KM Chicago Holiday Event - Tues 12/11 - RSVP required

KM Chicago is happy to announce that we will once again devote our December meeting to exploring food and wine from around the world.  This year we will have a couple of new twists to the event.  First, in keeping with the season, we will make this an all white wine tasting.  You will experience the breadth of aromas, flavors, styles exhibited in the world’s white wines.  Second, we will feature food from Pastoral catering.  Our selections will include cheeses, meats and vegetables from artisan producers around the world.  Pastoral is a well-known downtown catering operation and serves specialty foods with a flair.

Randy Russell will lead us on this journey of food and wine.  We hope you will join us. 

 The event will be held on Tuesday, 11 December, 5:30-7 PM in the Gensler Conference Room at 11 East Madison Street, #300 Chicago (The former Carson Pirie Scott building).  For obvious reasons there will be no dial in or web presentation.  Randy will share 6-7 wines and the accompanying food.  There will be a presentation about each of the wines and ample time for questions.  A take home program is also provided to help with your shopping.

To be sure we have sufficient food and wine an RSVP is required for this event.  Please send an email to randyrussell1@aol.com by close of business on Friday, 7 December.  Let us know who is attending and how many.  This is a great opportunity to bring a colleague or spouse and introduce them to your KM friends.  Due to the capacity of the room, we will limit the number of attendees.

To cover the cost of the food and wine, the price for the event is $20/pp.  The money will be collected at the event so please bring cash or a check with you.  Sorry we cannot accept credit cards.

We look forward to sharing food and wine with you in the spirit of the holiday season.

Go Social with Nalco's Dan Flynn on Nov 13

KM Chicago's regular monthly meeting Tuesday, November 13 will host Dan Flynn discussing the development of social knowledge exchange at Nalco, the global leader in water treatment technologies.

Going Social – The Journey

Implementing a social layer in a global company comes with both challenges and rewards.  Going Social explores the journey Nalco Company took to weave communities and a social layer into the fabric of its business. From pilot to production the journey is fraught with barriers, potholes and a thousand decision points that ultimately effect deployment, governance and acceptance. We will learn about Nalco’s journey from start to present that ultimately resulted in governance principals and a best practice approach for community deployment and growth.

 

Meet Dan Flynn

 

Dan is Nalco’s go to person for Knowledge Management.  His twenty seven years of industry experience, with the last ten in the knowledge group, make for a good blending of knowledge principals with a keen eye for customer needs. Nalco’s customer intimate business model demands quick access to operations data, knowledge assets and subject matter experts. Dan has been published both on-line and print, in industry and knowledge journals, most recently as editor for “The Nalco Water Handbook - 3^rd Edition”, and the “Nalco Guide to Boiler Failure Analysis – 2^nd Edition”, both published by McGraw-Hill. Nalco has been recognized as a North American MAKE* Finalist (2005, 2007, 2008, 2010),  Global MAKE Finalist (2010) and an APQC Best Practice Partner in 2012. Dan can be reached through email at dflynn@nalco.com.

 

* Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises

 

Tues. Oct. 9: Taxonomy for a KM Site - Why and How?

Please join KM Chicago and taxonomy expert Janice Keeler at 5:30 on Tuesday October 9 to explore taxonomy for better knowledge management. Meeting details are at right.

If you have search and user tagging on your KM site, why would you bother with a taxonomy (hierarchically structured keywords) or any other form of controlled vocabulary?  Synonyms, authority lists, taxonomies and other explicit relationships between terms can improve retrieval of relevant information from any sort of system.  Come learn more about the different options, with some real world examples of why they help.  We’ll also cover basic information about how to create and manage the term lists, and suggested resources for more information.  The talk will include a live demonstration of a taxonomy tool and some points on what to consider about the various types of taxonomy tools.

 

Janice Keeler is Manager, Knowledge Management at NERA Economic Consulting, where she is responsible for creating and managing a global taxonomy and a SharePoint site using it.  Before joining NERA, she had a KM role at McDonald’s Corporation. At Accenture, she was responsible for global content licensing for eight years. She also had leadership and team roles on global projects developing a knowledge management strategy and reorganizing knowledge centers into a global organization. Earlier, she started and managed information centers for a public relations firm and a local investment bank.  What ties all these roles together is a desire to help people get the information they need to do their work.  Janice is a co-founder of the SLA Taxonomy Division, currently serving as Chair-Elect. She has a Masters in Library Science from the University of Chicago, a BA in history from The College of Wooster, and a Certificate in Knowledge Management from Dominican University.

Collaborating Minds: Solving Tough Problems with a Unique Team

At 5:30 on Tuesday, September 11th, join Jim McGee and David Friedman at KM Chicago's monthly meeting to hear a progress report on "Collaborating Minds", their unique problem-solving venture. This meeting will be especially productive in person, but participation online is also available. See details on the right.

 

As Jim points out, we continue to make progress in developing tools to support the efforts of teams to conduct complex knowledge work. At the same time, we are deepening our understanding of what differentiates highly effective teams from average teams. But these two streams of progress rarely intersect.

 

Collaborating Minds is the business concept that Jim and Dave have developed that functions at that intersection of complex knowledge work and highly effective teams. 

 

Collaborating Minds tries to answer three related questions:

1. Given what we know about high-performance teams and current social technologies, can we create a virtual high-performance team with several hundred members?

2. If such a team existed, what kinds of problems could it solve that are currently unsolved?
3. Is there an acceptable business model to sustain that team over time?

 On September 11th Jim and David will tell us what they've learned to date and will lead participants in a design collaboration that will help shape Collaborating Minds' next stage of development.

David Friedman is passionate about problem-solving and about relationship building as fundamental human activities. That’s why he’s developing Collaborating Minds. He wants people to be much more productive and enjoy themselves much more too. He writes about collaboration at Positive Structures.  David was a partner at McKinsey & Company (a global consulting firm) and through his firm Bridgewell Partners has advised professionals on growing their practices through systematic relationship building. You can contact David here.

 

Jim McGee is an expert in knowledge management and knowledge use. He also knows a lot about technology, and about where technology and knowledge work intersect (or should). That’s why he’s a founder of Collaborating Minds. He’s been writing about these topics since 2001 at McGee’s Musings. Jim was a founder of Diamond Technology Partners (a technology and management consulting firm) and has been, among other roles, a faculty member at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. You can contact Jim here.

Save the date: Tuesday Sept 11, 5:30

Jim McGee, founder of Collaborating Minds and formerly co-founder of Diamond Consultants, will kick off our fall season. Stay tuned for more details.