1.

Supply and demand 22 Jun 2010
In the last edition, I wrote a flowery article about two cultural hindrances to the flow of knowledge. First we looked at ‘tall poppy syndrome’ where people are reluctant to share for fear of getting ‘cut down’ by their peers. Then we explored ‘shrinking violet syndrome’, where people are overcome by a sense of corporate humility, and don’t believe that they have anything worthwhile to share with others.
But what if we could nurture our organisational garden such that the poppies felt safe to grow and the violets stopped shrinking and started flourishing? Would that solve our knowledge-sharing problems?
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2.

Masterclass: Spinning the web 21 Jun 2010
Is your company’s website merely an after-thought? Is it always playing catch-up or is out of sync with the rest of the organisation? Despite it being the first port of call for most audiences, does it still receive a meagre budget compared to other areas?
These are all typical scenarios for many websites and quite a few organisations still position their website and the associated budget for it too far down the list of priorities. While it is recognised that the intranet or internet sites now play an important role in communications, customer and employee servicing and moving work online, somehow they often don’t match up with the other areas of the business. This is likely due to the lack of an online strategy.
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3.

Dear Stan... 26 May 2010
Once upon a time, I used to tell the tale of ‘Stan, the go-to man’ as a witty, too-simple example of the applications and benefits of knowledge management (KM). Stan is an everyman, who I’d describe as having been with his company for many years and who is regularly sought out when people needed answers or help with some critical project, even though he has responsibilities which have nothing to do with being a human wiki.
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4.

Challenging preconceptions: British American Tobacco 9 Apr 2010
The potential of KM was first explored at British American Tobacco back in 2000, by an internal division aptly named ‘Imagine Evolution’. Its brief was to investigate new working practices as the internet at that time was starting to have an effect on business, but the possibilities for collaboration had yet to be fully understood.
Aware of KM’s promise to help smart organisations to learn collectively from their successes and failures through online collaboration tools and cognisant of British Petroleum’s approach to such tools – as outlined by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell in their book Learning to Fly – Imagine Evolution was soon preaching the gospel of ‘learning before, during and after’, running retrospects and after-action reviews and publishing knowledge assets in specially designed intranet applications.
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5.

Community spirit 9 Apr 2010
As a freelance journalist, I have the pleasure of working with several organisations. This work stretches my skills and experience not just across different industry sectors, but also across disciplines – from business management to media relations. I believe that this independence is vital – both to being able to view knowledge management (KM) within a broader business remit, but also to having a perspective that is not driven by my own KM predilection. I may undertake research into KM disciplines, involving speaking to numerous practitioners, but I have no particular KM bias; nor would I have any particular motivation to extol the virtues of KM, if the environment was pointing to its likely demise. Such an outlook may be useful as a long-term question is whether the recession will act as a catalyst for change, which will fundamentally alter the practice of ‘KM’ as we know it. If we agree that change is more than likely, then this will clearly affect the ways in which KM should now be ‘optimised’.
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6.

KM on a shoestring 5 Mar 2010
One could be forgiven for approaching this subject with a degree of pessimism. However, it should not be seen in such a negative light. The current financial crisis has undoubtedly posed problems for the legal profession and those involved in devising knowledge management (KM) strategies for the short and medium term.
It has been argued in the past that KM has been too dependent upon technology; this approach has changed but in the current climate an organisation’s restrictions on spending money on IT will no doubt affect the ability of KM professionals to implement KM solutions.
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7.

Challenging preconceptions: A hybrid approach 5 Mar 2010
Continuing her 'Challenging preconceptions' series, Cora Newell interviews John Alber of Bryan Cave's Client Technology Group, and examines the divergent development of KM in the UK and US.
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8.

Cover feature: Innovation co-creation 5 Mar 2010
Our senior leaders do not want just another staff consultation exercise, nor an experiment in how to use online forums or blogs to stimulate staff interaction. Instead, the KM team has been asked to partner with the senior leaders and given the remit to be as innovative and creative as possible in finding ways to enable our staff to generate – and share – their best ideas to help shape the company’s future.
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9.

KM measurement Part III 17 Dec 2009
In the past two issues of Inside Knowledge, Robert Hoss and Art Schlussel have demonstrated how to set in place a strategy for measuring knowledge management maturity, plus provided some common metrics that can enable organisations to get started. In this final instalment, they discuss how to act on the outcomes of those metrics – including some of the activities in place at the US Army.
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10.

Technology the enabler 17 Dec 2009
There is no doubt that technology and knowledge management (KM) have long been bedfellows. While it has often been easy to criticise KM practice as too technology driven, the need to manage information flow has generally ensured a place for KM practice, with technology not far behind. That need to get a handle on information has also only grown as e-communication and the internet have given employees access to often unmanageable quantities of information.
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