Eric Mack On-Line

Next up, Dr. Steven Newman, Vice President, Technology Application at ARES Corporation is sharing his experience about "Succeeding with knowledge Management." Dr. Newman manages programs related to the Space Exploration Mission Directorate, integrated knowledge management, and risk management.

Notes from: Succeeding with Knowledge Management

First rule: don't call it a Knowledge Management System; we call it the Knowledge Management Program.

Don't walk into the room and say "I'm here to talk about knowledge management."

Instead, say, "I'm here to talk about helping you do work, efficiently and effectively."

For KM to succeed, it has to have a personal return on investment. Then there has to be ROI for the team, and then for the organization.

Believes in a bottom up approach to KM (Personal KM). Technology is strictly an enabler. (In fact, believes that KM should not be located in office of CIO)

Rule #1. KM does not exist unless it is peered with a critical business process.

Be careful about building fences around knowledge. (Silos)

#1 problem people have is TIME. There are only 24 hours in a day. #1 thing people can't do is create more time.

Key advantage of KM is to be able to more done in less time.

Work takes place in conversation: Words, body language, and the way it's said.

Knowledge may be transferred by:

• Transferring people with the knowledge
• Peer assists
• Knowledge sharing forums
• Coaching/Mentoring
• Focused training
• Codifying lessons in programs, documents, procedures
• an more (missed slide)

Process mapping - an extremely useful tool to understand work, how it gets done, who's accountable, what they know and what they need to know to do their job,

They create knowledge-based risks (I would call them knowledge nuggets) that combine rich media: interview, PDF, pictures, etc.

I like his point #2 on the slide on integrating risk and knowledge management practices. He seems to be making the case for personal KM - understanding your personal workflow before you look at the work the organization does.

Their knowledge based risks strategy:
- Perform activity
- Capture lessons
- Reuse
- Repeat

Seems to be blurring the lines between traditional risk mgmt and risks as in loss of knowledge. Might be me - I'm tired.

Fascinating discussion of how they are working to capture knowledge from the Space Shuttle and Space Station programs and then transferring these to the new Constellation other programs.

Using Knowledge Cafe's to facilitate knowledge capture; inviting past, current, and future space program engineers together to share stories and learning. Also involved 360 interviews to get different perspectives. Amazing to see what the different perspectives are based on interests and assignments of the individuals.

What;s on the horizon? a web 2.0 site: Riskapedia. A collection of risks, knowledge bundles, narratives, and discussion.

A key theme that he brought up several times is to maintain the focus on enabling the accomplishment of work.

For KM to be perceived as successful, it has to save people time.