KMTALK ASIA

When you observe how quickly companies like Samsung or Apple come up with their latest designs, you might get perplexed- how it is possible to come up with great new designs in such a less time. The answer could be- these companies are fast innovators, efficient and professional. Time is more precious now than before. Therefore, your KM initiatives have to be fast and produce quick results.

In this Fast KM series, I would like to mention few easy and quick initiatives that companies ( specially Small and Medium size) can undertake without putting a lot of planning and financial resources yet achieve knowledge sharing results.

Fast KM 1: Organizational Knowledge Sharing Session ( also considers as brown bag sessions)

Modus Operandi :

Frequency:  Once  a month or once in every 2 months

Cost:  Snacks +Souvenir ( for the presenter)

Value Creation:

- Improves internal knowledge sharing and communication

- Develops a culture of sharing

Question: what is the ultimate goal of managing knowledge with discipline in an organization?

Answer: to innovate and create value.

Knowledge is a raw product and organizations need to use it to deliver new services, products=value. Therefore, the role of knowledge management can not be just- reducing mistakes, sharing best practices etc.  but to create new ‘value’ for the organization. If we miss the ‘innovation’ component of the knowledge management model, we will fail to justify the existence of the latter.

While having a chat with Graime, an innovation consultant for 20 years, we argued if the notion of ‘knowledge economy’ ever worked. Graime said, Malaysia promoted the concept of the knowledge economy for a while and then realized ‘knowledge’ itself can not deliver economic growth.

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It was a rainy afternoon in Kuala Lumpur when I met Puan Murni Shariff, Senior Manager, Knowledge and Change Management in PETRONAS over a cup of hot tea at KLCC. Pn. Murni is one of the passionate KMers I have ever met and worked with. She has been doing direct KM for the past 7 years in PETRONAS and like many others she also has a set of challenges in implementing a sound KM program. The challenges she faces involve culture as well as process challenges.

“Creating a culture of continuous knowledge sharing and collaboration”- is a very bookish term to her. In reality, shaping such culture is not easy for any organization. Unlike the West, Asia is known to be ‘quite closed’ in terms of voicing out, sharing thoughts and ideas. Changing this culture requires many external stimulus and time.
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KM Asia is knocking the door! Starting from Nov 6, this 2 days conference will bring together KM practitioners and gurus from all over the world. Held in Singapore, this year, the conference has 2 different themes for each day. Day 1 goes with the theme-”Delivering and Demonstrating Value From Knowledge Management” whereas day 2 will focus on “Empowering People to Deliver Strategic Goals”. To know more detail about this yearly conference, please visit- www.kmasia.com

How to create an organization wide enthusiasm for knowledge sharing and collaboration- I suggest, let’s organize an exhibition.  We are familiar with all sorts of social exhibitions out there as well as knowledge fair.  Organizations have been doing knowledge fair to showcase the various knowledge ( mostly,  reports, publications, databases, or IT platform) they have across departments.  I suggest to do something little different.Instead of a static knowledge fair, I prefer to organize a dynamic exhibition that can exhibit the following-

1. Recently completed projects by various departments and their achievements

2. Current projects and their future implications to business

3. Future projects that the organization is planning to undertake

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How do you generate great ideas from your employees? – is a crucial question to many innovation management professionals. In my two personal engagements dealing with idea generation, I have found, great ideas are not easy to get. An organization needs to create the conducive culture to motivate its employees to generate good ideas that are innovative and value-driven. In my first experience with idea management, I had found that the program runs very well for the first few months ( i.e. 6 months) if there are any rewards/recognition scheme attached. Employees started submitting ideas with merits initially but the contribution was declining over time when they found that the idea implementation was slow/not happening. At one point, the company management asked the staff to be part of the implementation team, which makes the contribution even lower. After 6 months, the whole initiative was closed down due to lack of ideas submitted.
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Last week I was having a discussion with Mr. Jean-Louis, CEO of Development Gateway. Jean-Louis has been involved in data representation, geo-mapping, knowledge management for quite some time.  He was a Senior Vice President of The World Bank before joining Development Gateway. According to Mr. Jean-Louis, Knowledge Management is still in its very infancy stage. The overall adoption and success rate of KM is very low. He thinks it could be due to the fact that most senior and middle level managers (who are actually in charge of driving knowledge sharing) are Generation X executives, who were not born with computers or internet.  These executives didn’t exercise online knowledge/info-sharing in their childhood, though they used to be active in face-to-face sharing.  [Read more →]

Representation of data has always been an emerging field. Everyday companies around the world are trying to come up with new, better and more attractive mechanism to showcase their data. Geo-Mapping of data is one of the most popular data representation technique as this moment, for companies with global presence.  This visual mapping displays data on a map, with different color coding and legend. The presentation is quite interactive, where the user can define the types of data he wants to see, and the map will be generated accordingly. Oil and Gas companies use Google earth to display the location of various plants, even get live feeds of activities in the plants. Visual Geo-Mapping could be used as one of the ways to report data/performance to top management/stakeholders. [Read more →]

This interesting article in The Economist, Africa Rising triggered some thoughts in my mind today. It’s the 2nd day of the weekend. I had an wonderful BBQ party near the beach last night, so the day today will be lazier, catching up with more sleeps and reading few articles. I remember couple of years back one of big magazines (I can’t recall if it was Time, Newsweek or something else) wrote- Africa- the hopeless continent! Today?- we have a completely different picture. According to the Economist, over the past decade 6 of the world’s 10 fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan.

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