The seminar on "Knowledge Management" was held at Sun MicroSystem's Customer Briefing Centre in London on the 12th July 2002.
The Chairman, Paul Talbot of Ashford Borough Council welcomed the delegates to the latest seminar of the Association and introduced the Keynote speaker, Neill Allan of Partners in Performance Group.

What is Knowledge Management?
Neill set the scene by describing the differences between knowledge and information by use of an interesting practical demonstration. This showed that different interpretations of information is possible with an incomplete knowledge of the article in question. The relationship between of tacit and explicit knowledge was explored and questions were invited from the floor on the issues raised.
Contact: n.allan@ndirect.co.uk

From Knowledge to learning and improvement.
This presentation was given by Richard Grice, Assistant, Director of Knowledge Learning of the IdeA. He proposed that sustainable transformation & improvement came from within. Fear of failure can blight attempts at innovation and that the major difference between success and failure is that the successful have learned from their failures and changed behaviour. Knowledge and learning is critical to sustainable transformation where changes to the culture, challenging the relevance of existing processes and procedures and dramatically altering the status quo must occur. There is a high risk to this process but in the public sector the "new economy" requires the ability not only to operate in a changing environment but to engineer this fast changing environment. His talk also listed some transformational truths and graphically showed the innovators dilemma and the psychological impact of change over time.
Contact: richard.grice@idea.gov.uk

Cops & Robbers
Bill Woods, Head of Knowledge Management of Essex C.C. gave a potted history of how Essex C.C. had progressed from Information Management professionals in service-specific silos in 1975 to a corporate function managing 'core' information assets in 1997 and finally to an Information & Knowledge Management unit. His long experience in IT & IM had shown him that Knowledge Management was not about IT but about people.
These were represented by Communities of Practice (CoPs) which were seen as key enablers e.g. CoPs of lawyers, accountants and archivists whose skills for organising knowledge was in much demand. IT was helping in the CoPs development by providing virtual networks of people and sharing information on the Intranet & working with partners on the Extranet. There were a number of such CoPs being developed but there were issues to be addressed, such as reconciling Information overload with a knowledge deficit; what is the cost of not knowing or having the information & knowledge to apply it.
The "Robbers" of the title were seen as the holders of knowledge that were not prepared to share and instead created information "wars" with other knowledge users.
Contact: bill.wood@essexcc.gov.uk

Improving impact through Knowledge Management
The next speaker was Paul Najsarek of the Audit Commission who described the stages that the Commission went through in order to organise their own approach to their own Knowledge Management initiative. They developed their KM approach by Auditors & Inspectors sharing their experiences with LA's and creating knowledge networks. There were a number of obstacles to establishing a knowledge management system, among them :- evidence based culture, individuals feared loss of power/value, skills and capacity and it was not seen as the "day job".
Key learning points were to:- start with the outside world, people as the focus and what were the key business problems. Paul described the wide range of development on their web site and described the various networks set up within the Audit Commission to address and link up to form a knowledge network. The findings (in a report published on the 19th July) were that in local authorities there was clearly a recognition of the importance of the 'e' agenda, optimism about achievement and that improvement for users was the purpose. However, confidence about 'e' delivery varied, e-gov could feel marginal to the core processes. It was not just about access but quality also and it can't be done in isolation. The combination of business understanding and the ICT skills required were critical.
Contact: p-najsarek@audit-commission.gov.uk

3 Legged stools & Unintended outcomes
Kevin Miles the Head of Knowledge, Surrey Police opened his presentation with a brief outline of the Surrey Police area and functions. He outlined the tripartite nature of KM, business strategy, Human Resource management and Information management. Hence the 3-legged stool analogy where the absence of one or more of those elements would create an unstable KM environment. The key message and correction of the oft misquoted "Knowledge is Power" is that Knowledge is not a valuable asset until it is acted on. The relationships and dependencies between the 3 elements was well described with a cautionary note that for every intended outcome of mobilising knowledge there were at least 3 unintended outcomes. Kevin described several of those that had occurred in the Force.
Contact: 1372@surrey.police.uk

The Annual General Meeting of the Association was held and the present Executive Committee was re-elected unopposed. The Chairman made a point that he would not be seeking re-election next year but would be happy to continue as a Committee member if required.

Lunch was then taken and delegates had a good opportunity to exchange views and news on developments and issues in their respective organisations.

Workshop

After lunch the seminar moved to the last event of the day, a workshop entitled "Mobilising knowledge through people" This was facilitated by Elizabeth Lank & Sandra Ward of TFPL a well known knowledge management company. The first part of the workshop comprised advice on how to create and manage community groups, such as; restricting membership by numbers to avoid to large a group, create Community Associates, people who have worked for charities have good experience of recruiting volunteers.
The second part of the workshop commenced with the division into two syndicates and an exercise designed to create communication within the syndicate groups.
The individual members of the syndicates were then asked to identify those community groups that they were involved in and the pluses and minuses of those groups. The eventual aim of each syndicate was to identify the key "enablers" and "blockers" involved in the creation of a successful and creative community of practice or interest..
These were identified as:-
Enablers: Common interest or goals, Openness, Clear sense of purpose, Community spirit, gaining of knowledge and personal advantage.
Blockers: Lack of Leadership, Behaviour contrary to group values, "cliqueiness", lack of willingness to share knowledge or information. The workshop was drawn to a close with the delegates having developed a useful guide to the issues surrounding the creation of community groups.

Paul Talbot. Chairman ALABC.
16 July 2002