I am presenting an updated version of the Knowledge Transfer Toolkit presentation - read more about the background on this site, including this recently published article. The outline of the presentation is as follows:

Building and managing a knowledge transfer program:

How do you encourage technical experts to share their knowledge with others in the organisation that need it to do their jobs? How do you maintain currency and accuracy? This case study presentation will explain how to build a successful knowledge transfer toolkit.

Topics include:

• Encouraging knowledge-sharing behaviours
• Building a program-managed multimedia toolkit, comprising content, communication, learning and social media
• Governance – keeping content up to date
• Engaging the target audience in improving content
• Using social media principles to build trust and engagement

View or download the slide pack on SlideShare here.

This will be similar to earlier versions of this presentation, but will have a little more stress on the use of Social Media principles in this work.  The outline is as follows:

How do you encourage technical experts to share their knowledge with others in the organisation that need it to do their jobs? How do you maintain currency and accuracy? This case study presentation will explain how to build a successful knowledge transfer toolkit, covering aspects such as:

• Encouraging knowledge-sharing behaviours
• Building a program-managed multimedia toolkit, comprising content, communication, learning and social media
• Governance – keeping content up to date
• Engaging the target audience in improving content
• Using social media principles to build trust and engagement

See you there?

Many large organisations have subject matter experts with a deep knowledge and understanding of business-critical information. This knowledge needs to be conveyed to a target audience in another area of the organisation, mostly comprised of staff with a lower level of technical expertise. In traditional organisational structures, content management, intranet, communications and training are often located in separate silos. Yet all of these areas provide tools that assist in knowledge transfer – the desired end result is an informed audience.  

This splitting of functions can lead to inefficiency, duplication of effort, confused messages and errors. Other critical factors impacting effective knowledge transfer are maintenance of the currency and accuracy of content, as well as the problem of knowledge hoarding. 

In this article, a strategy for building a complete knowledge transfer toolkit will be described. This toolkit includes a range of individual elements, comprising content management, communications, learning and multimedia elements, coordinated as a managed program. Approaches to maintaining the currency and accuracy of content, dealing with knowledge hoarding and the relevance of social media principles will also be addressed.

I have written here many times about the “toolkit” approach we used in my work at Telstra (2000-2008).  This has been covered in a number of presentations that I have delivered, most recently at the 2010 CPA Congress. I wrote an article about it in 2009, and it was originally documented in a Case Study by Andrew Mitchell, also available on this site.

I have now published a more detailed article on the toolkit, chapter three in the book: TIMAF Information Management Best Practices – Volume 1, issued in November 2010. (An online edition is also available.) A copy of my article is now available for free download from this site here.  

This is the most complete description of the approach we used that has been published to date. (The team at Telstra is still using the same principles today.)

The TIMAF approach is to break the practice down into a number of steps. I have used – no, not ten, but eleven steps,as follows:

1. Establish a knowledge transfer team
2. Build a program management framework
3. Start small; think big
4. Deal with knowledge hoarding
5. Provide a central knowledge library
6. Develop content access methods and taxonomy
7. Provide other tools
8. Maintain content accuracy and currency
9. Engage the audience as part of the maintenance process
10. Use social media principles
11. Review and refresh

Have a read, and see if this approach would work in your organisation. I value your feedback!

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.

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.

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!

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…

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.

One of my old teachers spoke at the formal part of the day on Saturday.  A 1925 student also spoke.  She was born in 1914, and attended the school when it was an “Agricultural High School”. They had a school pig, and many students arrived by horse each day.  Turns out that my mother (around the same age) knew her, but they met after they had finished school.  It was a smaller town in those days.

It was interesting to note the average age of the attendees.  I would put it at over 60.  Maybe nostalgia grows on you more as you get older?

It was interesting to note how memory seems to operate.  The people I spent most time with were probably the most memorable.  Yet I also met my Year 8 History teacher, who was only at the school for that one year, and we remembered each other quite clearly.  At least one person who I spent most of the six years there with who repeated Year 11 was not so clear in my memory.  I had already seen an old photo of him earlier in the day, and the name was familiar, but when we met and chatted I was struggling to get a clear picture of our time together.  (If you are reading this, Cam, I hope you take no offence!)

Life flows on like a stream.  It’s sometimes interesting to look at which things we carry with us, and which we leave behind.

“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.

We have a huge number of connections while we are younger in order to soak up all the new sights, sounds and experiences.  But while we have all these connections, we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of signals.  In order to start making sense of everything, we need to develop a way of focusing on some signals, and blocking out the background “noise” of other signals.  We do this by progressively destroying the less “important” connections.

As our genetic inheritance and early childhood environment help us to sort out our neural pathways, our natural talents – our strengths – begin to emerge.

One of my strengths is apparently “Ideation”:

You are fascinated by ideas… concepts… Yours is the kind of mind that is always looking for connections, and so you are intrigued when seemingly disparate phenomena can be linked by an obscure connection… a new perspective on familiar challenges.

You revel in taking the world we all know and turning it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. You love all these ideas because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre…

This all makes me wonder.  Is it just possible, then, that some of the more creative, imaginative and intelligent people among us are those that have managed to retain some of the “child’s brain”? Conversely, have the most supposedly “grown up” of us in fact shut down too many connections, and lost the ability to enjoy the contrary and the bizarre; to see and feel the wonder of the world and the people around us? 

Perhaps we need to continue to expose ourselves to the “new things that challenge us”.  Give our imagination a little more practice.  Explore the things that we haven’t made sense of yet, flex a few synapses, and enjoy some of the noise that our “adult” brain would like to block out.

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!”
• If only 10% of the staff are editing Wikipedia, then don’t introduce a wiki to your organisation.  If 50% are already on Facebook, then provide an internal directory with editable profiles.
• Start small.  Don’t give people too much variety at first.
• A great way to reduce email traffic is to charge for emails, and give each staff member a limited budget.
• World email traffic volume has just dipped below social networking traffic.
• If you stop people from saying what they want to say on internal online forums, they will just talk somewhere else.
• Enterprise 2.0: a journey, not a destination.
• “Change is driven by feelings” (John Kotter).

Oh, and I nearly forgot:

“Let them own it, and they will protect it.”