In a knowledge-based economy nearly all  companies deliver at least some kind of knowledge-based services. The corporate knowledge manager plays an important role in integrating knowledge management methods and practices at all levels of the company. This is more the traditional part of our job:

• Strategy integration: on the one hand the KM objectives should be derived from the business strategy. However, on the other hand it’s equally important to include knowledge-based objectives into the corporate strategy (e.g. intellectual property services)
• Process integration: the knowledge management processes have to be part of the day-to-day work. Therefore, most companies should rather have a “KM Process Integration Office” than a pure knowledge management organization.
• Content integration: most waste is created in the content lifecycle, typically tons of assets created with high effort are barely used again. The effective management of the content lifecycle is a key discipline for a knowledge manager.
• System integration: from obvious requirements, as e.g. an integrated search, to more complex ones, as e.g. offering easy-to-consume content channels for the most important stakeholders within or outside the company.

Knowledge Manager as an Orchestrator

Knowledge management is all about creating the right environment for the creation, sharing, and re-use of knowledge. This means essentially to create and maintain a productive collaborative environment. That’s may be what some of you would name “People Integration”. This is the communication part of the job which makes us certainly to one of the most visible role in the company. Not always to our good if e.g. you haven’t enough resources at hand to respond to the expectations of the field. Again, I would like to have a brief look at different levels of orchestration:

• Leadership orchestration: senior management support was always an important success factors for KM initiatives. Nowadays, the senior management expects more: they expect from their knowledge manager to be one of their trusted advisor regarding knowledge-based business strategies and operations’ challenges
• Corporate functions orchestration: what makes the knowledge manager role so interesting is that you have interfaces with nearly all corporate functions, e.g. marketing, education, research & development etc. Typically the corporate function leads are your peers and KM aspects are integrated into their work area too.
• Market unit orchestration: if you work in a global organization you know what I mean by orchestrating the various point of views at regional and local level. It’s not obvious e.g. to have standards and guidelines applied across all important market units.
• Communities of practice orchestration: the management of the lifecycle of those virtual teams of newbies and experts is typically the most challenging part of the job of a knowledge manager, because virtual team contributions tend to be perceived as “hobby” by most line managers.

Knowledge Manager as a Designer

Eventually, I would like to close this summary by outlining the creative part of the Knowledge Manager job which is basically all about applying new methods to address challenges and issues.

• Content consumption design: I’ve experienced the Design Thinking methodology as one of the most promising ways to develop solutions to make the consumption of content as easy as possible in a given corporate environment.
• Continuous improvement design: Applying the lean principles also helps a lot to avoid “waste” and identify improvement potentials at all levels of integration and orchestration.
• Shared services design: knowledge management requirements may be one of the most important drivers to offer a complete shared services landscape to the business role owners.
• Change management design: knowledge management is about connecting people to people and creating the right collaborative environment. Therefore, change is and will be a permanent companion to our work. Using change management methods helps me getting things changed.

So, I would be looking forward to getting your comments and feedback on this brief summary. Which aspect is the most important to you?

One Marvelous Day in 2010 (View on Korcula Island, Croatia)

Dear reader,

I’ve just compiled some fun or inspirational video clips from 2010 as a year-end retrospective for my knowledge worker colleagues.

2010: a year with a good work – motivation - football balance

Maybe we have missed the one or the other opportunity. It’s quite easy to overlook the obvious.

However, great things can be achieved if we work together,

if we trust also in the power of self-organization and if we give new ways a chance.

The most important is to find the first followers, to be fast enough, but also to be perseverant.

I’m looking forward to many new challenges in 2011. Good luck!

Now, it’s time to be welcomed at home.

Wishing you all the joys of the Holiday Season (you know this story) and a colorful vibrant Happy New Year.

Warm regards

Felix

PS: even Swiss leaders are not always serious

I just met some friends and colleagues from my former employer Comma Soft in Bonn last Friday evening. We talked a lot and enjoyed some rounds of Kölsch beer: it was your shout, Sascha, thank you!

