Market intelligence is a commodity critical to corporate strategy planning. During APQC's June knowledge management community call, guest facilitator Dian Chu, a market intelligence specialist with Marathon Oil Corporation, will examine the framework of market intelligence and knowledge management used to achieve a competitive edge and why all companies should have such a framework. She'll also discuss the market intelligence and knowledge management cycle, critical success factors for effective KM, and the KM and market intelligence structure at Marathon.

The call will take place this Thursday, June 18, at 10:30 a.m. central time. Click here to register.

At the end of the session, attendees were offered the opportunity to complete a self-assessment survey titled, "Are You Ready to Accelerate?" The survey, which includes a series of yes/no/not applicable questions, is designed to offer a snapshot of an organization's readiness to "create the ah-ha moment."

Leandri has generously offered to make this self-assessment available to our entire knowledge management audience. The survey is anonymous, and there is no cost to participate. All you need to do to get started is send an e-mail to pwc.km.diagnostic@us.pwc.com expressing interest in the survey offered by PwC at the APQC conference.

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.

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.

It's taken me a while to gather my thoughts about day two of last week's knowledge management conference, but here are some notes on the final four keynotes:

• Rob Cross, associate professor at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce and research director of The Network Roundtable;
• John McQuary, vice president of KM and technology strategies at Fluor Corp.;
• Bryant Clevenger, global leader for IBM Global Business Services knowledge sharing strategy; and
• Alan  Deutschman, author of Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life.

Cross has studied corporate networks for many years. Part of his research involves going into companies and asking employees to fill out a 15-minute Web-based survey about how much time they spend working with others, who they go to when they need information, and so forth. He then maps the results to identify bottlenecks and breakdowns within the networks: Does the company have a problem with onboarding where new hires are not engaged quickly enough? Which individuals, functions, or locations aren't communicating with one another?  Who spends too much time inefficiently dispensing information?  

One of Cross' most insightful points is that more collaboration is not always better. If you weigh the benefits and costs of employee interactions, you realize that endless collaboration isn't the best use of people's time. Knowing a lot of people does not necessarily make you more productive. However, the networks of top performers include what Cross refers to as "bridging times"--people from across the organization with different areas of expertise. Rather than building huge networks, top performers focus on the most useful relationships. This allows them to form fruitful partnerships and find needed information without getting bogged down in excessive interaction.

For more information, I suggest reading Rob Cross' blog post from last month, which lays out five strategies to help leaders leverage talent and promote effective collaboration.

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While John McQuary's keynote dealt primarily with broad lessons learned over Fluor Corp.'s decade in KM, he also spoke to specific practical dilemmas that a beginning KM program might encounter.

First, he outlined a challenge that many organizations face: Fluor's engineers work in diverse, even remote, locations, yet they and all their resources need to be linked tightly enough that any question can be answered quickly and thoroughly. To create a worldwide knowledge-sharing environment, Fluor built a consistent, scalable KM platform that would allow rapid deployment and onboarding for both new employees and those working in new locations.

 McQuary also advised that, because the transformation to a knowledge-sharing organization requires significant cultural changes, KM should be part of a larger project. At Fluor, the natural partner was the human capital management (HCM) function. The value of KM was proven through the successful identification of knowledge gaps and the creation of knowledge-loss mitigation strategies, which became key components of the HCM function's succession management plan.

For the human side of KM, McQuary emphasized the importance of structuring a KM program around how users are most likely to search for the information they need. Fluor's knowledge-sharing system is introduced during the onboarding process, allowing employees to quickly tap into the organization's collective expertise as well as discover where their own unique experiences can contribute to Fluor's body of knowledge.

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During the lunchtime keynote, Bryant Clevenger discussed recent changes to IBM Global Business Services' knowledge management tools and appraoch. In 2007, IBM's internal KM system was good, but the company wanted it to do more.  Clevenger cited four key success factors that allowed IBM to achieve its new, highly responsive system:

1. embracing risk,
2. focusing on a service-oriented architecture,
3. building a highly extensible and flexible model, and
   
4. treating everything as data.

The new system allows users to verify the quality and relevance of the data.  All of the company's search mechanisms include the option of referencing the tags and ratings users have applied. The system also leverages knowledge about subjects, people, and expertise housed in other IBM systems.  For example, the expertise location portion of the system is not solely dependent on information that users have entered in the database.  Every individual's record also includes a listing of his or her bookmarked items, communities that he or she belongs to, coworker connections, and blog posts.  If the expert is not currently available, searchers can utilize these other means to find the same information they could obtain through a conversation with the expert.

