Vol. 4 No.1 – September 2001

This issue of Knowledge Management News is dedicated to our friends, colleagues, and fellow Knowledge Management champions and practitioners who perished or were injured this past week in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania – Vaya con Dios (Go with God).

As I have contemplated the events of this past week here in the United States I have experienced a range of emotions. We have experienced terrorism here in America at a new level, forever changing the way we view all aspects of life. In looking at the weeks events from a business perspective I believe that Knowledge Management should take on a more urgent and critical role in organizations. The loss of life at the World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan, the Pentagon, and on the four airplanes used as weapons of mass destruction is unimaginable. Greater still will be the loss of the individual and collective knowledge from those killed in these horrendous events.

I know many of you have been waiting patiently for this issue (actually any issue) of KM News. It’s been a long time in coming, and all I can say is that it has been a really interesting year. Many of you have been going to the KM News web site during the newsletters absence and know that it has been updated on a regular basis, especially the conference, technology, reading and jobs section. I want to encourage you to continue to visit the web site between newsletters.

Over the past year KM News has started to endorse conferences that I believe are of value and advance the discipline of Knowledge Management. You will find these conference both through banner ads, listings in the newsletter itself, and via the events section on the web site. Please rest assured that I have and will continue to honor the KM News privacy policy. I have not and do not anticipate renting or selling the names and email addresses of KM News readers, you will however from time to time receive supplemental emails about events I think you will be interested in attending.

This issue includes a few new and noteworthy articles and of course a really interesting product.

If any of you will be attending the Delphi Groups 2001 Portal Conference in Palm Springs California in early October, come listen to me speak. I will be presenting on Monday 1 October in the Enterprise Strategies for Enterprise Portals track. I’d love to meet any of you KMNews readers that will be attending.

Enjoy!

Brad Hoyt
Editor, KM News

If you know of someone that should be receiving KM News but isn’t, please feel free to forward them a copy and tell them they can subscribe at the KM News web site (http://www.kmnews.com). If you are re-distributing KM News inside your company, please remember to distribute it in its entirety and to include all relevant copyright notices.

Hear how the CIA manages its digital assets at…

World Research Group’s Best Practices in Corporate Digital Asset Management, October 24-25, 2001 in New Orleans. Hear other great case studies from leaders such as The Gap, Ford, Cisco, H&R Block, United Airlines, HBO, Hallmark and more!

For further information, please visit www.worldrg.com/it111
e-mail liz@worldrg.com or call 1-800-647-7600.

There have been many changes that have affected the discipline of Knowledge Management this past year. The global economy at present seems on the brink, even more so this week with the events in the United States, and KM which appeared to be headed for the buzz-word graveyard seems to be rising again like the Phoenix. It is gratifying to see that KM practitioners around the world have not abandoned KM because pundits and software vendors decided the term was no longer in vogue.

If you review some of my commentary from what seems like the distant past you will see that I often derided both pundits and technology providers for adopting the KM mantra without any real understanding of what the discipline of KM was or how it could benefit organizations. What happened was that those with a product or service to sell used KM as a way to reposition their offerings, make money (no I am not against making money), get funding, etc. We still see today the remnants of the confusion caused by this “we are a KM company” hype. The reality is that KM practitioners saw through this hype, but had to spend an inordinate amount of time clearing the fog of confusion within their organizations. The fog is clearing and organizations are finally coming to grips with the fact that KM is not some discrete “thing” that the IT or HR groups do, but an integral part of the organizations operations. I don’t want to eliminate the role that technology plays in KM, but merely point out that KM as a discipline incorporates not just technology but people and process.

What does the future hold for the discipline of KM? Well, if I knew I’d probably be sitting on some Island in the South Pacific sipping some cool concoction. What I do know is that we will continue to see an evolution that will see KM initiatives being more closely aligned with the overall strategy of organizations. We will also see the convergence of KM, eLearning, information management, and content management. Some initial work is already starting to be done in this converged space (more on that later) and holds much promise for incredibly powerful returns on investment.

Up the (E)Organization!:
Strategy & Business – Booz-Allen & Hamilton
- This article is well over a year old, but I found it interesting, relevant in this post internet crazed period, and very thought provoking. What the article does is lay out a model for a flexible centerless organizational structure leveraging individual and collective knowledge.
http://www.strategy-business.com/strategy/00106/

Call to Action
CIO Magazine
- Having recently been responsible for a corporate portal (information management) project this article really struck a cord with me. One of the important things to keep in mind when undertaking an information or knowledge management endeavor is to ask and answer the question — information/knowledge to do what? We all know that we need to manage knowledge and information, but to do it successfully we need to ask and answer in context the why and to what end. This article presents eight steps to creating actionable information. It is important for me to point out that I don’t fully buy into the notion that information management, data warehousing, etc. are knowledge management. They are components, very important components, but by themselves they are not KM.
http://www.cio.com/archive/040100_action.html

