The realisation of potential
Received the two copies of Managing Partner magazine with my article printed in it yesterday, looks great! https://www.managingpartner.com/feature/technology/make-or-buy-how-choose-km-system-your-firm.
I will publish it here, in my blog in a few days.
A few weeks ago, I participated in LawTech Camp in Toronto. Connie Crosby and I were launching our beta-test for our Law Firm KM assessment tool, so we had an opportunity to do a demo presentation and talk about KM, I’ve posted the slides on SlideShare, click on the <demo presentation> or <about KM> links to see the slides.
There was a lot of discussion both during and after the presentation about one of the slides, so Connie wrote a blog post about it, which you can see here: https://www.slaw.ca/2012/06/11/
This past week I attended the CKM training in Toronto, hosted by the Knowledge Management Institute and Knowledge Management Institute Canada. I attended, not because I felt I needed training (although I don’t have enough ego to think that I know it all, I have been doing KM for 12+ years, and certainly know a lot) but because I was curious to hear about their model and their approach. KMI has trained over 4,000 people worldwide over the last 10 years so they are onto something.
Just to backtrack for a minute, I come to KM from a technology perspective, because that is how I first came to KM. The processes and people part of KM are absolutely necessary and critical, and are the hardest part of KM, but technology enables it all, and poorly designed and implemented KM technology is the death knell for KM in a lot of organizations.
Okay, so back to my training. I did training with APQC when I was first getting going with KM when I was at Hewlett Packard, it was what was available to me at the time. It talked about the phases of KM implementation and how to mature KM in the organization, something I still use/refer to in my work. KMI’s CKM training provides a much more comprehensive model for KM, it introduces a lot of concepts and ideas about KM that I have learned over my 12 years of doing it. But because KM as a discipline is based on the experiences of its practitioners, and isn’t mature enough to have standardized/coalesced its terminology I was frustrated with the descriptions by times.
As much as I enjoyed the course, meeting everyone, and hearing the experiences and challenges that they all face and have faced, I tired of KM technology being the great evil of KM and that is something that needs to be addressed going forward. I have no hesitancy in recommending the course to people just starting out in KM, it’s a great start. However as technology ever embeds itself in our lives (work-wise and otherwise) understanding how KM technology can enable KM activities is critical.
The poor implementation of KM technology is the reason why KM has a bad name in the minds of many, but it is a necessary component of the KM puzzle, ignoring it does not change this. The sooner KM practitioners understand this, the sooner it will get better.
Alas, I think I am a lone voice in the wilderness on this one.
The Knoco May newsletter on business focused KM is out, https://lnkd.in/9rwyPS.
Lots of practical information on implementing KM, there’s an archive of previous newsletters here https://www.knoco.com/knowledge-management-news.htm
Ark Group has published my report, Aligning People, Process and Technology in KM. The Executive Summary and a sample chapter are on their website https://www.ark-group.com/product/aligning-people-process-and-technology-knowledge-management#.VnpHtpMrLq0
Just a quick blog post to let everyone know that I am now the Canadian Franchisee for Knoco Ltd., www.knoco.com. Knoco is a Knowledge Management consultancy based in the U.K. and with franchises in South Africa, USA, India, and Indonesia, as well as training partners in Spain. They offer KM people and process consulting, and training. I am excited by the opportunities that this expansion in my network and services will bring. You will see some changes to my website over the next while, although my Missing Puzzle Piece Consulting branding will remain unchanged and I will continue to do the business-IT alignment work in the KM domain that I have always done.
I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week (June 8-9) at Canada 3.0 www.canada30.uwaterloo.ca, which was an amazing experience. Sitting in a room with 1000 people who want to see Canada move forward and be a leader in the digital media space was energizing and motivating and if you’ve spoken to me in the last few days you know that I can’t say enough good things about my experience there and that I want to get involved and help move this forward.
I was part of a group listening to a case study presentation on the evolution of a Knowledge Management technology this week. I listened not so much for the lessons learned, but to hear about the particular experience of this individual at a company I was once familiar with. Continue reading “Can you Manage Knowledge?”
I did an interview on ThatChannel.com back in March, it was a great experience. We talked about Knowledge Management, Business-IT Alignment and the consulting work that I do, here is that interview! 🙂
The interview is posted in three parts on YouTube, here are the links:
Part 1: https://youtu.be/tWSb5QWIet8
Part 2: https://youtu.be/0uI3MSXZE9o
Part 3: https://youtu.be/6R4jO4rNaTo