KMWorld 2016 recap-making connections, sparking innovation
Trigger for learning
After identifying 10 facets of knowledge management, John Lewis, author and founder of Explanation Age, questioned why so much emphasis has been placed on two of them (knowledge technology and collaboration) at the expense of learning. He suggested an integrated framework for business process operations and organizational learning. The unified model ADIIEA is named for its stages, which reflect a continuous cycle of automation, disruption, investigation, ideation, expectation and affirmation. Rather than focusing on knowledge as an entity, he sees it as fundamentally a learning process. “We have been blindly using instructions leftover from the industrial age,” Lewis said, “where disruption is seen as a problem. Instead, we should see it as an opportunity to trigger a new learning cycle.”
Like search technology, enterprise content management (ECM) has been a core function in knowledge management and is changing equally dramatically. The extended enterprise now includes partners, customers and suppliers, and the majority of companies want to share their managed content with trusted partners. Organizations are also adding new business objectives for ECM. “More than half the firms in our global online survey are rethinking ECM, with the leading objective for new use cases being focused on customers,” said Cheryl McKinnon, principal analyst at Forrester. Rather than having a monolithic repository for content, organizations want content applications that have a particular purpose. “These applications require well thought out metadata that supports an understanding of the connections between people and content. Systems are evolving so users will engage with the content using natural language and bot assistants,” McKinnon said.
The Communities of Interest on Wednesday afternoon and the Knowledge Café Mentoring Morning on Thursday allowed attendees to participate in small groups that focused on a specific aspect of knowledge management. Facilitators guided the discussions, and participants developed practical solutions to their knowledge management issues. All in all, attendees left the conference with new ideas, new colleagues and new topics for further inquiry.
Here’s a link to the conference presentations: kmworld.com/Conference/2016/Presentations.aspx.