APQC – The Conference on Knowledge Management and Innovation – May 2007 – Houston, TX, US

Tags: APQC, Knowledge Management, KM, KM Events, Innovation, Dave Snowden, Jimmy Wales, Carla O’Dell, Alice Dunlap-Kraft, Mary Ellen Sullivan, KM Training, KM Learning, Communities, ThinkPlace, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Wikis, Weblogs, Social Bookmarking, Podcasting, Tagging, Syndication, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing

First day back after the long Easter break and it looks like this time around the everlasting battle between work / life balance was won by life! What an incredible weekend I have had! Checked out lots of different places and had a really good time! I took a whole bunch of pictures that I am hoping I will be sharing shortly in my Flickr account, as soon as I get back on track from catching up on everything! Goodness! How much e-mail can you get after being a couple of days off? At least, I am now done with it and back on track with almost everything.

Anyway, that is not the reason why I wanted to create this particular weblog post. Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on a presentation that I will actually be using very shortly as beginning of May I am heading over to Houston, TX, US, to attend the APQC event on The Conference on Knowledge Management & Innovation.

Yes, that is right. From May 10th till 11th I will actually be attending what promises to be a fantastic event, if you get to read the 7 Reasons why this KM conference is a must attend. The list of keynote speakers is rather impressive as well as you can read over here (Dave Snowden, Jimmy Wales, Carla O’Dell, amongst others). No doubt. But there is actually a whole lot more. From May 7th till the 9th there will also be some specific Knowledge Management training and I have actually decided to attend a couple of the different courses offered: Knowledge Management: Strategies and Tactics for Business Results and Measuring the Impact of Knowledge Management.

So in the end I am going to be there from the 6th of May till the 13th enjoying what I am sure is going to be a great learning opportunity to find out some more about what is going on around the world of Knowledge Management at the moment. As I have mentioned above, I am actually going to be speaking, along with two of my fellow IBM colleagues (Alice Dunlap-Kraft and Mary Ellen Sullivan), during the event as well as one of the different breakout sessions. The title of the session is Communities: Hotbeds of Innovation at IBM and I have taken the liberty of reproducing the abstract over here so that you get to see what we will be covering during the couse of the breakout session:

"IBM’s culture emphasizes innovation, and its leaders rely on communities of practice for innovation. The innovation culture permeates communities from the very top, where IBM’s vice president for technical strategy and innovation issued an executive challenge to communities, to the grass roots, where ThinkPlace catalysts evaluate new ideas from their communities. Community members swarmed around the buzz of new ideas in a recent 72-hour Innovation Jam, and IBM’s Academy of Technology created an outreach program to link to community members. The growing use of social software has increased the number and diversity of collaborators working on new ideas."

As you would be able to see, we will be talking about how communities have shaped the way knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst community members have taken a new wave of interactions within the enterprise by which innovation is thriving back again thanks to the adoption of different social computing tools, like wikis, weblogs, social bookmarks, podcasts, tagging, Web syndication, etc., in order to help those same knowledge workers drive that same innovation. And all that along with the usage of one other tool that has certainly grabbed a lot of interest already: ThinkPlace.

The final presentation has not been made available just yet. We are just giving it the last finishing touches, but as soon as it is ready to go I will actually be sharing it over here, so that you can have a look well ahead in advance of what we will be talking about. You can imagine how excited we all are with the whole thing, not only for making it to the event and present on some of the stuff we have been working for the last few months, but also because of the incredible opportunity it would be to attend some KM related training along with meeting up with a whole bunch of other passionate KMers and do some heavy (social) networking. Perhaps one of my favourite activities from every single event I get to attend 🙂

Will you be there? Will you be making it to this years’ APQC Conference on Knowledge Management & Innovation? If the answer to both of those questions is Yes! and if you would want to meet up for a drink, do not hesitate to drop a comment over here or contact me offline and we will be able to hook up, I am sure. Look forward to meeting up with those of you who may be going to the conference!

I may create another follow up weblog post with some final comments as the final dates approach, thus stay tuned for some more to come!