Croeso

Ten Years Gone

Having just spent the evening with lot's of Shell friends , celebrating 10 years of web 2.0 in Shell, I'm riding the train home musing about old friends just (Arjan etc), friends who joined the journey (Wim, Peter, Monica, Peter etc) and new friends (Erland Donna Tatiana etc) - it so nice how our work is not only still supported but being built on and expanded. Shell has just been given a 6th placed ranking in the MAKE survey - our best ever - and we are still not being fairly judged but anyway- here's to the next 10.

Knowledge Mnagement Magazines/Journals

Now it's that time of year when I have to renew our KM magazine subscriptions and I was wondering what is peoples opinion on what's out there?

Inside Knowledge and KM Review were my two of choice, plus access to the Elsevier ++ Academic papers via Scopus

I think Inside Knowledge (formerly Knowledge Management Magazine ) gives a nice European bias, and the KM Review gives a nice US Bias, so between the two you get a good coverage. But I was thinking of a change

KM World is read by Jack any thoughts?

Are there any others with a nice blend of original thinkers, academic studies and practical case studies

I aslo read Wired, Harvard Business Review, The Economist and Business 2.0, plus Fine Woodworking and Climber of course.

KM Blogging + KM jobs within RDS

Those of you who have been following Croeso for a while will have seen I've stopped blogging about KM stuff. This is because in Basell, the BASF Shell Joint Venture where I was Knowledge Manager, they explicitly let me do this to further our impressive KM work. Now I'm back in the main part of Shell again I've stopped for now, till we regain that explicit approval. We are working on that so keep your eyes on Croeso for when I start again.
What is nice is I've been contacted recently by people who have followed my blog, who came across Croeso via a KM Master-class from Cibit. We worked with Cibit nearly ten years ago and they are very good people, so I was pleased they referred to this little space (albeit would have been nice to have been told they were doing that) .
Now the people who contacted me are enquiring about the KM jobs Royal Dutch Shell have posted on their Careers site, so if anyone is interested in KM work in a very large company see here, and mention me as a referrer in your application form.

Dinner with friends

I took out to lunch lots of people I'm happy to now call my friends (and we toasted even more absent ones too) on wednesday. They started off as KM researchers, then sooon in my mind became colleagues and now I'm happy they are my friends. The reason why we all sat round a large table in a very amenable restaurant in Enschede is that with my job change, I'll be leaving my pet KM R&D project Metis behind. Ourselves Oce and the Telematica Instituut have been funding work over the last nearly 4 years to expand our KM horizons and further push the understanding in this field. Which we have done wonderfully.

I do hope I can keep in touch with all my friends there, it would be pity to let it drift

Diolch yn fawr as we say at home, Dank je wel as we say here. Hope you enjoyed our time together as much as i did

And what was it Anja said about me Anjo - quite intriguing?

Talking always frames your thoughts

I was talking to Leones.com and some of their KM clients this morning, and as I was talking about Jon Seely Brown's metaphor of tree for best practise and 'we participate therefore we are' ideas,  and how this maps into the Shell KM work. When my own thinking and reasoning why this appealed to me, suddenly became very clear. I'll blog about it very soon as soon as I've let the initial thoughts embed for a while longer.

Isn't it great how explaining yourself outloud to others, allows you to self reflect better then mulling it over in your own mind.

Jon Seely Brown's talk at KM Europe 2004

I've still not had time to put my thoughts together but here for now are his slides, (Thanks to Henry Anson from Ark)

Download km_europe_2004.pdf  Download kmeurope2004_keynote.ppt

I haven't got his basketball video which is a pity as that really fooled me - what Gorilla I said! Carla claimed to have seen something but I was too busy counting people passing the basket ball in white T shirts, to notice a man in a Gorilla suit centre stage beating his chest! I kid you not, when I saw the re-run it's kinda embarrassing. He was making his point about tunnel  and peripheral vision. Well made I felt.

KM Europe Day 3

Today I got there at 11 or so and attended a session on learning and it was awful, some Dutch consultant telling us all we were stupid and that he was right, then contradicting himself so much he nearly disappeared up his own arse - he was contorting the line of argument so much. Dreadful, how I kept quiet I'll never know! I must be mellowing now I'm nearly 40.

