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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A GATEWAY TO EXCELLENCE AND INNOVATION IN AFRICA

The Knowledge Management Research Team sponsored by the National Research Foundation in collaboration with the Information Studies Programme, School of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg) will host the abovementioned conference from 22-24 February 2006. This conference is going to provide an opportunity for knowledge sharing and collaboration among academics, researchers, and information and knowledge practitioners.

Sue Myburgh
University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

iKMS Newsletter November 2003

Feature Article - KM Asia Reports

Welcome to the November edition of the new look iKMS Newsletter, edited by FT Liu.

Don't miss our feature article and photo report on KM Asia 2003! Scroll down for details on each article posted, or use the links in the right hand column.

Your feedback, comments and suggestions are all welcome. Each posting gives you the chance to reply - just click the Comments link!

Report from KM Asia - Day 1

4 Nov 2003
Strategic KM

Editing by FT Liu

Singapore is facing unprecedented unemployment in recent years as the economy responds to the structural changes resulting from the rise of China as a manufacturing superpower. Worst hit are those workers aged 40 and above. How can these workers capitalise on the experience they have accumulated over the years? Delegates turned up at KM Asia 2003 hoping to find some answers…

Touted as Asia’s largest and most prestigious KM event, KM Asia is into its 3rd successive year. Dr. Thomas Davenport, co-author of the best selling KM book, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, launched the event with his thoughts on "Moving along the KM curve". He referred to two of his more recent books – “What’s the big idea?” and “The Attention Economy”. In the first book, he discusses how KM as an idea has matured and over time it will become as pervasive as, say the Quality Movement. In the second book, he talks about how time and attention, not information, are now the scarcest commodities - with big implications for KM. Looks like books are an effective means of knowledge transfer.

The second speaker was the Asst Commissioner of the Singapore Police Force, Mr. Ang Hak Seng. After reminding the audience that he is basically a policeman, he went on to share the 3P model (People, Product, Process) adopted for KM in the Police Force. The model has been used effectively to cripple a major loan shark syndicate, address complaints of Thai foreign workers and more recently, the handling of the SARS crisis. The KM model in the Singapore Police Force has been evolved to handle the “realm of the unknown” as in the SARS case. This will be especially useful for companies in a time of great change and uncertainty in the world.

Henrik Martin, CEO of Intellectual Capital, Sweden introduced the concept of Intellectual Capital (IC) - the factors not shown in the traditional balance sheet but which are of critical importance to a company’s future success. He followed with an actual case study of how a company’s IC was assessed using his company’s IC Rating methodology which focused on Human Capital, Organisation Capital, Relational Capital and Business Recipe. The result was that although the company was hugely profitable today, its customers do not consider them strategic and the lack of internal structures makes them highly vulnerable to losing future business due to their inability to deliver. Potential buyers of the company hesitated due to these new revelations of the company! Given that the Singapore economy is projected to grow at only 1% this year, the Singapore Government should take stock of its Intellectual Capital by doing an IC Rating on the country.

Three other KM case studies were introduced from Unilever, HSBC and Jones Lang LaSalle. Sam Marshall, KM Specialist from Unilever used KM to tackle business problems. Steve Ellis, Senior KM Manager from HSBC gave a depressing account of how his team had struggled with introducing KM to a hugely profitable organisation. He gave an example of capturing key knowledge (through a structured interview) from the HSBC CEO who recently retired after working for “decades” in the company. Christof Widmer, Head of KM from Jones Lang LaSalle, succeed in implementing KM under the guise of Client Relationship Management. His advice, also shared by Steve, was to call any KM initiative by the latest buzzword in the organisation so that people can relate to it.

If Singapore were to take the advice from these three gentlemen, KM would probably be used as a tool to tackle unemployment and should be launched under the guise of Remaking Singapore!

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Do you want to see an alternate account of KM Asia? Visit elearningpost.com, Martin Laycock's London Knowledge Network site, or Sam Marshall's Blogspot.

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View our KM Asia Photo Report
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Report from KM Asia - Day 2

Day 2 Report from Goh Su Nee and Patrick Lambe

5 Nov 2003
Practitioner KM
Editing by FT Liu

The keynote speaker for Day Two, Thomas A. Stewart, emphasized taking knowledge to the market, which is essentially selling what one knows. He quoted Art Buchwald who once said, “Never sell anything only once.” For example, columns in periodicals could be compiled into books, which in turn, could be recycled in the form of talk shows. Again the mention of books as an effective means of knowledge transfer. Mature Singapore workers should consider compiling their experiences into books so that their experiences can be marketed. Thomas Stewart himself is the author of two well known books on KM (“Intellectual Capital” and “The Wealth of Knowledge”) before taking on the position as Editor of Harvard Business Review in November last year.

Three other KM practitioners shared their various KM initiatives in the “Early KM” Track. Mr. Nakashima, Head of KM Team at Kewpie Corporation, worked on connecting employees (6,000 of them) through online communities. Mr. David Gurteen, a KM consultant, focused on demonstrating the value of KM through actions and results. Again he reminded the audience that there are times when promoting KM could be suicidal and the KM label should be dropped and the initiative should be conducted in business terms. Mr. Rosli, the head of technical support in one of Malaysia’s independent power producer, Malakoff, worked on a knowledge sharing system to support the sharing of good engineering practices.

In the “Mature KM” Track, Roland Zeilbeck, Principal KM Consultant of Siemens Business Services, shared his experience in developing a taxonomy for over 50 million intranet pages! Two key pieces of advice – organise the taxonomy around business objectives and use metadata to package the taxonomy so that search tools can find the items of content. The taxonomy theme was developed further by Raju Buddharaju, CTO of the National Library Board. Coming from the angle of managing digital library services for diverse communities, multiple taxonomies were used to suit different user needs. The main message – understand your user context and needs when developing your vocabulary, thesaurus and taxonomies.

Dr. J.K. Suresh, Principal Knowledge Manager of Infosys Technologies, took the audience through a range of different measurement techniques for measuring the value of KM Implementation. It is not easy to find direct measures and one should recognise that realistically, all measures will be approximate ones. Justin Chin, KM Practice Leader from IBM, ended the day with his hilarious spoof on “Animal Farm” where he characterised different cultures affecting knowledge seeking and sharing behaviours as sheep (like to be led), dogs (like to collaborate), cows (like to wander), pigs (like to be pushed) and wolves (like to have their target knowledge fast). A truly enlightening end to the conference!

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Do you want to see an alternate account of KM Asia? Visit elearningpost.com, Martin Laycock's London Knowledge Network site, or Sam Marshall's Blogspot.

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View our KM Asia Photo Report
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