During the KM World conference, this TED video "How to make a movement" was shown. It's only three minutes and I thought it very powerful. From now on you'll look differently at a weird individual who stands out and his or her followers. You can start a movement!
Yesterday the day was filled with presentations. It's hard to summarise here, or I need more time, so I'll quickly give a first impression. My experience is that I need time to let it all sink. Presentations that don't seem interesting at first sight, may suddenly sound far more relavant later.
The day started with two keynote presentations. The first by Tom Stewart, who talked about knowledge-driven enterprises, what has changed and where are we going. I had high expectations of this presentation and I wasn't disappointed. Tom was engaging, sometimes funny and had an interesting start of the day. The second presentation was by NASA Langley Information Manager Majula Ambur. She explained the situation at Langley where engineers couldn't find what they were looking for and about the internal Google search tool that made the searching much easier. Interesting but I don't know why this is a keynote presentation.
Then a series of presentations started, some interesting and some less than expected. The final two session made up for the rest of the day, first from people from Shell and finally a session by Richard McDermott about how to think like an expert.
This conference is a mix of knowledge management, taxonomy and Sharepoint sessions (not like KM Europe that was purely focused on KM). I only attend the KM sessions but find that many of the people I talk to are interested in Sharepoint (we use something else).
I realise I listen with the idea that I want to bring back home something, ideas or "how to" practices. Sometimes it's hard to translate something that is said to a big organization. "Talk to the C.. and tell ... " doesn't sound like an option for me, or "Involve your customers" (all the millions of users?). Anyway, I need time to 'translate' this to my situation. But now I have to go, a new day starts at the conference!
I signed up for two workshops, part of the pre-conference program of KM World 2010. The first one was titled "Experience Maps: KM & Visual Thinking". Although it was an interesting presentation, it wasn't what I expected, nor from the title nor from the description. Actually, the workshop (by Peter Morville) should have had the word "Information Architecture" somewhere, preferably in the title. Because that's what it was about: information architecture (IA) and the use of visualisation or visual maps. I think we were too much triggered by the word "visual" when we selected the workshop (it was a democratic process). There were some interesting examples though and for example the video "A Dinosaur Family explains Information Architecture" was very funny. I could have left after the break but I wanted to give the presenter the chance to talk about KM and experience maps, because that's what the title said. The second part, however, was a bit too quick to completely follow the presentation and when each group had to talk about a few questions, my group was mainly confused. Maybe I see the usefulness later, of what I can do with this in my work (sometimes it takes a while to see the links), but right now at best it was a collection of visual examples.
The second workshop was more directed at the work and situation I'm in: it dealt with developing a KM strategy and implementation plan. Presenter was Art Murray, and not, as the program said Judi Sandrock. We didn't get the promised book, which was a disappointment but that was the only disappointment (and I can't blame the presenter for this). This session was highly interactive, so if I didn't know what strategic objectives of my company are (as an example), there was someone else in the group who could tell about it and we could learn from this example. Basically, we went down from company vision, mission to key process areas and key enablers. Not easy to write down for me, so I think this could be a nice exercise to do in a group session. Next, identify the gaps and find the root cause (by asking as many why questions as possible). Usually the root cause is related to one step in the knolwedge life cycle: capture, share and apply knowledge. Then, create a KM strategy (people, process, technology) and a plan to implement. This sounds all very simple and it's a short summary of course, but I can already see that it won't be easy to carry out. Not on my own at least (in my little group), or without the necessary support from higher up.
Tonight (or, in a few minutes) the opening reception and networking event starts, so I'll head back to the conference hotel!
Quick update from my hotel in Washington. Yesterday was my travel day, flying from Toronto to Washington. I was supposed to arrive in the capital city at 10PM, but the flight from NYC to Washington had a delay of almost 3 hours. Everytime I checked the board, the departure time seemed to move (stop checking the board!), but I was happy when I heard the announcement the plane was coming. I talked with a Dutch lady (I recognised her accent) who was traveling to Houston but her flight got canceled. If that had happened to our flight, I would have missed at least the first workshop of this morning.
1 AM I arrived at the hotel and was so tired (and pumped up, I guess) that I could hardly sleep. I'll have to stay awake, I certainly don't want to miss today! What's on the menu for today? The pre-workshops. I selected two workshops, in collaboration with my colleagues. In the morning that will be "Experience Maps: KM & Visual Thinking" by Peter Morville. In the afternoon it will be the "Developing a KM Strategy & Implementation Plan" workshop by Judi Sandrock.
It's unbelievable how many webinars there are these days. I get invitations almost daily. The one on Open Innovation by Gartner sounded interesting, so I listened to that one, which I will summarise here. Open Innovation was/is a topic that suddenly became so popular that I felt it was hyped up. This webinar showed that OI is more than just a hype.
Innovation no longer happens internally; more and more ideas come from outside the company wall. According to IBM, customers should be integrated into the core processes. Apple’s Steve Jobs disagrees; he thinks you can’t ask customers what they want. By the time you have developed it, they want something else.
Gartner’s definition of open innovation is: "The practice of seeking ideas, concepts or talents with external people or organizations". Most innovations (or ideas) don’t come from the R&D department, as one would think. Research (Economist survey, June 2010) shows that the customers are number 1 source when it comes to innovation, followed by the business unit heads and employees in general (outside R&D I think). R&D comes on a low fourth place. Why business unit heads score high, could be explained by the fact that they often talk with customers and many other groups; they hear more and make the connections. Gartner’s advice is to engage these heads more in the business process.
Now that I'm getting used to Google Reader, I receive a message that Bloglines is up again. Same account, password, so it should be an easy step to pick Bloglines up again as my blog reader. The question is, will I return? I'm not sure. I'm glad Bloglines is back, but I'm sure they've lost a lot of customers.
I run for almost 15 years now (that long?) and even though I'm a long-distance runner, I don't think I often got into the state of "runner's high". What I love most, however, is the power of running really fast. Then I feel like flying.
The VP from our group sent me the announcement of a webinar organised by The Conference Board of Canada with Tom Malone as speaker on October 27th with the question if I was interested. Absolutely! So that’s what I did last week: I listened to the webinar (although I missed the first 12 minutes due to technical issues). I read Malone’s “The Future of Work” long time ago, but this presentation was based on a new study about Collective Intelligence.
Malone studied the building blocks of Collective Intelligence. He calls them “genes”, which sounded awkward because I missed the introduction of the presentation and thus the explanation of the use of “gene”. I needed the slides, sent afterwards, to fill in the gaps from the introduction.
