This is an excellent and detailed description of how knowledge is managed and transferred on the modern battlefield using what amounts to be a wireless intranet, commercially available off the shelf GPS and microsoft chat. Chat is used for real-time consideration of issues from the field by experts with quick turnaround. There are some great (and funny) examples of application of knowledge transfer in this article. It also details some of the environmental challenges of deploying the infrastructure to support it.

Summary:

I did a bit of digging into Knowledge Management professional associations and certification so that I could determine whether being "certified" might be a good thing to do in terms of lending credibility to my employer's KM practice. My findings are as follows.

Certification organizations:

Knowledge Management Consortium International: KMCI

Knowledge Management Certification Board: KMCB

They compete. KMCB came after KMCI. There's a story about this included in the details below.

KMCI offers:

CKIM (Certified Knowledge and Innovation Manager)

Overview

Details

The associated professional society is KMPro

KMCB offers:

CKM (Certified Knowledge Manager), levels 1, 2 and 3 with concentrations in Knowledge Mangement and Knowledge Systems Engineering (CKM and CKSE)

Overview

Details

The associated professional society is CKIMPS

A listing of Knowledge Mangement Organizations can be found at DMOZ.org or Google's directory (Google piggybacks on DMOZ but ranks the links by relevance rather than alphabetically as DMOZ does) as:

http://dmoz.org/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Organizations/

http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Organizations/

Details:

KMCB is lobbying ANSI and ISO to set standards. KMCI feels that's the wrong approach. Dunno who's going to win. David Skyrme writes about whether "standards" are really needed here.

CognaTek and KMPro support KMCB. Ed Swanstrom of Cognatek is listed as a board member of KMCB. A narrative of Ed Swanstrom's hand in the origination of the split between KMCI and KMCB is described in XML Topics Maps (XTM) discussion group [XTM is an emerging standard for ascribing semantic meaning to information in XML form; an area of natural interest to KM practitioners] in a response by Andrius Kulikauskas to a post by Ed Swanstrom solicitng XTM's participation in the ISO Technial Advisory Group (TAG) formulating standards related to knowledge management and knowledge economics.
Swanstrom's original post is here.

Note that GKEC.org, KMCB (kmcertification.org), cognatek.com, eknowledgecenter.com and ckimps.org all appear to resolve to the same website (or related websites). The choice of the domain name for the professional society, CKIMPS.org, is similar to the certification acronym (CKIM) used by the rival organization, KMCI)

This article focuses on Donald Schon (Schön) , a trained philosopher who enhanced our understanding of the theory and practice of learning.

Significantly, he was also an accomplished pianist and clarinettist – playing in both jazz and chamber groups. This interest in improvisation and structure was mirrored in his academic writing, most notably in his exploration of professional’s ability to ‘think on their feet’. On this page we review his achievements and focus on three elements of his thinking: learning systems (and learning societies and institutions); double-loop and organizational learning (arising out of his collaboration with Chris Argyris); and the relationship of reflection-in-action to professional activity.

I've read a very interesting study by him done for the British architectural professional society analyzing how knowledge and skill are transferred from practicing architects to students in the rather unique professional context of the architectural studio. It explains and elaborates the transfer as occuring in the "Watch, Participate/Practice, Do" cycle.

In this article: ongoing·Why XML Doesn't Suck (a mostly technical thesis of the good points of XML in response to an earlier complaint of his wherein he points out the difficulties of programming with XML), Tim Bray relates:

When I'm doing a standup speech, I often ask: “Everyone in the audience who thinks they're going to be using the same word processor in ten years, raise your hand.“ No hands go up. “Everyone who has data around that's going to have value in ten years?” After a minute's thought, every hand goes up. The lesson is clear: information outlives technology.

Knowledge, of course, is the more valuable form of Information (cf Nathan Shedroff's
Unified Field Theory of Design).

I can't recall if I've blogged this, but John Seely Brown writes about Organizational Learning as it *actually* happens; not as the corporate entity would design it to happen via the development of shared narratives in communities of practice (Watch, Participate, Do). He discusses how organizational learning occurs because people desire to *become* part of the community (good 'ol aspiration and affiliation at work ... where have I heard *that* before) and the motivation to do that is what causes knowledge to be transferred, diffused and shared. It's a fascinating and *long* article. Prepare to mentally chew on it a bit. Excerpt from the conclusion:

To foster working, learning, and innovating, an organization must close that gap [between espoused and actual practice]. To do so, it needs to reconceive of itself as a community-of-communities.

