Get together with fellow KMers now and then - it's inspiring!

For a few days last week, I swapped Wiltshire’s winding lanes for San Francisco’s frantic streets.  I’d been invited to speak at KA Connect – a Knowledge Management (KM) conference for the AEC industry (i.e. Architecture, Engineering and Construction).  More about my involvement in a future blog post….

The conference was attended by a little over 220 people, drawn from the 3 sectors, and focused on 2 key themes:

·        Critical knowledge – i.e. how to define, capture and manage it;

·        KM strategy – i.e. how to use KM to support a firm’s commercial strategy.

In the parlance of the moment, I took a number of ‘take-aways’ from the event, some of which I’ll explore in future posts but, to summarise here:

·        After so many years of battling the yet-to-be-convinced, getting together with other people that ‘get it’ is good for one’s KM mental health!

·        Twitter enables speakers’ insights to reach the wider world within seconds which, for most people reading this blog, will always be remarkable;

·        Larry Prusak remains the Godfather of KM, and deservedly so;

·        As with military operations, so with life – prior planning prevents piss-poor performance….

More to come….

For a conversation about how managing your knowledge can help improve performance, please contactme direct, or via the Knoco website.

KM UK 2016 - Come and learn about learning...

I'll be speaking at the forthcoming KM UK Conference on 16th June.

My old boss, Colonel Ian Tinsley (Retd) and I will be talking about how the British Army learned from both the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and how it managed the knowledge it gained.

Frequent readers of this blog will have read the article linked at this post in which I examine the ways in which the Army increased its learning capacity from 2009.

Building upon some of the material in that article, we'll cover:

• What does 'good military KM' look like?
• What does it take for a lesson to be actually learned?
• Why does the Army do KM?  What should anyone?
• Top tips and things to watch for when managing lessons.

The agenda for the conference is listed here.

Come along and let's learn about learning.

If you'd like to chat about knowledge management, or 'lessons learned', please get in touch direct or via the Knoco website.