For our July activity we thought we would do something a little different…

A tour of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) site at Lucas Heights has been arranged for Saturday 26th July, and for this excursion families are welcome.

The tours will visit the Education Centre, the OPAL Reactor, the Neutron Guide Hall and one of ANSTO’s particle accelerators – either the Australian National Tandem Accelerator for Applied Research (ANTARES) or Small Tandem for Applied Research (STAR), which significantly assist the study of the environment, nuclear safeguards, geology, archaeology and paleontology.

There will be 2 tours:

• 9:45am to 12:30pm; and
• 1:15 pm to 4pm.

Tour groups are limited to 20 participants and strict security provisions have to be observed.

If you are interested in joining these tours please reserve your place with Denise Quay on email denise.quay <at> ansto.gov.au or telephone (02) 9717 3363 by 18 July 2008.

Details of how to get to ANSTO are available on the webpage at http://www.ansto.gov.au/discover/visiting_ansto.html

More details about ANSTO and the research equipment it provides is available at http://www.ansto.gov.au/home.html

Cai Kjaer (Partner in Optimice, but also General Manager for Implementation Management Associates in Australia) is facilitating a 2 day workshop in Sydney on 5-6 August which is focused entirely on implementation….not a single word about what your strategy is or should. Bring your current project or strategy and we will work on the implementation plan.

Participants learn how to improve the success rate of initiatives and achieve the intended Return on Investment on time, on budget, and with all business, technical, and human objectives met. 
Participants receive a detailed assessment of their organisation’s Implementation History in order to pinpoint inhibitors and identify leverage points to accelerate their implementation.

There may be others in your organisation who would also benefit from attending this program, including project managers, business leaders, IT, and training. We would be pleased to have you share the information below with them as well. Project Managers can earn PDU credits through PMI.

Implementation Management Associates (IMA)’s proprietary methodology is used globally by companies such as Pfizer, BT, GlaxoSmithKline and in Australia by companies such as CSC, New South Wales Health and Aristocrat.

For more information visit http://www.optimice.com.au/ima_frames.html

From http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/002874.html

“Step Two has been growing strongly over the last few years, and we’ve built ourselves a global reputation in the intranet space (and beyond). We have staff in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, but the work is still pouring in. We’re therefore growing our team, to further support our consulting, mentoring, training and publishing.

We’re looking for great people to join the consulting team, working in the fields of intranets, information management, collaboration, content management and knowledge management.

This includes conducting field research, developing intranet and information management strategies,mentoring teams, developing best-practice resources, running workshops, and more.

Experienced web, intranet and information managers are ideally placed for this work, as are consultants looking to progress their professional careers. (We provide plenty of mentoring support to help build the skills and experience of our new starters, that’s half the fun!)

If you’ve read our work or seen us present, you know where we’re coming from. Take this opportunity to join our team, and to play your part in helping organisations to be more successful in their information activities. “

WHAT

It is well documented in recent global CEO survey’s that CEO’s express the importance of innovation while lamenting their own innovation performance. Learn the secrets of how organisations are delivering outstanding performance using innovation as an important element of their strategy. Case studies from Hargraves Institute members will be detailed so that lessons can be transferred to the field of knowledge management.

WHO

Allan Ryan

Allan Ryan, the Executive Director of the Hargraves Institute and the Director of Managed Innovation International, is a practitioner who partners with leaders, both in Australia and internationally, to accelerate organisational performance and grow shareholder value.  His experience spans fast-moving consumer goods, building and construction, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, the paper industry, government and service organisations.

The Managed Innovation© Program was developed after extensive research with over 200 companies in Australia and internationally. Initially starting at the Australian Technology Park, Sydney in 1999, and while contracted to the Australian Graduate School of Management in 2002, Allan established Managed Innovation International Pty Ltd to work on a one-to-one basis to accelerate growth in leading organisations. 

Allan focuses on:

• Strategy and leadership of innovation
• Facilitation and collaboration and
• Innovation process and programs

Allan is the Program Director of the Strategic Innovation Program at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management and presents in a variety of executive education programs, conferences and events.

