Luke Naismith (then) a knowledge, foresight and change project leader with Contax, operating in the Middle East.
My contribution was based on my experience with the “KM Toolkit” at Telstra. (I had just left the organisation by the time the article was published.)
Keith March 25th, 2009
Presented a half-day workshop on this topic at the CPA Australia Newcastle Convention this afternoon. Seemed to go well - had some good discussions. This is basically an updated version of the same presentation I delivered at the Victorian CPA Congress last October.
See the updated slide pack on SlideShare.
The details are as follows:
- A toolkit approach to organisational comms - an overview of a range of comms media that can be used.
- Understanding the social media revolution - understand how much things are changing around us.
- Engaging and collaborating - working through a number of Web 2.0 tools, their applications and results.
- Segmenting the audience - understanding diverse styles and needs.
- Putting it all together - how to assemble a program of both traditional and Web 2.0 tools, with some specific case studies.
Keith March 24th, 2009
I delivered a presentation yesterday that I really enjoyed putting together, and it was great fun to deliver!
The brief was a keynote presentation for Panviva’s annual SupportPoint User Conference. SupportPoint is a “Business Process Guidance” system.
The brief was to deliver a Keynote presentation, and to set the theme for the conference: “Communication and Collaboration”. The underlying theme that I used to couch this on was Creativity, and the importance of creativity in both leadership and knowledge work. The slide pack is available on SlideShare.
I have used this as a good opportunity to shake off (at least some of) the shackles of PowerPoint - by using lots of pictures, and a lot less words. Some of the photos are mine, and most of the rest are Flickr “Creative Commons - Attributions” licensed photos, all with links on the relevant slides.
As there are lots of pictures, some of the slides may not be clear without the voice over (which maybe I’ll add to SlideShare later). The initial point is explaining my initial perceptions of creativity - influenced by the paintings of both my mother and my sister. (See the post “Moving mountains” on this site for more of this story.)
The next section refers to the material in this post on creativity in leadership, and briefly touches on my thoughts on Change Management. I then go over some of my past experiences with a Knowledge Management Toolkit, and how we went about developing it. The final part of the presentation picks up on a recent post on story at Anecdote, which includes a link to the story of “the one-armed boy”.
With that explanation, I hope it all makes sense, and that you enjoy this as much as I did!
Keith February 17th, 2009
After a long break (due to appearing to be very busy for some time), back to the blog. Just a brief note to advise that I will be speaking in Wellington, New Zealand at BrightStar’s 7th Annual Information Management Summit on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 March. The title of my presentation is: Developing Organisation-Wide Knowledge Management Strategy and Incorporating Social Media in the Process. A brief precis follows:
This international case study presents the Knowledge Management and Transfer toolkit developed by the Telstra Corporation (Australia) Enterprise & Government KM team.
This toolkit was used to capture the product and service knowledge developed by the Product Management teams, and make it available to the business sales force, using an integrated program of content, communications and training initiatives. This included developing a standard taxonomy, governance processes and templates, with all developed content made available via a single portal.
This presentation will focus on the processes used to maintain the currency of content, the use of an open policy and rewards and recognition to promote knowledge sharing, and the use of multiple media to ensure that the needs of the total audience were adequately catered for.
The lessons learned from this development are broadly applicable to knowledge capture and sharing in project teams, organisational changes, enterprise-wide knowledge programs and many other similar situations.
I will also be chairing day two of the conference.
In other news, my son Scott is in the final stages of planning for a two-month trek on the National Bicentennial Trail with three friends (and six horses). We have set up a new blog for loading stories and photos once the trip commences. They will be starting at Providence (near Canberra), and the plan is to finish at Knockwood, Victoria. We will be travelling to meet them at least once during the trip.
So that’s two trips I’ll be doing in March, not counting a few days in Darwin for my mother’s 95th Birthday. And then there’s the CPA Congress in Newcastle, as well…
Keith October 31st, 2008
I delivered a half-day workshop at the 2008 CPA Congress on Friday last week on Effective organisational comms - Blending traditional and Web 2.0 techniques. The slide pack is now available on SlideShare.
This workshop was all about developing a toolkit approach to organisational comms, with an emphasis on social media. Includes engaging and collaborating, segmenting the audience and putting it all together.
You can also see other slide packs on my SlideShare, and a full list of published documents on the Docs page on this site.
If you would like a presentation or workshop on any of these topics delivered to your organisation, please contact me to arrange.
Keith September 3rd, 2008
The slide pack I presented at the Web Content Management Forum in Sydney this week is now available on SlideShare. It’s about Managing knowledge as an asset and building a knowledge transfer toolkit, and includes ownership and currency maintenance. (Interesting to note that my pack from the last conference has now had 539 views on SlideShare.)
Jonathan Cooper of the Art Gallery of New South Wales was one of the other speakers there yesterday morning. They are doing some interesting things at myVirtualGallery - and he also introduced a few other interesting web sites:
Something else I picked up from Twitter - see how popular your name has been over the last 100 years (in NSW) at The Baby Names Explorer. (Interesting to see that my name was ranked number 8 - in the 1920s. Since then, the popularity of the name dropped to almost zero by 2005, but it is making a slight recovery now.)
Keith July 25th, 2008
Patrick Lambe has produced a fantastic little resource for KM practitioners - a pack of KM Method Cards. This is a pack of quick reference cards covering 80 approaches, methods and tools that can be used in KM planning, assessments and implementations. You can get the cards from the Straits Knowledge online store.
The cards give neat, useful summaries of “KM approaches (eg CoPs, Information Literacy, KM Champions), methods (eg AARs, Pre-Mortems, Anecdote Circles) and tools (eg Wikis, Taxonomies, Competency Frameworks)”. Patrick’s team at Straits Knowledge has already been using them “in a variety of activities with our clients, often in helping them to visualise and plan how they are going to operationalise their KM strategies. Our clients have used them to provide quick reference guides to their KM activists and champions, and also to identify training and competency development needs.”
They are really neat, easy to carry around and use, and give a really good snapshot of all the topics in a form that can be very quickly read and digested!
Keith February 20th, 2008
I really enjoyed the workshop yesterday at the Ark Group Facilitating Knowledge Transfer and Retention in the Modern Workplace conference. I promised to blog about it, but now I can’t remember precisely what it was I was going to blog about! So, if you were there, and you have any questions, please post them here as comments, and we’ll talk about it!
Keith August 21st, 2007
Just picked up this interesting Case Study of a Wiki changing an Enterprise. This was posted on actKM by Andrew Mitchell, from James Robertson.
Keith August 9th, 2007
Arthur Shelley and Patrick Lambe are arranging to facilitate some ”fun exercises to encourage Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing” for the actKM Conference in October, and have asked for some input.
Here’s one that I have used in a different context, but is potentially useful.
As with a lot of these, the “learning” aspect can be pitched in a number of different ways, and depends on how you introduce, facilitate and debrief the exercise.
Not sure of the name of this one. It is based on the standard game of five-card poker. You just need some standard packs of playing cards (no jokers). I used four packs for a group of around 80 people - you can vary to suit. You need to have at least one card per person - having more increases the randomness. You also need a cardboard box to collect cards in (or more than one for a larger group). It is also worth putting up an order of winning poker hands on a large notice or on a projector. The game then runs as follows:
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