Knowledge Management Roundtable (KMRt)

This week I attended a meeting of the Knowledge Management Roundtable in Melbourne. Land & Water Australia is a corporate member of the KMRt which means we get to send 2 staff to each meeting and take advantage of their great Common Interest Working Groups as well. Each meeting (quarterly) has a series of guest speakers within the theme of Knowledge Management.

This week we had the pleasure of hearing about

• Managing a Workforce of One from Hewitt Associates
• Collaboration is all about People from James Robertson at Step Two Designs
• Trying out a Peer Assist with 3 of our colleagues
• Setting the agenda for the rest of 2008
• Evaluating our Common Interest Working Groups and where to from here.

The KMRT meets quarterly and is a great blend of both public services and private enterprise charing their information and knowledge issues and developing solutions collaboratively.

Education for Information Professionals

Hi all I have just spent another fascinating week. Sunday through to Tuesday evening last week I was at Charles Sturt University School of Information Studies in beautiful Wagga Wagga, NSW. I was very lucky to be invited to sit on a Think Tank which was looking at the future of information management education at CSU. CSU is one of the few universities which offers undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD opportunities for librarians and information managers. I met up with some old friends from the information industry such as Sally Dallas from Zenith Information Management (providers of information professionals to all types of organisations), Robert McEntyre from Robert McEntyre and Associates (who I have worked with in the past developing strategic plans for library and information services), Kay Harris who for many years has been one of the key people in driving the Online Conference which is held in Sydney every 2 years, and met Mike Eisenberg from University of Washington iSchool.

I also learnt that CSU has 28 PhD candidates who are undertaking research in information management. Very impressive. The venue was the wonderful Wine and Grape premises at CSU which is set in a vineyard with the most spectacular views.

The end of the 2 days left me very confident that CSU will develop into an iSchool like the model used in the USA.

I could not resist but take photos.



This event was topped off with a visit to Buckman Labs and dinner with Mark Koskienimi the MD for Australia and New Zealand. Buckman is famous for being one of the (if not the) first ever knowledge enabled company. Robert Buckman's book 'Building a knowledge-driven organization' is a classic in the KM field. This photo is of Mark Koskienimi MD of Buckman Labs in front of their amazing premises in Wagga Wagga, NSW.

Victorian State team training a huge success

Another blog post from Nerida (who is starting to get the hang of this) Last week Melanie, Bruce and I conducted our first solo Core Group Knowledge Leaders training for our Victorian State colleagues. By solo I mean we did not have our consultants (Anecdote) with us for moral or practical support. We managed to cram 3 days worth of training into 2 and a bit days and still came out smiling. Although there were a few moments such as Melanie losing her voice and having multiple coughing fits.

We had 4 State level participants who were put through the entire Knowledge Strategy process as documented in the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK).

Feedback was excellent and I am meeting with the participants for a follow up on the 14th Of February when I am back in Melbourne for the VCMC KM Meeting

We are now booking the other States into our calendars for he Regional Knowledge Leaders training and expect all States to be completed by the close of the Program on 30 June 2008

Our next blog will be from Alison, Claire and Pam (AANRO manager) from the VALA conference in Melbourne.