Leaked document angers Rockford Public Library fans

Reading this news story, competitive intelligence, best practices and what not comes to your mind.
Leaked document angers Rockford Public Library fans By Susan Stephens @ Northern Public Radio
Extract:

The Rockford Public Library’s board of trustees can expect to see something unusual at its meeting Monday night… a large crowd. That’s because two confidential reports by the library’s executive director have been leaked to the public.
The documents detail ways to offer the public more digital services by cutting staff, closing some branches, and heavily “weeding out” print materials.
The Public Library has been an important institution in Rockford since it opened its first reading room in 1872. And the 110 year old Carnegie library on the banks of the Rock River now anchors a six branch system. Continue reading Leaked document angers

Knowledge Sharing Manager: Whats in a name?

Extract from 10 questions: Dianna Wiggins, presently Sr. Knowledge Management Specialist at DeVry Inc

Knowledge management can be a hard sell. One of the first things we did at McDonald's was to change my job title from knowledge manager to knowledge sharing manager. People get defensive about having their knowledge "managed," but when you say "share." they think, "Oh, she's going to help me share my knowledge. I can handle that." It's not threatening to them, and there's an implication that something will be coming back their way that's going to make their life easier somehow.

The folks at McDonald's knew it was going to take some work and some trust building to make inroads in this area. My first question to people was always, "Tell me your pain." One of our first steps was to choose 20 key stakeholders throughout the restaurant operations division and walk them through a structured audit process, spending about three hours with each person. Then we put that whole audit process together, which mapped out the direction we had to go and the recommendations we had to make to move toward a desired outcome. It's not an overnight thing. It's a process.

Continue reading: 10 questions: Dianna Wiggins: she's between jobs right now, but the president of SLA's Illinois chapter is learning and sharing as much as she did when ... An article from: Information Outlook, by Forrest Glenn Spencer (Author)

Time For KM To Manage Knowledge About Management?

Steve Denning, RETHINK - Forbes, Mar. 18 2011

EXTRACT:
The bottom line of these discussions is that the horizontal, collaborative, value-adding principles of knowledge management are barely compatible with the top-down, bureaucratic, efficiency driven preoccupations of traditional management. Even KM programs that by all measures are doing well and enjoy significant top-management support are still at risk. In any efficiency or cost-cutting drive, knowledge management will usually be seen as “a low hanging fruit.”

The practical options for a knowledge manager in the light of this are as follows:

* Wear a parachute at all times. One never knows who will wield the axe or when it might fall.
* Educate yourself about the nature of traditional management and realize that there is a fundamental difference in values.
* Make sure that your knowledge management operation meets all the metrics and responds to the efficiency concerns of traditional management.
* Learn about how some organizations are managing themselves in a radically different way that is compatible with knowledge, as discussed in, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century as well as other books such as The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, or Reorganize for Resilience by Ranjay Gulati, or The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque, or Leadership in a Wiki World by Rod Collins.
* Join together with allies both inside your organization and outside. You may well find that there are groups already practicing radical management within your organization in software development (under titles like “Agile”, “Scrum”, “Kanban”) or in manufacturing (under the title of “Lean”).
* Spread knowledge about radical management within your organization. We now have reliable knowledge that traditional management is leading to disastrous long-term business result. The extraordinary financial gains that come from making the shift to radical management (e.g. ten times increments in share price over ten years) will far outweigh the gains from any other knowledge that KM can disseminate. ... continue reading

Knowledge Management in a Changing World - Best Practices Revisited

Just found an excellent article on "Knowledge Management in a Changing World," by Steven A. Lastres, Director of Library and Knowledge Management at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. West Librarian Relations - Law Librarians newsletter - March/April 2009–Law Books and Legal Information–West:, Also linked at Future Ready 365 and India librarian international

Contents of the article include issues, such as, Knowledge Management in Action, Becoming Business Managers, and Other considerations in selecting and deploying KM services.

Extract:

Since the earliest days of libraries, librarians have served as knowledge managers. Whether they were maintaining the scrolls at the Library of Alexandria, creating the catalog for the House of Wisdom (a Ninth Century Islamic library), or assembling annotated links for the law firm intranet, law librarians have always been in the forefront of organizing information and adding value to it. Librarians have long excelled at getting information into the hands of the people who need it. The precise definition of knowledge management (KM) is an elusive one, but one pillar of KM practice holds that knowledge management "is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets."(1)...

Other considerations in selecting and deploying KM services include the following:

•Access needs to be intuitive–no training should be required. A well-developed taxonomy that makes sense to the legal staff is key. Content ought to be logically organized. The process is a laborious one for the KM staff, but it pays off in time saved by attorneys;
•It also pays to train attorneys how to get the most out of the services KM makes available. Getting the best value out of subscription services is a two-step process, in which the KM manager (1) makes sure the legal staff knows what is available and (2) makes sure that staff know the ins and outs of searching those services. continue reading

(1) Megan Santosus & Jon Surmacz, The ABCs of Knowledge Management, CIO Magazine, 2001.

What I learnt about Communities of Practices - a conversation

By Abdul Jaleel Tharayil Venue: Indian Institute Of Science - Bangalore Date: Jan, 2008 ...

About the speaker: Mr. Abdul Jaleel Tharayil is working as Senior Manager - knowledge
Management, MindTree Consulting Ltd, Bangalore. [Source taken from Session invitation]

What I learnt about Communities of Practices - a conversation

View more presentations from abdul.tharayil.

Laws of knowledge management

• Seven spiritual laws of successful knowledge management, by Marcus Speh Birkenkrahe [1. The Law of Unity; 2. The Law of Giving; 3. The Law of Cause and Effect; 4. The Law of Least Effort; 5. The Law of Intention and Desire; 6. The Law of Detachment; 7. The Law of Purpose in Life]


• Are There Laws of Knowledge Management? by Stephen Denning, Michel Pommier and Lesley Shneier. [1. Knowledge sharing is essential to economic survival; 2. Communities of practice are the heart and soul of knowledge sharing; 3. Virtual community members also need physical interactions; 4. Passion is the driving force behind communities of practice; 5. Communities enrich organizations and personal lives; 6. Knowledge sharing has inside-out and outside-in dynamic.
  These six “laws” of knowledge management have three corollaries which are found across a very large number of organizations: Knowledge sharing is at some point confused with IT; Middle-management resists; Vibrant communities of practice attract new talents]
  


• Five Laws of KM, by RajLibrarian
  Inspired by Dr.S.R.Ranganathan!
  

  
  Knowledge is for use;
  Every bit of knowledge its user;
  Every user his/her bit of knowledge;
  Users time is precious;
  Knowledge and knowledge centres are growing organisms.

• RANGANATHAN REVISITED: FACETS FOR THE FUTURE, ISKO UK meeting: Connecting communities: Content, knowledge, information: Same Difference?