KMWorld 2008 is already one month old. About half of the presentations can be found on the conference website. Here a small excerpt of the presentations:

• Peter Moreville has summed up the current state of findability in his presentation on “Search 3.0″. Good overview, but I don’t understand the “3.0″ in the title…
• Dave Pollard has presented his points of view in “From Content to Context and from Collection to Connection“. One important thing which hasn’t been considered in the presentation is the enterprise environment. His valuable points are valid for one-person-companies and small enterprises, but I don’t see the connection to medium and large enterprises.
• Yves Noble shows this connection in his slide deck on “From Collection to Connection“. Yves outlines the Enterprise 2.0 transition experience of Cap Gemini’s KM systems. They seem to walk the talk.
• Steve Kaukonen has calculated a ROI of 2,506% for the knowledge exchange initiatives at Accenture.

The main German Knowledge Management conference KnowTech took place yesterday and today. I didn’t plan to attend due to the fact that two KM colleagues from SAP had planned to travel to Frankfurt anyway. The strange thing is that only very few of the 500 participants (+ 25% in comparison to last year) have blogged feedback from the conference:

• No blog feature on the conference webpage (only in German)
• Michael Koch (Blog communixx) compiled some not very enthusiastic points in three posts (in German)
• Frank Koch and Christoph Rauhut confirm this impression in their compilation (Blog Projektmanagement 2.0) of the conference with the following findings: I. German companies are still beginners regarding “Enterprise 2.0″ II. No presentation dealt with the question on how to best embed KM into daily work without additional effort III. The importance of tag management to be able to use Folksonomies in an enterprise context, and IV. the lack of web 2.0 support for the KnowTech conference (e.g. no TwitterBoard)

And believe it or not, that’s it (according to Google Blog Search and Technorati.com)… So, I didn’t miss a lot, did I?

Mary Abraham, Knowledge Manager for Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, points us to a Harvard Business School report in a recent entry of her excellent blog:

Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge reports on a new study that demonstrates that while past performance may be a reasonable indicator of future performance, “the quality of colleagues in his or her organization also has a significant impact on the [star's] ability to maintain the highest quality output.” In other words, hiring a star without the supporting team will greatly diminish your chances of replicating or exceeding past performance.

and asks the following questions at the end:

What does your knowledge management staff look like? A group of under-engaged disaffected individuals? A collection of motivated but unsupported stars? A team of diverse people that consistently produces high quality work product?

Well, I would definitively agree that the quality of the colleagues has a significant impact. Dedication and passion for KM are also key ingredients. What I particularly appreciate at SAP is the right mix of achieving specific objectives for the business (“what”) and having a lot of degrees of freedom in the choice of the methods (“how to achieve the goals”).
Thanks to the KnowledgeBoard newsletter to allude to Mary’s blog.

Dan Keldsen (from AIIM) made his presentation on “Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0” available on SlideShare.
Well, I was a bit surprised that there were so few other interesting presentations on knowledge management on SlideShare. No surprise that the “I’m Knowledge Worker 2.0” is the most downloaded presentation tagged with “knowledge management”. It’s well done, but appeals only to the right-hand brain. On the other hand, sorry, appealing to the left-hand brain, I had already seen the presentation on BP Knowledge Management (uploaded one year ago) at the KM Europe conference some seven years ago… Good to know that Chris now works as a consultant (it’s a pity that his blog is not updated that often). His former colleague Geoff Parcell also earns money as a KM and change consultant.

I added “Green Chameleon” from Patrick Lambe to my blogroll. I came across his blog while searching for a nice picture for a “KM champion”: I found this felicitous picture of a “Super KM Champion” on his blog.
Patrick offers also videos of training and conference sessions. The one on “Knowledge Enabled Project Management” gives some good insights on this topic.

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.