Nick Milton

We all suffer from bandwidth issues in KM – generally due to the deluge of information. Here’s a good principle from the military for dealing with these issues. Information overload by SparkCBC on FlickrThe phrase […]

 I wrote a blog post yesterday on 4 types of KM plan, and (too late) realised that there were more than 4. Here are another four types. Yesterday’s blog post mentioned the following 4 types of plan, which are a […]

Knowledge Management plans exist at many scales. Here are 4 of them.KM planning sessionImplementing KM is a project, and a prject needs a plan. However KM can be implemented at many scales, and many variants of KM […]

 Reports are poor places to keep knowledge. However they do have a role to play in Knowledge Management. Image from wikimedia commonsby user Coolcaesar under CC licenceOnce upon a time, we relied on reports, pap […]

A reprive from the archives – an overview of Connection and Collection as dual components of KM.Image by Marc Smith on FlickrThere are two main mechanisms for supporting the flow of knowledge in an organisation – […]

Governments know all about supporting traditional economies. So why are they so poor at supporting the knowledge economy? Image from wikimedia commonsby 401(K) 2012, CC licenceA “knowledge economy” is a focus for […]

Peter Drucker said that our task this century is to revolutionaise the productivity of the manual worker. Here’s how KM can help.Assembly Line, from Library and Archives Canada, via FlickrPeter Drucker famously […]

How many times do people miss knowledge because they don’t know it exists, or can’t find it?Image from wikimedia commonsattribution Dg-505, CC licenceMy guess is that this happens all the time. Someone creates a […]

It is tempting, when starting KM in your organisation, to set up a Knowledge Management community of practice as a way to demonstrate the value of communities. I suggest this may be a mistake.Of course knowledge […]

One the  enduring challenges in Knowledge Management is defining effective metrics to measure its value. A promising metric which may fill the gap is the Frequency of Lost Knowledge (FOLK) and it’s partner the […]

How do Simple Rules help share or prompt knowledge in a complex world?Image from wikimedia commonsDonald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt’s book “Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World” describes the […]

If the culture of your organisation makes Knowledge Management difficult, what do you do? Seek to change the culture first?  Or work your way around the different cultural elements?Change Alley sign by Matt Brown […]

Many Knowledge Management initiatives fail to get going. Others succeed initially, yet fail once the KM implementation team is removed. And yet some are sustained for the long term, with KM becoming “part of the […]

Imagine you have identified some lessons or new knowledge within a work team. How do you pass them on?  There are 8 different contexts which determine how you might approach this.I am a great believer in […]

Sometimes you need to change the terminology in order to change the way people think. Maybe we should copy the Army, and do this with the commonly misused phrase “lessons learned.”The term “lessons learned” is in […]

There is a concept in lean manufacturing known as the “minimum viable product”. This is a very valuable concept to bear in mind when introducing Knowledge Management to an organisationImage from […]

What happens in a world where the crowd, or the machine, is smarter than the expert?The excellent book Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael Mauboussin, was that “as networks harness t […]

The Curse of Knowledge is a real problem when it comes to knowledge sharing; trying to transfer knowledge to the Unknown User. It’s also one of the reasons why lesson management systems are full of mushy […]

It’s not often you see a public review of a KM Strategy – here is a good example.Image by Stefan Erschwendner, on FlickrI blogged yesterday about Oxfam’s KM strategy. Oxfam referred to knowledge and to knowledge […]

A KM strategy map is a great way to visually connect KM activity and organisational strategy. Here is an example.Last week I blogged about Knowledge Management at Oxfam, and shared their Rights and […]