Nick Milton

Mature KM is a mixture of attitude, habit, and framework.If you visited an organisation that had truly embraced and embedded Knowledge Management, what would you see? What would be different and distinctive about […]

There are a number of strategic approaches that you can apply when implementing Knowledge Management. All have their failings – we recommend a combination of two of them. There are many and varied ways to […]

I  blogged recently about Connect and Collect – the two parallel approaches to transfer of knowledge. Now let’s look in more depth about the two modes by which knowledge is carried – Content and […]

The lesson learning system should be a supply chain for new knowledge. But how do you calculate its effectiveness?We can look at lesson learning as a supply chain; identifying new pieces of knowledge and supplying […]

Knowledge that “everyone knows” but which is quite wrong, it termed “General ignorance” and is a dangerous component of KM. QI stage-set from wikimendia commonsThere is a highly amusing TV quiz here in the UK, […]

If you are interested in how different industries approach KM, here is a new way to differentiate them. Different industries tend to approach KM in different ways, or apply KM in “different flavours.”  In S […]

Business in a world of change is a learning race. The winner is the organisation that can develop and mature knowledge more quickly than the competition, bringing new and improved products and processes into the […]

How do you structure your knowledge store? There are 3 options, but one is far better than the other two in meeting the needs of the knowledge seeker. Image from Robins.af.milThere are three ways to organise your […]

Probably the worst place to store project lessons is to leave them in the End of Project Report.Tombstone created using http://tombgen.appspot.com/I know this is still the default approach for many project […]

All projects deliver not just a product, but knowledge as well, and there needs to be a clear understanding of what form that knowledge will take. Part of any Knowledge Management policy therefore has to be a […]

This is a reprise and rewrite of a post from 5 years ago about KM change models vs KM maturity models. AKA “why KM change is more like spread of a forest fire than the growth of a tree”.Photo from the US National […]

Does KM need a single technology platform? More likely it needs several technologies.This blog post was prompted by a thread in Stan Garfield’s SIKM community asking what technology platform people use for KM. My […]

If you are a leader who wants to help develop a Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning culture in their organisation, you can do this simply, by asking two questions. I have a question by The US Army on […]

I have blogged quite a bit recently on Connect and Collect approaches to KM, aka the transfer of tacit and explicit knowledge. Here is a reprise and extension of a useful table which describes the two. Three of my […]

This post is an update of an earlier post in 2014, brought up to date with new survey data.As part of our global surveys in 2014 and 2017, answered by over 700 KM professionals, we asked respondents to rank a […]

Connecting people is far less efficient than Collecting while being far more effective – but how much more effective?Knowledge can be transferred in two ways – by Connecting people so that they can discuss, and […]

In organisational safety management, they identify a “near miss” as evidence that safety practices need to be improved.  We can do the same in knowledge management.Image from safety.af.milI have often used Safety […]

If you are a competent ship’s master, what types of knowledge do you need to be able to navigate on a new voyage to an unknown port?  You need two types – explicit and tacit, charts and pilots.Brunswick Harbor […]

The story here is taken from the book “Performance through Learning”, and tells of a crucial “proof of concept” exercise at De Beers, the global diamond company, which was instrumental in demonstrating the value […]

KM requires a learning culture, and motivation to learn comes from motivation to improve.  That’s why KM thrives in a high-performance culture, where people are not content with existing performance, and a […]