Lauren Trees beat me to the punch (not surprising) and was the first to post some short impressions from Day One of the conference. I composed mine in parallel and, after reading Lauren's post, do not see a great deal of overlap.
The Houstonian is a very good venue for
the conference. Their service is excellent, they provide great food,
the hotel is right next to APQC Headquarters (HQ for us military
types), and the hotel has great Wi-Fi access (a must for those of us
using netbooks or laptops to take notes). I used my Asus Eee PC
1000HE with super long battery life (at least eight hours) to take
notes, but certainly could not keep up with most of the speakers so I
also used my Livescribe Pulse Smart Pen to record audio so I can take
more detailed notes later. I will be working on those in my spare time in the weeks ahead and then will make them available via this blog.
Jim Lee (snappy dresser that he is) provided a nice introduction to the conference, just like last year. He announced a contest associated with connecting with people (collecting business cards as the evidence), but was cagey about the possible reward. He encouraged people to be taking pictures during the conference. He was not too clear about where to send them, but I suspect Lauren Trees (ltrees@apqc.org) will know what to do with them if you send them to her.
Keynote Presentation: "Knowledge Transfer Revolution" by Carla O'Dell
O'Dell talked about the journey of KM and made reference to the knowledge management maturity model (five levels) that APQC developed last year:
- Level 1-- Initiate, build awareness, move to next level through collection of ad hoc knowledge
- Level 2 -- Develop localized and repeatable practices, move to next level through applied knowledge
- Level 3 -- Standardize, common processes and approaches (where the ROI starts), move to next level through enabling knowledge
- Level 4 -- Optimize, measured and adaptive, move to next level through scalable knowledge
- Level 5 -- Innovate, continuously improving practices
She noted that experts use critical thinking and appropriate problem-solving heuristics to make sense of situations and develop innovative responses.
The purpose of the conference is to give attendees what they need to enable the future.
Keynote Presentation: "The Future of Business" by Christopher Meyer
Meyer started out with a provocative question: "Is KM the next newspaper industry?" He noted that Microsoft's Encarta was overcome by the different approach used by Wikipedia to illustrate how new approaches can render existing business models obsolete.
The convergence of content and container
What if you could give feedback on your or others' emails? Wouldn't you like to be in the top 10 of your company? (Soule note: There are a lot of people I know who would definitely be strong competitors for the "bottom 10" e-mailers.)
Networks and cheap connected sensors have made it much easier to adapt and improve. What information is there that pertains to your organization's performance that is not being sensed or not being used?
It is not good enough to just manage knowledge inside your organization; you need to manage all the knowledge in the world.
The well-established path from "data to information to knowledge to wisdom" is giving way to the new model of "sense, respond, learn, adapt" through new applications of technology (use of cell phones and even networked cars to develop new capabilities in new, unexpected ways).
Past knowledge management was static, individual, historical, categorized whereas Web 2.0 is dynamic, distributed, current, boundary-less, tagged.
Breakout Session: "Creating the Ah-ha
Moment: Engaging Leadership to Drive Cultural Change at
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)" by Susan Leandri of PwC
(Note: I could not find a slide handout for this presentation so my notes are limited to what I could type while Leandri spoke.)
Original state of knowledge strategy was characterized by inefficient use of collective knowledge.
US Knowledge Gateway is how PwC shares knowledge. PwC designed a funded, comprehensive plan to accelerate toward meeting its objectives of a knowledge management strategy.
She thinks of change as a bell curve. Leadership needs to create a compelling reason for the 60 percent in the middle to flock to success.
Lunch, including "Birds of a Feather" groups: Really good food and even better desserts. Bravo to the Houstonian.
Breakout Session: "Transferring
Knowledge and Wisdom Across Generations" by Elizabeth McCoy of the Natick Soldier Research
and Development Engineering Center (U.S. Army) and
Steve Trautman of Practical Leader
Many organizations need to prepare for loss of expertise due to potential retirements--back up employees with singular knowledge and rebuild lost capabilities.
McCoy volunteered her team to pilot a formal mentoring process for the organization. The goal was to demonstrate the effectiveness of peer mentoring as a tool to transfer critical knowledge to Chemical Technology Team (CTT) members.
Breakout Session: "To the Moon
and Beyond: Capturing 50 Years of Human Spaceflight Knowledge"
by Jean Engle of NASA and Pamela O'Beirne of SAIC
As chief knowledge officer (CKO) of Johnson Space Center (JSC), Engle developed and implemented a center-wide knowledge management program to identify, capture, and make available 50 years of human-manned flight knowledge for current and future generations. It was inspiring to see how much she accomplished with a very limited staff and budget.
She started out by performing a center-wide knowledge management assessment to identify strengths (social networks, informal mentoring, formal training, and large data warehouse with Google search capability) and weaknesses (barriers to knowledge sharing, lack of incentives, informal OJT, and security restrictions inhibiting knowledge sharing) of JSC's current state of knowledge management. She then used the results to determine the highest-value targets for corrective action and refinement.
With a very limited budget, she established the JSC Organizational Learning Program using social networks, storytelling, mentoring, case studies, and enhanced search. She got NASA veterans interested in coming back to teach others what they know through small group talks that could be recorded and made available to others on the computer network.
Keynote Presentation: "Taking KM to the Strategic Level: Opening Up the Strategic Knowledge Management (SKM) Option" by Victor Newman (former Chief Learning Officer of Pfizer, 2000-2005)
All great leaders are great at making things simple. SKM is about learning to manage knowledge to create innovation opportunities and realizing them.
Three SKM questions:
How long before we have to do something new?
How good is the knowledge that underpins your strategy?
Does it create news freedoms to innovate or keep you trapped in the same old box?
The way we think about change has to become more agile and insightful:
Organizations have developed powerful routines for resisting conventional change approaches.
We have to become more skilled at facilitating people's thinking processes in real time.
The inertia of success means we cling to our past when our environment changes and continue working harder in the hope that the situation will become predictable again.
The value of knowledge is like the value of fruit (timing is everything, must be presented at the right time).
He talked about Innovative Leadership Behaviors and how they specifically support innovation.
Strategies are based upon a series of assumptions. When one of these assumptions decays, the situation is similar to one of the blocks in a wooden tower being removed and the tower becoming unstable.
Networking Reception: Following Newman's keynote, APQC hosted a reception outside the Grand Ballroom. This was a great way to meet people. Just by hanging out with Carla O'Dell, I got to talk at length with Victor Newman about all sorts of topics, especially Afghanistan. He really is an interesting person.
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