Then I joined the KennisCirkel by Proven Partners, whom Ton and Hanneke Lambrets (ex Pink Roccade, ex KPMG) work for.
This had a speaker from Aon who was just getting the the part of his story where he was inspired by the KeyNote speakers at KM Europe 2003, when I had to leave to attend a keynote for 2004 - John Seely Brown. Pity. Upon leaving the room I literally bumped into 2 more good KM friends, Carl Theilen and Ursula Stocker from Holchim the Swiss concrete company. I first met Carl and Ursula in London at another Ark event  and Carl was pretty fed up with that event and we sat next to each other for lunch, and so he vented his frustrations . Again today he was not happy with the workshops, the keynotes, and the venue, he really is a sucker for punishment if he always feels this way, still I like him though.

So off to John Seely Brown with Carla from the TI and Phil Riding from Cambridge, He was everything I expected and some more. I took some photo's with my phone camera of all his slides, but the quality is pretty low, but I'll see if I can get them readable and place them here. I also ask Henry from Ark if he could forward me the slides.
I'll put a separate blog entry in about John and his Social / Anthropological view on business improvement - I hope I can do his thoughts and my current enthusiasm justice.

KM Europe 2004 - Day 1

Well we're lucky again in NL as KM Europe is on our doorsteps - literally 15 minutes drove from work.

I spent most of yesterday there and bumped into all sorts of people I hadn't seen for a while. Anita Pos (Unilever) and Chris Fox (ex Unilever) were there and it was good to bump into those guys, their people Km work is very impressive and fully justifies their MAKE winners position.

I bumped into a Shell colleague Toin van Dijk, and blogger consultant Martin Roell

I also saw the Site-scape folk Harriet and Pim plus Joel Friesergie? (Unisor) sorry Joel I lost your business card I do hope I have your email address on my system!

I also saw Marleen Huisman from the Vrij universitiet of Amsterdam, who we all hope will join our research consortium next year.

Lilia, Wolf, Henk (Saw you henk but did not speak to you) were there from the Telematicxa Instiuut.

I spoke to Richard McDermott for the first time in years which was good.

Anne Jubert ex Siemens and now with Knowledge Board.

The event was stuffed full of software vendors whom I largely ignored although there was some interesting ontology work done for financial fraud - maybe interesting for Aldo?, and some interesting search result presentation styles to think about.

I'll be there tomorrow where my old buddy Arjan van Unnik will be speaking and Lilia and Ton are running a PKM workshop for knowledge board.

On a final note I ran into Arie Baan who unfortunately will be leaving Shell soon, his DTW work was excellent and I will ceratinly miss him.

KM Europe

Well KM Europe is fast approaching and as per usual my phone and email are going mad with people want to see me or sell me systems at the event, the system sellers are easy to deal with, where a short sharp 'no thanks' suffices there - when will they every learn!

But I do seem to be able to juggle the rest of the invites to please me and the inviter's

Lilia and Ton are presenting the PKM thinking on behalf of knowledge board - which will be interesting. From half of the PKM debate I've heard I feel it is being lead by people who see the individual ahead of the team/community and focusing the KM processes (or at least theories) on enhancing the individual. I am somewhat counter that argument as KM for me is all about the collective and working together, not self promotion or self gratification (Which I do feel the 50% involved in the debate I refer to are somewhat guilty of). Lilia and Ton offer a balanced view but I'd be interested in what everyone else says. I belief PKM is all about the skills and competencies we all need to play in the community/team arena effectively, with the main focus on the Enterprise First mindset. But let's see.

Siemens and Opentext are talking about their co-work which will be interesting and John Seely Brown has caught my eye and I'll be attending his talk.

I'm also interested in what SAP have to say as they have such a prominent position in most companies

It's really lucky it's in the RAI in Amsterdam, I could virtually walk there from my office!

Well well

Has it really been 2 months plus since I last blogged? Hmm now lets see Portugal 2004, Holiday, Work on the house, Olympics, family, these activities have been taking my spare time and as I blog from home no spare time was left.

