BrightStar is hosting the 6th Annual Information Management Summit in Wellington today and tomorrow. There’s about 100 people in attendance, and apparently this is normal for this conference in Wellington. David Armstrong is the conference chair, a role he has played for the last 5 years.

The first presentation of the conference is by Grant Margison from Information Leadership, with the topic Creating an Enterprise Wide Knowledge Management Strategy. Key points:

– don’t call it “knowledge management”. Grant and others prefer the term “know how”.
– be careful about talking that substitutes for action, eg, “tacit knowledge”, best practices (better to focus on standard everyday things … FAQs, “what form should I use?”, “who do I talk to?”)
– focus on the wins that you get from doing something positive for the business.
– think know-how value chain … data (someone called about a problem), information (it’s the 25th call on this today), know-how (escalation alert), and tacit (what can we pre-emptively do about this?). In order to make the tacit work, need to summarize up what is being found and tracked.
– let’s look at it from the perspective of the person … a person brings experience, talent and passion … and we add things to them … expert support, collaboration, data and information, and know-how. Out of this we get people asking the right questions.
– lots of different forms of data and information. Need to run this through the knowledge pyramid. At the top … the definitive (sources of truth, contracts), then instruments and mechanisms (workflows, templates), data “file and find repositories”, definitive self-help “knowledge articles”, and finally “informal know-how”. Top down is for saying what should happen, bottom-up is advocating for change.
– “So what?”. The “what” provides a way of mapping the 5 items above to three key questions: content (what do we need?), systems (what is necessary?), culture (what needs to happen?)
– when an organization looks at what they are doing today, and the map of the above, it highlights the gaps. Can then plan some roadmap programmes. Want the outcomes to be about a KM “movement”, not just a KM “project”. This is about leadership and governance, common language (through negotiation), system infrastructure, expertise development, unbundling of expertise, roles and responsibilities framework.
– learning styles come into all of this … we develop content out of our own learning style. But this doesn’t match with others. Eg, reference (read the manual), people (ask someone else), experiment (just try things), practical (will just leave it there until we need something done). These different learning styles need to be taken into consideration when planning a knowledge environment.
– what’s the biggest issue with KM? “You expect ME to change my habits and behaviour?”. Grant argues that you need to do “triple U” … (u)seable, (u)seful and (u)sed.
– make it safe for people to share
– with expertise unbundling … identify, observe, analyze, socialize, and embed. Helps identify business process, know how, and opportunities for others to support.
– sometimes experts make things too complex on purpose … so they can keep their job and retain power.
– how do we drive this strategy? Get CEO or 2nd tier support. Go for a person who is pragmatic and can get things done. Build the team with a few core people from the organization, rotating through the organization.