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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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 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.