Colin Cadas
Colin graduated from Cambridge University in 1985 in Engineering. He is a chartered engineer and a member of the British Computer Society.
Colin started his career 25 years ago in Rolls-Royce as a methods engineer developing nuclear containment for the company’s submarine business. Since then, he has worked extensively in knowledge acquisition, knowledge modelling, expert systems, real-time systems, artificial intelligence, software engineering, knowledge management, semantic web, and design engineering processes.
He is currently “Engineering Associate Fellow – Knowledge Management” in Rolls-Royce. In this role, he is responsible for both the research and technology acquisition strategy in engineering knowledge management, and the knowledge management implementation and support strategy. This involves the acquisition, development and implementation of knowledge management techniques and practices across the company, working with all business units at senior executive and working level within R-R to implement functional, programme and sector KM strategies. Though the work has an engineering focus - the tools and techniques are deployed across the global Rolls-Royce engineering community (17000 people) and beyond.
His experience encompasses a very broad spectrum from the deployment of social tools and techniques (such as Communities of Practice, Lessons Learned, Organisational Network Analysis) through to formal methods for knowledge capture, representation and automation/expert systems. The methodology he formalised for knowledge capture has received worldwide publicity as a standard for knowledge retention.
Over many years, Colin has been invited to speak at many conferences around the world, and has given invited speeches at BCS, MIT, Babson Institute, Applied Knowledge Research Institute (which he also chaired for many years), KM Brazil, BrainTrust, APQC, KM Europe, GIBS Institute and many others.
The EU funded project he led from Rolls-Royce to pioneer the adoption the CommonKADS methodology was recognised by the EU as “best in class”, and for a period supported the EU in providing to industry guidance on best practice.
Colin is currently working on:
• Deployment of mandatory policy, process for KM to apply across all sectors, functions and sites across R-R
• Deployment of new technology for search, collaboration, lessons learned and Communities of Practice
• KM strategies for all functions
• Knowledge capture, modelling and transformation for Human Readable and Machine Readable Exploitation (“Platform Independent Knowledge Models”)
• Design Automation
• Development of advanced semantic technologies for application to both legacy and new knowledge, working with Universities of Cambridge (engineering dept), Sheffield (Computer Science), Loughborough (Manufacturing technology), Birmingham City University (Design Automation) and Leeds (Work Psychology)
• Organisational Network Analysis, working with University of Virginia
• Meeting and Email Effectiveness Change Management to Improve Productivity
• Secure Content Management Deployment (SharePoint)
His personal interests include music, sport and travel. As a lover of good food, Colin hates mayonnaise and other mayonnaise-like foods.