Dec 16
KM Strategy for Small- & Medium-sized Businesses
Compared to large enterprises, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) lack the resources to implement large scale knowledge management projects. They rather focus on practical and simple solutions. In SMB an initiative to foster knowledge sharing should not require additional work and the KM strategy should focus on elements that are straight-forward and bring tangible benefit. On the other hand, small organisations have the advantage of less barriers and obstacles for this kind of initiatives. And with the right mindset of the leadership, the KM strategy can be quickly and successfully implemented.
Vision
Each strategy should start with the aspiration to achieve something great. Often, this might be called the vision. Here is my humble suggestion on how this “dream” could be formulated:
“In order to strengthen our business performance, we want to network our knowledge workers, which will lead to better decision making and enabling innovation”
Dec 06
Designing Conferences as a Learning Event
Nancy Dixon’s blog about a breakthrough in the way the US Army organises its annual KM conference reminds me of a pet peeve of mine. Given what we know about how people learn, why are some conferences still organised the way they are – with back-to-back-breaking plenaries and powerpoints?
Thankfully, habits are slowly changing. The Rome-based UN agencies are years ahead with their Share Fairs. Last month, the Asia Pacific Division of the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) organised a 3-day learning event based entirely on KM principles (see the event’s social reports here). And to a large extent so did the Asia Pacific Business Narrative Conference. KM Asia this year introduced “interactive sessions” on both days of its programme.
My favourite KM conference is the ACT-KM Conference, where in true Aussie style they manage to keep it laidback – and fun. I remember being surprised by how casually delegates ask presenters questions during their presentations, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Here in Singapore, we wait respectfully until a 50-slide presentation is over, and then many of us are too shy and/or exhausted to ask questions.
We also seem to be uninterested in doing social reporting. During the recent KM Asia conference held in Singapore, only one out of the few people who tweeted was a local. We missed out on an opportunity to practise using social media tools in a safe-fail environment, to practise what some of us preach back at our workplace.
We have still some long way to go before conferences become the learning event that they ought to be, but thankfully the chipping at old habits is well underway.
Dec 04
KM Asia 2010 - A Summary of Topics
Last week, I have participated in KM Asia; as usual, this has been a very interesting event with great contributions from the region and other parts of the world. The speeches covered common topics which I would like summarise here.
As a start, Dave Snowden initiated his session with the essence of Knowledge Management; nothing new but always worthwhile to repeat:
“Enable Human Networks to make Better Decision“
Nov 07
Trends in Knowledge Management
Traditionally, KM was more often than not a top-down driven approach. For example, document taxonomies and knowledge sharing procedures were defined; identified experts shared their knowledge in defined communities.
Today, we can identify six strong trends that lead into new concepts of knowledge sharing and collaboration:
Oct 18
Video on KM Competencies, Skills, Experience
On the sidelines of the Special Libraries Association conference in New Orleans last year, Karen Huffman of the SLA’s KM division, made some videos for wannabe knowledge and information managers. In this one, she asks a bunch of seasoned professionals what advice they would give on the competencies, skills and experience that would be useful in that role. Full disclosure: I appear in the video.
Oct 08
Conducting a KM Planning Exercise
Followers of my company Straits Knowledge will know that we have produced a number of KM job aids out of our consulting experience. They are all designed to make KM thinking accessible to “ordinary” operational managers, so that we can help them get the insights they need into how KM can help them in their business, in a genuinely participative way, without having to learn any detailed theory in advance.
We have KM Diagnostic Cards identifying typical pain points relating to knowledge and information issues, Organisational Culture Cards which identify commonly found patterns of behaviour around knowledge sharing and use, and KM Method Cards which help you brainstorm a whole range of possible interventions depending on the need. Now we’ve produced our latest product which helps to integrate these tools in a single facilitated conversation with operational managers: the KM Planning Canvas. You can buy all of these from our web store!
This video tutorial takes you through a rapid planning exercise on the KM Planning Canvas using input from a real organisation as an example. Even if you don’t want to buy the full kit, we hope it gives a useful insight into the things to think about when planning practical KM interventions at an operational level. Enjoy, and if you like it, buy the complete kit from our store! If you already own some of our card sets, you can also buy items separately.
Download the MP4 video file by right clicking here
Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here
Oct 07
Taxonomy: Workshop in Australia March 2011
For all you Australians out there, I’ll be bringing my taxonomy workshop to Sydney 3-4 March 2011, courtesy of Matt Moore of Innotecture. Matt’s been running a survey of taxonomy professionals in Australia, and we’ve fed some of the insights from that survey into the workshop design. There’s a $100 discount if you register before 12 November, and participants get a free copy of my book! More details here.
Oct 05
Taxonomy: Error Cascades in Semantic Analysis
Here’s an interesting piece from the New York Times on the effort to develop intelligent machine categorisation. Most interesting is the way that early mistakes in the computer’s interpretation of content leads to mistake “avalanches” because prior learning is used to make inferences about future learning.
“When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.) NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education.”
Sep 29
Taxonomy: When is a Toy Not a Toy?
When it comes under onerous safety legislation, it seems. For those who believe that taxonomies describe the nature of things in themselves, and that taxonomies of things are the easiest things to create because of their observable, objective characteristics, this story from the New York Times illustrates how political shifts in the human system can drive previously uncontroversial categories and criteria for classification into headlong disarray. New safety legislation enacted in the USA places such an onerous burden on toymakers that previous classification criteria such as size, packaging, intended use or ultimate use are all up for grabs as toymakers redefine who uses their products and why.
Sep 26
Trust in Digital Media
The other day, I have participated in an event about Social Media; opportunities and risks from the perspective of corporations. During the presentation and especially in the following discussions we touched the topic of “trust”. I think this topic is generic for the wider use of electronic media and in my eyes worthwhile to share here.
The trigger of the discussion was the statement, or if you agree the fact, that people trust posts on social networking sites more than posts coming directly from corporations. Looking at this, it is even more astonishing that we trust posts from people we have never met before; these people might be friends of friends, but still, aren’t those people strangers to us?
