We had a great morning yesterday with our mini KM Bootcamp, held at IPP Consulting’s new offices at 50 Pitt Street in Sydney. This event attracted the interest from people in the professional services, education, government and health sectors – I even had to turn a few people away as we had reached our room capacity!
I was too busy talking to take notes, so Brian Bailey recorded a few key observations from our discussions (in no particular order) yesterday:
- Don’t get caught up trying to define KM, it’s the discipline that dare not speak it’s name.
- KM activities often provides a focus on areas where growth, restructures and cutbacks has eroded organisational slack – mentoring, innovating and generally sharing points of view.
- There is nothing as powerful as an idea that’s time has come. When the boss decides it’s time for KM, it’s time.
- Need to understand the organisational culture and influence executives and thought leaders, sometimes indirectly.
- Mix of technology and people approaches, pendulum swinging back toward people orientation.
- Ageing workforce is a critical issue for organisations.
- Law firms have a deep knowledge of their specialist subjects such as precedents but after that it can be hard to diversify the effort.
Funnily enough, last night while Skype’ing with David Gurteen to help plan his visit to Sydney in September, we had exactly the same conversation about the first point. We both agreed how pointless it is to worry about what we call Knowledge Management when fundamentally the issue is that there are business problems to solve and this is where we should really focus our energy.
Look out for similar events on other knowledge, information and technology topics in the future – in fact, feel free to get in touch if you have an idea for a topic or would simply like reserve a spot in advance!
Thanks for the wrap up James.
ReplyDeleteDid the participants know much about KM already? What did the participants think afterwards? Did they go away with some useful insights? Are any of them taking it into action?
RE: Other topics. I'd love an Enterpise RSS session focused on use cases, business case and tool selction. What do you think?
Most people attending knew about KM already and many of them had a KM responsibility. One person came along specifically to learn more about KM. I think one of the key insights was that there is no such thing as one size fits all when it comes to KM. And, yes - I think Enterprise RSS would make a great topic ;-)
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