Category Archives: Conferences, Events & Masterclasses (Observations & Reports)

A new way to share “old” knowledge & the launch of Expertise Discovery 2018

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Its been a busy start to 2018 professionally and domestically. My mother turned 90 a few weeks back and we celebrated with a surprise event that involved her extended family age range 2-92 who braved the snow in the north to assemble in Eastbourne on the 20th.  Why you might understandably ask is that relevant. Here’s why:

Gatherings such as Mother’s 90th are usually characterised (like weddings) with people from both sides of a family / friends occupying different sides of the room with chance encounters at the food table or bar area.  So I used a technique I often employ to kick off events followed by a new way to share “old” knowledge.:

  1. Introductions: I invited people to assemble at the back of the hall and to go and stand next to someone they didn’t know.  At that point I then invited them to introduce themselves and say how they knew Mother. We did a couple of rounds and by the time Mother made her entrance there was a good feeling in the room and the 40 guests felt they knew more people than when they arrived.

  2. Paul reading out a question while Mother (and great grandchildren look on)

    Post dinner (which was an Iranian Buffet – quite an adventure for the over 70’s) I ran a quiz on Mother’s life. I’ve wanted to try this with someone who is leaving or retiring from a business so this was a dry run. Comprising of 5 rounds of 6 questions the quiz focused on: events; places; dates; likes; and true or false.

  3. I encouraged Mother to give the answers and where she felt comfortable to do so to tell a few stories that amplified the answer.
  4. It worked perfectly: everyone learned something about Mother’s life and we also got her take on some of the events we had only heard others speak about.
  5. Does it have a relevance for Knowledge Capture and Sharing? You bet. Imagine “An audience with…” session with someone who isn’t naturally voluble. A quiz based on a set of grouped questions is a fun yet insightful way of getting an insight into events, decisions or history.

and finally

I am delighted to be able to announce I will be participating in Masterclasses in Lisboa and London (x2) with Martin White and Eric Hunter in the coming months. The first of these “Expertise Discovery 2018” will be in the week of April 23rd and is expected to cost £395.

Here’s a few details:

Expertise Discovery 2018 – optimizing access to corporate knowledge

One of the major challenges for organisations is being able to find out who knows what. This is important when assembling client-facing teams, when facing a new challenge, when revisiting previous decisions, when acquiring or merging with another organisation.
Self-completed personal profiles are recognized as having relatively little value. Potentially the range of expertise discovery applications that are now available should solve the problem.
But do these IT solutions deliver?
This workshop will bring together consultants and practitioners to help you develop an expertise management strategy.
Attendance at Expertise Discovery 2018 will enable you to:

  • Build a business case for investment in expertise discovery applications
  • Assess the claims made by solution vendors
  • Understand the respective roles of IT, HR and KM managers in expertise discovery
  • Share experiences of specifying, testing and implementing these applications
  • Appreciate the potential impact of AI and machine learning on expertise finding

The workshop will be led by Paul Corney and Martin White. Paul started working with expertise discovery applications in the 1990s and is a leading authority on knowledge management good practice. Martin White specializes in enterprise search implementation and has written a recent report on People and Expertise Search. Both have published acclaimed works.

Martin and I are excited about how this is shaping up – we already have reservations despite not yet naming the venue or making it available on line for bookings.

More on the other events in my next posting.

Next wave is where KM is not even mentioned: a dive into KM Asia 17

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The view from KM Asia 17

This was the first KM Asia event run by Ark Group I’ve attended in Hong Kong. Part of an Asian tour that also took in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and comprised Masterclasses and presentations, I was there to give a talk on Collaborative Knowledge Spaces and run the hour long closing session styled thus:

KM competencies: A day in the life of a knowledge manager in 2020 “This highly interactive practical session will use a timeline technique to draw on the emerging themes of the conference. Paul will look at the skills likely to be required of a Knowledge & Information Manager in 2020. He will then invite delegates to imagine the life of a knowledge manager in 2020″

No pressure then!

In prepping for the “future story” session I was indebted to Andrew Curry of Kantar Futures who I met to discuss one of the frameworks he uses to help clients imagine their future. Here’s how I used it in my presentation to paint a backdrop for the future.

