Knowledge Matters™

It has been a busy week again, but a thoroughly enjoyable and productive one. On Wednesday and Thursday I attended the ‘Promoting a Culture of Knowledge in the Public Service’ conference in Sydney, which was organised by the Ark Group . On Friday I helped to run two post-conference workshops with my business partner Patrick Byrne . The conference was a small boutique affair with only about 30 people attending, which provided plenty of opportunities for networking. Several themes emerged from the conference, which are not new and are consistent with the popular literature. I’ll recount them below and offer some comment.

Unfortunately I missed most of day one, but the slide set and notes give some pretty good insights. Further because of the small size of the conference it was possible to talk to most of the participants. The keynote was given by Paul McDowall who talked about knowledge management in the Canadian Public Service . The slide set shows some models in use by various departments in the Canadian Public service and highlights to me the absolute need to tailor an initiative to the organisation. It also seems in common with Australia that “knowledge management” is a dirty phrase, and hence knowledge management initiatives are badged as something else. This was a theme in one of our workshops, where we suggested the value proposition of a knowledge management initiative is “using knowledge productively”, rather than “we are going to manage knowledge”.

The use of Web 2.0 technologies, like RSS, blogs, wikis, and social computing was also a theme of day one. The public service is slow to adopt these technologies, yet they offer many opportunities for informed public engagement.

Day Two’s central theme might be summarised as ‘case studies on preventing knowledge loss because of an ageing workforce’. It was remarkable in that a number of organisations shared their experiences warts and all, which belies Patrick Lambe’s assertion that knowledge managers are loath to share . The opening presentation by Catriona Byrne of SageCo and Myffie Coady of Country Energy was particularly interesting. Of note was the Country Energy initiative to identify ‘sages’ and then connect them with apprentices and other workers to enable knowledge transfer. The whole aim of this initiative is to prevent corporate amnesia , something HolisTech® has been addressing with the Australian Defence Force through the TARDIS project .

I also found David Pender’s presentation on ‘Next Generation Talent Development’ very interesting. (David is a lecturer at the Adelaide Graduate School of Business and has his own company called Knowledge Perspectives.) He presented the results of his PhD research, which used social network techniques to examine succession planning. Not surprisingly he found large differences between the connectivity of management selected successors, and those peers would select as successors. He is about to publish a white paper around this theme.

All in all it was a very productive conference, with all attendees willing to openly share their experiences. The take home message was knowledge management can succeed providing it is badged as something else. It seems knowledge management remains a dirty phrase, and that language matters in selling the value proposition to management.

Regards, Graham