A link to register can be found at http://actkmiamevent.eventbrite.com/

Connected - the film

Have you ever faked a bathroom trip to check your email? Slept with your laptop? Or become so overwhelmed that you just unplugged from it all? In this funny, eye-opening, and inspiring film, director Tiffany Shlain takes audiences on an exhilarating rollercoaster ride to discover what it means to be connected in the 21st century. From founding The Webby Awards to being a passionate advocate for The National Day of Unplugging, Shlain’s love/hate relationship with technology serves as the springboard for a thrilling exploration of modern life…and our interconnected future. Equal parts documentary and memoir, the film unfolds during a year in which technology and science literally become a matter of life and death for the director. As Shlain’s father battles brain cancer and she confronts a high-risk pregnancy, her very understanding of connection is challenged. Using a brilliant mix of animation, archival footage, and home movies, Shlain reveals the surprising ties that link us not only to the people we love but also to the world at large. A personal film with universal relevance, Connected explores how, after centuries of declaring our independence, it may be time for us to declare our interdependence instead.

This film was recently shown at the State Library of Victoria and is being provided by Michelle Lambert of the KM Roundtable.

We will be starting right on 1 pm so it is recommended you arrive at 12.45 pm at the latest to get your seats.

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A Defence man from way back, Graham Durant-Law now works at Hyperedge and talked about the idea that each organisation is made up of a formal organisation and an informal organisation. He says that the formal organisation has its place but 90% of the work gets done inside the informal organisation.

Theory

Although Graham has worked in knowledge management since 2001 and built KM systems for Defence, he has some issues with the term and the industry. His main criticism is that KM professionals don’t know what exactly they’re talking about; it’s all a bit trial and error because we haven’t played with KM theory enough. His view is that more discussion of KM theory would get the industry to a shared understanding and common meaning.

Structural terms

• A node is the smallest unit in the network. Also known as a vertex or entity. They can be people, teams, whole organisations.
• A tie is a line between two nodes indicated a relationship also called an edge or link.
• A graph is a set of nodes and ties.
• A network consists of graph and additional info about nodes/ties. Also known as map.

Typical measurements of interconnectivity

• Density is the number of possible connections between nodes.
• Distance is the degrees of separation or the diameter of a network.
• Reciprocity is the number of bi-directional links expressed as a percentage.
• Centrality is the extent to which a network is organised around one or more central nodes

Organisational dynamics

Graham emphasised that there are many different roles that people fulfil in flowing information through an organisation. Some of these roles he terms brokers, providers, gatekeepers, seekers.

He emphasised the importance of quality over size of the network, and the extreme value of having a person who is a super connector. If you are lucky enough to have a super connector, one of the best things you can do is leverage them to help get the right information to the right people.

By juxtaposing a traditional organisational chart (which executives love) with a chart showing the structure of communication connections within an organisation, Graham demonstrated how these super connectors are unofficially at the centre of an organisation’s communication network. Therefore, it is hugely important to make them official as well by putting them on your knowledge and/or change management team.

PB’s KM capability grew from the drive and motivation of its staff. Principal Civil Engineer David Kent received a grant to research, design and implement a common knowledge base for technical procedures and associated specifications, and a model for local Capability Leadership Teams and Communities of Practice. The aim was to make it easier for people to find what they needed to know to do their job.

David’s efforts were successful which led to an external review and the development of a strategy and program of work to build on this foundation.

Subsequently, Cory was appointed full-time as Knowledge Manager to design and the company’s KM program. Growing his team from one to five, PB’s KM team now consists of a Knowledge Manager, Knowledge Coordinator, two Librarians, and an Intranet Coordinator.

In September of 2010 Cory Banks handed over the reins to Christine Harding who has lead the team into the next phase of evolution.

Cory Banks enjoying his win.

For presenter Sha Reilly of Origin Energy, talent and expertise management came to mind immediately as one of the things that keeps CEOs awake.

She said it’s an important topic for CEOs because:

• post-GFC growth is a priority


• they are concerned about skills shortages especially in growth industries like mining


• skills shortages lead to knowledge loss through poaching


• the retirement of baby boomers is also threatens knowledge loss


• they are concerned about the generational gap between baby boomers and new recruits and don’t think it will be resolved easily or quickly.

Sha took the group through an approach for finding experts within organisations, applying it to KM and helping people to figure out if it was an approach they could apply to their organisations.

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1. People were separated into groups to experience the approach for themselves.

2. They were given half an hour to complete self-assessment questionnaires about their areas of expertise and particular topics of interest, rating themselves

3. The results were collated and translated into graphs to show what knowledge the whole group of conference attendees was working with.