The backdrop:

  • The world’s working age population (especially in the developed world) is shrinking
  • Big disruptive technology platforms emerge every 50-60 years or so. The current ICT (digital) wave is slowing down because the leading companies are no longer able to grow easily by adding more users; they need to find innovative ways to grow revenues per user, and this is challenging.
  • Global growth is slowing: its a combination of demographics (how many people are working) and productivity (how much they are producing). Fewer people of working age means fewer people to support an aging population.
  • Societal values are changing and the newest entrants to the workplace place less value on individual financial success and security, and more value on good work done for a good cause.
  • Climate scientists suggest that by 2050, the average global temperature will have increased by anything between 0.8 and 2.8 degrees above levels in 1990. The implications for the world’s resources are significant and will in the shift to nationalism precipitate conflict.

A good crowd at KM Asia on Day One

So, what emerged from 2 very full and well attended days at the Royal Pacific Hotel Hong Kong and my closing session?

what surprised me?

  • The group takeaways (3 highlights from each day) revealed how dfferently we see things and thru our own lenses.
  • How few people had focused on the idea of curation being a role that the “Knowledgeur” (Knowledge Manager of the future?) might be required to fullfill.
  • That one organisation who focuses on inspecting others did not have a process for feeding process enhancements and learnings back into their own.

what intrigued me?

  • That those who’ve offshored functions are looking to bring them back in house as they now recognise the danger of critical knowledge loss.
  • That the chat bots being used for basic ‘stuff’ cannot handle difficult complaints which are then passed over for human intervention.
  • The thirst for accreditation: people and organisations want recognition for their knowledge and a KIM career path.
  • That Hong Kong is still going through a massive building boom fuelled by demand from the mainland.

what delighted me?

  • Rudolf D’Souza’s opening exercise with ‘Knowledge’ money
  • Three of the best presentations I’ve seen at a KM event on morning of Day Two from Eric Chan, Vincent Ribiere and Rudolf D’Souza. Set the bar high for my closing session!
  • Meeting up with a former client and friend Olivier Serrat (formerly of ADB).
  • The response to the closing session. Forget the scoring (6.4/7) and the nice feedback comments, the big plus was the enthusiastic way the delegates engaged with the exercise and were willing to ‘grab the mike’ at the end to tell the story of why their team had won a 2020 KM Award. More on that below.

what frustrated me?

  • That few knowledge partnerships deliver according to Olivier Serrat. The majority of time is spent sharing news about the partnership.
  • Jet lag: despite getting to Hong Kong early I was still tired from lack of sleep 5 days into the triip.
  • That the ‘facilities’ were on another floor accessed by stairs and quite prescriptive in their use!

what was missing?

  • Representation from the 3rd sector many of whom practice Knowledge & Information Management on a shoestring yet have developed some of the most effective tools and techniques.

quotes I took away:

Km has gone thru peak of inflated expectations which AI is now going thru (Les Hales)

Every company should have an anti strategy (Dave Aron)

Explore, Learn, Share, Ask, Incubate! (Ricky Tsui)

Technology should support not lead, it can’t understand rituals of people (Rudolf D’Souza)

and finally: what the delegates took away?

As part of the closing session I asked delegates to get into groups of 5-6 with people they had not met during the event.  I invited them to then reflect as individuals on the 3 “takeaways” they had from the morning and afternoon on both days.

Though simple it none the less brought to the surface ‘stuff’ or presentations that had made an impact. I further invited them as a group to consolidate their own findings.

And when that was complete to circle the room and see what others had noticed.

One group’s highlights from each session

It proved to be an entertaining as well as an insightful session.

Looking forward to 2020 was the last exercise of the event. Having drawn on Kantar Futures research and brought to life my thoughts on the future role of the “Knowledgeur” (KIM’er of 2020) I asked the groups to imagine they were the recipients of an award and to describe what they had done to win it!

