This article effectively serves as a White Paper on the work that I have done in the past on a Knowledge Transfer Toolkit, and the related consultancy service now offered.

The Australian Collaboration Software Report

Are you currently using collaborative software, or are you planning to acquire it? Would you like to benchmark your experience against that of others? Are you based in Australia? Please fill out the survey at http://tinyurl.com/ozcollab now!

Matt Moore of Innotecture and I are researching the use of collaboration tools in Australia. “Collaboration” is a buzz term at the moment, and we want to get behind the hype to discover how organisations are selecting and implementing tools and whether they are benefiting from them. If you have experience with selecting, implementing or maintaining a collaboration tool within the last 12 months then we would like you to take part in this survey. 

Read more about what’s in it for you at: http://ozcollab.com/.

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.)

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.

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!

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…

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.

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:

• You absolutely MUST have a play at jacksonpollock.org.  (If it’s not obvious at first, just move the mouse and click somewhere…)
• Create your own animated models at sodaplay.com.
• Create and browse modern art at viscosity.
• See the Genealogy of influence viewer.

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.)

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!