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”.
You Are in the Army Now
Written by Felix on October 3rd, 2008Olympic Knowledge Management
Written by Felix on September 24th, 2008I 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.
Be Commited, Build Interactions, Network Effectively
Written by Felix on September 22nd, 2008The topic that Hubert Saint-Onge presented during the SIKM call last week wasn’t brand new. “Collaborative Networks and the New Enterprise” was e.g. already presented during KM World 2007.
Nevertheless, it’s always good to listen to a thought leader with 25 years of experience. There were three points which I’ve particularly appreciated:
- “Collaborative networks require commitment not compliance.”
Yes, to be successful in collaborative networks you need a personal conviction, the ability to build trust in relationships and to deal with risks. Commitment is being willing to do whatever it takes. - “Building interactions that are part of getting work done is more important than building knowledge bases.”
Yes, and please leverage technology to make judicious use of face-to-face meetings. - The fourth chapter of the presentation that outlines principles for effective partnering in collaborative networks:
- focus on the customer
- trust based interactions
- testing assumptions
- well-defined accountabilities
- attention to process
- appropriate elevation
Thank you Hubert for the presentation.
Why I don’t understand as much as I think I do
Written by Felix on September 10th, 2008I’m back from some nice, relaxing, amazing, sometimes puzzling August summer days that I’ve experienced with my kids, wife, friends, or SAP colleagues in Hamburg, Berlin, Beijing, and Rome.
The harsh reality of the German education system hit me yesterday: my younger daughter’s grade 1 teacher has introduced herself to all the parents and the first impression was just disappointing.
Have I looked too much for evidence to reinforce my own model of learning in the 21st century? Jonathan Drori presents his views on “Why We Don’t Understand As Much As We Think We Do” in a 10-minute video. I totally agree with one of his conclusions: Poor teaching does more harm than good! This is why I won’t accept below average teaching for my kids and their friends.
Update (15.09.): my daughter is very satisfied with her first teacher: “She’s very nice, dad! She has even offered us apple pie today.” Actually, I don’t understand as much as I think I do.
One Laptop Per Child (for Germany please)
Written by Felix on July 28th, 2008My daughter has closed her first year at the local primary school. The exposure to new technologies during this first year was 0.0% of all lessons. If you linger along the corridors and across the classrooms of this school you will remember your own primary school days back in the seventies. Nothing has changed (Did you know that? 
…
Therefore, I admire the “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)” project by Nicolas Negroponte. It seems that OLPC has done important steps from vision (see e.g. the initial TED presentation) to execution (see e.g. the updated TED video). Nevertheless, what I do miss is an impact assessment: what has the usage of the OLPC really delivered for the children and schools involved?
Knol – Better use the steam cleaning equipment…
Written by Felix on July 27th, 2008So, 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.
Have you learned your lessons?
Written by Felix on July 16th, 2008Steven Wieneke, Technical Fellow in GM’s Global Engineering group, presented an interesting approach to lessons learned in the monthly call of the SIKM community.
Steven has rolled out a “visible learning process” at GM Global Engineering that not only includes lessons (“things gone wrong and corrected”) but even more important learnings (“things gone right and valued for reuse”). “Subject Matter Responsible Persons” drive the development of know-how and references assets in more than 60 communities and nurture the exchange of experience (complete presentation). Unfortunately the time was too short to have a look at the implementation side of the concept, e.g. how the users retrieve assets for a specific context and how they assess the value of the assets. Jack Vinson has also commented the SIKM call in his blog.
An article in InsideKnowledge describes the main knowledge management activities at GM and focusses especially on the “closed-loop learning” promoted by Steven and his group.
Another interesting article on GM and knowledge sharing is the “Wikinomics Report Card” by Ben Letalik.
Awesome Visualizations
Written by Felix on July 13th, 2008Jonathan Harris introduces us to the web’s secret stories in a TED talk. And, it’s indeed astonishing to see the tons of stories sparsed across the web be visualized in new ways.
Please try it out: Universe is a 1000 times more interesting and beautiful to consume than Google Analytics… From Jonathan’s website you may also have a look at the intriguing “We feel fine” or the fascinating “The Whale Hunt“.
In a short interview with Adobe’s Think Tank magazine Jonathan states that he designs
“[...]On paper. I do all my thinking on paper. I can’t think behind a computer screen. When I sit at my desk with my hand on the mouse, my creativity stalls, and I turn into a robot, efficiently executing what’s already in my mind.[...]“
Building Great Knowledge Management Teams
Written by Felix on July 2nd, 2008Mary 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.
Spies exchange knowledge collaboratively
Written by Felix on June 23rd, 2008Don 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?
