KMTALK ASIA

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.

[Read more →]

Branding is the most important factor in today’s marketing. Apple can sell their products with a much higher price than many of its competitors because of its brand value. Steve Jobs (who is a brand name himself) spent lot of time in creating the ‘Apple’ brand by its unique product design, packaging, logo, presentations.  “A brand can be defined as a unique value proposition expressed in a relevant and differentiated way such that it creates preference and loyalty among key audiences”. (MIT Sloan Mgt Review).

Why branding your CoP:
- To create unique visibility in the organization
- To articulate purpose of the community in a fashionable manner
- To gain support from the Management  in terms of receiving necessary operational resources ( financial, human etc)
- To develop a sense of belonging amongst team members
 

How to Brand it?

[Read more →]

In a global survey by Deskmag.com, many people said they grew their personal and professional network by working with new people. 76% said they were more productive working with others.   I consider this as an interesting finding. Working with people who are not from the same department, subject and location enhances the changes to think creatively. Diversity is positively correlated with new ideas creation. Following this concept, it would be more beneficial to create communities of practice with members from various backgrounds, not just from the same interest group. For example, a CoP for Finance can recruit members from Marketing and Corporate affairs department. Perspectives from those departments (mainly about client’s perception, demand, media relations) might help the Finance people to look for new areas of investment, developing new financial plan to relocate some of the resources in traditionally non-strategic areas and identify novel possibilities. In this way, new ideas, approaches, plans are created for mixing with other field experts and unique value can be realized by organizations.

Do you have a challenge that you want to tackle with some help from hackers? Working on a solution and need some developer support? Call Random Hacks of Kindness- a global community of innovation building practical open technology to solve development problems.

Check out what they are doing-

A world of solutions (for people with disabilities in Latin-American countries) was an innovation challenge organized by the Inter-American Development Bank. Rather than taking the similar approach of asking people to submit their innovative project, this challenge has an interesting approach. The Bank asked people with disabilities about their demands/needs, issues and problems they face in their daily life. They launched blogs to submit the problems. Many problems were received from the crowd and the Bank indentified priorities from the list of problems/needs. After this, they had taken the approach of crowd-sourcing to solicit solutions. The priority problems were exhibited in the website again and people were invited to submit their innovative ideas/solutions to solve those problems.  The Bank team received 150 proposals from 16 countries on the identified problems/needs. 10 innovative proposals were funded for implementation.   This pure crowd-sourcing approach not only created excitement among people but also ensured solutions from authentic problems identified by the crowd themselves.
To know more about this initiative, check out-  Innovation Lab

David Gurteen is one of my favorite KMer. I love his ever smiling face, conversations with wisdom and his spirit to travel to many places, meeting many people. Recently, David made a presentation in KM Middle East 2011, said, don’t do KM and just solve business problem. I do surely agree with the idea of ’solving business problem’; whatever we do in an organization should either solve a business problem or generate another business problem ( by innovating a new business, thus creating issues in managing it). But what I found interesting is his opinion- ‘Don’t do KM’ and ‘there is no KM initiatives/strategy’! He is suggesting to use KM tools to solve business problems and don’t have a project called KM!- My question is- then why does the term exist at the first place? Tools/methods like Content management, taxonomy, brainstorming, after action review, communities of practices, blog, wikis etc- all can exist individually and we have no reasons to call them ‘KM’ or ‘KM Tool’. Just call them tools to capture and create knowledge. But then lots of items are also capturing & using knowledge- business process writing and management, ideas generation, strategy development, policy writing, quality control, budgeting- all these are knowledge work and we need to manage it for the smooth operation of an organization.

So, what is so special about KM? Why we need to have such a term? Why should we have a KM role/department?- Let the IT dept manages portal; get the business analyst to do content management, taxonomy; HR to do training, capability management, knowledge sharing sessions; R&D dept to capture new ideas, research work and store them in the portal, strategy dept to develop strategy, vision, goals, KPIs, CoPs; Communication dept to disseminate information internally and externally, do newsletter etc. - do you see the importance of a KM department with some KM roles?

So, David is right. Let us not do KM as a project itself, it is embedded in the organization already. But then I cannot call David a KMer or we cannot have any conference/forum called KM!

The lack of information sharing was a contributing factor to the tragic events of September 11, 2001!
Some of the 19 terrorists of September 11, were on official watch lists. But that information was not shared or collected and analyzed so that it could have prevented those acts of terrorism.

Smooth knowledge management is crucial for any investigative work. Inappropriate Information sharing, exposes police dept to the following risks:

• Failure to exploit information to effect necessary policing outcomes
• Failure to share information to the same ends
• Compromise to police operations through poor quality or poor control
• Litigation

How knowledge flows in the investigative work is shown in the following figure. It is evident that using data/information (explicit knowledge) is the prerequisite to make decision (tacit knowledge).

[Read more →]