4. Identified which areas were particularly strong which included KM strategy, KM leadership, communications, facilitating networks, project management, taxonomy development, content management, storytelling.

5. Identified areas that were less strong which included taxonomy, KM consulting and expertise mapping.

The discussion at the conclusion of the presentation covered possibly flaws in the method, the importance of self-assessment because often the individual is the only one who really knows all of the aspects of their skills and experience.

Here’s an overview of Matthew Cain’s presentation on what the Australian Army is doing in knowledge management.

A brief history of knowledge management in Army

People seem to manage knowledge differently from how they manage anything else, in a very piecemeal way. For example, Navy and RAAF are both good at capturing lessons but not good at sharing findings. They’re both working hard on their systems but are also sitting back and watching what Army is doing. Everyone is working towards reducing the gap between the information available and the information needed.

The four areas of KM in Army are:

• doctrine development


• capability development


• training


• operation planning.

iArmy

Today’s soldier is very technologically aware just like the rest of their generation so they have iArmy, an online tool that supports the information needed by soldiers. Using a combination of Microsoft and Google products, its objective is to allow soldiers to prepare themselves to deploy into battle. Menus include “observations”, “insights” and “lessons”.

The Centre of Army Lessons (CAL) . Focuses on these areas. Observations are the information captured from sources on the ground; insights are what can Army can get out of these observations; and lesson are drawn from insights.

The wedding

Matthew ended by talking about wanting to hear from the big group of knowledge management professionals about how they would merge iArmy with the Army Capability Management System (ACMS) which is an online learning tool.

When you went out and spoke to people about the coming organisational change, what was the vision you presented?

Rather than telling people what I wanted them to want, I did a lot of listening to find out what people wanted, to build their trust and to find out what the best way forward was.

You were confronted with a huge mess when you began this project. How did you keep yourself going through dark days?

Even though I might quip about getting rid of a whole lot of senior management, there’s no glory in doing what was done to those people. I remain in touch with a fair number of them and helped some of them get new jobs. When you’re doing this type of role you are alone. I had no one I could talk to. Trying to explain things to my partner at home was quite interesting. I tried to keep it out of my private life. Roles like this are always lonely and tough. There are occasions where you wonder if it’s worth it. Also you’re travelling quite a bit, so you’re away from home. There’s no glamour in travelling for work.

Are you now a gun for hire?

I try to stay away from the gun for hire tag which I've been called often but don’t like it. Ironically, what I do now is work with soon-to-be-former business heads and ministers of parliament to transition to other role.

Why didn’t the CEO act earlier?

He was surrounded by yes people.

How did they find you?

I had a bit of a reputation. The CEO had heard of some work I had done for another organisation and approached me.

How did you build trust to share knowledge?

Empowering people, getting them feeling like they were involved in the decision making process. Giving them small wins.

During the initial four-month evaluation period, did everyone ask you what you were doing?

No, that’s about your personality. I don’t look like a traditional CEO or consultant. I went in and become part of the organisation. I became their friend, listened to and contributed to water cooler talk. It’s not something you learn right away, it’s something you develop as part of who you are. Talking to people and listening is key.

How do you walk away after investing so much?

You never really walk away from a group of people who have become part of your corporate family. Hopefully you’ll know them for a lot longer than either of you were at the company. You do need to detach but I remain a supporter of the business and business strategy. In five years’ time, you’ll need to go back and do it again so you keep those relationships going.

By guest blogger Sarah Jansen

Ian Fry’s presentation came out of a discussion that happened at actKM 2010 in Canberra and its theme was “toughen up”. He says knowledge management professionals aren’t hard enough on themselves, especially regarding measuring their results. Apparently it’s common to say that knowledge and its management is immeasurable. Ian says that is weak.

There was some robust discussion in the room about the different ideas that Ian brought up and conflicting research findings cited. It seems that much more discussion is needed among knowledge management professionals to compare and combine the competing knowledge paradigms, the different perspectives, the many areas of meta-knowledge.

If anyone is interested in continuing the exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives, Ian is putting together a team to work on this challenge to try to achieve something tangible out of the discussion.

Michelle has been talking about social media since 2006. Her experience (and I'm sure a lot of people’s) is that there are lots of consultants out there doing social strategies although a lot are not doing it well. When she couldn’t find any good guidelines, she and her team made their own which is a huge spreadsheet called the Social Media Field Guide.

In 45 minutes, she attempted to give us a high-level overview version of her usual full day workshop thing. Here’s my overview of her overview.

Rupert Murdoch said in 2006 that technology was shifting power away from editors, publishers, the establishment and the elite. We’re seeing that coming true. Now some of that power is in social media—relationshipping on steroids.