Having created a moldable, teachable system, IBM believes that its content management tool will be able to evolve and provide users with increasingly customized ways to access the information they need as well as a streamlined way of broadcasting their own information. User acceptance has been high, and the increased user feedback is resulting in dramatic refinements in the search, language, and expertise elements.

Click here for more information and to watch a short video on IBM's new KM tools.

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After all the inspiration generated by two days of KM-practitioner knowledge sharing, Alan  Deutschman's closing keynote offered a path forward: You've seen where you want to take your organization, now you must figure out how to get there. According to  Deutschman, to understand how to enact change within your organization, you must first understand how you don't. One of  Deutschman's first questions to the audience was, "Why do we fail at creating change?" He argued that the answer lies in the very techniques we think most likely to help us effect transformation within our organizations. He calls them the Three Fs: facts, fear, and force.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, presenting facts will sway few people's opinions: We are rational people, but if a fact does not reflect our long-held beliefs, we are likely to reject it. It simply has no place in our paradigm, and our brains resist believing truths other than our own.

When appealing to ration fails, we frequently switch tactics to tap into anxiety--we try to sell an idea based on fear. It's this technique from which  Deutschman drew the title of his keynote: Change or Die. An abstract future need--especially one requiring capital investment or a great deal of work--will not motivate change.  A future peril will not always translate into a present fear.

The final F, "force," is one that is often extolled as a change virtue. Many change proponents wish for the one thing they believe will overcome the failures of facts and fear, the seeming holy grail of change: a senior management mandate.  However, Deutschman points out that it is often human nature to rebel against so-called direct orders, and that "pulling rank" can make workers feel belittled. In order to regain their dignity and maintain their sense of autonomy, employees will often decide for themselves whether they wish to comply--or, at the very least, will continue to do things the way they've always done them and hope the new initiative goes away.

What strategies are effective for creating change?  Deutschman suggests looking at change the way you would any complex form of learning, such as studying a foreign language or mastering a musical instrument. First, you must secure a teacher, coach, or mentor to guide you through. Then, you have to practice--any real change involves mastering dozens of new skills and/or habits, and until you struggle through the learning phase, you will not be able to progress. The final step requires a shift in mindset, at which point the new behavior starts to feel natural. That's when you know that you've successfully enacted the desired change.

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Thank you again for a great conference. Every year, this event allows us to engage with our knowledge management community and learn about the challenges you are facing. Regardless of whether you were able to attend, we hope you will continue to communicate with APQC and tell us what knowledge management issues are most important to your organizations. If you have any thoughts on future topics for KM Edge or would like to contribute to our Web site, please contact me at ltrees@apqc.org.

As most of you know, APQC kicked off its 14^th annual knowledge management conference in Houston this morning. With so much knowledge sharing going on, it's only possible to scratch the surface in a blog post (even a rather long one), but here are some of the key insights and take-aways from the three keynotes.

APQC president Carla O'Dell got us off to a great start this morning. Given that she outlined many of the main points from her presentation in her latest blog post, I will not repeat all of them here, but I will mention a few ideas that stuck out for me.

O'Dell argued that, in her opinion, there are three main reasons why so many organizations have not yet reached level 5 maturity:

1. Not everybody needs to be at level 5, which involves using your organization's knowledge to allow you to enter brand new lines of business.
2. The goal keeps changing, and the definition of level 5 keeps changing.
3. When progressing through the lower levels of maturity, organizations don't always do a good job of creating a compelling vision of the future.

Picking up on this idea of a "vision of the future," O'Dell presented some of the insights generated by APQC's KM Advanced Working Group regarding five ideal future results that would define a mature, level-5 KM program. The ideal future result that generated the most discussion was: "People use critical thinking and appropriate problem solving heuristics to make sense of situations and to develop innovative responses." O'Dell cited the example of Toyota, which uses the heuristic, "Ask why five times" as part of its effort to uncover the root causes of problems. Ensuring that employees have strong critical thinking skills will become increasingly important to business success: As one of the members of our Advanced Working Group pointed out, not everything is in Google, and people need to be able to solve problems and distinguish good information from bad.

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In the next keynote address, Chris Meyer was asked to speculate about the future of KM.  The increasingly sophisticated knowledge-sharing technologies available to organizations prompted Meyer to ask the question: "Will KM be the next newspaper industry?"  By the end of the presentation, his conclusion was a definitive "no."  Instead, knowledge management will evolve--must evolve--along with the tools and the nature of knowledge both inside and outside corporations.