Mapping the Enterprise Software Market
KMWorld Magazine
- This is a very good high-level article putting forward a basic taxonomy for the enterprise software market as it relates to KM. Do I buy into everything the article puts forward? No. But it is in fact a good starting point for putting the enterprise software and KM software markets into context.
http://www.kmworld.com/publications/magazine/index.cfm?action=readarticle&Article_ID=1072&Publication_ID=53

Codification vs. personalization
KMWorld Magazine
- In this very short article codification vs. personalization is looked from the perspective of the percentage split between the two approaches. The author, and I agree, states that in certain organizations the split between the two should be closer to a 50-50 straddle. Read the article and form your own opinion/approach.
http://www.kmworld.com/publications/magazine/index.cfm?action=readarticle&Article_ID=1075&Publication_ID=53

KM Jobs:
KM Career Opportunities and Links — let me know of any opportunities and I’ll post them here (and don’t forget to tell me when the positions are filled). An asterisks (*) denotes a new item.

Positions:

None to list

Job Sites:
KnowledgeFarm, http://www.knowfarm.com/kjobs.html
Enterprise Software Career Center, http://www.softwarejobs.com/erp.html
@Brint, http://www.brint.com/km/ken/jobs.html

• 09/24/01 – 09/25/01 Communities of Practice 2001 San Francisco, CA www.iirusa.com
• 09/26/01 – 09/27/01 Sharing the Power of Knowledge London, UK www.marcusevansbusiness-strategy.com
• 09/28/01 – Seminar on Formal Ontology Management Systems Affligem (near Brussels), Belgium www.landc.be
• 09/30/01 – 10/03/01 2001 Portal Conference+ Palm Springs, CA www.delphigroup.com
• 10/04/01 – Blending eLearning Virtual Sumposium Online www.iirusa.com
• 10/04/01 – 10/05/01 Monetizing Intellectual Property* Chicago, IL www.iirusa.com
• 10/10/01 – 10/11/01 Next-Generation Knowledge Management: Enabling Business Process Houston, TX www.apqc.org
• 10/10/01 – 10/11/01 Knowledge Management Masterclasses Asia 2001 Singapore info_conferenceworld@asia1.com
• 10/10/01 – 10/17/01 Knowledge Management Masterclass, London London, United Kingdom www.mdx.ac.uk
• 10/11/01 -  Knowledge Audit Seminar-Training London www.hyltonassociates.com
• 10/20/01 – 10/22/01 SOL2001 – Supporting Org. Learning: KM and CBR Tokyo, Japan www.ifcomputer.co.jp
• 10/24/01 – 10/25/01 Best Practices in Corporate Digital Asset Management* New Orleans, LA www.worldrg.com
• 10/30/01 – 11/01/01 KM World 2001 Santa Clara, CA www.kmworld.com
• 10/30/01 – 11/02/01 Knowledge Management Solutions for the Enterprise Miami, FL www.intervista-institute.com
• 11/08/01 – 11/09/01 European Conference on Knowledge Management Bled, Slovenia www.iedc.si
• 11/12/01 – 11/15/01 The 6th Annual Chief Learning Officer Summit Boston, MA USA www.linkageinc.com
• 11/27/01 – 11/29/01 Knowledge Management Europe The Hague, Holland www.kmeurope.com
• 12/02/01 – 12/04/01 Intelligent Enterprise World Summit Orlando, FL www.icdevents.com
• 12/10/01 – 12/11/01 Managing Knowledge Management Projects* Arlington, VA www.iirusa.com
• 01/16/02 – 01/18/02 5th World Congress on Intellectual Capital Hamilton, Ontario, Canada worldcongress.mcmaster.ca
• 02/10/02 – 2/13/02 Braintrust 2002: The Fourth Annual Knowledge Management World Summit* San Francisco, CA www.brain-trust.net
• 03/11/02 – 03/14/02 Knowledge Technologies – Bridging Knowledge Communities 2002 Seattle, WA www.knowledgetechnologies.net
• 03/16/02 – 03/17/02 Knowledge Management 2002 Hammersmith, London, England www.knowledge-management.co.uk
• 03/20/02 – 03/22/02 Business Intelligence World Asia 2002 Singapore www.businessintelligenceworld.com

Brain Ranger Portal from Brain Ranger (I, P, S) – www.brainranger.com
The Brain Ranger Portal provides personalized, secure, browser-based access to the information for corporate decision makers. It also provides “Aptitools”, best-of-breed applications spanning collaboration and content management that support key business processes for sales, marketing, HR, etc. The product can be a single, unified platform for internal and external Web initiatives. I have used this product and highly recommend it.

If you’ve seen or are using a cool and useful product that falls into the KM space (or close to it), let me know about it, I’ll include it here and you’ll get the credit for it.