[...] minimal impact KM touts the benefits of doing a great deal without in any way affecting the work lives of your colleagues or the results of your enterprise [...]

Dr. Vaine identifies several proven methods of achieving minimal impact KM:

- depreciative inquiry
- social network paralysis
- corporate flogging
- six stigma

Great stuff, but if you’re really interested in catching up on KM World 2008 better check out Michael Sampsons conference notes. Interesting in many regards, especially for an (enterprise) social software consultant who sees Knowledge Management as one of the most interesting usage arenas.

Apropos Wissensnetzwerke, am 18. und 19. November 2008 finden quasi nebenan in der Stuttgarter Liederhalle zum vierten Mal die Stuttgarter Wissensmanagement-Tage unter dem Motto “Wissen verbindet” statt. Schwerpunkthemen der Veranstaltung sollen sein:

- Projektmanagement und -debriefing: Wissensarbeit im Team;
- Kommunikation: Erfahrungswissen – verborgene Schätze heben;
- Interaktion durch Social Software: Wissensaustausch in Communities und Foren;
- Unternehmenswissen: Intelligente Suchtechnologien revolutionieren die Informationssuche

Mal sehen ob ich da hingehe, im Vergleich zu einem BarCamp ist das durchaus eine hochpreisige Angelegenheit, zudem mitten unter der Woche und damit potenziell konfliktär zu verschiedenen anderen professionellen Aktivitäten – aber im Grunde behandeln die WM-Tage genau mein Thema. Wie auch die “Future of Work and Business Conference 2008” vom 4.-6. September in Krems, Österreich – aber nun ja, auf allen Hochzeiten tanzen geht nicht

Ein paar “Anspieltips”, die zumindest ich mir zuerst anschauen werde: In Kapitel 2 “Von der Innovation zum Geschäftsmodell” der Artikel “Open Source als Werkzeug der Wirtschaft” von Matthias Choules und Roman Rauch sowie “Wissensmanagement auf Basis von Open-Source-Software” von Georg Hüttenegger in Kapitel 5 “Vom Wissen zur Vernetzung”. Die Potenziale von Wikis werden leider nicht wirklich behandelt, der Schwerpunkt liegt auf Groupware und CMS-Systemen (und nein, unter dem letzteren kann man Wikis nicht “subsumieren”).

I am attending a workshop on business model innovation and design and knowledge management organized by Asian Productivity Organization (APO) together with the Thailand Productivity Institute (FTPI) in Bangkok, Thailand.

In fact I am not only attending but designed and delivered the first two of five days of lecturing and activities. I will share some of the slides from my presentation deck on Slideshare when I am done and back to normal mode of operation, which in effect means after another two weeks of family holiday in Denmark …

“Storytelling is energising for companies. It gives employees a chance to feel something about their brand and shows them how they can contribute to the story, which has to be good.”

Nothing new, but interesting to see that the Financial Times gets on the storytelling bandwagon, i.e. the use of stories for fostering innovation and knowledge transfer.

And did I mention that (internal) blogs are an excellent tool to support storytelling and organizational sensemaking?

While the fast adaptors on the web are digging (no pun intended) cool stuff, people in organizations are not really interested in change. And replacing or complementing costly workplace systems like Notes et al. is something that people (and the IT department) are loathing … partly with good reason. So what to do? Perhaps MS will speed things up, when they combine Office (Live), SharePoint Portal and more, plus adding RSS-functionality into Windows, thereby offering a way for IT departments to dive into wikis and more …

In the end enhancing knowledge work is the thing everything boils down to … ?

Here this article in BusinessWeek comes in handy, touching on the uses of wikis in the workplace, noting that email has “turned into a maddening time waster” and more:

[knowledge workers] are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another’s work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.’s () SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams’ use on projects.

and that

Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.

and

[...] companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, [...] a scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation’s human capital. [...] the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it’s not as much about leveraging what’s inside your factories’ machines as what’s in your employees’ heads.

An interesting read is also this article by McKinsey consultants Johnson, Manyika and Yee in the lastet McKinsey Quarterly on the next revolution in interactions, holding that

Successful efforts to exploit the growing importance of complex interactions could well generate durable competitive advantages.

[...] despite huge investments in corporate IT, executives currently feel unable to exploit large amounts of corporate information. Two-thirds of companies in the survey complain that while their IT systems generate huge volumes of data, much of it is not actionable. According to the report, executives are now seeking smarter IT tools that enable them to filter, prioritize and analyze corporate data.

notice also that

Too much information impedes decision-making [...] IT’s failure to prioritize information is the main barrier to effective decision-making. Consolidating information and providing consistent performance indicators are regarded as the most important step firms can take to improve the speed and quality of decision-making.

more in EContentMag.com