It was also a kind of “knowledge pub” around the question: “What will be the future of the company?”. It happened last week, too, that I participated in the “Knowledge Cafe Masterclass” led by the (I know that you don’t like this) KM guru David Gurteen. It was set as a pre-conference tutorial of the KnowTech 2010. I particularly enjoyed getting to know some new interesting KM peers of other German companies.

So, what is this “Knowledge Cafe” all about? It’s a good method to initiate a dialogue or to support change in an organization. David has explained the method extensively on his website. The Knowledge Cafe is pretty similar to the WorldCafe approach. However, it’s easier to “sell” to managers in a company. David has built the method based on works of Jay Cross, Theodore Zeldin, David Weinberger, and David Bohm.

I would use it e.g. instead of a long-winded presentation or as an alternative to coffee corner sessions. The challenge is to create the readiness for dialogue, to have a non-intrusive facilitator, and to be comfortable with the outcome “what people take away in their heads”. It’s by no mean the right method for a virtual meeting. Thank you David, it was a pleasure to meet you!

Simon Dueckert shared his “best practices” on “one day in the life of a knowledge worker” as part of the latest BITKOM KM meeting (unfortunately only in German but I hope that he is going to translate his presentation…). I particularly appreciate his KM objective: “creating knowledge, sharing, and perpetuating it to achieve the preconditions for a sustainable living on Earth” and the way he connects this objective with his knowledge strategy (slides #14 and #15). Simon also explained the way he organizes all the information stuff crossing his desk, desktop, mobile, mind each and every day.

From his presentation I’m curious to test the following tools for my own personal knowledge management:

Zotero (citation and research tool)

yEd (social network analysis tool)

mixxt (social networking platform creator)

I decided to pursue my growing second passion and started as a knowledge management consultant back in 2000. I’ve been with my current employer for nearly three years working as the knowledge manager for the 600-employee business transformation consulting group of SAP consulting.

• Wikis: 34% said “no, I don’t use them”, 22% said “don’t know”, 18% said “I’m opposed to the usage of this tool”, only 15% said “fully agree”
• Blogs/RSS-feeds: 35% said “no, I don’t use them”, 28% opted for “don’t know”, 25% are opposed to the usage of this tool, and only 5% “fully agree”
• Instant Messaging: 32% don’t use them, 25% don’t know whether their company uses IM, 23% are opponents, and just 13% “fully agree”

These findings have led the magazine to title the article with “Real communities exist only in real life”. Well. that’s certainly just half of the truth. Maybe the real reason for the low adoption of web 2.0 in companies in comparison to their large usage in a privat environment lie in the difference between the norms governing them.
I’m just reading the excellent book of Dan Ariely “Predictably Irrational” and in his chapter 4 he exactly outlines “why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them”. A study that should be realized is whether the employees of companies which think more in terms of social norms also more easily adopt the social network tools.

Photo from Ricky Romero (Creative Commons License)

Yes, we are happy MacBook users! Me and my wife too: “Why didn’t you already buy this Mac some years ago?” She loves the dock with its program icons, the amazing fast boot time, and the intuitive handling of day-to-day tasks (e.g. including a foto into an e-mail).

The only thing which I’m not satisfied at all is the missing import function from Outlook to Mail. This is a basic feature that I would have expected to be implemented by Apple. Why do I have to buy a 3rd party tool to import properly emails and contacts?

Which are the other pieces of software that are very useful, not part of the Mac software package, and free of charge?

• Cyberduck – the right choice for an FTP client
• Fruux – a good solution to synch your address books, calendars, and favourites between Mac users (even on the same MacBook)
• Gimp – for the more advanced editing of your fotos and graphics
• OpenOffice – good enough for 80% of the tasks I use the MS office package for in the office
• MPEG StreamClip – a converter for MPEG video files
• RadioLover – the right tool to record and split MP3 songs from radio streams (limited to 30 minutes per session for the free version)
• Skype – no need to introduce this one…
• Smultron – an open source text editor (e.g. to edit HTML code on your website)
• XMind- use it for mindmapping
• Zattoo – watch TV via an easy-to-use peer-to-peer system (mostly German channels)