I am primarily posting my notes from the 2011 KM World on the Darwin blog. I will share a few key sessions here and then a list of all of them with links. I attended the Wednesday keynote, Let Your Networks Be Your Guide: Search in a 2.0 World, by Carla O'Dell, President - APQC Author, The New Edge in Knowledge. Here is the session description. The session was more about knowledge management in general but it was excellent.
“A defining feature of our 2.0 World is the reliance on employees to create, share, rate, and consume content. Every employee can be an author, arbiter, and consumer at once. The implications for the networked enterprise are profound: The more people create and interact with each other’s content, the more the content improves; search results get better as the best content and the most active peers bubble to the top; people build new connections to others they never knew had the same interests. Through engaging examples, stories and data, O’Dell shares the latest findings from APQC’s KM research and her new book, including the following: How best practice organizations are using 2.0 to enhance search results; the surprising impact of participation on personal and team performance; and novel ways to get people to participate to enhance search and findability.”
Carla said that 17 years ago AQPC got interested in KM. She had noticed that the transfer of best practices was slow and looked into it. The holy grail of KM is how to get people to participate. If knowledge flows miracles happen. We learn from our mistakes. Carla said three things are needed. People need to contribute. You need to have an answer when people search, as the second thing is to get people to use the knowledge. You want people to be advocates.
You also need to make it rewarding if people share knowledge. The rise of social computing helps with participation in KM. Five years ago there was a lot of promise with social. Many of the promises have come true. She had the audience discuss these promises. I was excited to see that KM could now be a byproduct of using social tools to do work and knowledge contribution did not have to be a follow-on activity (for example see An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). You could also more easily embed collaboration into work processes (see Putting Social Media to Work). Other ideas: break down silos and hierarchies, to enable conversations, moving stuff off email to a platform where we can find it, more help finding experts and giving voice to people who did not have a platform before.
Carla added to the promises: the wisdom of crowds would help us find the good content. She showed the relationship between participation and the implementation of lessons learned. The number of lessons learned then correlates with a reduction in defects. This shows the power of social computing to effect business outcomes.
Next she covered myths; If you just start social computing it will go viral. Also, what happens in the Web happens in the enterprise. Carla said that content on the Web was created to be discovered. This does not happen with content within the enterprise. Clara contrasted a cute puppy video on the Web that went viral with 3 million views with a boring collaboration platform screen.
She asked the audience for what it takes to have something go viral in the enterprise. I would say that it has to demonstrate business value to the organization and personal value to the individuals within the organization. But I am not sure that viral is the same goal within the enterprise. Knowledge needs to align within work processes.
Audience responses: simplicity and relevancy, executive participation, easy to access, “make it about raises or layoffs.” It has to be relevant to the individual and if your friends have seen it, then you will want to see it. The final one was it has to be lead behind the scenes.
Carla picked up on this last one. She said that KM people need to work above the flow of knowledge to enable it. The employees need to be within the flow of knowledge. However, you should not require experts to evaluate everything. You do need to have an enterprise wide platform to avoid silos within different tools.
You need to ensure that networks are in the flow of work. Some best practice organizations in this area are Conoco Phillips (see Creating Global Knowledge Sharing Networks at ConocoPhillips), CSC, and Fluor. These organizations all say that their networks are key to success.
Carla next covered what is in KM for the individual. People want to be able to see their career path. You need to make participation in knowledge sharing part of this path. At Fluor getting involved with knowledge sharing communities is part of your advancement. You want to obtain an acknowledged level of expertise.
Carla provided links to ways to assess KM in our organization. She then closed with Susan Boyle who got over 64 million views. I remember when it when viral. It was exciting and I was part of that viral activity.
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