It’s not all about young people either: middle aged women are the fastest growing demographic of social media users. She has lots of great statistics on social media use in Australia (what about the rest of the world?) that will probably be available somewhere soon. I’ll post an update when I have a link. Or just follow #actkm11 on Twitter and someone will tell you at some point.

Public sector social media examples

She did a great comparison of the social media activity of Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads and Victoria’s VicRoads. TMR is using social media as a broadcast channel (their social media details are available on their website under “newsroom”). VicRoads is actually engaging with people (they have a customer service Facebook page with a link from the “contact” page of their website).

POST framework

Michelle uses the POST framework when talking to her clients about creating their social media strategy:

People: Who is your audience, how many of them are there, what’s the demographic(s), where are they, what are their preferred communications methods, what level of technical skills do they have?

Objectives: What are you trying to achieve? What is success? Often gets people tackle questions they have been avoiding.

Strategy: Often defensive, not productive.

Tools: What do you need, what is your audience already using, what suits you, do you have skills and time available to manage and maintain the tools you choose, keeping in mind that different tools require different levels of resourcing.

She then got the group to write down their ideas for these four areas for their own organisations and post them up to share and exchange their ideas for everyone's benefit. Except me, because I was busy typing this up and didn't hear. Anyone else?

Arthur Shelley facilitated an ongoing inter-connected conversation where attendees split into six or so groups and each was given two discussion topics to explore. The full list of topics was:

• Performance
• Staff turnover
• Lost knowledge
• Aging workforce
• Constant change
• Work-life balance
• Relationships, stakeholders and networks

The groups came back together and each was given one minute per topic to précis their discussion for everyone. All topics were written up on a flipchart and as each group spoke, Arthur drew lines connecting the different topics. Once people had presented, the discussion was opened up to comments and challenges from the rest of the attendees.

Here are some gems that came out of the conversation:

• Performance and the unknown: if you don’t know your staff well enough, you may not understand what their skill sets and preferences are. You need to build relationships and trust in the workplace to learn what you don’t know about people.
• Sometimes staff turnover is good; the key is what happens to the knowledge, and this depends on culture and processes of the organisation about how knowledge is shared.
• Slow growth can be a good thing as mergers, acquisitions etc can be destructive due to trying to merge different organisational cultures and staff insecurity.
• Rather than seeing former employees as “dead to us”, companies should be focusing on keeping that connection/relationship going as an opportunity for growth.
• Many organisations have a culture of secrecy and innuendo and only a tiny number of people having knowledge. If you can change this to a culture of sharing, it will lead to better growth and efficiency. Knowledge is not power unless it is shared. To foster an organisational culture of knowledge sharing rather than knowledge holding, create recognition systems for good sharers, have your senior people walking the talk and recognise them for good sharing behaviours, enable teamwork and conversations, encourage learning networks and communities of practice which building knowledge around specific topics by sharing and collaborating.
• Most organisations have “sages”: people who have been with the company for years, often decades, who have built up a big parcel of knowledge. They are seen as indispensable so when they move on, staff worry but soon find that the world still goes on. We need to strive for balance between having gurus, advisors, mentors etc, and sharing knowledge. A lot of companies are moving their gurus from operational roles to moving among different areas of the business spreading their knowledge.
• Mentors teaching new people the old ways could be a problem. You need to be able to let go of the old knowledge you don’t need.
• If employees don’t trust the organisation, then that will bleed into the marketplace. If you can work on that by applying good tools and improve things, you will improve your relationship with the consumer. Being socially responsible from the inside of the organisation will improve the market’s perception of it as being socially responsible in the community, improving its reputation.
• Maybe knowledge is its own worst enemy. If we shared knowledge, we wouldn’t need to manage it. (I think this might just be an issue of terminology.)

By the end of the session, the flipchart looked like this:

The conference’s keynoter, Phil Ruthven, is CEO of IBISWorld, an Australian market research company that specialises in long-range industry and business forecasting. So he was a good person to get to speak about, well, industry and business forecasting. His presentation was based on decades of experience (he founded IBISWorld in 1971) and an ability to see the big picture and the detail of a business and a market.

He is a personable and gently charismatic speaker and that combined with some of the points he made about employees made me wonder if he really is good to work for or if it’s a really good act. I’ll see if I can suss him out at dinner tonight (if he’s there) and get back to you.

The presentation slides (also basically Phil’s notes so lots of info) will be available online shortly and in the meantime here’s what jumped out at me as the most interesting.

Cross-posted on Opinionate

Limited tickets are still available for the premier KM practitioner event of the year (Online Registration Form).

We look forward to catching up with fellow KMers but for those who can't make it, we will be leveraging the power of social media to keep you informed and engaged in the conversation.