Knowledge Management and Innovation interactive group meeting

Today I went to one more meeting at this group and the main topic to discuss was Management Model for KM. First, Correios (Biggest mail company of Brazil) presented how is their management model, and then Gerdau (a brazilian multinational siderurgy company) presented their model and an interesting case of Community of Practice. At the end of the presentation session Petrobras presented the strategic plan for KM to 2020.

After a coffee-break, where I had a chance to talk to many people from different companies including a guy from Petrobras that told me about a book “The Living Company” written by Arie De Geus, who worked in Shell for many years and his book is one of the references for Knowledge Management.

At the discussion part I was together in a table with some other private companies to discuss how can we get a management model for knowledge management in place. Not only what is needed but also how can we get there. The answer was that we need first a “click” in somebody’s head to realize that KM can be something to help his/her needs for the moment or for the future. Then, one of the ways the group realized this model could appear (thinking bottom-up) was this person getting what are the strategic goals of the company, articulate with sponsors intra-area and inter-areas, check the existing actions, and draw some possible scenarios for future and how those can impact an area or even a company result. One of the things this model must have is consider 4 big areas:

• Strategy (aligned to the company strategy),
• Structure (formal or informal, KM needs a representative person that will be the owner),
• Processes/Technology (to give directions on how the knowledge will be managed and supported by what) and
• People (the ones who have the knowledge).

I came back with a lot of ideas in my mind, thinking on how to bring Shell KM (that is strong in different ways in other countries) to Shell Brazil.

Knowledge as an Action adding Value

This week I went to a presentation made by Prof. Milan Zeleny (Professor of Management Systems at Fordham University), one of the fathers of the Data Information Knowledge and Wisdom (DIKW) Hierarchy at the knowledge domain.

One of the interesting things at the presentation was vision of the difference between Information and Knowledge looking through another glass. For him, Information is the description of action while knowledge is the coordination of action. This way Knowledge is always tacit because once you describe it, it is Information. To be knowledge again, this information must be transformed into an action.

In my opinion this is a very interesting point of view because most of the time we see a lot of information available but nothing is done using it. When someone gets the Information and starts an action, then we can say that this person knows how to do something.

If Information triggering action builds knowledge, and if we can measure the value added (to external customers, to users, etc) by each action, than we can measure the value of the knowledge being used. Nowadays where the Information and Information Technologies are becoming commodities, as they are highly available, the knowledge, or in other words the coordination of actions using those IT and Information, can be the difference to add more value to the business.

Knowledge, Innovation and Wisdom are measurable, and then must add value to your business.

Regards,
Alex Lopes

High Impact Presentations training

Hi everybody,

Do you know how to open a presentation bringing the public attention to your speech and motivate them to do something at the end? Today I started a training about how to make a high impact presentation.

The training is going great. Only one day and I could feel how I improved my way of get the public attention, getting more confortable to speak, more organized and structured and making it a good experience not only one more presentation. The best part of today’s training was about how to open the presentation, using some techniques like mistery, asking questions to think about, making weird afirmatives that will impact and get everybody’s attention, etc.

Tomorrow there will be more exercises about how to open for questions, answer hard questions and also how to behave using voice levels and gestures while presenting something.

If you want to improve your way of presenting something, even in informal conversations, I’m sure that a presentation training is good not only professionaly but also for life.

Regards,
Alex Lopes

Knowledge Sharing as a continous process

Most of the time people see Knowledge Sharing as an overhead activity, completely out of scope, or try to pack it inside of a project or workshop to be done in some days or hours.
Knowledge Sharing should be much more than that, it should be a running maintain activity. If somebody needs something that you know, for the company is better if you expend some minutes explaining that then this person have to look for it, expend a lot of time searching and learning pieces of it in many different places.

Thinking about time expent, some minutes from people who knows are cheaper than many hours from people who doesn’t know and needs to buy this knowledge from nothing.

Thinking about medium term benefits, if you help someone with some expertize you have, this person will do the job better and faster, the results for the company will be better and it will come back to you and everybody soon. If everybody does that, the Synergy makes the benefit much bigger.

Here in Shell it should be considered “Enterprise First” behavior but some managers seems not to see the benefits of it and for the whole company, only worried about their specific “to do’s”, ignoring that everybody are multicultural and multi-knowledge people and maybe me or you know what somebody is looking for.

If you see somebody or something when you can use your knowledge to help, do it. It will be better to everybody! Share your knowledge, build this sharing culture, one day you will need and somebody will be there to give you the directions.

