DaChispa

I got a bit of surprise this morning when I loaded a product I had installed a few weeks back to have a quick look at.   It is called Illumio http://www.illumio.com/web/home.jsp and comes from TACIT, who have been working in this arena for some time.  It is a sort of expertise location friends reunited and the shock was that, without doing anything at all, I already had some sensible requests for expertise.  It looks like you can set up communities to which you can send requests but, not as emails, they appear on a screen or pop up to tell you another request has come in.  It also looks like you can manage what you respond to.  Maybe a bit amorphous for business use?  Or is it exactly what we need as I’m not sure expertise location tools have ever really become essential tools in many places and this might be a way of making them part of the furniture?  I wasn’t going to do much more with it, but I think it might be worth keeping on the radar.

One of the things I really want to do is to get people in my organisation to think about how they use and share knowledge as part of their working life – not as part of some ‘km’ project, but embedded in what they do.  I know this is a bit of a KM Holy Grail, but just because it might be difficult, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted.  The objective in ‘job’ terms is to set up some form of KM training – and I know that some organisations have had some success in doing this.  However,  I have decided to kill several birds with one stone and make it more personal.  We are working on offering a consultancy style service that will produce a personal knowledge profile for individuals.  This will be linked to other work going on around the employee knowledge lifecycle where we can map people to stages in their job/career and point them towards tools and techniques for creating, using and sharing their own knowledge.  I hope that, by doing this, we will open a few eyes around growing strong personal networks and improved methods of knowledge sharing.

 As we work on this, we keep finding additional, almost accidental,  benefits.  Although this is aimed a personal km development, it should give us an overview of the stages that people in the organisation are at.  To give an extreme example, if we find a lot of people in the ‘death’ (i.e. ready to leave) stage – this might give an organisation pause for thought.  Similarly, we are looking at individual networks, but this could be built up into a larger group/organisational network overview and would certainly show us who people feel are the real experts in the organisation.

Eventually – as this is very labour intensive – we would aim to automate the process and follow up where it will have the most effect, but for now, we need to try it out on a few more people and see whether it  has legs.

This came to me through one of my techmails and is the Regional Leadership Forum’s (RLF) 2007 book list. RLF, “a nine-month program of individual work and group sessions presented by the Society for Information Management (SIM), fosters leadership development in part through book discussions”.  The link is here: http://www.cio.com/archive/111506/tl_readlist.html?source=nlt_cioleader but I include the booklist below in case the link breaks.

I thought this was an interesting idea and another way of helping people both learn and share.  Nothing like a heated discussion over a management book to bring out how you might apply the techniques.  I wonder whether this is something we could try in this organisation.  I know that there is an existing book group, but I don’t know how well it runs – and I guess this would be something slightly different anyway.  Might be worth a go – maybe something to add to the online mix.

2007 RLF Reading List

1 Adler: How to Read a Book
2 Boyatzis & McKee: Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with     Others through Mindfulness, Hope and Compassion
3 Kotter: Heart of Change
4 Bridges: Managing Transitions
5 Buckingham: First Break all the Rules
6 Dotlich, Noel and Walker: Leadership Passages
7 Conger: Winning ‘Em Over
8 DePree: Leadership is an Art
9 Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning
10 Friedman: The World is Flat
11 George: Authentic Leadership
12 Ghandi: the video
13 Goleman: Working with Emotional Intelligence
14 Hammerschlag: The Theft of the Spirit
15 Jamison: Nibble Theory
16 Katzenbach: The Wisdom of Teams
17 Lencioni: Death by Meeting: A Leadership Problem about Solving the most Painful     Problem in Business
18 Machiavelli: The Prince
19 Mackenzie: Orbiting the Giant Hairball
20 Marquardt: Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by     Knowing What to Ask
21 O’Toole: Creating the Good Life
22 Patterson: Crucial Conversations
23 Rousseau & Cranston: The Social Contract
24 Shafir: The Zen of Listening
25 Jaworski: Synchronicity
26 Useem: Leadership Moment
27 Wallis: Two Old Women
28 Whyte: The Heart Aroused
29 Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
30 Michalko: Thinkertoys