I’m home again now after KMUK12, tired as as soon as I hit Didcot (Oxfordshire, UK) I was getting ready to go teach some Ballroom and Latin American Dancing…for the record, we recapped a Cha Cha Cha routine we’d done earlier in the programme and developed the Jive a little, working on “Change of Hands Behind The Back”. Anyway, back to KMUK12.
The day with Jane McKenzie of Henley Business School (just up the road from me) remining us of Paul J Corney’s mission and swimming pool exercise…as per the title, I’m still in the changing room but think I may have gained a rubber ring or two to help the swim. Jane suggested that the question for this year’s conference was “what is the value of what you’re doing to [with perhaps a better word] the organisation to the organisation”…put another way (my words), is it all worth it? Unfortunately, I had to leave a little early so didn’t take part in Chris Collison’s (@ChrisCollison) session or the final panel discussion which were intended to answer that question…hopefully other attendees can add comment to this posting, or even do their own. Jane noted that the word “CONVERSATION” was used an awful lot during day 1.
To be honest, I guess most of us really weren’t listening that well to Jane until she introduced Dave Snowden (@snowded) with the words “no KM conference is complete without…”. Now, people who work in or study KM will have real difficulty not knowing Dave’s name or work so little point in going on about Cynefin and suchlike. I do need to say though that I like Dave’s work; he doesn’t dismiss the stuff I did in the past (or even now for that matter) like Scientific Management or Business Process Reengineering. He recognises there is a place in the ordered world for these things (unless you make a religion of it of course). But his focus in in the unordered world, particularly the complex domain. Today Dave is talking about Expatation: using existing ‘stuff’ in a way that is totally different from what the ‘stuff’ was developed for. He showed us a picture of cars that had been wrapped in giant plastic bags to protect them from floods. It’s always going to be difficult to summarise a Snowden presentation in a paragraph so I won’t try (too much). As ever, Dave promises that the presentation slides are made available on the Cognitive Edge website. What did I take from the presentation…in the non-Gaussian world we need to recognise that best practice is a nonsense concept…because things are unlikely to happen, irrespective of consequence, good practice is unlikely to have been worked out, let alone best practice. Dave used the phrase ‘conceptual blending’, which I take to mean the brining together of different view points/perspectives (is that a view point?) exeriences and knowledge to develop solutions to what are essentially one-off problems. This is relevant to my work; in the nuke industry we are required to have effective (the regulators use the word adequate) arrangements for handling emergency situations. Now, while you can have certain ways of acting in these situations, you can never really define a problem solution. We need emergency response teams that can react to a situation and bring together diverse skills and experiences to deal with the situation at hand…not unlike in the film Apollo 13 where engineers had to ‘Heath Robinson’ an air scrubber (I think that’s the word) using only what was available to the astronauts .
I didn’t envy Brigitte Ireland’s (@Briginthjing) task, to follow Dave with her presentation about how Ernst & Young (referred to as EY throughout) developed a global knowledge organisation. EY (see how adaptive I am) are big…we are talking hundreds of thousands of people delivering services to much of the world. They have ‘knowledge professionals’ all over the world who need to provide an effective and efficient service to the company. They have set up what is essentially a triage process to deal with service requests so that much of the mundane (my word, not Brigitte’s) work is facilitaed through on-line self-service tools. This leaves the knowledge professionals free to deal with what EY call the ‘priority’ request…the areas that will add most value to the company. She talked about balancing the need for global (standard) approaches with the desire for local solutions…in the OU’s Managing Knowledge course, we called this ‘glocalisation’…something the apparently MacDonalds are good at. A major ‘takeaway’ (no pun intended…though it is good don’t you think) for me is the need to ‘get stuck in’; KM needs to be part of the conversation, needs to be proactively ‘taking a seat at the table’ something for me to work on here I think.
Again, it was time to choose: Adrienne Monteath-van Dok with ‘From zero to hero: A knowledge management ‘comeback’ story’ or Dr Johannes Müller’s ‘Global knowledge exchange using Web 2.0 at Siemens, Building Technologies Division’. I’m afraid that Dr Müller’s session sounded far too techy for me (I was considered an ‘expert’ before Windows 3.1.1 but since then have lost it) and the fact is that we have 400-500 people on two sites in the UK and global networking is really not an issue. So, I went with Adrienne.
Adrienne described how Plan International (referred to merely as ‘Plan’ during the session) are in the ‘business’ of ‘Promoting child rights to end child poverty’. She also told us that, in spite of a KM Strategy that was good, KM was not regarded as important by the powers that be…to the extent that the strategy on 2008/9 was not approved by the global leadership. The KM community in Plan did some navel gazing (or root cause analysis for some) as identified some of the reasons for this lack of interest: KM, as presented, was too conceptual, people were unclear what it was an what benefits could be gained from it’s use…people wanted to see the benefits before they’d buy-in (I know, chicken and egg stuff, but not unusual). There was also frustrations within the organisation around participation: Plan took on board outsider views, but seemed to have forgotent their own staff. So, Adrienne and her KM organisation started to work on this. They sought to gain credibility by building a portfolio of case studies to show the benefits of KM; they admitted mistakes but parked them and moved on; they started to build networks and trust within the organisation. They were also helped by a change in the leadership and culture of the organisation (Snowden’ serendipity?). They now present practical solutions to problems without being too ambitious, they manage people’s expectations. Their strategy is iterative and in two parts: the bits that must be done, the minimum amount of sharing that is expected and the stuff that while being the ideal is not mandatory. I think that Adrienne’s obvious passion for the work of Plan and KM also added greatly to KM’s comeback.
