April 2010 Archives

APQC's 15^th KM conference is next week, and if the registration is any indication, knowledge management is alive and well, and travel budgets are being released from their chokeholds. This conference is always a bellwether for The Next Big Thing in KM.  We'll have to wait until next week to be sure, but my sense from talking with the keynoters and presenters is that there are two hot top-of-mind topics right now.

The first is how KM can help (rather than simply lament) today's socially networked, information-overloaded knowledge workers with their digitally induced shrinking attention spans, their iPhone/BlackBerry obsessions, and their perception that they don't have time to stop and "do KM." This includes discovering unexpected applications of Enterprise 2.0 tools to enliven communities of practice;  finding the right way to incorporate Facebook-type functionality in a business setting; using analytics to make sense out of human behavior;  and finding the "KM app for that" for mobile devices. If Apple can have a 474 percent increase in Asian sales of the (three-year-old!) iPhone and its biggest non-holiday profit EVER, then you know KM better pay attention to what will go on that tiny little Apple appliance. Or Droid. Or Blackberry. All while keeping the bad guys from getting a peak at it.

The second Big Thing is a deeper desire to understand the roots of real knowledge and wisdom.  Good heavens--dare we go there?  American KMers often fear we will be dismissed as academic or irrelevant to business if we talk about things like wisdom or judgment. Hmm... How's that working for us?  We'll see next week if there is traction to be found there.

Every year, I swear that the content and camaraderie at the conference couldn't get any better, but it does. This year should be no different. See you there.

Over the past year, APQC's internal Web technology team has been designing our next-generation Web presence. I say "presence" because our site is the primary outward-facing point of contact to our members, and many have come to equate access to our online Knowledge Base with APQC membership. Based on comprehensive feedback from our members and customers, we evaluated everything from well-known portal and content management system (CMS) vendors to this week's "Web 2.0 tool du jour," ultimately selecting Drupal as the platform best suited to our needs.

For those unfamiliar with Drupal, it's often categorized as an open source CMS, although the term "CMS" doesn't do it justice in terms of functionality. Drupal has a large and rapidly expanding install base, ranging from small, independent sites to large enterprises such as www.whitehouse.gov and www.fastcompany.com. From a knowledge management perspective, the most fascinating aspect of Drupal is the collaborative way in which the platform's programming community handles innovation. In return for access to more than 5000 contributed modules centrally organized at www.drupal.org, developers are on the honor system to contribute any generic modules they write that they feel will benefit the community as a whole. The community then offers feedback, bug reports, and feature patches.

I want to remind everyone that APQC's April 2010 knowledge management community call is coming up this week. The call will feature guest presenter Linda Hummel, knowledge management leader at GE Energy, and her colleague Dave Cerrone.

Since GE Energy's KM program was created in the second quarter of 2008 to support the company's sales and marketing team, the KM team has focused on the program's four pillars: people, process, content, and technology. Hummel and Cerrone will describe:

• how the foundation for the KM program was established with an emphasis on Google enterprise search,
  
• how GE Energy is taking people search to a new level with an expert locator system,
• how the KM team is measuring its success, and
• what processes are used to maintain content freshness and fill gaps.

This call will take place this Thursday, April 15, at 10:30 a.m. Central. You can register for the call at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/469076536.

In the interest of transparency, let me just say up front that the folks I'm helping to publicize below are clients of mine. There are two good reasons why I'm happy to help them out: 1) what they do is pretty cool, and 2) I figure that, if I want to keep them as clients, I'd better do this because they asked me to.

What does Carrier Team One do? They share knowledge, transfer good practices among projects, and help create a collaborative, networked environment (in an otherwise very hierarchical one) to improve the maintenance activities of the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier fleet. (Quiz: Without help, can you name all the carriers in the current fleet?)

So while I'm not really all that worried about our relationship with the Navy, it would be great to fill the room to hear what these folks are doing to create a peer-to-peer "organization" that is really made up of over 50 distinct organizations.

In the modern world, we are inundated with a flood of data and information. Traditional editing systems designed to help us sort through this clutter--like newspapers--are endangered and may not survive. But the increased flow of information makes it more important than ever that we learn how to convert the myriad data streams that surround us into useful knowledge and insights we can act on. I would even go so far as to say that we are seeking wisdom out of all those facts and numbers.

How can we accomplish this? The wise use of data depends on our ability to link it to real life, to real people and their experiences, to human transactions and interactions. History is littered with examples of companies that went awry because they did not understand the context and realities associated with the data they were supposedly analyzing. In other cases, leaders did not "ask deeply" enough. They knew what, how much, and where their customers were buying, but they didn't ask the right questions to ascertain why their customers bought what they did or what those people were really looking for. Often, what we sell is not what the customer is buying (something Peter Drucker points out in Innovation and Entrepreneurship).