KM @ APQC

I presented the KM implementation toolkit that I’ve been working for two years now in the recent APQC KM conference at Las Vegas and attended some sessions by thought-leaders and practitioners from various industries as well. This was my third international conference and definitely an experience to savor. While I received some good feedback from some of the people at the end of the session, I realized that there’s a lot more meat that can be added to the toolkit. (Now, that’s a benefit that I’d like to point out.)




A quick summary of what the implementation toolkit is all about: It looks at various business challenges and questions and maps them to practices, techniques and tools that cater to these challenges. How it does this is actually backwards. Based on my KM experience so far, I weaved the toolkit themes around four areas – Explicit Knowledge Capture and Explicit Knowledge Dissemination and Tacit Knowledge Capture and Tacit Knowledge Dissemination. The practices, techniques and tools revolve around each of these themes. What I think makes the toolkit special is that I managed to combine with a simple idea – a cardboard box. The cardboard box I’ve created projects the themes, business challenges and the practices and techniques in a simple manner that makes it very easy for the user to understand especially if she is new to KM and confused about its wide-reach in terms of business problems and solutions. Now, that’s all I can say for now. If you want to know more, I can surely help you out ….but provided I find the time for it and you don’t happen to be a competitor :).




Coming to what I learned from other sessions, there were four that I attended. One of them was about a scientific method to go about succession planning by identifying the roles and people at risk and prioritizing them to take preventive measures. Good analytical thinking, but whether it will work(achieve results) or not depends on the people of course. Another session was interesting. It was about a petroleum company that uses storytelling to a very large extent to preserve knowledge – historical, technical and culture. I thought their work was impressive – text, audio and video – and boy, they seem to be spending millions on this exercise. That must surely be possible only because the CEO believes in it. The third session was about using creative communication techniques to spread the knowledge sharing culture. Frankly, this one wasn’t new at all. The fourth session was something I wanted to know more about. Social Network Analysis. This company uses SNA to get communities to work together. They apparently don’t do an automatic SNA on emails but based on questionnaires and in-house tools and applications. Worth a try, I thought. Especially if the organization is a large one.