Knowledge Matters

I've been head-hunted to be the principal change champion in a large health services organisation, and to work up the information/knowledge management requirements for what will be potentially a multi-million dollar initiative. Whilst I am very excited I am also quite sad because this means I will be leaving HolisTech® Pty Ltd and TARDIS .

TARDIS is a joint venture between HolisTech® and the Australian Department of Defence to build and maintain a knowledge management system. I believe it to be one of the most significant attempts at knowledge management within the Australian public sector: an attempt that truly has tried to integrate people, process, technology and content. I'm very proud to have been associated with TARDIS, so today I thought I would share with you some of the lessons I will take away.

Just over four years ago Pat Byrne and I began to put the TARDIS dream into reality. We began with an interesting set of high-level requirements and constraints, with the constraints largely setting the direction of TARDIS. The two most important constraints were:

• only existing software and hardware were to be used, and
• software coding was to be absolutely minimised and kept to the application level.

Now with the benefit of hindsight I think these two constraints were truly inspired. ...

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On the 14th of May Patrick Byrne and I will be presenting "Understanding the Complexity of Program Management " to the Canberra Chapter of the Project Management Institute. The presentation shows how HolisTech® Pty Ltd's Project Knowledge Model and Business Network Analysis (BNA) techniques can be used as a diagnostic methodology to inform project and program managers. Using real data the presentation shows how the method can be used to understand the alignment of outcomes, achieve requirements consistency, and understand the "stakeholder weave".

To give you a flavour of the presentation content have a look at the following blog-posts: ...

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Just over a month ago, and before the current debate on wisdom management began in earnest on actKM, I had a brief exchange with Professor Bruce Lloyd on the relationship between knowledge and wisdom. Bruce kindly pointed me to a number of his papers. I've reproduced them below, some with hyperlinks. ...

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On the 26th of May I will be the guest lecturer on a management course at the Australian National University . I'm supposed to be talking about risk management and networks. Now part of the required reading for the students, which I thought I'd better read, was an article by Mickey Butts, Rebecca Wayland, and Lawrence Wilkinson called "Navigating the new realities of risk". The article was published by the Global Business Network and is very interesting in its own right. But the thing that really caught by attention was the STEEP framework, because I could immediately see it has utility as a knowledge management framework.

Now we're all familiar with the people, process and technology mantra, however I've always thought it lacked something. STEEP is an acronym for social, technological, economical, environmental, and political, which as a knowledge management framework I quite like. I think as a diagram it would look something like the picture below, noting it's a bit raw and unsophisticated.

Now it seems to me the STEEP framework captures all the considerations for a knowledge management system. ...

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