Each knowledge manager in Germany, Switzerland or Austria (hopefully there will be an English version) should have a closer look at the series of presentation on “Enterprise 2.0 Enabled Knowledge Management” by a T-Systems team. The three presentations are visualized in an excellent way; it looks like they applied Garr Reynold’s best practices.
The third presentation on how to implement knowledge management 2.0 is the best one. It also shows that the frameworks and experience of knowledge management 1.0 programs can be leveraged, e.g. the content of the slides 26, 46, and 60 have been also part of knowledge management 1.0 presentations. Therefore, use the best of both worlds, implement it step by step, embrace the change management issues and your company will stay ahead of competition (it sounds more like an evolution than a revolution;-).

Toyota set up a long-term strategy in 2007: Toyota Global Vision 2020. The very generic “Toyota Way” outlines the two most important values: “Respect for People” and “Continuous Improvement”. The current rough economic situation shows that this is not only a “happy day paper” but it has really been embraced in the regions. One example outlined in this post from the Evolving Excellence blog is the reaction of the North American plant managers to the industry’s downturn in Q3 2008: they trained the people instead of sending them home. However, the unprecedented crisis seems to make job cuts unavoidable – the first time since the 50ies. Therefore, titles like “Will This Economy Finally Push the Toyota Way Into Software Development” become ambiguous. Anyway, it’s far too shortsighted to put agile software development on a level with “the Toyota Way”. So, let’s have a look at KM at Toyota in one of the next posts.

The value of today’s bailout plan in the US equals to the US military spending of 2008: 700 billions USD. A very, very small part of it has been apparently spent to design a new knowledge management strategy and its principles.
Graham Durant-Law (I’ve discovered his blog thanks to the Pumacy “study” on KM blogs) pointed me to the twelve new principles of Knowledge Management (PDF). The interesting thing is less the principles (I would agree to whole of them as they are pretty “KM common sense”) but the story that the CIO-Unit of the US Army uses to illustrate the adoption of the twelve principles: it’s less a “hero story” than a “wounded soldier and his family in angst story”.

I have been lucky enough to enjoy the last day of athletics and the closing ceremony of the XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing. It has been an extraordinary experience. A great thank you to SAP Services that has made this journey possible for ten fortunate employees!
So, reflecting about this outstanding experience I’ve just asked myself: How do the IOC manage its specific event knowledge? The current IOC President, Jacques Rogge, initiated a knowledge transfer programme back in 1998. Olympic Games Knowledge Services (OGKS) was created as an unique supplier of knowledge management services in 2001. This company was integrated into the IOC in 2005 and was eventually liquidated in 2007. The extranet mentioned in the article of 2006 is not working any more.
The former chief executive of the OGKS and secretary general of the Australian Olympics Committee, Craig McLatchey, is now CEO of Event Knowledge Services, a spin-off of OGKS. This article describes some of the achievements of KM @ Olympics.

So, Google has started the beta of Knol. The Dutch steam cleaning equipment producer Knol seems to be quite happy, because I won’t be the only one that simply typed in “www.knol.com” and was surprised by what I saw…
More seriously: I was a bit disappointed after a “short walk” through the Google Knol offering. There are just too few articles, sorry “Knols” (aka “a unit of knowledge”), to make it attractive to publish own ones. I’ve searched for a “knol” on Berlin and I’ve found only two articles. None of them has to do with Berlin as a city. The “knols” contains only few links to other resources. On the other hand if you search e.g. for “obama” you’ll find 19 “knols”. So, which one is the most convincing? Am I supposed to read through all of them?
Conclusion: I don’t see the value-add of knol.

Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen, and Sean Dennehy, Intellipedia Evangelist introduced the enterprise 2.0 approach of the CIA at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. A very good presentation especially for those people who would like to introduce a concept that “like Wikipedia doesn’t work in theory, but works in practice” as Sean quoted.
I particularly appreciated the three principles outlined by Don and Sean:
1. Work at the broadest audience possible
2. Think topically, not organisationally
3. Replace existing business processes (move day-to-day practices to the tools)
Some questions remain:
How good is the active participation of the intelligence community across the globe (more than the 1% that one would expect)?
Which change management efforts were necessary to replace existing processes and to think topically?

According to Forrester’s G. Oliver Young the global Enterprise 2.0 market will grow from 455 millions in 2007 to 4.3 billions in 2013. Well, even 0.5 billions in 2007 are quite a lot compared with a global ECM software spending of 1.5 billions.
Major points of this Forrester report have been discussed e.g. by ZDNet blogger Larry Dignan. But I don’t think that

[...]For instance, social networking is a decent substitute for knowledge management applications, a category that companies haven’t quite cracked.[...]

I still see social networking as a supplement that adds value. Therefore, social networking should be part of the KM approach.
Oliver presents an abstract of his findings e.g. also in an article for the Indian Express Computer magazine. The interesting point is at the end of the article where Oliver points to the assumption that

[...]Forrester expects far greater demand for process engineering and change management services than for systems integration because many of the early adopters have reported much more difficultly with cultural change and adoption than with technology integration and optimization.[...]

The AIIM published a survey on Enterprise 2.0 one week ago.
One interesting finding is that age has less an impact on attitudes and approaches to Enterprise 2.0 than the knowledge management orientation of the company.

The article “Make KM fun” in the “InsideKnowledge” magazine drew my attention to Raj Datta, the CKO of MindTree Consulting.
As far as I understood, KM is strongly aligned with MindTree’s business strategy. MindTree Consulting developed and lives the concept of the “knowledge eco-system”
The KM approach of MindTree Consulting (BTW: MindTree is partner within the SAP ecosystem and is also a great place to work) – as outlined in the article and a podcast – makes use of some unconventional methods: e.g. “unconferences” (presented in more details on Shahnawaz Khan’s blog), or constantly refreshing KM solutions being offered to the employees. The MindTree KM team has success with its change & innovation initiatives: KM got the highest ever rating received by any function in MindTree in a company-survey, MindTree has won the MAKE Award 2007 and has delivered good figures.

Thanks to the frogpond blog entries on the enterprise 2.0 summit @ Cebit I discovered the video serial with Dr David Vaine by Patrick Lambe: well done “how to NOT do it” introductions.