Einfach-Schnell-Klar » knowledge management

KM for Climate Change

Felix — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:02:15 +0000

Photo from amirjina (Creative Commons License)

So, what’s on in the knowledge management scene for climate change? Who are the “thought leaders” regarding KM for climate change? A first round tour:

WorldChanging is always a good place to start and a top site for sustainable solutions. However, the search shows no hits for “knowledge management”.

Grist is the #1 green website according to the Guardian. Same picture here: no content for “knowledge management”.

RealClimate offers a forum for climate scientists. Also, no content on “knowledge management”.

KMAfrica seems to be an excellent knowledge sharing platform. Going to have a closer look at it during the upcoming weeks.

Climate-L.org is another interesting site from a “team of the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Reporting Services (IISD RS) brings you news and information on the actions of international organizations in responding to the problem of global climate change.”

KM is too generic, let’s focus on KM for Sustainability

Felix — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:26:00 +0000

Eventually, I would like to combine two of my professional passions: “knowledge management” and “sustainability”. I studied environmental sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and worked six years for an environmental management consulting company, mostly on international cooperation projects focussing on sustainable development issues.

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.

KnowTech 2009 – A Mixed Experience

Felix — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:51:59 +0000

I was lucky enough to free up two days in order to attend the leading German knowledge management conference KnowTech in Bad Homburg two weeks ago. So, what did you miss? Let’s begin with the keynotes:

Achim Berg’s presentation (CEO Microsoft) introduced nothing new to the audience. I assume that each attendee has followed conversations e.g. on the differences between “digital natives”, “baby boomers” and “generation X”. The focus of his presentation was on technology as an enabler for social networking. A typical sentence was “knowledge gets lost if it’s not supported with IT”. The only thing that stroke my attention was an Economist study of 2008 which has been quoted as “companies which invest in enterprise 2.0 are three times more profitable than the average”. Unfortunately, there is no source for this study in Achim Berg’s slides.
Dave Snowden (CEO CognitiveEdge) has given the audience a totally other experience. His keynote on “Why Does Social Computing Work?” was excellent “food for thought”, especially for those of us who still believe in KM processes, governance and infrastructure. His speech is available via the website of the institute CognitiveEdge.
Eventually, Utz Claassen – one of the few ‘enfant terrible’ of the German management scene – presented a very good overview on the value delivered by knowledge management. The interesting point was that he focussed on knowledge management as a value driver and that he used strictly business administration language to argue. Claassen did also a very good job in establishing a clear interrelationship between business strategy and KM. The only weak point of his presentation was the total number of slides and the amount of text on his slides.

The Power of Less

Felix — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:45:21 +0000

Not so sure whether the web 2.0 expo title was so powerful. I’ve barely found interesting presentations on the public website:
Tim O’Reillys keynote “Web 2.0 Five Years On” outlined nothing new. We have all already heard of harnessing collective intelligence, smart grids, gov 2.0, “build a simpler system”, “create more value than you capture” and “something that we create together” pleas.
Aaron Kim from IBM compiles some important enterprise 2.0 anti-patterns in his presentation (the content related to the anti-patterns is presented in the appendix).
Eventually, the presentation from Christina Wodtke seems to be my favourite from this series. She introduces a framework to design social websites (see below):

Designing the Social Web (for Web2.0 expo)

View more presentations from cwodtke.