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Check out highlights from the KM Showcase 2019.

Save the date - March 4-5, 2020 - for the next Showcase!  The 2-day event will be held at the Westin Arlington Gateway. 

You won't want to miss it!

Creativity and Innovation for KM Programs

The second in a series of videos about knowledge management, creativity, and innovation. In this episode, Stephanie Barnes (www.realisation-of-potential.com) and John Girard (www.johngirard.net) discuss knowledge management and why collective intelligence is worthy of note.

Recently scientists discovered a new organ in human body “Interstitium”, probably one of the biggest. It was always in the plain sight, but it was never recognized as an organ. Knowledge is also probably suffering from this overlooking. While it is underlying any activity done by organizations and the ability to manage knowledge directly impacts performance and competitiveness of an organization, this is completely missed.

If you have Netflix, you’ve probably seen Tidying Up pop up on your feed. It’s a new series based on Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which presents her methodology for clearing your clutter, getting organized, and creating space for only the things that still and will continue to serve you and “spark joy” in your home.

When charting a new destiny for KM, it is important that we get the basics right. The basics involves understanding what Knowledge is for organizations. Anything and everything within an organization are expressions of knowledge, be that the ability of an employee, approach/process adopted to perform an activity, culture of an organization, how employees come together, the products or services.

I’ve been in the business of Knowledge Management Consulting for the vast majority of my career and, in my experience, one of the most challenging aspects to KM is its intangibility. I’ve helped an array of organizations to define their KM Success Metrics and KM Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to make KM measurable and tie it to business value and hard return on investment. In these cases, though, many of these KM KPIs are only measurable over years and often have a stronger demonstration of value to the organization rather than the individual. 

For this first in a series of videos about knowledge management, creativity, and innovation Stephanie Barnes (www.realisation-of-potential.com) is interviewed by John Girard (www.johngirard.net) and shares her thoughts knowledge management’s challenges and the possible role creative leadership plays in creating a culture that supports organisational learning.

Click anywhere on Video image to launch.  A new window will open on YouTube.

I find that quite often when we say Knowledge Management, we actually mean Content Management or other aspects of explicit knowledge. That is a logical starting point for most of us, for historical reasons but also because it is the easier of the two knowledge dimensions to quantify and measure both progress and business impact.

Law firms, like other professional services, are constantly looking to improve our knowledge-management strategies, i.e., to share and reuse valuable work product and leverage institutional knowledge. When properly executed, these programs translate into efficiency, higher quality work, happier clients, and more engaged employees.

"The Knowledge team took an incredibly complex backend product—one that searches a content-management system, matter-profiling system, client database, HR database and lawyer bios—and made the experience feel simple."

What is KM about?

It depends on who you ask and what their experience is with it. Some people/organisations focus on technology, some on people, some on process, a very few recognise that it needs to be a balance among the three, and for good measure also create a strategy to support their plans and ideas and to ensure alignment with the organisation.

But beyond that, what is knowledge management about? Why do we/our organisations do it?