Regards,
Alex

Book "Sinergia" (Synergy) from Sergio Lins

Last week I received an e-mail from Sergio Lins, that was my professor in MBKM, offering his book named Sinergia (Synergy in portuguese). I had a look at some pages in his website and the book seems to be great. I'm very excited to start reading it.

The book talks about how to create, develop and keep the synergy, capitalizing the knowledge built in this process, not only in an Enterprise world but also personal and interpersonal.

Also some lessons learnt from consultants and executives that are investing a lot in Collaboration and Knowledge Management methodologies to improove the synergy in their business.

For the ones who speak portuguese, it is a very good book to read. I'm already waiting for mine to arrive.

Alexandre lopes

Kiva.org - loans that change lives

Some weeks ago I found a very interesting site called Kiva.org that is a social network to provide microcredit.

The idea is very simple. There are many microcredit institutions around the globe and all of them need money to give as much credit as possible. Also, there are many people around the world who would like to help people in other countries with at least a small quantity of money. Then Kiva, created by Matt and Jessica Flannery in 2005, came to provide this link between people who wants to help loan small quantities of money to those people in developing countries who needs money to improove their small business and pay it back later.

The only concern I would have to Kiva is that we loan money to them, they send to those organizations locally and they loan our money with very low interests, but still interests. When the person pays back they keep the interests and just pay back to us our money. It's like we are a bank with 0% interests. Anyway it is still a good initiative.

Kiva is already in 39 countries, helping more than 28700 projects with an average of 600 dollars each.

If you want to help someone in the other side of the world with some dollars you have stopped in your account, just go there and create an account. This is one example of connactions that trigger actions.

Alex Lopes

Interactive Innovation and Knowledge Management group

Last week I received an e-mail asking me if I could be the focal point in Shell Brasil inside of a group that will discuss and share what is being done around innovation and knowledge management inside the big companies in Brasil. Petrobras (NOC), Vale (3rd biggest minning company), Embraer (flight constructor), 3M (innovation company), BNDES (National Bank for Development – getting specialized in intangible assets), and some brasilian government institutions: FINEP, INMETRO, ONS, ANP and TJ.

After ask my manager permission, she approved and now I’m going there to represents Shell what will be good for Shell Brasil (having a person there to share what we are doing and learning from them) and to myself (expanding my KM connections inside of the big companies in Brasil.

Next 7th May there will be the first monthly meeting of this group of companies and I let you know here what happened there. Now is time to collect as much information here in Shell Brasil as possible around Innovation and KM being used. If I don’t find much I will talk about Shell global.

Regards,
Alex Lopes

Collaboration Tools in Shell

Friday I was requested by a colleague to do a presentation to his team about Collaboration tools we have in place here at the company. That's interesting because I'm not from any Knowledge Management or Collaboration team but I'm being recognized as a person who knows a lot about the tools in place.

Today I expent almost 2 hours in the morning putting together all info I have from those tools and reusing some presentations from the Downstream Collaboration Center of Excellence to get the right descriptions for all tools. Simple tools like Groove Virtual Office and Wiki are completelly unknown for most of the people here what is surprising. I hope I can bring a general awareness to this team and use this presentation further to other teams.

Building Knowledge Management Culture

To start my posts in this blog I would like to start to a post published in my Shell Blog that had many comments.

I went to a presentation made by Dr. Klaus North, KM professor and founder of German KM Society, who showed KM and Inteligent companies. The presentation was here in Rio at the Federal University and was there weren't empty seats. At the presentation something interesting that came over was about the KM culture.

Most of the time that we look at KM and learn about KM, in MBA's or reading books, we always see KM in a management point of view, integrated to the business strategy, giving directions to the company, etc but there isn't much talking on how to build this KM culture at the level of people will do the KM happens at the day by day.

Companies can have a great process, tools in place, framework, management support to run KM but if there isn't an Ask - Learn - Share culture, things just don't happen. The question here is how to have this culture built? How to start it? How to onboard the sharing part of this culture at the day by day? Usually people Ask, Learn and then keeps this learning without sharing the knowledge built.

How to start doing that in our local teams? Maybe trying to put it in our GPA's a goal regarding collaboration for 2008? Maybe building a workshop to show the benefits when we have a collaboration environment that enables a leraning company? Maybe both approaches together?

Once we have a Share culture built at the team, it will start contaminating the other teams and this will becomes a company culture. Why dont you try something different today in this direction?

Regards,
Alex Lopes