Charlotte Winther is project manager of Business Strategy & Governance at Novo Nordisk (pharmaceutical company). She defines knowledge management this way (thanks to Dave Gurteen). Charlotte presents her lessons learned on developing a knowledge strategy in Novo Nordisk in a presentation for VidenDanmark, a Danish innovation, knowledge and learning network.
Novo Nordisk focuses on defeating diabetes and has established a global best practice sharing initiative, called DAWN.
October, 2006
...now browsing by month
KM practicioner (3) – Charlotte Winther
Sunday, October 29th, 2006Transition to English
Sunday, October 29th, 2006Blogging means communicating personal thoughts to some interested people out there. I ‘blogged’ in German until today but decided to change to the most well-understood language of the world: English. It’s also good language training, by the way.
Syntegration – An effective way for common decision-making
Sunday, October 15th, 2006Fredmund Malik promotes and applies the method Syntegration, which hearkens back to Stafford Beer. As far as I understand (I haven’t yet participated in a Syntegration workshop) the advantage of such a workshop is that it allows a group of people to discuss important topics very effectively, with the aim of finding a decision and coming to a consensus.
The course of actions is as follows:
- The participants are persons who are strongly involved in and affected by the solution of the key problem.
- The key problem is partitioned into topics within half a day. These topics are then discussed in teams.
- Five people review one topic over one hour. The topics are addressed in parallel or consecutively.
- Every topic is treated in three cycles (as-is state, target state, measures).
- Every participant takes on either the role of team member, slasher or observator when discussing a topic.
- The method makes great demands on the facilitators (six facilitators are necessary to deal with twelve topics, for six topics about four facilitators are required).
- A syntegration workshop costs between 30-60,0000 Euros.
Field reports about syntegration are rare (see blog of the Computerwoche magazine). The magazine Computerwoche has promoted the application of the syntegration method, with articles referring to Syntegration workshops used to help develop the IT strategy of the City of Zurich (Switzerland), as well as the business strategy of a medium-sized IT-company, and the strategy for the Swiss Pro-Football Team. Computerwoche also offers a description of the Syntegration method (all articles are in German).
Orhan Pamuk
Thursday, October 12th, 2006Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature today. I am just reading page 216 of his latest book “Snow“. Pamuk writes about the journey of an exiled writer in the provincial town of Kars, Turkey. He describes a society divided between the Orient and the West, between Turks, Kurds, and other cultures, between Turkish nationalism and religious extremism. The final conversation between an islamist and the school director of Karst in the chapter „Excuse me, Sir“ is alone very awe-inspiring and as I read it my blood ran cold.
KM Practicioners (2) – Kathryn Protopapadakis
Thursday, October 12th, 2006Kathryn Protopapadakis has been Head of Knowledge Management at Fujitsu Services since 2004. Kathryn defines KM this way. She sees herself as a ‘change agent’ and catalyst to pressing ahead with the management’s awareness of knowledge management issues (according to an article in InsideKnowledge). There would be no other way for her to act owing to the limited resources available.
KM Practicioners (1) – Catherine Flutsch
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006Catherine Flutsch is Head of Knowledge Development Operations at Bird & Bird, an international law firm. A search with the term “knowledge management” on the website of Bird & Bird delivers only relevant hits – well done!
Catherine defines „knowledge management” this way (a short video interview by Dave Gurteen).
She co-writes an article with her colleague Andrew White in ‘Law Week’ in which they describe important KM challenges facing law firms. The main one is clients expecting a personalized access to the know-how of the law firm. The increasing knowledge requirements of the clients are leading to an intensive exchange of information between the departments and the support units. Bird & Bird offers client-friendly law information on an extranet. Some additional experiences had by Andrew White are published in an article of Legal IT.
