Mopsos

Subject: "Targetting, harnessing and extracting the value of unstructured information"
Location: Marriott Hotel, Kensington, London
Date: April 26-27. 2004
Format: 15 presentations from practitioners and experts + related discussions. Small tradeshow booths by Factiva, Verity and Infolution, acting as sponsors of the event.
Note: I could only attend day 2.

I- Important Highlights of the Conference

A. From Corporate Knowledge Management programs

MWH (WATER & WASTE)
A pragmatic knowledge management program founded on Communities of Practice launched in September 1999, which led to the endorsement of KM at heart of MWH vision after two years. The vision is focused on best practice transfer: "The corporation will use is global position and knowledge management concept to export best practices around the world instantly".
The company's knowledge strategy was published in February 2002. It is basically about supporting and nurturing global knowledge communities, whose role is to capitalize on local learning experiences and transfer best ideas and practices globally.
The flagship project was "KNet", the company's knowledge portal on the intranet, as a "gateway to [MWH] data and knowledge". It focuses on lessons learned. Every knowledge community has an active discussion forum on KNet.
Collaborative spaces have been opened as well:

• Lotus QuickPlace for internal collaboration or for external collaboration
  on one-off projects


• BIW for multi-project programmes


• Bentley ProjectWise for drawings


• Webcasts for online courses


• Sametime for Instant Messenging and synchronous meetings

Knowledge sharing events are also organized:

• Annual global technology conference


• Regional "knowledge forums"


• Awards for exceptional accomplishment in knowledge transfer and outstanding innovation

121 knowledge communities are now active at MWH. Almost 30% of the 6000 employees belong to at least one of them.

Personal Comment : Pragmatic approach and high level sponsorship is a good combination for success

SYNGENTA (AGROCHEMICALS)
Syngenta is a 20,000 people company formed in Dec. 1999 from the merger of the Agrochemicals businesses of Zeneca and Novartis. The rationale for the KM program was post-merger integration, based on the idea that, after a merger, informal networks of people are broken and need to be rebuilt.
The first approaches for knowledge management were clearly managed top down and relied heavily on IT tools, structures, processes and policies. They were not successful. One of the reasons claimed is that "IT competency of users was seriously overrated". The current approach is much more focused on clear business issues, namely decision-making in R&D projects, and tries to involve people much more to embed the program into day-to-day processes.

Personal comment: Syngenta claim they are making progress but they clearly are still facing internal resistance. The still need to understand, like my company by the way, that all stakeholders must be involved in knowledge sharing projects from the beginning. "In the knowledge economy everybody is a volunteer" (Peter Drucker)

EUROPEAN COMMISSION - DG ENVIRONMENT
A librarian's view on knowledge management. Traditionally, information was classified by information professionals (librarians) using universal classification systems (professional and technical thesauri), or using internal organizations or functions. The client focus was the user of the information, and the foundations was division of labor. Now the classification is business driven, and organized by actions.
A simplified model for business driven classification of documents builds on four facets: "Actor - Activity - Matter - Time". An example of top level classification of a document in the system would thus be something like: "Department A4(Actor) - Controls legal implementation (Activity) - Electronic Waste (Matter) - 2002 (Time)".

Personal Comment : I found this approach interesting for two reasons. First it relates directly to what the organization stands for: its missions, its projects. Second it establishes a link with management accounting.

SOLVAY (CHEMICALS)
Solvay (Philippe Drouillon) presented a very elaborate corporate Knowledge Management program which was conducted for two years in an exploratory mode before it was officially endorsed by the CEO. The "knowledge life cycle" (Identify knowledge gaps ->Collect/capture knowledge -> Codify/structure -> Organize/store -> Share/spread -> Create new knowledge -> Use/exploit) has been systematically analyzed and the company has been provided with proven group methodologies and collaboration tools for each phase. Communities of Practice and Business Intelligence processes are the foundations of the program. All knowledge sharing activities are performed in the context of either a community of practice or a Business Intelligence process, which ar currently being unified in a single corporate framework.
The KM team is composed of four people and reports to the CEO. Their main function is to run the program, teach methodologies and facilitate group events using those methodologies. For example, the company expert locating system on the intranet is populated using an interviewing "knowledge extraction" technique, called X-Fert.

Personal Comment: I was amazed by some of the knowledge methodologies implemented by Solvay which would be socially unaccepable without strong management backing. For example the Knowledge Network Analysis, "a way to explicitely lay down the roles and knowledge flows between people in the organization". An excellent presentation for an impressive program.

JONES LANG LASALLE (REAL ESTATE)
The rationale for the KM program is the same as Syngenta: Post merger integration between Jones Lang Wooton of the UK and LaSalle from the US. It was triggered by customer requirements (large international firms who want the same service in Buenos Aires and Singapore) and by the shared idea at the management level that "business quality is driven by market transparency". The KM program of JLL is a very traditional top-down "knowledge portal" project involving "knowledge plans" and "content managers".

Personal Comment: With this top-down approach, they will have a hard time.

B. From KM solutions providers

VERITY
"At the end of the day, what we are really doing is building the corporate university"

Personal note: Very unfortunately, Verity's presentation was a pure sales pitch, and I had the feeling that I should not have paid for that… However it struck me that the emphasis was put on Verity as an intelligence tool for the management, to help them understand what's going on in the company. Though it does make a lot of sense, it takes for granted that every "owner" of an electronic database should accept his/her data to become indexed and searched regardless of the benefit for them or the authors. I find this very questionable.

C. From The Ministry of Defence of the UK
One presentation which I unfortunately could not attend shows that the MoD is taking KM very seriously, as in the US DoD.

II. Overall assessment

• Pros: A few excellent presentations and interesting contacts for the future for benchmarking purposes.


• Cons: I wanted to participate in one event organized by the Ark-Group in London, because they have a well established name in Knowledge Management. However, in spite of their reputation and good choice of topics, I found this conference overrated, and too expensive for the value.

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