NSW KM Forum members (you must be on our email distribution list) qualify for a $250 discount on this event.

Please contact NSW KM Forum committee member Alister Webb (alister@ajwebb.com) to arrange your discount.

For details about the event, visit the Ark Group web site.

Date: Monday 5th December, 2011
Timing: 5.00 pm – 7.00 pm
Topic :Launch of IMM NSW Chapter:  Realising the true benefits of semantic technologies and linked data

The semantic web has been talked about for a decade but what’s the reality? Around, the world, we are seeing organisations use semantic web approaches and technologies to deliver value to their citizens, customers, partners and employees. This session explores the opportunities the semantic web presents for Australia with some real examples of how some people are approaching it.

Speakers
* Leanne Fry, Executive Director, Workplace Relations Communications and Solutions at Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman.
Leanne was responsible for delivering two Gov 2.0 Taskforce projects and now manages communications for a key federal agency.  She is looking at how to utilise emerging web technologies to better enable the Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman to better connect with all of its stakeholders.
* Luke Dearnley, Manager, Web Services (acting) at Powerhouse Museum
The Powerhouse Museum has been recognised internationally for its use of technologies such as OpenCalais and Flickr to make its collections more accessible and valuable to the public.

Plus we will be demonstrating some semantic technologies in action.

Venue: Parking is available at ATP, entrance off Cornwallis Street, next to the NICTA building

Register here: http://www.metalounge.org/IMM-Launch-of-IMM-NSW

Is the traditional Intranet dead? – Alister Webb

In the early days of the world wide web (long ago in the 90s) the challenge was to create a central information site called the Intranet and publish static content to it. Then train staff to use a browser. The meaning of Intranet in the 90s was simple – ‘being online’.

In the early 2000s the focus turned to back end databases. Everyone was talking up dynamic intranets. Intranet in the 2000s equated with ‘content management’.

Now, in 2011, just as dynamic intranets are reaching a high level of maturity, we have a new kid in town: collaboration. Rarely has there been such a buzz going around. To many people, the term Intranet now equates with ‘collaboration’.

How the new kid fits with established Intranet models is a debate now raging inside many organisations. The question starting to be asked is: will the irresistible progress of collaboration sound the death knell of the traditional Intranet?

Over the last decade Alister Webb’s role of Collaboration Manager in Telstra Corporation Ltd has involved him in traditional intranet content management as well as large scale SharePoint deployment. He is in the middle of trying to figure out if they are two sides of the same coin, or have an entirely different DNA.

A wiki for cancer treatment guidelines – Jutta von Dincklage

Ensuring health professionals have access to current, accurate guidelines is a matter of life and death. However several factors work to undermine the delivery of such guidelines:

• Written treatment guidelines are often out of date by the time they are published as new medical evidence emerges.
• Public consultation and stakeholder input is important, however it also adds to the delay in publishing written guidelines.
• Guideline authors, who are health professionals that volunteer their time, collaborate on guideline drafts with “track changes” in never-ending email trails causing regular headaches to project managers and editors.

Cancer Council Australia has been exploring new ways of ‘doing guidelines’ and has developed a wiki platform to develop and publish such guidelines. This presentation will showcase the guideline wiki platform and then discuss the challenges, learnings and rewards of this knowledge initiative with the KM community. The presenter is very eager to receive feedback from the KM community and ideas on how to move forward to the next level.

Jutta von Dincklage has led the development of the wiki platform at Cancer Council Australia over the last 1 1/2 years. This project and her passion for collaboration, knowledge sharing and change management has introduced her to knowledge management world, learning how to look at things from a KM perspective, loving KM concepts, champions and crowd.

Details & Registration: http://nswkmsept11.eventbrite.com/

A noted authority in his field, Larry has lectured and published widely. and was the founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Knowledge Management at IBM engaging in advancing the practice of knowledge management through action research. Larry has had extensive experience, in the US and internationally, in helping major organisations and corporations such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, NASA and World Bank work with their information and knowledge resources. He has also consulted with many US and overseas government agencies and international organisations. He is a Professor of Practice at Columbia University in their Information and Knowledge Strategy Program and is the co-author of Working Knowledge, which has sold over 100,000 copies and been translated in 12 languages.

In a major coup for the Business School of the University of Sydney the DOKTOR Research Group was able to entice Larry to come to Sydney. In his four days with us he engaged in a very powerful video interview, provided individual time for discussions with many academics and PhD researchers and was the keynote speaker at a dinner on July 18. At the dinner Larry gave an engaging and inspiring talk about knowledge in organisations, sharing stories of his experiences working in the knowledge field for over 30 years. He also spoke at length about his forthcoming book on organisational judgement. The dinner was attended by practitioners and academics, who enjoyed the opportunity to meet and talk with Larry.

• View image gallery
• Watch the videos

I attended the Knowledge Management Asia Pacific Congress 2011 (KM APC 11) on 19th July. I now have more knowledge on knowledge! and am quite invigorated in bringing back what I’ve learnt to both my studies and to my organisation. Here is my personal recount of the KM APC 11.