More information can be found at www.managedinnovation.com

About the Hargraves Institute

The Hargraves Institute was formally established in July 2006., when 12 leading companies supported Allan’s initiative and provided seed funding. The founding members of Hargraves are Roche Products, Cerebos (Australia), Caltex Australia Petroleum, BlueScope Steel, Aristocrat Technologies Australia, Boeing Australia, Mars Food Australia, Cochlear, Australian Wool Innovation, Jacobs Australia, Westpac Banking Corporation and George Weston Technologies

The aims of the Institute include strengthening our business leaders’ understanding of issues surrounding innovation, fostering innovation focused collaboration between all levels of organisations, identifying and promoting effective techniques and best practice. Currently there are 40 member organisations, most of which are in Australia’s top 150 list, and including the 12 founding member companies. More information can be found at www.hargraves.com.au

WHERE: Ernst & Young, The Ernst & Young Centre, 680 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000. Download a map.

WHEN: 5.30pm for 6pm, Tuesday 27th May.

HOW MUCH: $5 donation.

WHAT NEXT? If you plan to attend please RSVP by e-mail to: rsvp<at>nsw-km-forum.org.au (hint: replace the <at> with a normal @ to complete the email address and please include the date and/or title of the event in the subject line).

Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk from Anecdote will be in Sydney next week to run a one day course on Storytelling for Business Leaders - learn and leave with:

• a better understanding of what makes an effective story in a business context
• a newly discovered story- re-crafted story from your own experience
• understanding of how to best craft questions to discover stories
• ways to interview people for stories and facilitate anecdote circles
• when to use what story pattern - build confidence in telling your story.

For more information and bookings, see the Anecdote Website.

WHO

Dave Snowden, Founder & Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge, is a major figure in the movement towards integration of humanistic approaches to knowledge management and sensemaking.  He is generally held to be one of the leading practitioners and thinkers in the field of a naturalising (science based) approached to decision theory and sensemaking.

WHERE: Ernst & Young, The Ernst & Young Centre, 680 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000. Download a map.

WHEN: 7.30am for 8am-9am, Friday 14th March.

HOW MUCH: A $5 donation*.

WHAT NEXT? If you plan to attend please RSVP by e-mail to: rsvp<at>nsw-km-forum.org.au (hint: replace the <at> with a normal @ to complete the email address and please include the date and/or title of the event in the subject line).

* Please note: As discussed at our last meeting, we are increasing the voluntary admission charge for our forum meetings from a gold coin donation to a $5 donation in order to help better meet our modest operating costs. The forum committee itself runs on the scent of an oily rag and Ernst & Young provides a venue, however our operating costs include expenses such as Website domain registration fees, gifts for presenters and also the snacks and drinks provided at forum meetings.

Finally, here are some of my observations from Ross Dawson’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum…

Firstly, while there was nothing particularly new in what I heard from Andrew McAfee and Euan Semple, it was great to hear them both speak face to face even if only by videoconference. However, I’m sure for many other people attending the forum this might have been the first time they have come across these thought leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 space – considering McAfee initially defined “Enterprise 2.0”, his ideas and the SLATES model are an important starting point. They also counter pointed the sponsor’s presentations, who quite frankly I felt struggled to really described Enterprise 2.0. A couple of Euan’s points I scribbled down were:

• Its about bottom up change;
• Ask for forgiveness, not permission;
• Deal with the issue of regulating the use of social media tool, by using social media tools to discuss the issues (nice!); and
• Managers have been operating under the false assumption – “you never had control!”

I also enjoyed the local case studies, which is of course in part what the forum was all about:

• Melbourne-based KM’er Andrew Mitchell talked about his experiences of using social media tools at Urbis – blogging didn’t work so well (this was all the experience of others) and they had more success with wikis. I also like Andrew’s idea that organisations need both lasting truths as well as point in time truths.
• Victor Rodrigues from Cochlear talked about their slow, bottom up growth of social media that started about 2 ½ years ago and reached a tipping point about 8 months ago – lessons included the need for constant gardening, putting the right infrastructure in place, giving people access to the tools and the providing training and coaching (for both wikis and other tools). I would have liked to have spoken to Victor as I remember hearing that they had quite well implemented traditional collaboration suite, so I wonder what happened to that?
• Nathan Wallace of the now well known Janssen-Cilag Wiki case study spoke about his experience and more recent initiatives, including experiments with using Twitter to publish awareness information on their wiki. The key take away from Nathan was that Janssen-Cilag aren’t using it so much as a classic anyone can edit wiki (although the functionality is there), but just a very easy to use intranet content management system (and there is nothing wrong with that).

