LtF Chapter 14 - Review of the book

This chapter offers a quick summary of how the book was written and what the authors learned in the process.

Time similarly for a review of this blogging exercise.

Firstly - in purely practical terms - it took a little longer to get through the book than originally planned. Two chapters a week was fine until I had a health blip and a bit of leave. I found it very hard to regain momentum after this. I think the longer time frame made it harder to "read" the text as a whole and the later chapters were less well considered and connected than the earlier ones. Certainly a quick look shows I had less to say as the exercise went on.

I found the process of writing the entries not too onerous and helpful in terms of ordering my thoughts. I plan to go back and consider if any of the ideas I came up with at the time merit further investigation.

Overall the book was very helpful. I have often found KM too nebulous a concept or one that seemed rather faddish in use. The examples in the text and in particular the tools and techniques presented make this an altogether more concrete under taking.

I had some very interesting discussions with colleagues inspired by things I had read - all be it that these rarely happened on the blog. Perhaps the commenting facilities in blogger are too clumsy? I also had the pleasure of being contacted by both the authors and various members of the community of interest around the book.

I also identified a whole stack of other things I might like to read (though this is nothing new).

I am not sure if this is a method I will reuse often but I can definitely see me doing it again on occasion. I plan to continue to use this blog for KM related thinking.

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LtF Chapter 13 - Embedding it in the organization - preparing to let go

This chapter deals with how KM practices and processes can be established and become the culture. It revolves around an example of this in action.

Five stages of are suggested:

Awareness : Start : Consolidate : Embed : Support

These can be related to other models around change management.

A useful point is how the various KM initiatives underway in this area do not use the term KM. This is in line with discussions in the KM community of practice on NHS CfH ESpace. KM surely has to be within the strategy and business planning of others not a discrete entity in itself.

An example is worked through around Operations and exploiting the common factors in diverse business groups. It refers back to various tools like the river diagram and learning gap analysis that this enables. 25 areas of common practice were identified. A useful tip was around using a requirement to both offer and request help (3 of each in the example) as a way of breaking down peoples reluctance to ask for assistance. A form of peer pressure is applied through this encouraging sharing.

The chapter closes with a reflection point - where are the knowledge gaps for your organization. I think that is something I need to think about offline!

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LtF Chapter 12 - Leveraging what we know

Generously Blogger has attributed the last post to the day I wrote the first line of it. My apologies for the long break in the scheduled posts. This post will now appear late also to add to the confusion.

This longer chapter looks at how we can capture knowledge. More specifically it considers the benefit of distilling experience into Knowledge Assets. This reflects the fact that often the same thing will happen in many places so a core message can be defined.

A good area for a Knowledge Asset for most NHS organisations (and their librarians) at present would be around bid processes. While bids are always important the current organisational environment makes successful bidding key. The potential is there to share learning across the organisation around this topic.

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Learning to Fly Chapter 11 - Networking and communities of practice

Back to the book after some much needed recovery time.

The chapter considers how people network and the establishment of communities of practice. I like the definition of different types of communities:

• C of Interest - linked through hobbies, sports etc
• C of Practice - working together around an area of knowledge and competence (enabling)
• C of Commitment - networks accountable for acheiving a clear goal (delivering)

The importance of the coordinator role is interesting when again we consider the proposed Team Knowledge Officer role for NHS organisations. Might these people be the ones charged with coordinatoring CoP/C?

The importance of face to face meeting very much chimes with my experience. You just need to meet people from time to time.

I have been involved a few times of late with attempts to create documents collectively. Thus far my conclusion is that (at least in my networks) people are not comfortable with Wikis - people will read but very few will edit.

Generally I think the chapter has some good tips on working in networks and in particular how to keep these running.

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Failing to Post - Chapter 1

Apologies for my failure to post this week. I have been severely afflicted by the dreaded lurgy. I honestly cannot imagine I am going to feel up to completing my LtF posting for a few days. Normal service will hopefully be resumed in the middle of next week.

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LtF Chapter 10 - Finding the right people

A chapter describing the benefits of having a corporate yellow pages. There is some sound advice about how to encourage participation (include the personal, build organically through champions etc) and some nice examples of how these have been used.

I find it hard to get excited about this. I think this is in great part due to seeing the technical issues that would be involved and the degree of challenge of getting people on board. I would want something that built onto a system that had to exist anyway - the email directory for example.

I think for a lot of areas the people they really need to know are their direct teams and they will know them through constant contact. I am not sure that within the organisation there is the degree of changing project work where people would not know each other. This would obviously be different for specific parts of the NHS.

The NHS Health Informatics Espace might support some of this functionality for health informatics staff but it feels clunky. You can search peoples profiles but have to click into each one to see any detail for example. Equally there are barriers to participation - despite being registered I cannot access one of the areas listed in the top navigation of the site (Sharing Experiences) - not very conducive to sharing!

Quote for the day (found through unrelated reading) "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett.

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LtF Chapter 9 - Learning after doing

A weekend at UEA for the annual Pirates versus Old Boys knowledge sharing exercise (ahem). Once again the current students learnt a great deal about how to play American Football through the invaluable method of actually having a go. Best of luck to the Pirates for the season ahead.


Not much to say about this chapter. It is a fairly detailed framework for a larger end of project learning event described as a "retrospect". The key thing I would pull out of it is the importance of linking it in so the information gathered is available to future projects. One place I could see this usefully applied would be in work around Map of Medicine. As pathways are refined and localised there is the potential for speeding up the process by capturing learning after each one is completed.

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