Meyers' view is that, right now, much of the corporate world sees KM as the content and IT as the container.  Considering the growing number of Web sites that both hold information and facilitate commenting, rating, organizing, and data submission (examples he cited included Flikr and Amazon), the outside world is clearly ready for the two to merge.  The corporate world must follow suit.

Are you prepared for your work e-mails to be rated according to their usefulness?  How would you like to be called into an executive meeting because your e-mails have achieved the top ranking in your subject area? Consumers are already engaged in these types of feedback loops, but are corporate environments equipped to handle such a culture shift?

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During the final keynote of the day, Victor Newman voiced an opinion likely shared by many KMers: All strategies are knowledge strategies. All are a series of choices based on knowledge--both the knowledge you pay attention to and the knowledge you choose to ignore. To spur strategic KM thinking within your organization, Newman suggested three questions:

1. How long have you got before you have to do something new?
2. How good is the knowledge that underpins your current strategy?
3. Does that knowledge create new freedoms to innovate, or does it keep you trapped in the same box?

Newman defined strategic knowledge management (SKM) as learning to manage knowledge to create and realize innovative opportunities. Rather than focus on the transfer of internal company-related knowledge, SKM encourages leaders to look at the context of change as something that continually changes and to develop the intuitive knowledge necessary to make their organizations more agile and insightful.

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 To those of you who are here in Houston with us, thank you so much--your energy and participation were a big part of making the first day of the conference such a success. I'd also like to extend a special thank you to the other members of our APQC content team, Krystl Campos and Michelle Cowan, who contributed to this blog post.

I look forward to seeing you all again tomorrow as we welcome keynoters Rob Cross, John McQuary, and Alan Deutschman as well as another great round of breakout sessions.

If you are really going to take knowledge management seriously--invest time and resources, engage with senior leadership, and expect to see results--then you need to consider the roles and resources required to support your organization's KM activities.

APQC's KM Advanced Working Group recently completed a collaborative project focused on knowledge for the future. As part of the project, the KM Advanced Working Group identified four critical roles necessary for developing and maturing an organization's KM capabilities.

1. knowledge management leader--focuses on strategy, leadership, and facilitation;
2. knowledge management specialist--focuses on knowledge/content, flow and the impact of knowledge on processes and business/knowledge domains;
3. communication director--focuses on communications and change management; and
4. information technology/business analyst--focuses on IT tools, infrastructure, applications, and content management.

What KM roles have you found to be most valuable within your organization? At APQC's KM conference this Friday, APQC Executive Director Cindy Hubert and I will be leading a lively discussion on roles within KM. We hope you'll be able to join us and share your experiences.

It is no secret that, for many organizations, training is one of the first and easiest cuts to make when money is tight.  The need for training doesn't go away, just the budget.  Tough economic times cause companies to reduce headcount, reorganize, merge, outsource, retool, add products, chase new markets, and act in many other creative ways.  Each of these actions creates a transition such as an employee taking on a new role, a team introducing a new process or a new technology, or a partnership requiring a reset on "how we do things around here."

In each of these transitions, there are people who "know" and people who "need to know."  With formal training dollars slashed, the only way this training will happen is on the job.  Experienced people will be called on to teach what they know to their less experienced colleagues.  They'll have to break their knowledge down into manageable chunks, teach with deference to learning styles, test to ensure that they have been heard, and then give feedback on the resulting work--all while carrying a regular workload.

Beth McCoy, team leader of the Chemical Technology Team at the U.S. Army's Natick Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center, has experienced this firsthand. About three years ago, she began implementing a knowledge transfer toolset called Peer Mentoring to ensure that her team would continue to grow and develop even without much in the way of formal training available.

Beth and I will be co-presenting at APQC's knowledge management conference next week. In addition to sharing Beth's story, we'll lay out specific steps that can be used to grow an army of trainers within your existing staff.  I hope you'll be able to join us.

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Steve Trautman is the creator of the Peer Mentoring Workshop and the author of Teach What You Know: A Practical Leader's Guide to Knowledge Transfer.

He will be presenting at APQC's upcoming knowledge management conference, The Knowledge Transfer Revolution: New Paradigms, New Payoffs, in conjunction with Elizabeth McCoy of the U.S. Army's Natick Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center.