KM Asia, SUNTEC Convention Centre, Singapore, Nov 8, 2006

Woke up early as usual and walked over to Suntec at 0845. The highlights for the second day were two live conversation with Tom Stewart from Boston and Dave Snowden from Canada.

Tom Stewart, Live from Boston

Tom started with the question ‘who are we to talk about creativity’? In his assessment KM seems to be fighting creativity. To him conventional KM works are not focusing on codifying what we do not know.

He explained the interesting position he is at, at HBR where he could observe trends, understand them and to share his thoughts on them world wide. Some of the trends he observed are cost of raw materials are going down but wages increase. Sometimes with no real creation of what he called as wage wealth. Another trend, based on observing at the expenditure in US, people pay and spend more on knowledge compared to food. He saw opportunities of creating wealth through innovation using brain power. He believes ideas are Capital and everything else is just money. To him the role of manager is to look at certain continuity and change accordingly which to him means being innovative.

To him the pillars of knowledge economy are.

• KM a strategy? How you buy and sell Knowledge? Stick in knowledge into products and processes. Turn knowledge into products and services. Selling high-end knowledge services
• Knowledge asset separate winner and loser. Discover and locate Knowledge Assets in your organization the analyse and invest on them. Understand the structure of your knowledge assets. As an example for us the Human Capital and the importance of Relationship Capital are growing rapidly. So we should strategise and capitalize on them.
• KM is to understand the jobs involve around these assets and how to deliver knowledge to the right people. Though it is important to store, transfer and share knowledge effectively it is more important to connect high end tacit knowledge.
• The returns of knowledge - Blue Ocean strategy

In summary he opined that ideas with assets will be the future. He sees KM role as in between ‘the suits’ and creative people. As for measurement he recommended to concentrate on values/measures at the output.

Dave Snowden, Live from Canada

Dave continued on his complexity theme and he delivered it this time with enough emphasis and examples that resulted in clarity that I thought was the best that I have heard from him.

• Now distributed knowledge and JIT KM – social computing (wiki, blog)
• Narratives Mgt rather then tacit management
• Knowledge ecology - Grameen Bank
• Shift to naturalistic management – Innovation

KM Asia, SUNTEC Convention Centre, Singapore, Nov 7, 2006

I was told there were more participants this year compared to the last. I observed ¼ are Malaysians that include people I know and those who know me. Whether true or not, good or bad my reputation precedes me. I am mainly at this years’s KM Asia to learn something really new but the first day disappoint me already. Lief Edvinsson maybe a revelation to some but to me he talked about the same thing with less or no value-add. Nevertheless organizationally we are ready to explore the possibility of looking at IC accounting seriously. In general he set us on several challenges.

• The idea of looking at things Organically – city of ideas, organizations
• Quizzics – the art of asking questions• Future is 14 second away
• Knowledge Navigation
• Knowledge city, Regusa –Dubronik
• Blind spots
• Product to people business
• HR – why internal brains whereas more available external
• www.Akwissensbilanz.org, www.Wissenskapital.info
• www.intellectualcapital.se
• Volunteers – Volusion
• Island economy – Open source, society
• Knowledge tourist
• Measure, Multiply, Futurise

Alex Bennet also shared her US DON experience that I have heard before. Afterward I said hello to both Lief and Alex. Lief interested to come down to talk to us and Alex asked me what I have done. The networking was great as I got to meet new interesting people which include some from Malaysia.

The first day was hectic as the organizer cramped a lot of things for one day. In the end I had to miss the later part of the evening’s session as I already booked myself to attend my first Knowledge Café by David Gurteen at the NLB. Around 1730 I left Suntec with Annis on a cab to NLB. Later I found out the place to be very near and walking there would not be an issue by my standard.

Knowledge Café is not rocket science and it is about honest and free flow conversation on any topic. There were about 40 of us comprises of really a good mix of practitioners which include 5 from Malaysia. Dave initially explained to us the mechanics of Knowledge Café. Basic rules are;

1. Select a topic to converse
2. Divide and sat yourself in a group of 5-6 any more or less than that would not be effective
3. The idea is to converse with no record or note taking or even a conclusion. The idea is to break the barrier of knowledge sharing as well as discovery. Quite different compare to Peer Assist

Of course on a corporate setting the idea of just talking about something together without any objective in mind would be wasteful. However the simple nature of Knowledge Cafe is what makes it works. I would suggest using Knowledge Café carefully and not going into the extreme. I had fun doing it and again met with a lot of interesting people as well including Naquib who introduced himself to me. We finished around 2030 and as I planned walked back to the hotel.

Singapore to me is just like the Singapore that I had been three years ago. Concrete jungle with rows and rows of shopping malls that some areas, to certain extend, too clinical. Knowing that I would be in Singapore I bought and read Neil Humphrey’s (Notes from even a smaller island) Singapore trilogy, one of the current Singapore best sellers, to understand Singapore from an outsider perspective. Humphrey’s version of Singapore is from the perspective of and expatriate living in Singapore like a normal Singaporean. For the record he lived in Singapore for ten years before he decided to move to Downunder. So you know now my biases looking at Singapore during this visit. Continuous urban redevelopment, building more and bigger shopping malls, the latest was Vivocity, Kiasuism, and a young generation that seems to me very confuse.

KM Asia 2005

Recently a colleague who had just came back from KM Asia 2005 shared with us that the trend is shifting from managing continuity to discontinuity. What my colleague meant was, organizations spent and invest quite a lot on infrastructure for IM and KM which in the end becomes a routine process of coding, capturing and storing knowledge. But, how much of these knowledge are really useful for the organisation ultimately? How do we know the quality of our tacit knowledge? What is the real value of building KM tools based on yesterday's information? To me both have its merit. In order to have KM happening in any organization IM (Information Management) has to be there first. When they talked about capturing, coding and storing to me they are talking more of IM rather then KM perse and there is a very thin line separating these two now. I believe this is still the struggle in most organizations. The questions asked are valid and what we need to do as part of mitigation is to do an information audit. A lot of what we collect and keep are, what I called as, ‘just in case information’.

At the KM Asia John Seeley Brown and Prusak also talked about intellectual and social capital where managing knowledge flow is even more crucial