Incidentally, just about everyone using wikis inside their organisations appeared to be using Confluence.

One of the other issues raised during the forum was the issue of time wasting. The consensus appeared to be that some people will always find ways to waste time, but social media tools are a bit more visible. There are far better ways of avoiding doing work, like attending meetings. Further, while organisations say they are focused on efficiency often the processes within them are inefficient and people need personal connections to actually get work done in an efficient way.

Jonathan Stern from IBM Lotus, who were an event sponsor, also made the point that increased efficiency can only take you so far, innovation comes from internal and external collaboration – they also talked about the need for a “collaborative infrastructure”, a concept close to my heart! (while I can’t take credit for the term, its a concept I’ve been using for a while).

So, (and this is from notes) Enterprise 2.0 is all about collaboration, innovation and conversation.

BTW These are just my impressions – check out the E2EF blog, which has exploded with posts from participants, and really demonstrating the interest in the Enterprise 2.0 trend right now here in Australia.

Also cross-posted on the ChiefTech blog.

Last year we gave away a free pass to the Creating Your Future in the Digital World Workshop - better late than never, here is some feedback from Patrick Burkhalter and Matt Moore who both attended this event:

From Matt:

“Ralph Kerle and Peter Williams are onto something interesting. Ralph is a former theatre director with an interest in arts-based facilitation and Peter is a social software addict who runs Deloitte Digital in Australia. The workshop itself involved a mix of their mutual interests - Peter discoursing on blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networks, etc and Ralph running creativity exercises such as stream of consciousness writing. The two perspectives haven’t quite gelled together yet but I have no doubt they will. And this important because social software is all about user-generated content and collaboration - the largest outpouring of collective creativity in history. We urgently need a synthesis of Ralph and Peter to make the most of our potential.”

From Patrick:

“As humans, we rely on our own inherent abilities to evolve and innovate to better suit our ever-changing environments. But with the increasing and (seemingly) inevitable role technology plays in the way we learn, work, communicate, and even socialise - ranging from basic computer usage to elaborate online and mobile collaborative technologies - it is critical that the ‘human’ remains at the forefront of such technological use and development. The combination of left-brain creativity with real and fast-growing technologies is an ongoing source of personal interest to me and an area that any serious business or organisation should be staying on top of. What Ralph and Peter aimed to provide in this workshop forms an excellent starting point for those not so well-versed in technologies (or even in creativity) and should be a part of any serious self-development activity, if not personally then at least professionally.”

Patrick and Matt - thanks for sharing this feedback from the event. BTW Ralph Kerle from the Creative Leadership Forum is now also a NSW KM Forum committee member and has offered to present for us during the year.

I attended yesterday’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum - while I haven’t had a chance to write up my observations, the event did attract some media coverage:

• Social networking sites help boost business: expert NineMSN 
• Janssen-Cilag dances Enterprise 2.0 jig
• Wikis may be working for Westpac

Also, visit the E2EF blog or check out what else the blogosphere has to say about it.

PLEASE NOTE: All 3 sessions are now full and the room has reached capacity! Due to the amount of interest they’ve received, they are going to find another date for a demonstration in late March/early April. Stay tuned for details.

The NSW Department of Primary Industries intranet, InSite, was recently named one of the 10 best in the world for 2008 by Jakob Nielsen, an internationally renowned web usability expert and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group.

On Wednesday, 12 March 2008 they will be giving live demonstrations of the intranet, and explaining some of its key features, background and future plans.

When & where

Wednesday, 12 March 2008

Session 1: 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Session 2: 2:30pm - 3:30pm
Session 3: 4:00pm - 5:00pm

The 30 minutes between sessions will be available for questions and answers, if necessary.

Conference Room 6.2
Level 6, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney (see map)

RSVP

Please RSVP, indicating the session you are interested in attending (including number of attendees), by Thursday, 6 March 2008 to:

Kate Needham
Manager, Internal Communications
Tel: 02 6391 3353
E-mail: kate.needham <at> dpi.nsw.gov.au (hint: replace the <at> with a normal @ to complete the email address)