Good timing (or have we reached the tipping point?): IBM has launched a “Smarter Planet” initiative which pretty much covers the main change streams of Barack Obama’s change programme (analysis by James Governor).
I agree with Luis Suarez that this initiative lacks one decisive point: people & collaboration. Technology alone won’t be sufficient as we all know:
Meant is not said,
Said is not heard,
Heard is not understood,
Understood is not accepted,
Accepted is not adopted,
Adopted is not retained.
(Konrad Lorenz)
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off Tags: Examples (CM)
Matt Moore offers a very good white paper on “Justifying Your Knowledge Management Programme“. The power of persuasion lies in the combination of personal credibility, logical arguments, and story telling. Matt focuses his paper on developing the logical arguments. While the chapters 1 and 3 are rather generic persuasive presentation tips, the six sources of information to construct the argument (presented in chapter 2) are the good ones for KM.
One point that has surprised me is “[...] at some point, you will have to justify [...]“. Well, I can’t imagine that senior management would have started a knowledge management initiative without a solid business case since the days of the Internet bubble.
Additionally, Mary Abraham had also referenced to European Guidelines for Measuring KM, and Kelly Butler from APQC briefly outlined some effective KM measurement methods and examples.
But Matt’s paper makes the difference between measuring and persuading. Do you know any other convincing contributions?
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off Tags: Methods (KM)
Sponsoring a child is another nice way of connecting people with people. The following points have convinced us to take part in the activities of Plan International:
our daughters establish a relationship with a child in a totally different part of the world (Assitan lives in Mali – a fantastic country that I got to know back in 1997)
the funds benefit the whole community in which the child lives
Plan is a transparent organization
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off Tags: Global Local
Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva connects enterpreneurs who would like to fund investments with lenders like you and me. Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this. Kiva makes not an extensive use of social networks features up to now.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off Tags: Examples (IM)
Tim O’Reilly brings it to the point in his great presentation for the Web 2.0 Expo Europe: The current crisis is not an investment bubble, but a reality bubble. So, his first robust strategy is “Work on stuff that matters”, i.e. work on the important challenges while making use of one of the deep trends, e.g. harnessing collective intelligence. His second robust strategy is “Create more value than you capture”. His presentation contains a lot of good examples for the application of both strategies and is by far the most interesting contribution of this conference that took place in Berlin last week.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off Tags: People (IM)
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.
One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.
A common viewpoint of the participants of a two-day colloquium at Harvard Business School that has been outlined in the article “Creativity and the Role of the Leader” of the Harvard Business Review.
One good point of this article is about “managing the commercialization handoff”, where the participants emphasized on the importance to connect idea originators with commercializers, “rather than trying to teach inventors to spot market opportunities”.
The discussion on the article (e.g. “Can you lead creativity?“) pointed me to the news that John Maeda is now head of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). John’s great inauguration speech is part of his new blog. I appreciate John’s attempt to make us better understand the “Laws of Simplicity” (Nice video on TED).
Luc Galoppin and Siegfried Caems offer an excellent book on managing organizational change. The book focusses on SAP® Implementations, but the good thing is that the overall and detailed methodology, the templates, the structure along organization/communication/learning/performance-management streams also applies for the implementation of other large scale business process initiatives. A must-read for each knowledge or program manager.
It’s great that Luc also writes a blog on Organizational Change Management with the right mix of insights and visualizations.
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:
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?
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off Tags: People (KM)
James Nachtwey won the TED Prize in 2007. He has created a “viral” awareness campaign on extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis. TB, a disease that still kills more than 1.5 million people a year. Reversing the epidemic would cost about 7 billions USD a year.
As Chris Anderson stated it’s all about “[...] a race between the ability of a deadly, mutated bacteria to spread, and our ability to spread awareness first. [...]“
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off Tags: Examples (Com)
I grew up in Switzerland, studied in Zurich, worked in Berlin, Bonn and Africa. I'm curious by nature. Therefore, I present and share parts of my learning journey as a knowledge manager in a large blue chip company.
