ACKMIDS 2005 – Larry Prusak’s presentation

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —December 8, 2005
Filed in Insight

On Monday and Tuesday this week I trundled off to ACKMIDS. Actually I didn’t think I would make it this year FradaHenrybecause I was scheduled to be in Adelaide but as luck would have it my client postponed our work which left me free to attend. ACKMIDS stands for the Australian Conference for Knowledge Management and Intelligent Decision Support. Frada Burstein and Henry Linger have been running this conference for 10 years and because it was a momentous occasion I took this snap of them both.

The highlight of the conference was the keynote address by Larry Prusak. He gave a presentation by video-link on the past, present and future of KM. Here are a couple of things I noted from Larry’s presentation which were good reminders:

  • 1st generation KM largely failed because of the mislabelling of everything as KM and an over-emphasis on technology
  • knowledge is profoundly social
  • it is very difficult to share knowledge; it’s local, sticky and contextual
  • physical, cognitive and social space will be future areas of knowledge endeavour
  • no one identifies with the firm anymore—people identify with their groups and communities
  • trust and social norms have yet had the attention they deserve
  • norms need to enforced
  • transparency is important to foster trust
  • trust is contagious therefore putting trustworthy people into the network hubs is important
  • people don’t learn from failure (hmmm, I didn’t agree with this one)—only workers and organisations fail, never management
  • knowledge management will never disappear but the name will change

Thanks to Frada and Henry for another excellent conference. I look forward to seeing the proceedings.

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

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