Thursday, March 15, 2007

Tuesday, 10 April KM Chicago Meeting; 5:30pm

Kate Pugh of Intel and Nancy Dixon of Common Knowledge discuss Knowledge Harvesting
Knowledge “harvesting” programs -- such as post-mortems, Action-in-Reviews, and Lessons Learned – have three major objectives. 1.) Real-time team and individual insight; 2.) Improve team’s processes; and 3.) Reuse by the larger organization. Many organizations fail to achieve these objectives, or feel they don’t get a return on their knowledge capture and reuse efforts.
We argue that you need to “harvest with reuse in mind,” and that integrated, well-planned and well-facilitated harvesting does pay off. We tailored our harvesting approaches in response to 10 environmental and business factors, such as criticality of the knowledge, perishability of knowledge, technical complexity, the need for safety, team proximity, hierarchical barriers, and team size. We sought to answer questions like:
What is the appropriate format (interview, focus group, panel)?
When does the facilitator need to ensure originating teams’ anonymity?
When do you need to enlist external SMEs to help with the inquiry?
What “anchors” a group discussion (on topic, on insight, as opposed to blame)?
We will be describing this approach and look forward to a lively discussion about what has worked at your organizations!
For information on our two locations, see sidebar. For this meeting, speakers will be joining us by Web and conference call

Monday, March 12, 2007

March meeting: speaker change

Our original speaker is not able to attend the March meeting, but KM Chicago member Curtis Conley has graciously offered to step in at the last moment to talk about the KM program at Perkins Eastman and the connection to his PhD research on critical success factors in KM.

Curtis Conley is a Knowledge Resource Team Coordinator at Perkins Eastman, a global architecture firm recognized as an operational and thought leader. Working in the downtown Chicago location of Perkins Eastman, Curtis is responsible for overseeing the KM processes in the Chicago, Toronto, Oakland, and Shanghai offices. Additionally, Curtis is currently a doctoral candidate at Northern Illinois University. He is earning his degree in Adult Education with a cognate in Knowledge Management. Curtis also holds an MBA and Bachelors degree in Organizational Management. His current research interests include the critical success factors for KM, the integration of KM within strategic planning processes, organizational learning, and human resource development.

Curtis will provide an overview of the KM program at Perkins Eastman, both current practices and an agenda for the future. In addition, Curtis will also discuss his dissertation topic which aims at providing KM practitioners with a holistic framework of the critical success factors for KM.