Knowledge Leadership Associates » Knowledge Management

The skill set is changing!

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:00:51 +0000

In his blog entry on Information today (Europe) of 22 July 2011, John Davies of TaskForceProLibra (TFPL), discusses research that uncovers trends in the design of roles and skill requirements in the information sector. In particular, he draws attention to the way in which knowledge management and information management are coalescing. He comments, “One of the outcomes [of the research] was the identification of knowledge and information management (KIM) as a single discipline that would unify and replace information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM)”.

The full report Connecting information with innovation may be downloaded from the TFPL site.

The skill set is changing! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

How to tell a good story . . .

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:05:32 +0000

The value of narrating stories has long been recognised in Knowledge Management: such accounts often contain a wealth of tacit knowledge, unacknowledged insights and other useful information about an organisation, its business practices and the “real” job, as distinct from the one we describe in our job descriptions. To be valuable, a story needs to be rich but robust. In a recent American Express Open Forum blog, Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith consider the Seven Deadly Sins of business storytelling, providing helpful guidelines and concluding that stories need to be documented and stored because of the tacit knowledge they contain.

How to tell a good story . . . is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Are you working too hard?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:09:49 +0000

Independent Online’s Business Report for 20 October 2010 reports the results of the 2010 LexisNexis International Workplace Productivity Survey conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia and South Africa. It has important implications for Knowledge Management. According to the results of the survey, South African professional workers spent, on average, 9.5 hours a day of the working week at their workplace, longer than any other country group included in the study. In addition, “the survey found that the amount of information workers have to manage for their jobs continues to increase at an alarming rate, with much of it irrelevant to employees getting their jobs done”. Not surprisingly, 82% of the South African respondents wished to be able to spend more time in using the information rather than organizing it; 88% indicated that the inability to find relevant information was a major time-waster and that this was having a deleterious effect on their productivity. The survey concluded that “Workers believe they could be more productive at work if the tools they had access to were designed to work the way that they worked.”

Are you working too hard? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Knowlead Course – Managing the Integration of E-Resources into Library Collections (KL-MIER)

benfouche — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 23:17:46 +0000

Managing the Integration of E-Resources into Library Collections (KL-MIER)

Dates and Venues

Midrand, Gauteng

22– 26 November 2010

Download printable course brochure here in pdf : KL-MIER

Check out course page for more information (click here)

The transition to electronic sources of information has recently gathered momentum and is affecting all subject areas and services to all levels of user: scientific and technical sources, community information, reading materials for children. The acquisition, provision and management of these e-resources leave librarians in all library and information sectors with a new and wide-ranging set of challenges. How can one find this material, how should it be managed in a modern library service? Come and find out.

Knowlead Course – Managing the Integration of E-Resources into Library Collections (KL-MIER) is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Facilitating collaborative work

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:12:14 +0000

Many of us work with colleagues overseas or in various parts of South Africa and beyond. TitanPad (http://titanpad.com) provides an application for facilitating this that is independent of operating system. There are several choices, so it is possible to customise to suit different purposes. TitanPad includes a blog. Perhaps the principal use of TitanPad will be for the sharing of documents on which several people wish to coordinate work. The main advantage over other systems, such as GoogleDocs, is that it is set up to allow work in real time. Each member of a group viewing a document will see the document and any changes being made, as they happen. Each person working on the document is assigned a different colour, and their changes are highlighted with the designated colour, and are easy to track; there is a “time-slider” feature so that it is possible to move back and forth through successive stages of the document. Additionally, a “whiteboard” feature allows open discussion with other members of the group — which is useful if several people are trying to develop an idea. At any point, one can download a copy of the document for off-line use. Some users have commented that the need to scroll through long documents to find a set of words is tedious and have asked for a “jump to” feature to be added. Let us hope that the designers (a team of IT professionals located in Austria) listen and continue to develop this useful service.

Facilitating collaborative work is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Knowledge champion roles

benfouche — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:24:20 +0000

We are noticing a trend especially in public sector organisations here in South Africa to institutionalise knowledge championship roles as part of knowledge management implementation initiatives. Part-time or full time KM champions are appointed at divisional level to create awareness and interest in KM; assess and communicate knowledge needs; match and connect knowledge requirements with sources; build or augment repositories: and act as links between divisional and institutional KM activities. Several government institutions have already trained KM champions and have completed full blown KM strategies. Leaders in the field include the City of Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape Provincial government. In both cases formal Innovation and KM groups have been established at the institutional level to provide leadership, training and support. Having been involved in providing some of the training we would be interested to learn about other instances of and approaches to formalised public sector KM not only in Africa but elsewhere as well.

Knowledge champion roles is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Empowering Africa

gretchensmith — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:23:55 +0000

Although the world financial crisis has abated and the global economy is recovering, this recovery remains brittle and volatile. Sub-Saharan Africa, although initially not as hard hit has not escaped the effects – particularly countries like South Africa, where our financial markets are extensively integrated into global financial markets. What can Governments in Africa do to speed up this recovery? The Knowlead Team suggests that, other than the financial amelioration that is already being instituted, Governments in Africa can fruitfully engage with Knowledge Management practices to not only bring about a more rapid economic turnaround, but also to confront the many patent inefficiencies in government.

It is heartening to note that some positive signals, such as provided by Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi^1, have been sent out from the public sector in Africa:

The 21st Century African public service has to be a learning organisation, a learning organisation in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about, where the organisation encourages new ways of thinking, where the collective vision of creating the best is liberated, and where everybody continuously learns how to learn together.

Developing countries are thus not necessarily reluctant to embark on implementing KM in the public sector, but as the World Bank has stated, wary of the challenge and their lack of experience and knowledge to do so. This provides a clear signal to encourage African Governments to proactively engage with KM training. We should further strategise innovatively and, as Sinclair (2006) puts it, adopt “stealth KM” by alerting African Governments of the many KM success stories from other parts of the world and the benefit of leveraging a country’s embedded knowledge.

¹Address in 2007 as South Africa’s Minister of Public Service and Administration to the African Management Development Institutes Network Conference

Empowering Africa is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Forthcoming Courses 2011

gretchensmith — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:24:53 +0000

Forthcoming Courses 2011 is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates