I have been covering most of my notes from the 2011 KM World on the Darwin blog. I am also proving the keynotes here. Tomorrow I wil porivde a complete listign wiht links of my Km World 2011 notes. I attended the Thursday keynote, KM for the Future: Pioneers’ Perspectives, by Robert H. Buckman, Retired Chairman & CEO - Bulab Holdings, Patrick Lambe, Founder - Straits Knowledge, Dave Snowden, Founder & CSO - Cognitive Edge, Verna Allee, Founder - ValueNet Works and author, Value Networks & the True Nature of Collaboration. Here is the session description.
“Longtime KM practitioners and industry pioneers reflect on the key strategies that are necessary for successful knowledge-sharing and application in any organization. They are interviewed by Lambe to bring out their different perspectives and insights. They will definitely stimulate your thinking about the future of knowledge-sharing in your organization.”
Patrick led the discussion. Dave was in Darwin and on Skype and the others were on stage. I have heard all three of these people many times. Patrick first asked about the key changes in KM and where is it going. Verna said in the early days KM seemed to pull together treads form several fields, organization learning and communities of practice. The business case for knowledge came from intellectual assets and building knowledge assets.
There was an early focus on databases but that has changed. We have moved from top down databases to more diffuse knowledge sharing through social tools and search and the cloud. The focus is less on storage and more on sharing. The evolution of job titles has shifted from CKO to community of practice leader and now to more of a business focus. Also there is less focus on explicit knowledge and more on tacit knowledge sharing. There is more of a focus on collaboration and how people are sharing knowledge. There are also more role based resources and people have multiple roles. We are also rediscovering learning that was part of early KM. We are going full circle to how do people learn. There is more learning on the job. How can you bring coaching to people at the time they need it? This is a nice summary and I certainly agree with her points.
Bob also said that the early focus was on explicit knowledge and databases. But the largest knowledge base is in the minds of employees. So the challenge is how to bring this tacit knowledge to play at the right points in the organization. You need to accelerate innovation. Communication is social networking. Collaboration is social networking around the needs to company. Innovation is social networking around the needs of the customer. Speed is key to winning.
Bob continued by saying we are now talking about metrics. We need to focus on outcomes more than activities. His grandchildren are using Skype for hours a day. They multi-task. Skype is becoming the kids’ favorite tool for social networking. He also talked about speech recognition software and how that could be transformative.
Dave said KM is going downhill. There were multiple origins for KM. Most other movements started with a single book and guru. KM did not. With KM there was learning, intellectual capital, decision support, growth of collaborative computing, and more. Lotus Notes was dominant then. KM was strategic in the 90s. Now SharePoint has replaced Notes and it is just file management. KM is now part of IT and less strategic. However, the need for KM is still here.
People are realizing that tacit knowledge transfer is key. Best practices are really past practices. The US Army realized this and focuses on direct person-to-person collaboration and not fixed practices. Small units of information have greater flexibility. Distributed cognition is more effective. There is also a need for decision makers to be in direct contact with the data without someone in between.
Patrick said that Dave seems to imply the KM is staking claims in other areas such as HR, IT and organizational design. Patrick asked if this is over reaching Dave said no. These were the original goals of KM but other movements are picking it up. KM got distracted by managing content.
Patrick asked if KM has a better chance now. Bob said somehow this movement got labeled knowledge management by some consultants. As a result we got focused on managing knowledge and you cannot do this. Bob tried using term knowledge management and it got a turn off in his firm. When he shifted to using the term ‘knowledge sharing” people responded well. His organization doubled its speed of innovation. We need to focus on how to move from command and control to a network organization to respond to customers quicker. We are not going to beat the competition by managing the databases.
Bob said that you need to help your managers move from be controlling to being leaders in a networked organization. Dave said the big switch in IT is from applications to architectures. If you have the right architecture then collaboration can occur. If you have an application focus then collaboration will be blocked.
Verna built on what Dave said. She said we are starting to realize the potential to for collaboration. Value networks priced the need flexibility to come beyond the tangible to model role based collaboration. Patrick said we are moving beyond metrics to modeling. Verna said you can take the narrative from the past and present and project into the future to try out scenarios. Patrick asked who does the modeling and Verna said it is the people who do they work, not outside experts. It needs to be simple enough so the people doing the work can do the modeling.
Dave commented on the dangers of modeling as is can bean abstraction away from reality. After a group discussion, Verna said if we become more skilled at addressing our informal needs, there will be a healthier business environment. This fits with Bob’s comments on knowledge sharing. Dave was asked if KM was more like American football or association football. He said that KM has been like US football and it should be more like rugby. If play US football you always have to go forward and you can change the team. With UK football you can go forward or backward and the team has to stay the same so there is more coherence.
Bob said we start by sharing more trivial content to establish a comfortable level. Then they become more comfortable with sharing serious stuff. He added that is a networked world be prepared to support chaos. You need to be able to get meaning form the chaos.
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