Nicolas Gorjestani, Former Chief Knowledge and Learning Officer of the World Bank, now the Executive Director and Secretariat of Global Indiegenous Knowledge and Innovation Partnership, opened the KM APC 11. He spoke about how knowledge is the dominant factor of production in today’s era and that it is the source of wealth. Many problems can be solved quicker and in a sustainable way by following a traditonal route – gathering ideas – than by a scientific method, such as, data mining. Management often have this systematic mindset of solving problems which make it difficult for them to take a knowledge approach, which is more compex. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Gorjestani quoted Albert Einstein. Management should pay more attention to their “invisibles”, key people who strive for impact and inspire individuals in their organisation as these “invisible” discover solutions, providing organisations with knowledge wealth.

NAB’s Manager of Virtual & eLearning, Cheryle Walker, presented on how such inspirational individuals in the organisation were given the opportunity to create podcasts to share their knowledge. Podcasts distributed through the company’s “Academy” are short, quickly produced videos, “by the people for the people”. Everyone has experience or coaching advice to share. Education only contributes to 10% of an individual’s knowledge, Walker claims, while 20% comes from coaching, and 70% from experience. Rob Wilkins, Head of Learning and Development at Aussie Home Loans, (and also fellow UTS Alumni) also agrees with this, and that 70% of what is learnt is gathered from the “network”. The network consists of trusted nodes of people, content and technology.

I got to speak with Rob after his presentation and he told me that the difference now in knowledge management since when he first began his Masters degree in Knowledge Management at UTS, is that people understand more about the values of KM. They understand that KM is an organisational practice rather than a technology platform, and people take the time to see how the KM approach develops in their organisation. Rob’s key lesson in his presentation “Catering for the modern day knowledge work: skills and capabilities that facilitate collaborative knowledge work”, is that trust is key. He said that trust in a network is developed through collaboration.
The trusting culture of Peter Williams’, CEO of Deloitte Digital, organisation stems from their knack to collaborate with one another. The two factors of successful knowledge sharing – trust and collaboration – is encompassed with Williams’ statement about Deloitte: “We learn by doing”. There is no business case, no risk analysis; Deloitte’s employees gain new knowledge from giving it a go and not having a negative connotation with “failure”. They use enterprise social networking tool, Yammer, to create connections and rapidly commercialise ideas internally. While externally, they’ve embraced social media such as Facebook, to give prospective employees an insight into their organisation, and Kaggle, holding data prediction competitions for companies across the globe. Deloitte Digital learn by doing, creating a trusting and collaborative network.

Trust is carefully given to those who work in the US Army, Joseph Oebbecke, Chief Knowledge Officer of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command presented. Ever since Wikileaks, there have been a lot more rules and regulations on information and knowledge management in the US Army, and collaboration is often done “behind 2 to 3 doors.” Collaboration is the antithesis to rule making. How do you provide command and control for such a dynamic knowledge sharing technique? Sharing information and knowledge is important, especially if it saves a soldier’s life.

Other presentations included Susan Murray’s (the George Foundation), where she discussed the great amount of health knowledge being unfortunately disorganised and scattered. She also gathered insight from the audience on how marketing a business partners with knowledge management. Kim Hai Neo of the Singapore Armed Forces showed us knowledge management has been in the DNA of the military, e.g. after action reviews are a knowledge management tool derived from the military. Kim’s interest was to gather military knowledge through the latest technologies (i.e. iPads) and web 2.0 technologies (e.g. wikis and blogs), which he thought would be easy as younger, more tech-savvy soldiers join the armed forces. Over the lunch break, Kim told me that social media can harness tacit knowledge and that social media will not disappear. Social media can only improve and become more intuitive, and if brought into an organisation, will allow employees and their bosses to work on the same page.
Alan Thompson of Production Services Network in Scotland, talked about how a knowledge management strategy rewards both the organisation, the employees, and the clients. James Robertson, Managing Director of Step Two Designs, spoke about how a fragmentation of technologies overwhelms everyone and there should be a consolidation and simplification of tools. And, as a fun break throughout the conference, Stuart French of Daniels Sharpsmart and Dr Helen Hasan of the University of Wollongong, taught the attendees how to play the ancient game of ‘Go’. As knowledge managers, they said, we had to be able to be strategic in the complex environments we work in. Knowledge managers are complexity experts.

I got to speak with chairperson David Gurteen, Founder and Director of the Gurteen Knowledge Community, during the lunch break. When asked what he found so exciting about knowledge management, the short answer was: “everything”. “The reason for my interest in KM is if we look at our global society it’s filled with so many issues, economical issues, resourcing issues, etc. Life is becoming unsustainable. We have, maybe, 30-40 years to survive? We’re going to collapse in some way… and a better understanding, better collaboration, better reasoning skills… these skills, KM skills, will help us survive.” David is less interested in the physical world (though he studied physics and is interested in cosmology), but more in people and how we acquire knowledge. As with the majority of the presentations at this year’s Conference, technology isn’t everything. David believes that there will be an inflection point where technology is so far advanced that we can’t see beyond it or how we as a race can improve ourselves through infrastructure. Does our existence and advancement rely on knowledge?

Anthony Loshiavo concluded the conference with the statement: unlike capital and labour, the sharing and distribution of knowledge makes all individuals “wealthy”. Therefore we all benefit from knowledge sharing through collaboration and networking, and take something away that will make us all more valuable.