The ‘stories’ were brilliant and this (with grateful thanks to Nick Stone who captured the recording) was one of the best: KM Asia 17: KM in 2020 Future Story

If you want more on the event I was among a number who provided regular tweets and those can be found here: KM Asia 17 Twitter Stream

 

How to avoid “drinking from the fire hydrant” at Arup

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Taking a break can be therapeutic as well as challenging if the venue is so good it makes you reluctant to leave.

The world as viewed from within the walls of Portugal’s highest hill village Marvao seems different from the 24×7 connected envirnoment we all inhabit: Manners matter; avarice is not the driver for day to day life; food is to be savoured not devoured as a fuel between meetings; conversations are not superficial based on what each brings to the table and; the sky really is blue not pale blue impacted by pollution.

It was good to get away. These last few months have been hectic to say the least:

  • The launch of two new businesses Bees Homes and Bees Homes Financial Services
  • Arranging and planning an Asian Tour in November comprising Masterclasses, presentations and book launches – more soon!
  • Knee and dental surgery in Lisboa

As a portfolio worker you are often spinning plates and managing tight shifting schedules for clients. Yet every so often a ‘gig’ is both rewarding and stimulating as happened this week.

Knowledge in a Digital Age at Arup

A few months back the KM team at Arup asked if I’d kick off Day Two of their Global Skills Network get together. I was happy to accept. Arup get KM and do it as well as anyone being the recipient of a MAKE award. And yet working across generations and managing the risk of critical knowledge loss challenges them as it does everyone.

Like most businesses Arup has gone digital and is trying out many new technologies. It’s not a state secret, they want to be the best in the built environment. My remit was to act as a provocateur for the sessions that followed reflecting on what Knowledge in a Digital Age might look like and how they might respond to the opportunities it presents. I began as follows:

Some 20 years back Tesco Chairman Lord MacLaurin said when he saw the early results from analysis of the Clubcard holders spending patterns:

“What scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after 3 months that I know after 30 years”

Think of the modern digital economy as a massive extension of that Clubcard concept involving far more data points.

Recognising that today’s worker is deluged with ‘stuff’ and that few organisations have created an effective integrated dashboard that iincludes activities, skills, experiences, transactional data and social collaboration I addressed six basic questions:

  • Who or what should I trust? (Which sources, individual and team’s capacity to absorb and the need for trusted curated material)
  • What can I do? (To prevent Critical Knowledge loss)
  • Why should I? (Make better, more informed decisions)
  • Where do I find? (What ‘we’ know about a topic) nb Here I spoke about the recent judgement in the Trant vs Mott MacDonald case around a Common Data Environment (shared Knowledge Base)
  • When should I? (Incentivise / reward and in what format)
  • How do I go about it? (Engaging across generation and virtually)

My summary led into panel sessions whch it would be unfair to document in detail however I am sure Arup won’t mind if I paraphrase a bit since they are not uncommon:

  • People consume knowledge in different ways therefore its important to publish in a variety of forms across different platforms at different times.
  • There is a need to value team collaboration and authorship. Rewarding contributions in an environment where people believe knowledge is for everyone and not tradeable might be counterproductive.
  • There is a danger that in focusing on the digital environment and explosion of tools you lose sight of the importance of the person and networks. A way to prevent this is to develop an incubation lab to try out new technologies with beta users.
  • Knowledge bases and how to guides are important; new entrants rely on them for answers but often fail to ask “is it appropriate?”
  • Today’s youngster is comfortable with the search process having grown up immersed in technology. What can we do to bridge the gap, create effective knowledge transfer mechanisms with experienced Skill Network Leaders who struggle to articulate the question they are trying to ask of knowledge and information people and systems?
  • Knowledge informs research which drives client business.

And finally

Back to the title. It seems to me that although there are huge technological advances in the way individual, team, organisational and external knowledge, information and data is presented and we have access to, we are still struggling to absorb it all let alone keep up with the tools used. Despite technology giving us the ability to analyse data, information and knowledge to a higher level than ever before we are still hugely reliant on search to present the findings. Yet few seem to have cracked the ability to search across internal and external sources concurrently.

In a previous post I talked about the need for Assisted Search . My session this week reinforced that: A Knowledge Base is a form of curated assisted search where those responsible for it have assembled critical knowledge their organisation needs to sustain and grow its business.

