Keith March 15th, 2010
For some time I have been working with a team of highly-skilled consultants in a business consultancy group called “The 3e Factor”. A new website for the group has just gone live.
The 3e Factor is an innovative management consultancy specialising in business transformation, leadership development, and recruitment services, with its head office in Melbourne, Australia. Our focus is: Transforming Strategic Thinking into Reality by Developing Corporate Capability.
Have a look at the site, and browse the capabilities of the consultants working with the group.
Please feel free to contact me or The 3e Factor if you would like to know more.
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 March 11th, 2009
The slide pack I presented at the recent BrightStar conference – 7th Annual Information Management Summit, in Wellington, New Zealand – has now been loaded to SlideShare.
There is a brief synopsis of the presentation on a previous post. Summary points as follows:
- Developing a knowledge sharing toolkit
- Keeping content up to date
- Dealing with knowledge hoarding
- Using multiple media and applying Social Media principles
As I also chaired one day of the conference, there is also a bonus introductory slide pack, featuring photos of New Zealand!
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 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 31st, 2008
“We go on being children, regardless of age, because in life we are always encountering new things that challenge us to understand them, instances where a practiced imagination is actually more useful that all laboriously acquired knowledge.” – Milan Kundera.
This is quoted from an essay by Shaun Tan – PICTURE BOOKS: Who Are They For?
C S Lewis has also written (in the Narnia chronicles) on the importance of retaining a child’s view of the world. (Not to mention the biblical injunctions.)
I have recently completed the StrengthsFinder assessment. The accompanying book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton provides a brief description of how the human brain develops. We are born with “a hundred billion neurons”, and we keep “about that many up until late middle age.” More importantly, these neurons form connections – synapses – with each other.
By the age of three, “each of your hundred billion neurons has formed fifteen thousand synaptic connections with other neurons.” But from this age, these connection start to fall into disrepair. “… between the ages of three and fifteen you lose billions and billions of these carefully forged synaptic connections. By the time you wake up on your sixteenth birthday, half your network is gone.”
This may not be final – there has been some recent work on brain plasticity (by Norman Doidge in The Brain That Changes Itself) – but it appears that in general the connections within our brain do not change appreciably after that age.
However, Buckingham and Clifton state that our effectiveness depends on how well we capitalise on our strongest connections; the point of the book and assessment.
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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:
- “So there are photos of me drunk on Facebook. So what if a prospective employer sees them? If they don’t like it, then I don’t want to work there, anyway!” Continue Reading »
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.
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Keith June 20th, 2008
Just back from working with Dan and the team on the Kokoda Pathways blog. Finally got PodPress under control last night – it’s all taking shape! Just waiting for iTunes to set up our feed, and James and Jess will be full-time on interviewing, editing and uploading next week. Good fun!
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Last week I had the opportunity to meet Jay Cross – thanks to an invitation from Shawn. Jay and I share some views on the role of learning in today’s organisation. My main view is that making distinctions between learning, communications and content/knowledge/information management is an entirely archaic device intended to protect some people’s individual empires. (Read more on my view here.)
Jay wrote back, directing me to one of his blog posts. The salient point here is:
KM & training both suffer from corporate Alzheimer’s: the inability to read the handwriting on the wall. The future is bottom-up, open, networked, and more complex than we’ll ever understand. Deal with it… Isn’t it time for a requiem to these “solutions” to yesterday’s problems? Old-style KM and training don’t work in today’s egalitarian, networked world.
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Keith November 30th, 2007
Now here is a really interesting concept! Have a look at FreeRice:
From the site:
FreeRice has two goals:
- Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
- Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.
WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance…
Sound too good to be true? Well, it does appear to be totally legitimate. The Urban Legends Reference Pages (Snopes) supports it. You can also read about it on the United Nations World Food Programme site – the agency that is distributing the donated rice.
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