Sue Mucenieks from Deloitte now told us how they were using social networking to generate business value. Hank Malik was suppoed to have been there to but I guess he was delayed (I did see him in the room later). Deloitte, like EY is a vast organisation providing services throughout the world. They are a global network of member firms that need to collaborate in order to maintain the Deloitte ‘frontage’. They have a number of tools that are used for this collaboration, but the presentation ‘Turning ‘social’ networking into business value: Transforming collaboration at Deloitte’ concentrated on their use of Yammer. A couple of ‘fun experiments’ in the use of Yammer in Austrailia and the UK led to global adoption in November 2011. Membership of the network, which is voluntary, grew virally from just a few in October 2010 to more than 50000 in May 2012…and this continues to increase. The implementation initially was very hands off with no formal training people learned by doing. There were challenges such as: how much ‘social’ was to be allowed so it didn’t detract from serious use, the information security risk, people’s attachement (no pun) to email being a few. They learned lessons in that there is a need for a suporting infrastructure to help people get real value from the tool, there is a clear policy of purpose (social is ok, but this is a business tool). They now have some structure, some support together with Yammer ‘champions’ to promote it’s use…and social: one of their Directors is a regular contributor…of jokes (e.g I’m getting pretty nervous about my maths exam, I think I’ve got a 40:40 chance of passing…don’t blame me, it’s on the slide)…his view is that the jokes make him more approachable in his business role. The final message? ‘Don’t give up. It’s a long term challenge, taking a long time’ in my notes I added ‘for a long term effect’.
Once more, a De Vere lunch, always very nice but presented very much in a production line fashion. This was followed by a presentation from Lieutenant Colonel Minham LIM of the Singapore Aremed Forces. The presentation, entitled ‘Knowledge management at the frontline: KM as a key enabler of Singapore Armed Forces’ full-spectrum capability’. SAR (as it seems to be affectionately known) are not a big force (~30k regular and ~40k conscripted for 2 year with a 300k strong reserve force that receive annual training for a futher 10 years) but they want to have a big presence in the world. As part of training, they equip their people to make judgement calls rather than referring to standard operating procedures all the time (sound familiar? See the splurge above on Dave Snowden’s session). They learn before through planning and use of their eSILK knowledge repositiory. They learn during with quick reports/logs that are referred to during things like shift changes; they have During Action Reviews when things go wrong to stop, review and react (similar to ‘probe-sense-respond’ perhaps?). They learn after, using their experienced people as trainers to share and spread experiential knowledge. Their goal in the field is that a battle is not 1 SAR combattant against 1 enemy combattant, but the entire SAR through the network against 1 enemy combattant. It seems to me that SAR, through its use of technology and KM fights well above its weight.
Another choice: efficiency and effectiveness with Colette Bewley of Innovation Burges Salmon LLP or walking the talk with Dr Susanne Etti of ERM. Now, while I’m well known for my desire for effectiveness and efficiency, I have a great deal of regard for walking the talk, so downstairs to see how ERM are ‘Walking the talk: Using a knowledge sharing approach to drive change’. ERM are in the business of ‘delivering sustainable solutions in a more competetive world’ and the knowledge sharing community are playing their part in delivering this goal. In ‘Let’s Shout About Sustainability’ local projects make short videos to describe the project, documenation is made available and together the videos and documents are held in a database that is searchable. We saw one of the videos and heard feed back from the video maker about how energised the project had become because of the enterprise wide recognition of the projects worth…and the personal electronic ‘card’ of thanks from the CEO did no harm either. A second case study shows how ERM are preparing for Rio+20, the UN’s Conference on Sustainable Development. Through the use, and reporting of events, like knowledge cafes, the whole company is helping prepare the three person delegation. ERM are able to show how individuals within the organisation are contributing the sustaining the planet, energising their people to greater effort…my view? Recognition of people’s work and worth goes a long way to increasing their motivation in delivering organisational goals.
This unfortunately was the end of my conference…I had to be somewhere else quite urgently, apart from getting back to Didcot in time to teach.
What did I get from KMUK12? Well, in other years I’ve gotten a broader view of KM…I originally though it was just glorified records management (I know, I know…I was naïve…uneducated). My question to Dave Snowden at KCUK09 “Why do we do KM” started to change that…his answer then? ‘To support better decision making’. In KMUK10 & 11 I got more conceptual information, more pointers about what KM is. Now I have a view of what KM is, and what it isn’t and from KMUK12 my ‘takeaways’ are more practical. Positive Deviation is a tool I think I can use in my work of business improvement; the difference between installation and implementation and, more importantly, how to articulate it; effective presentation through emotional engagement (this has utility in my dancing too…I know, I tried it last night); thoughts of how my understanding of my inner animal, and other people’s, can help me interact effectively with those people; the need to be involved in ‘the conversation’, to have a seat at the table; the need to restrain ambition, to be practical and to deliver on promises (although I guess I knew that one already, but it’s always good to be reminded).
Work of the conference: CONVERSATION…it’s all about conversation and generating common usnderstanding of what’s needed and how we are to get there. We do business with people and people are social animals, so conversation, effective conversation, is an absolute necessity.
This may be my last KMUK, who can tell but it was certainly the most practical…and by the time I’ve finished today, my network will have increased some more…more following and (already) more followers to hopefully make me more effective.
My apologies to the lovely people I’d met over the last two days for not saying goodbye…as I say, it was quite and urgent call-away. Hopefully we can connect with twitter (@Mark_Harbor) or on LinkedIn (Mark Harbor) or even Facebook (guess what…Mark Harbor). My work email is mark.harbor@research-sites.com and my personal email mark_a_harbor@hotmail.co.uk, I hope to hear from you. Takle care all.
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