E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Information Management and Knowledge Management by John Bordeaux

And since it looks like I am on a roll, now that I have returned back home from a long business trip to the US and Madrid and have spent most of the day today on a massively intense catchup with everything that has been happening since I left, I thought I would share with you another presentation which I am sure you are going to enjoy quite a bit. In fact, I am sure it is going to make you think twice about things, specially if you have got an Information Management or Knowledge Management backgrounds.

The wonderfully provocative presentation is also in Slideshare; it was put together by John Bordeaux, one of the smartest talents and thought leaders in the Knowledge Management space that I have been following for a little while now and whose blog I can certainly recommend to anyone out there interested in the topic of KM or Knowledge Sharing, whatever you would want to call it.

A little while ago he put together What I Did and in it you would find a rather inspiring approach towards what most folks feel has gone through a certain death over the last couple of years: KM itself. Like I said, this is one of those decks that will change your point of view on some of the key elements behind it all. Have a look and you will see:

Oh and if after going through that particular slide deck, it hasn’t changed many of your views on what is traditionally known as Knowledge Management, then let me point you to a recent article he put together in his blog and which has got so much food for thought on it on this very same topic, that I will defer to an upcoming post to chew further some more on it. I tell you. It will totally be worth your time. Head over and read Back to First Principles for Knowledge Management …

I told you, it would make you think! (Thanks ever so much, John, for the inspiration!)

Tags: Collaboration, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Innovation, Slideshare, John Bordeaux, Essentials, KM Essentials, Traditional KM, Traditional Knowledge Management, Information Management, IM

Communities of Practice: Conversations to Collaboration by Steve Dale

For a good number of years Communities (of Practice, of Interest, of Purpose, etc. etc.) inside of the corporate world weren’t viewed as important and crucial as they eventually are. For a good number of years, while working as a community builder for various different business units, I have been saying that the major driver of the adoption of social software within the Enterprise are actually communities themselves. Nowadays, it looks like things are finally changing and communities are back into the game, and therefore social software is bound to succeed within the corporate environment just because of those living organisms pushing forward their usage and adoption, now more than ever before!

Thus now that your business is, at long last!, looking into the task of setting up a community building program, so it can help further with the adoption of those social networking tools, you may be wondering what interesting resources are available out there, that you could reuse, right? Well, let me help out with that.

I thought I would share with you folks over here a superb presentation that my good friend Steve Dale put together and which he just shared very recently, both over at Slideshare and in a blog post titled: Communities of Practice: Conversations to Collaboration. You can check out the deck over here (Or flip through the embedded slides below) and in it you would be able to find the following topics covered:

• "What is a "Community of Practice" (CoP)?"
• Five steps to a successful CoP
• CoP Facilitation – the magic ingredient
• Case Study – IDeA CoP Project
• Case Study from the private sector"

It is one of those decks that makes for a very interestingly helpful and educational reading, including some real case studies!, if you are new to the topic of Community Building in general and would want to know how to get started with your communities programme inside / outside of the firewall.

Well done, Steve! Thanks much for sharing this lovely presentation with us and for helping pave the ground on how to successfully nurture and facilitate communities within the enterprise world by  embracing social software. Excellent stuff!

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Communities of Practice, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Productivity, CoP, CoPs, Community Building, Community Builders, Slideshare, Steve Dale, Case Studies

IBM Lotusphere 2009 Highlights

Well, not many, I am afraid. At least, for now. More than anything else due to the lack of DAI (Decent Access Initiative). Yes, that same one David Terrar managed to put together under "Always say DAI – conference WiFi" a couple of months back and which, it seems, keeps failing more and more these days. That’s right, the lack of proper WiFi while attending conference events, specially technical / Internet related ones.

A few days back, you would remember, I put together a couple of blog posts where I was sharing further details about the good number of online resources about the event itself, i.e. Lotusphere. Resources that I was planning on using myself as well as check them out throughout to see what was going on, specially for such an event of these dimensions (I bet plenty of us would have wanted to clone ourselves to be at multiple places while in there!).

Well, it didn’t happen. From day one (Monday to me, since I arrived Sunday evening) and right till the very last day, Thursday, the WiFi connection at Lotusphere was everything, but functional. Don’t take me wrong, I am ok without it, since I was there in person, but given the relevance of the event, we all know it is a good thing to share the news with the rest of the online world, so we all expect to have a fully functional Internet access. Yet, it didn’t happen.

Most of you folks who have followed this blog for a while now, as well as my twitterings, know that I have adopted the approach to live tweet @ elsuacon, so that apart from capturing live thoughts I’d then want to blog about at a later time as highlights, I would also have the opportunity to share those thoughts with anyone out there who would want to follow up on them. Well, at Lotusphere, it didn’t happen, at least, as often and as much as I would have hoped for. On the contrary, rather erratic!

To the point where I gave up altogether and decided to focus on enjoying the event from an offline perspective, i.e. lots of superb conversations face to face with the folks attending / presenting / demoing at the event. And in that respect I had a blast! (More on that at a later time)

By the end of the event, at the Closing General Session it was mentioned how the wi-fi didn’t cope with the high peaks throughout the event, not because of the bandwidth, but because of the lack of enough access points for us all to access the Web and while I do praise the explanation, and apologies, of what happened, I am still disappointed that such an important and relevant conference event as Lotusphere didn’t plan ahead that well, in this area, the fact that technical folks are always going to carry multiple devices with wi-fi enabled, at the same time that they would be watching on the Internet the unique events that took place throughout the week. That’s to be expected, I would think, specially coming from where it is coming: IBM.

Poor planning? Maybe. I don’t know. For me though one of the biggest disappointments of the year. For sure. Why? Because I realised that even my own company cannot put together a proper wi-fi network connection for us all attending it live to cover the IBM event of events as thoroughly as we would have hoped for! And that, my friends, hurts. Ouch! It really hurts!

(You may be wondering whether I will be putting together further highlights of the Lotusphere event, right? Well, yes, I am, but they are going to be just like my live tweets. Erratic and not complete. So I’m going to wait for all of its content to become available online, including the recordings, if they are made available as well, that is, and comment further on those sessions I thought were worth while talking about, specially those dealing with the same topics I get to blog about over here. Stay tuned!)

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Relationships, Lotusphere, Lotusphere 2009, Lotusphere09, LS09, Events, Conference Events, Orlando, Florida, Internet Access, Wi-Fi, DAI, Decent Access Initiative, David Terrar, Twitter, Live Tweeting, Highlights