TFPL, Head of Training and Events
Last week we held our first TFPL Connect event of 2010. It was great to see a combination of new members along with some familiar faces. Speakers Michele Fordyce from EEF, Hank Malik from Carbon Trust and Caron Cant from Birmingham City Council introduced their ideas about future challenges for KIM specialists, which sparked some interesting questions and thoughts from the audience.
The evening was chaired by Martin Sanderson, TFPL and began with Michele Fordyce sharing with us her experiences at EEF, looking at how they engage with their customers through the new Information and Research function. Michele explained this turn around had been made possible by focusing on the key business needs, building relationship with the service lines and senior management and talking the language. Engaging with internal customers was vital to demonstrating how KIM could contribute to the business goals, help functions meet their targets and increase value to members.Hank Malik, then gave some interesting insights in to knowledge and innovation, discussing how we have moved from collecting content, through communities and connecting people, to ‘the wisdom of crowds’ enabled by ‘open’ connectivity in public spaces. Open innovation, the public exchange of ideas is, he argued is the next phase of KIM but with this brings issues around governance and control of information.
Caron Cant, went on to talk about her experiences at Birmingham City Council , where she highlighted that with over 56,000 employees, recognition and reward of information management skills and behaviour was key to developing an effective information driven organisation.
Interestingly in a KIM world of W2.0 technologies, blogs, jams, podcasts, it was communication and people skills that topped the speaker’s agenda. However, during the evening it became clear that there are three central issues that are likely to be with us for sometime: the tension between structure and freedom; aligning with business drivers and customer focus; and the recognition and reward of KIM skills and behaviours.
Rhetoric, Fashion or Fact was one of TFPL Connect's regular events. All our Connect members will receive a summary of the evening and we will be running three further evening events during the year.
Comments