But Now we are back on track and after a gentle reminder yesterday from Lilia and Carla
I'm back to it. Finding time for this is hard with so many other things on my plate never mind work, but that is also instructive for our KM research into blogs.

I have been reading blogs in that time thought so I went into input only mode I guess.
I'll start tomorrow my promise to start debating with myself the KM work we have been busy with for the last 10 years and those volunteers will receive a pre and post questionnaire to see if we transfer anything, hmm I'm intrigued to see what will happen

Knowing your neighbours

Ton posted some interesting thoughts recently on Cybercities.

I, on the other hand know all my neighbours as I am very keen to integrate within my local community. I actively arrange to say hello when we first arrive and like to keep in contact with them. Maybe this is all about my house at home being in a small village in North Wales where it is common for me to hear someone enter my kitchen and put the kettle on to make tea ( a sure sign as neighbour has just dropped in). Maybe this is also because I've lived all over the place and in many houses, so I know how, when I arrive in a new place, to seek out new acquaintances, climbing partners, furniture makers etc - otherwise these international careers are very lonely places.

But on the KM point of view it worries me a little we are splitting ourselves up into 2 camps:
Those who live and work in Cyberspace, and those who live and work in conventional space. Of course some people have a foot in both realities but generally we are polarised to one or another I feel.

What is also worrying if we bring one side's style of thinking, approaches and realities and brought to bear on the other, so if we have Cyberpunks running KM programs it's no wonder many fail, and if we have corporate punks trying the run their work environments to emulate the cyber world, but have never really lived their themselves, we'll also get many problems and failed KM projects.

The norms and realities of both sides are quite unique and non apparent to the other, one good benchmark I mentally use to test my own thoughts is , can we get our internal high flyers and senior managers to do these things, if we take for example blogging I think no way, as they have their careers to loose by exposing their planning and thinking too much. Maybe the newer generation coming into the company will, when they are senior, be different, but this will be 10 to 20 years away. But they also may get infected by the politics and play the game as it is played and not try to buck any trends or take any risks.

So are bloggers non corporate types? An interesting question I have no answers for at the moment.

The British government is a bit worried about the poor rich divide in the UK and broadband access exasperating that issue, so the poor will find it even harder in the future, if Ton's visions are true. As they are not only excluded by not having the means to access, but if they do occasionally access, say by a free library connection, they may then be exposed to a whole new subculture whose models, norms, processes and identities are quite different and somewhat impenetrable.

All this maps very nicely back to my corporate KM work where, we very much have to have one foot in each camp, one to understand some of the KM processes the Cypercities find (Not all come from the Cyberspace 50% would be my rough guess) and then a foot in the normal space as we need to know how we may implement such changes and have a good chance of making them stick.

Hmm

One to many vs one to one

To me the nub of getting KM right is to focus on the one to many or many to many (Community of Practise and to some extent Blogs) style of interactions rather than the one to one (i.e. contact an expert from your internal yellow pages, email, telephone) interactions. How else do you discover people who you don't know, who know what you need to know?

Here's an interesting article on the unsuitability of TCP/IP to support this.

Milano bound

Well I'm sat at Schipol of to Milan for an overnight trip for work.

It's times like these that I think to myself how can our work in the realm of KM tap into our travelling users, yes we have a great wifi network at Schipol but who has access to their works LAN via wifi , not many (but that will come). We've not decided yet on the PDA phone option and so I'm sat at one of the many internet cafes here enjoying braodband surfing. But my mind is occupied with the thoughts of how can the company/my peers tap into me now I'm here.

1. email me via my home account - not many know I'm away and networked
2. phone me and leave a voicemail
2a. Phone my mobile
3. Search my postings in the variopus CoP's (both documents and discussions)
4. Wait till I'm back (this must take up 90%+)
5. Of course we also must make the point that no-one needs to access what I know as the company will not fall over now I'm away for 2 days, and in an emergency they'd phone
6. Read my blog (but what would they find there?)

I again drawer to the conclusions that KM intercations work best on timescales of days and therfore not being around for a few days do not matter, and who searches old stuff anyway when you can chat to the indivual or to the community via a CoP? not many in my experience!