Day 2 of the Virgin Blogger - Thoughts on the future direction of KM

Over the last few weeks, I've had the chance to think a lot about where organizations are taking KM. I participated in a study APQC just completed called "Leveraging Knowledge Across the Value Chain" that caused me to examine some of the ways we've been thinking about KM. My number one takeaway - sophisticated organizations don't have stand-alone knowledge management anymore. Instead, they've begun to integrate...with their organizational learning initiatives (talent management, leadership development, training and development), their process improvement programs (6Sigma, lean, Baldrige), and their supply chain management areas. We coined the phrase "Performance Program" to describe this - focusing knowledge management, process improvement, and learning tools to improve process performance and the performance of the people who engage in those processes. I don't know if that's a good phrase or not, but it seemed to capture the mood.

I found it particularly intriguing that the KM practitioners of old who have survived and thrived are concentrating on helping the process performance of the entire value chain - internally of course, but also with suppliers, customers, regulatory agencies, academic partners, and other vendors. KM may not be the right answer for every situation (we all know this intuitively) - so these people have pulled together an "awesome set of tools" (one of my favorite quotes from Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") to focus on driving business performance. We actually revised APQCs Stages of Implementation KM roadmap based on these findings - we'll discuss and hope for feedback on our KM community call on February 28 at 10am central. I'll be interested to hear other's thoughts.

On another note, as we bask in the beautiful spring-time weather in Houston (yes, we can have good weather here...in February, no less!), I've had a few days without intense project work to catch up on articles on organizational learning, marketing in associations, and developing leaders virtually. It reminded me of how important it is to occasionally stop, step back, and fill up your head with new thinking - it's certainly helped me regain some perspective that I lost in the last 6 months of working on tons of projects and traveling all the time. I've found that content feeds like BNETs leadership, human resources, and supply chain newsletters have helped me find relevant information without having to remember to search. Here is a link: http://nl.com.com/view_online_newsletter.jsp?list_id=e805

I'd love other people's suggestions for sources of relevant business information outside of the traditional Fortune, Business 2.0 etc.