The role of the knowledge professional in that remains vital and “curate” is one of the 8 ‘ates I describe in “Navigating the Minefield…” and will be going into more detail on when I visit Asia in November.

 

 

 

Collaborative Knowledge Space: Asian reflections & beyond

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International Islamic University of Malaysia Kuala Lumpur

I’ve been back a couple of weeks since the Masterclass I ran at the International Islamic University of Malaysia.in Kuala Lumpur.

Today I received some of the photos of the event so figured now is a good time to reflect and provide an update on the survey analysis and the timing of the report I promised to write.

It’s also a good time to remind Eileen Tan from Asia and Ciaran Joyce from Europe that they have not yet given me their addresses so I can send them “Navigating the Minefield: A Practical KM Companion” which is being printed as I write this.

survey report:

Last week I met with Professor Clive Holtham and Ningy (Jonny) Jiang at Cass Business School to review some of the responses.  We are now working on a report and paper to appear in May when I will share some of the findings at the 10th Anniversary Celebrations of NetIKX.

survey analysis in KL

Among a number of practical exercises the KL masterclass group undertook throughout the day was to look at the questions and 120 responses and decide which they thought most compelling.

One group chose Question 7: “What do you understand by the term digital workspace?”

They were asked to share their findings with the rest of the group which made for a very interesting discussion. Alongside is what they chose.

This one also stood out:

My office has all the things I need to work, computer (obviously), tools, my old notebooks, reference documents, books, address book/name card
case, telephone, toys, post it notes with reminders. Scrunch that all up and make it available anywhere and anytime via the internet and an interface.

What I found interesting: there were more definitions than you could throw a stick at!

What was also revealing from Question 2 Where do you have your most interesting work conversations: informal space is really important but there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach that will work since people are people and have different styles and ways of working.

masterclass takeaways:

The takeaway session

I was particularly delighted by the delegates response when I asked them to list 3 things / learning’s they would take away from the Masterclass.

Here’s what they said:

A conducive collaboration workspace can encourage innovation

Increase collaborative hub / breakout spaces

(I must) Go out of my room and meet more people

Technology is critical for virtual collaboration

(An understanding of) The digital space success factors

Mind shift is important to make change work in an organisation

Ask specific questions to area experts

Issues on establishing digital space including the importance of establishing it in promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing

The kind of approaches to establishing digital space.

How to create effective virtual team space and collaborative space

(An understanding of) The drivers for knowledge space

Understanding on the concept of an effective knowledge space design for collaboration and innovation

Space matters, either physical, digital or neutral and we are dealing with people.

Methods of sharing:

·       Postcards to the future

·       “let’s go for a walk”

·       Memory page to explain experience

How to make collaborative space work:

·       Conducive space (online/face to face)

·       The hybrid of both is important

Know the culture to avoid culture barriers and communication breakdown.

Virtual collaboration can only be effective if it is properly planned, everyone provided full training risks clearly identified.

A conducive collaborative workspace can encourage innovation.

Technology is critical for virtual collaboration.

Knowledge sharing can improve productivity.

It is important to know how to create the environment to encourage knowledge sharing.

Knowledge sharing and collaboration can happen anywhere, any time, any device.

It felt like everyone went away having had a great day. I certainly enjoyed it and am already looking forward to returning in November while I am in Asia for KM Asia.

Paul and the Masterclass delegates

Collaborative Knowledge Space: Survey Prize Winners

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I am pleased to announce that at today’s Masterclass held at International Islamic University of Malaysia the delegates selected three ‘names’ from a metaphorical hat.

The winners of a copy of my co-authored book “Navigating the Minefield: A Practical KM Companion” when It’s released next month by American Society for Quality (ASQ) are:

  • Amir Tolster from Africa
  • Eilleen Tan from Asia
  • Ciaran Joyce from Europe.

If the winners care to contact me with their respective addresses I will be delighted to send them the book when its released.

In the meantime today’s event was a memorable occasion in a stunning venue.

I will be writing up the outcomes when I return to England in April.