Keith August 25th, 2008
Matt Moore and I recently collaborated on an article for Melcrum’s KM Review magazine: Closing the deal with the help of knowledge.
A copy of this is now available for downloading on the Documents page on this site.
Keith August 22nd, 2008
My next event - I will be speaking at the Marcus Evans 5th Annual Web Content Management Forum in Sydney on Tuesday 2 September, at the Sydney Harbour Marriott.
The title of my presentation is: Improving your knowledge management performance to gain a competitive advantage and developmental process. As soon as I figure out what that means, I will get my slide pack finished and be ready to deliver it!
But seriously - if you are in Sydney that Monday or Tuesday and would like to catch up, happy to do so. I expect that I will be having some client meetings while I am there, but I should have some spare time around that, particularly on the Monday evening. I’ll be staying at the Sydney Harbour Marriott.
Keith August 18th, 2008
“… when you tell people you write, read or listen to blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks and online video - if they give you a funny look, it is now officially them that’s a freak, not you.”
Picked up a couple of recent reports from different places. One was in time to build into last week’s presentation, one not.
Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies
The reports highlights the use of Social Media for: “… recruiting, alumni programs, mentoring, learning, collaboration, and connecting people…” It also reminds us that: “Professional networks are the backbone of business”.
Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media
“77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.”
This post highlights that social media adoption is “skyrocketing” in 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US.
Keith August 15th, 2008
So, I delivered the workshop today - to three great participants! The workshop was: Using social media to harness knowledge within an organisation: Addressing the challenges. We all had a great time, and a good conversation!
I have now also registered with SlideShare for the first time, and uploaded a (very slightly modified) version of the slide pack. Not totally happy with the way it has been rendered, but it seems to be fairly readable. It is also available for download. Help yourself! And thanks to those who contributed…
Also had a great conversation with Ian Farmer of Bullseye. Ian pointed me at a few interesting sites:
Also got a good reference from elsua via Twitter for “Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss - Don’t Forget about Yourself!” This may be of particular interest to this morning’s participants!
Keith August 14th, 2008
A good day today. Met some good people, and all of the presentations were good.
Great live Second Life demo from Decka Mah (aka Lindy McKeown) to end the day. She also introduced us to PicLens - a cool Google plug-in for image viewing. Second Life is definitely a usable environment for learning, but the interface probably has a way to go yet to be really seamless. One thing to remember - it really works best as a synchronous learning environment - you have to be there at the right time. One neat application - a virtual city for immersive language learning.
You’ve heard of blended learning? Well, with Second Life, you can have “mixed reality”.
Some of us got a Twitter commentary going. See the tweets here - and a couple of rogue ones here.
Chieftech mentioned this site as a good source for info on RSS for the enterprise - he has also blogged about the day.
Lots of other good stuff, but I really need to make sure I am all ready to present my workshop tomorrow. A few parting thoughts that caught my attention, (somewhat paraphrased) from various presenters today:
Keith August 13th, 2008
“Social media has enabled me to feel ahead, not behind as I return to work after 2nd baby.”
- Serena Joyner (on Twitter)
While preparing for my workshop for Key Forums on Friday - Using social media to harness knowledge within an organisation: Addressing the challenges - (breathe in now) I read this great tweet from Serena Joyner on the benefit she has found in Social Networking tools as she returns to work after her second baby.
Serena then directed me to a longer blog post that she has written on this topic, which was inspired by a similar blog post from “wonderwebby” (Jasmin Tragas), who I have only met recently via Twitter.
They each have a number of points to make about the the benefits of social networking, and wonderwebby has a number of additional ones from others as comments on her post. In brief summary, these points (which I have now added to Friday’s slide pack) are:
Keith July 31st, 2008
“Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First there was no subject under the sun in which he [sic] could not easily get interested - from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all fields of information.”
- James Webb Young in A Technique for Producing Ideas (1965)
There have been a number of discussions on and off about what makes a good knowledge manager. In various discussions, I have always been interested to note the amazing range of backgrounds people come from - and usually a somewhat chequered career path - to get to this point. Personally, I have come via an IT degree, Project Management, Telecoms Consultancy, with a dash of adult learning and communications thrown in.
As “knowledge management” is such a broad church, there are a range of disciplines such as librarianship, information management, content management and IT that you would expect to see, but why are there so many zoologists now working in KM? I must admit that I haven’t met too many in the field from an advertising background (as per the quote above - highlighted in actKM a while ago), but these fields may well share a preference for diversity - and creativity.
Keith July 29th, 2008
A number of other bloggers have been writing about the KM Australia conference. I have posted links to a couple on the Melbourne KMLF blog, and Ark have now posted some more links - see the following:
(For all posts on this topic here, see the KM Aus 08 category.)
Regarding the KMLF session - a bit hard to say more than Frank has already written at VPS-CIN!
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 July 22nd, 2008
“It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humour, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.”
- Edward de Bono
The last presentation at KM Australia last night was from Gene Smith. This was one of my favourite types of presentation - wide-ranging, interesting, mind-expanding and minimal text on the slides.
The main topic was the future of information architecture. Among other things, Gene talked about the following:
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