Far Wise in Knowledge Management

Consortium for Service Innovation Member Summit 2019

This is a post from last year that was waiting to get posted (oops). 

Beginning of April 2019, I attended the annual Member Summit from the Consortium for Service Innovation. It was the first time for me, although I had visited smaller European (team) meetings. The location for this event was Cape Neddick in Maine (US), another 'new' in the list for me. For me this Member Summit was especially exciting, as Greg Oxton (former Director of the Consortium) and I were going to present the Intelligent Swarming framework. Theme of this year's summit was "Big knowledge and digital transformation". There is a great recap on YouTube by the Consortium (note that Matt avoids pronouncing my last name, as did Greg at the Summit despite practicing many times). 

Resilient Service Organizations – Conference visit

When I saw the program (in Dutch) of Srvision & Trends in Tooling 2019, I had more than one reason to be enthusiastic. Resilience organizations is a topic that interests me, so the theme “Service Resilience” was one reason to attend. The other is that one of the presenters talks about swarming in combination with the Cynefin framework. Since I refer to his work in the upcoming Intelligent Swarming framework, I thought it would be nice to hear (and meet, if possible) Jon Hall talk. Here is my summary of the day. All presentations can be found in a Dropbox folder, as well as pictures drawn during the presentation. Also, read the blog post of the organization (“Bouncing back with ITIL4).

KCS Europe Team Meeting in Delft

My first KCS Team meeting happened to be at only 10 cycling minutes away. The meeting was hosted by Topdesk in Delft and held on 30 and 31 October. It was a mix of presentations and Open Space discussion / brainstorm. Participants were practitioners and consultants / tool vendors from the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK. The meeting was lead by Melissa George from the Consortium of Service Innovation, she came over from the US. On the phone were also some participants, I think mainly from the US. It wasn't a large group, but according to Melissa this was about average for all their meetings. All presentations and notes can be found in a wiki.

The theme for this meeting was "Evolution of KCS content". It aimed at the Evolve loop and the role of the Knowledge Domain Expert (KDE), but during the meeting I learned that the role of the Coach is equally important, if not more. I learned a lot those two (1.5) days, from listening to the presentations, the discussions during the break and dinner Monday night. I'm still quite a newbie in this area!

Social Now Event 2015, Amsterdam (Day 1)

It's been a while since I blogged attended a conference, so when I saw the Social Now announcement and knowing that Amsterdam is only 1 hour by train from Delft, the decision to register was quickly made. I saw Samuel Driessen is the event chair and some of the presenter's names are familiar (bloggers / twitterers), so even more reason to go.

Monday April 20th, I arrived early at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, the venue for the event. The set-up of Social Now is not like the usual conference, with keynote speakers, many presentations and some room for discussion. Ana Neves, who is the conference organizers, is trying to get more interaction between the presenters and the audience, which works well as the number of participants is not very high (60?, hard to tell). At the same time, there are no sales pitches by vendors allowed. No, an almost real case is developed (by Ana) that the vendors use to present the possibilities of their tools. And then there is a 3-person judge that looks at the business, IT and user side of the tool. At the end of the event (after 10 presentations), all participants could put their votes into four categories (best presentation, most suitable tool for my organization, coolest product, coolest feature). 

Just a comment: in this post, I'm not going to summarize everything of the day. Simply because I didn't take sufficient notes. And there are many sources online that did a better job than I can do here, so I'll try to link to those!

Before we go to the case and the tool presentations of the first day, Dana Leeson (BSI) gave a keynote presentation. Dana wants to challenge us in her presentation that was titled "The Social Workplace Tipping Point; Are you in the Best Position?". One of the topics she brought up that stuck to my mind was the shift from BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) via CYOD (Choose Your Own Device) to CYOT (Choose Your Own Tool). It's interesting to think about what CYOT means. I've seen it happening in a company with many smart techies who built their own tools, because the available tools weren't satisfying. The problem is that information exchange is impossible between the tools, so they create silos. Is CYOT something we want? (Freedom versus silos) I talked with Dana about it later and she agrees that CYOT has advantages and disadvantages, but it is something that happens in organizations.

Another interesting topic, which kept coming back the two days, is employee engagement.  Dana's main message: the gold standard (of employee engagement), stop that! There is no need for an employee to be involved in every activity. One other comment from Dana: “Collaboration is a mythical beast that can never be found”. People just don’t strive for the same goal.

On a side note: I found out that Dana is from Waterloo (and yes, the same Waterloo that I lived for 6 years). She now lives in the UK, but it was nice to find out we share similar views on this Canadian city.

Now we get to the fictional case of Cableinc, developed and presented by Ana Neves. Cableinc is a cable maker, has 1200 employees spread over 4 locations in 3 countries. Manufacturing company that also delivers services (installation, for example). In their plans is a new facilitation that will be built in Turkey. It's one of the different story lines that the tool vendors can choose to demonstrate their product. Requirements: no sales pitch, no slides, presentation with the tool. Quite some work for the vendors, but it made for a more realistic presentation of the tools.

On the first day we saw presentations by Iris Intranet, Jamespot, KanBo and (after the lunch) Brikit, IBM Connections /XCC (Time to Act Group), MangoApps. Good I made notes for the voting later, otherwise I would have lost track already of the different tools and the features they offer!

The day ended with short presentations by Luis Suarez "Reducing Email Dependency" (for the people who follow his blog it's no surprise he promotes a work life without email), Carsten Rossi "Improving Internal Communications", Paul Corney "Improving Knowledge Retention" and Phill Kropp "Increasing Adoption of Social Tools". The presentations ended with a debate between these men and the audience (when they were able to break into the presenters who really got up to speed in the debate!).

Few more returning /new / interesting topics: Working out loud (WOL), Random coffee meetings (invitation to drink coffee with a random person in the organization), Narrative grid, Gamification. And "Content is king".

(I get an error when adding pictures, so for now plain text!)

KM World 2010, Day 2: Presentations

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!

KM World 2010, Day 1: Workshops

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!

KM World 2010 Day 0: 1AM Destination on the right, you have arrived

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.

To be continued!

I'm going to KM World 2010

It has been some time that I attended a conference, but I have my trip booked to go to Washington in November to attend the KM World 2010 conference. The program looks interesting with Dave Snowden and Thomas Stewart as keynote speakers and I had a hard time selecting the workshops that I want to attend. I'm trying to get some colleagues attend as well, but I don't mind going on my own as well. Usually it's even better to go alone, which gives better opportunities to meet other people.

Hope to meet you in Washington!

Webinar season is open?

I have never received so many webinar announcements as in the last couple of weeks. Is this a new trend? Instead of sending out a report, apparently organizations prefer to present it.

I have to admit, I'm bad audience. I think I attended only few webinars, but missed most of what was being said because I got distracted. And the other times I signed up, I forgot about it because I was busy with something else. Webinars don't work for me, is my conclusion. Just give me the report that I can read at a moment that suits me. Or give me a presentation away from my computer, so I don't do other things at the same time. Yes, in the old fashioned way.

Human is more important than technology

"The human is more important than technology". Nothing new about this, thoughI think it can't be said often enough. The comment was made Monday by, and this is also not a surprise, the co-founder of Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak. "The Woz" was keynote speaker at a Communitech breakfast event (sponsored by, among others, RIM). It was an event attended by over 700 people, while Iain Klugman, director of Communitech, beforehand thought it would be nice to invite Wozniak to visit Kitchener/Waterloo and have a meeting with 80 people or so. The room was filled by people of all kinds of organizations, gadget lovers (like Wozniak) or not - everybody wanted to hear his story.