Five Opportunities, What is KM, 2007 Global MAKE Winners, Best Business Book of 2007 Poll

27-Nov-07 Archive of Weekly KM Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question of the Week

Q: Can you help publicize the following?

(NOTE: These are all from 2007.)

A: Glad to. Here are five opportunities for readers of this blog.

1. MITRE Corporation’s Knowledge Management Technical Exchange Meeting

You’re cordially invited to attend the MITRE Corporation’s Knowledge Management Technical Exchange Meeting (KM-TEM). TEMs are forums for exchanging ideas, learning about new technologies, sharing resources, and collaborating across programs and organizational boundaries. The KM-TEM is intended to promote discussion within MITRE and between MITRE and the broader community about experiences and stories in the field of Knowledge Management that help address the challenges and goals of our sponsors. This event will be held at the MITRE 1 facility in McLean, Virginia on Wednesday December 5, 2007 from 8:00 a.m. — 4:30 p.m. EST.

The KM-TEM will include a variety of distinguished speakers from MITRE, our government sponsors, and the private sector. The KM-TEM will cover topics such as the history of KM and where it’s headed, specific examples of KM work at MITRE and other organizations, the role of portals in facilitating KM, social software and its impact on KM, and more.

Ren Resch and Marcie Zaharee are the organizers.

2. New Study of Developing Expertise

Richard McDermott is conducting a study for the KM Forum of the Henley Management College on innovative and effective ways of retaining, deepening and developing expertise. He has found many organizations capturing the knowledge of retiring experts (some quite comprehensively) and many have good traditional apprenticeship programs. He is taking a different approach. He is interested in what organizations are doing to help learners understand how expert practitioners diagnose and solve problems; how they see, think about, and act in their domain.

If your organization — or one you know — is experimenting, piloting, or masterful at this, he would love to hear from you. Is your organization good at:

• sharing the real expertise of senior staff before they retire?
• developing young professionals who move rapidly between organizational units?
• managing handovers when overlap between staff is not possible?
• integrating the expertise of seasoned practitioners with talent development programs?

Would you like to “compare notes” with other organizations that have cutting edge approaches to these issues, and learn how they approached similar issues? The sponsors are quite sophisticated about Knowledge Management, and are looking beyond the traditional KM tools for effective and/or innovative approaches specifically geared to deepening expertise.

Participating organizations will receive a copy of the report and will be able to participate in a set of virtual discussion sessions with other innovators to compare ideas and approaches.

3. Hubert Saint-Onge in Europe

Hubert Saint-Onge will be speaking at the KM Forum Conference February 6–7, 2008 in the UK. While Hubert is in Europe, he is available for consulting, presenting, or conducting workshops.

He will be around and available for internal consultation and presentations. He could also run internal workshops on collaboration between different segments of an organization.

4. Interview on virtual communities of practice

Erin Langston, a PhD student working on a dissertation on Knowledge Management, is looking for an interview group. His focus is on virtual communities of practice, and he is looking for individuals to participate in an interview taking around 30 minutes.

The interview will be to discuss the pros and cons of virtual communities. This will be a positive interview about how CoPs are being used at large organizations.

5. Best Business Book of 2007

There is voting going on at CEO-READ for “The People’s Choice” of the “Best Business Book of 2007.” The Secret Language of Leadership by Steve Denning is one of the books up for selection.

KM Blog of the Week

Simon’s KM Blog by Simon Goh

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge is the stuff that matters to achieve task efficiency, quality and innovation. This stuff could be one or more of the following:

• information — such as documents, web content, etc.
• relationship — knowing someone else to get your job done
• skill — the know-how that could be obtained through training
• experience — job exposure and practice over time
• method — the way of getting work done that is not documented
• talent — the in-built stuff in a person that gives them the flair to do well

Knowledge Management is the use of enablers to mobilize these knowledge elements in context, so as to complete work efficiently and/or spark innovation. The inner core of the diagram shows some enablers KM. The outer core shows the KM process. In fact the KM process is not always sequential as per shown. For example, internalization can happen directly from sharing without leveraging if there is trust between both parties. With technology, information could be captured and leverage by someone else even though the content owner didn’t mean to share it. And there are other permutations. Thus, KM happens when the right mix of KM process is supported with the appropriate enablers.

KM Link of the Week

2007 Global MAKE Winners Announced

McKinsey & Company is the overall 2007 Global MAKE Winner for the first time. The Winners of the 10th annual Global MAKE study, conducted by Teleos in association with The KNOW Network, are (in alphabetical order):

1. Accenture (Global)
2. Apple (United States)
3. BP (United Kingdom)
4. British Broadcasting Corporation (United Kingdom)
5. Ernst & Young (Global)
6. Fluor (United States)
7. General Electric (United States)
8. Google (United States)
9. IBM (United States)
10. Infosys Technologies (India)
11. Intel (United States)
12. McKinsey & Company (Global)
13. Microsoft (United States)
14. Nokia (Finland)
15. Royal Dutch Shell (The Netherlands/United Kingdom)
16. Samsung Group (S. Korea)
17. 3M (United States)
18. Toyota (Japan)
19. Wikipedia (Global)
20. Wipro Technologies (India)

2007 Global MAKE Hall of Fame

An even more select group of organizations form the 2007 Global MAKE Hall of Fame. These 21 organizations have been Global MAKE Finalists in each of the past five studies: Accenture, BP, Ernst & Young, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Honda Motor, IBM, Infosys Technologies, Intel, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Nokia, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Royal Dutch Shell, Samsung Group, Schlumberger, Siemens, Sony, 3M, Toyota Motor Corporation and Wipro Technologies.

KM Book of the Week

The 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards

Steve Denning asked for your vote for his book (see above). The full list contains 286 books.

Four of the books were featured in this blog as books of the week:

1. Everything is Miscellaneous — David Weinberger
2. Made to Stick — Chip and Dan Heath
3. Mobilizing Minds — Lowell L. Bryan & Claudia L. Joyce
4. The Secret Language of Leadership — Stephen Denning

Here are 20 others which may be of interest:

1. The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2. The Cult of the Amateur — Andrew Keen
3. Different Thinking — Anja Foerster and Peter Kreuz
4. FAST Creativity & Innovation — Charles Bytheway
5. Getting to Innovation — Arthur B. Van Gundy
6. Getting to the Next Level — Melvin J. Gravely II, PhD
7. The Global Brain — Satish Nambisan & Mohanbir Sawhney
8. Group Genius — Keith Sawyer
9. Innovation Nation — John Kao
10. Intellectual Property — Paul Goldstein
11. Intelligent Innovation — John A. Cogliandro
12. Judgment — Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis
13. Know-How — Ram Charan
14. Let’s Connect! — Jan Vermeiren
15. The Power of Story — Jim Loehr
16. Return on Ideas — David Nichols
17. Think Better — Tim Hurson
18. Trust — Kathy Bloomgarden
19. We Are Smarter Than Me — Barry Libert, Jon Spector and thousands of contributors
20. What’s Your Story? — Ryan Mathews, Watts Wacker