In Part One of this series, we reframed knowledge management strategies in the context of strategies for improving the health of the knowledge ecology. We’re using the metaphor of building a nest (sometimes referred to as an intranet) where our eggs can hatch and ideas grow, and decisions improve in quality. In Part Two we explored five strategies, tactics and frameworks for accomplishing this. Now, in the final post of this three-part series, we offer an additional five strategies.

In Part One of this series, we reframed knowledge management strategies in the context of strategies for improving the health of the knowledge ecology. We’re using the metaphor of building a nest (sometimes referred to as an intranet) where our eggs can hatch and ideas grow, and decisions improve in quality. Now let’s explore some strategies, tactics and frameworks for accomplishing this.

Over the past few years we have heard a lot about the special role of elevator speeches—those sound bites you practice in case you have the ear of a key decision maker or influencer in your organization for a few floors. I love this tactic, but let’s remember that it’s just a micro-skill and we can’t leave our communication strategies up to chance encounters. Let’s learn how to make our own magical moments.

In their recent Harvard Business Review article, Help Employees Create Knowledge—Not Just Share It, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown argue “the most valuable form of learning today is actually creating new knowledge.” Traditional KM systems represented a huge leap forward in terms of making explicit knowledge accessible and structured, but what knowledge management strategies and applications do we need in today’s business environment in order to maximize the intersection of knowledge and learning?

In my upcoming book on promoting knowledge management initiatives within the corporate world, I share a number of useful KM components that can be mixed and matched to suit an organization’s specific needs. Please read on for a sneak preview.

Due to popular demand, we are reprising a webinar presented by museum evangelist and strategist Nina Simon, where she drew upon research for her book, The Art of Relevance, and offered substantive, creative, and inspiring advice on how to increase your organization’s relevance to communities you hope to engage. Join us on February 2nd and see how Nina’s advice applies whether you work in a library, a museum, a theater, a park, an academic institution or a corporation.

We recently offered a webinar presented by museum evangelist and strategist Nina Simon, where she drew upon research for her book, The Art of Relevance, and offered substantive, creative, inspiring and practical advice on how to increase your organization’s relevance to the communities you hope to engage. Interestingly, in Nina’s role as speaker, she offers advice that applies whether you work in a library, a museum, a theater, a park, an academic institution or a corporation. It’s all relevant.

Does your organization’s mobile website lack the punch of your desktop version?

“Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.”
–Google Webmaster Central Blog, Mobile-first Indexing, November 4th, 2016

As part of its new mobile-first strategy, Google will give preferential search rankings to “mobile-friendly" sites (sites optimized for mobile devices). This change will have a significant impact on search results.

We will be offering a free webinar on November 15th that promises a substantive and thoughtful discussion full of creative, inspiring and practical advice on how to increase your organization’s relevance to the communities you hope to engage.

This is the third in a series of posts on IT and the information Professional. When I chat with information professionals and IT managers about open source software, they often talk about two key concepts:

• It’s free
• Bug fixes and enhancements come from the community

While both of these statements are true, they fail to paint the whole picture and hide some pretty ugly truths.

In my last post, I discussed the unfortunate fact that many information professionals find themselves at the bottom of the IT totem pole, and thus they receive underwhelming IT support as they attempt to build and manage world class knowledge/library systems, or special collections.

So what’s an information professional to do? Knowledge and library systems are complex pieces of technology that require IT involvement at some level. Over my career, I have observed that in departments having the best relationship with IT, the information professionals practice what I call "IT Jujutsu."

I talk to lots of information professionals about IT. Some have great relationships with IT, others not so great. But if you’re leveraging technology to build and maintain your collection and information/knowledge systems—and who isn’t?—then just like death and taxes, it’s inevitable that you’ll be working with IT.

The other day I joined a discussion on content migration with a client who is beginning a KM project. While preparing for the meeting I ran into this post. It’s from a customer support company, but many of the migration issues they face are similar to my KM experiences. I’d like to share some of the strategies we’ve used over time to turn this early implementation challenge into an opportunity for KM success.