This touches on how we store information and the extraordinary efforts we must go through to find something in digital milieu. The case cited here is a documentation of the first use of The Smiley :-)

Dr. Carla O'Dell, the president of the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) writes in the Navy's Chips online magazine an overivew of Knowledge Management, What's Now and What's Next.

Here's an article at GanttHead (a site for project managers, natch) that discusses a technique that integrates the hemispheres of the brain by allowing creativity and imposing order. The technique, using a Mind Mapping, was developed by Tony Buzan in the 1970's. There are books out about this stuff too.

Alright! Ben Hammersley of "The Guardian" newspaper (UK) writes an accessible treatment of how you can use a piece of software called a "Newsreader" to efficiently process news on the web. He even describes RSS (and what it's written in: XML) in an understandable fashion. Good job, Ben!

Chris Goetz referred me to this article on the Accenture website about the subtleties of virtual collaboration. This came up in an email thread about the usefulness of instant messaging.

This whole area on the Accenture site, "Outlook Online", looks like it will be an interesting read and area to track.

Nathan Shedroff's new book, Experience Design, arrived in the mail yesterday. I enjoyed diving into it. I've heard Nathan speak at a couple of web builder conferences and have enjoyed following his development of experience design as a discipline on his website and in the AIGA Advance for Design, an initiative to define Experience Design from the Graphics Artist direction, I suppose.

One of the sites referenced in the book was Virtual Tourist. I've gone there and set up my travels. Lots of fun.

But I digress: the book is a visual feast and I'm enjoying it as an unorthodox textbook. Definitely recommended.

Andrew Dillon, Dean and Professor of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of the University of Texas at Austin is interviewed by IT@UT as to what he's trying to accomplish there. I wanna go, I wanna go!

Ok, I know you'll think it's nuts but here is an Evangelical Christian Pastor, a specialist/thinker on how the church should respond to the cultural paradigm shift towards postmodernism, proposing that making the "church" into a "learning organization" as part of the solution. Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Post-Modern Matrix.

I'm in the middle of reading George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things : What Categories Reveal About the Mind. It's tough sledding (read: serious research-y stuff) but very interesting as a primer on how people process and deal with "information".

Gerrit Visser's view on Learning Organizations, what got him interested in them and what books have been helpful. Addresses the question: "What is the difference between a LO and OL"

Closing the Cognitive Gaps: How People Process Information, An article from the March 22, 1999 Financial Times of London Mastering Information Management Series.

Constructivism explained. Systems of classification are interesting to me as a means by which we acquire and use knowledge (epistimology). Course notes from:
P540 - Constructivism, defines it in two was: as a philosophy and a set of instructional practices.

"As a philosophy, constructivism suggests that, while there is a real world out there, there is no meaning inherent in it. Meaning is imposed by people and cultures. So, for example, one who followed the constructivist philosophy might say that there is nothing inherently correct about the way we classify living things (genus, species, etc.). This classification system is a human invention, and it is subject to revision or replacement. Thus, when we teach this classification system, we should teach it not as fact, but as the current system accepted by scientists. And we should also teach about the process of creating a classification system, not just the end product.

As a set of instructional practices, constructivism favors processes over end products; guided discovery over expository learning; authentic, embedded learning situations over abstracted, artificial ones; portfolio assessments over multiple-choice exams, etc"

Idea Management. David Weinberger, editor of the "Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization", discuses in Internet.Com's Buzz Soup what Idea Mgt is all about (article posted TODAY! so very current). Dave is a co-author of "Clue Train Manifesto" and explains what he thinks the real differences are between "information", "knowledge", "know-how" (!) and ideas.

"Whatever you do, keep the three types of knowledge separate in your minds. For one thing, they live in different strata:

• Knowledge mining is in the province of marketing data wonks


• Know-how is in the province of people doing hands-on work with customers


• Idea development generally is the job of office workers in various departments -- although good ideas can come from anywhere, of course (whereas the sources of bad ideas are usually easier to identify).

And, for another, how you "leverage" all three types of knowledge is different: you mine the first type of data, you publish the second, and you encourage the third.

Idea Reservoir - Interactive Idea Management GroupWare. A tool for creating a "reservoir of innovation opportunities" sort of. Looks "not very professional" (like it was done by those more "technically" inclined).

Idea Management A consultancy based on the concept of Idea Management. The author claims to have thought of the whole thing in 1995 (at the dawn of the web age).