Eric Mack On-Line

Steve and I presented our half-day workshop on knowledge worker productivity, today at the KM World Conference. The workshop went very well and I think the participants left pleased. The workshop focused on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), which explores how expertise and effectiveness scale up to organizational value with a focus on the capabilities and contributions of each and every knowledge worker. PKM starts with individual priorities and processes that lead to self-organization in the workplace with values, skills, and tools to build stronger teams and networks from the ground up.



Executives consider knowledge worker productivity to be a priority for bottom-line results. Knowledge workers need to make informed decisions, but then they need to translate decisions into successful actions. We talked about the eProductivity equation - how to combine knowledge, methodology and technology to achieve a successful outcome.

Steve and I talked about KM and then took a look at the fundamental tools and processes of KM from a personal perspective. We then presented a framework for sustainable personal and team effectiveness that blends learning and collaboration-oriented tools and practices with the kinds of action and outcome-focused habits and behaviors found in action management methodologies, such as David Allen's Getting Things Done or Stephen Covey's 7 Habits.

It was great to have so much time hours for the workshop; we were able to include a large number of exercises for the audience and we had lots of time for Q&A. Normally, in our one-hour presentations, we do not have the time to invite the audience to share their experiences and lessons learned. I think that everyone benefitted greatly from the discussions.

I really enjoy presenting with Steve, we make a great team; Steve brings number of soft (non-tech) skills to the team and I bring a lot of technical method application for a balanced presentation. Steve and I also don't always agree on our approaches to KM, which provides for lively debate and wonderful opportunities to discuss the similarities and differences in our approaches.

We would like to thank all of the attendees of our workshop; we appreciated your questions, comments, and most of all your participation!

We hope to see you again, next year, at KMWORLD 2008!