act-KM 2008 - a nice Balance

I have just returned from the act-KM's 10th anniversary conference.... so there was the old-timers and therefore an opportunity to catch up with old friends, the real 'we have been through the war together' feeling as we discussed the KM trials, tribulations and rejoiced in the successes of the past decade. But also a good influx of newcomers, new people to meet, new perspectives, suggesting that KM is not dead but perhaps evolving toward a 'drop in centre' for those struggling with different business issues looking for a non-mainstream perspective that could trigger a path to resolution.

On the conference itself Dave Guteen launched the theme for the conference which ended up being 'everything 2.0' ... a good way to launch act-km into its second decade....act-km 2.0 :) Another prevailing theme for me from many of the talks and discussion was a new preparedness to face up to reality. Matt Moore re-acquainted us with Arostotle's two roads to the truth... the logic road which has dominated western thinking and rhetoric, which we are only now starting to re-discover. These two roads to the truth were first introduced to me by Tony Goldsby-Smith who was brought into then BHP by believe it or not, the chief engineering executive at the time. Andrew Campbell provided us with an excellent example of leveraging both paths in his impassioned, yet research data rich plea for the world to take notice of climate change issues ... move over Al Gore! Jane Crystal gave us a view of what it was like working on the ground with climate change issues around water catchments . I was impressed by her dedication... clearly highly qualified, having worked all around the world, but has chosen the small town of Wellington in North Western NSW from which to make her mark.

Organizational Zoo man Arthur Shelley has now joined a new zoo, popularly called universities, and is clearly shaking up the traditions through his wiki enabled courses. Having done my share of academic course giving, the delivery is the easy part....its the assessment that sucks. So Authur's use of collaboration stats from wiki use logs resonated well with me. My thoughts while Arthur was speaking was that wouldn't it be good if the students themselves voted for who should get the High Distinction through referencing their work in their own work. Therefore in order to get the HD you would have to post your contributions early and ensure they were high quality... no more last minute and rushed contributions!

The last presentation of the 1st day was from Graham Durant-Law who's concept of business network analysis are closely related to my own work. Graham is using a PhD platform to explore his ideas, which I can relate to quite well. I was impressed with how he was able to extend the traditional social network analysis approach to include nodal objects like projects, policies and business processes ... hence the name "Business Network Analysis". The insights from his applied work on large defence programs with highly interdependent projects and also the identification of a raft of policies with no ownership as responsible job roles are restructured, was refreshing in the way that it challenges the notion of neatly presented project/program charts and policy frameworks with a picture of what it really looks like! Sociograms are good for showing it as it is....nearly the antithesis of a project gantt chart of business process flow map.

The evening and the next morning was largely conducted by my good friend Serena Joyner, who I worked with on a knowledge audit come SNA exercise at Sydney Catchment Auhtority some years ago. Serena is emerging from full-time mum to full time worker (and full-time mum:)) and undertook the challenge of trying to get us to collaborate in the collaboration cabaret before the conference. Her show host performance for the dinner however showed us that she definely has a backup career opportunity should she ever get tired of KM.

My session was a repeat of a Singapore session I ran earlier in the year on applying the partnership scorecard and value network analysis to the KM context. We had 'antagonist' roles for HR, IT and Business Execs for the KM managers to work with. I will be posting up the value network we came up with shortly.

Matt Hodgson took his on-line musings off-line for us and provided a passionate address on how he now really believed their was a KM 2.0. The colourful Corey Banks ran us through an exercise on after action reviews and peer assists and how valuable they were, which was followed up by an even more colouful David Snowden who told us among other things that many of those old KM practices like AARs and Peer assists don't really work....fortunately we know Corey has a thick skin and Dave was not really gunning specifically for Corey... he had bigger targets to shoot at in his session. As always Dave's talk on narrative applications was insightful, informative and irreverent, yet entertaining, which makes him such a good keynote speaker. Of course Dr. Vain got his own bit of irreverence in the night before. The conference ended with David Guteen teaching us how to think backwards with some 'reverse brainstorming' ... which showed us that we all like to have a gripe ... something we will be shortly launcing a new site on... so what this space.

All in all a good time was had by all ... for me only spoiled by the person who left that deceased wombat on the road that I couldn't avoid on my way back to Sydney!