In September-December 2003, during the 2nd year of my MBA (which was mainly at Melbourne Business School in Australia), I took one course at McMaster, “P727″, in Knowledge Management.
This year I was invited to go back as a Speaker to talk about Blogs and Wikis. And so, last night, Dr. Nick Bontis introduced me to the class of 2007.
Nick introduced me as “probably the only guy in Ontario who knew about wikis in 2003,” and told that the very first day when I arrived in 2003 I’d started by asking him what he thought of wikis as an enabler of Knowledge Management. Back then to me, they were old hat. I researched, convinced management and lead a project of 6 people to installing and technically modify a wiki at Arthur Andersen in 2001. Needless to say, I ended up teaching my peers in the 2003 year about wikis.
Last night I repackaged a minature version of my KMWorld presentation for the class of P727. Starting with the premise that mass-transparency poses the opportunity to change everything, I introduced blogging and wikis.
I posited that as MBA students the class of P727 2006 absolutely must blog for the sake of their careers. Blogging is a great way for an individual to create a public profile, to get into open conversation about half-thoughts and through this build rigor into their thinking. Getting thoughts and conversation “out there” gets your name in front of search engines and in turn in front of prospective business partners and customers. I touched on how blogs have created unprecedent participation and created an expectation of individual involvement and empowerment in societies and recently in companies.
The main thrust of my talk was about wikis and creating wikis as knowledge bases. I talked about wikis primarily being a negotiation tool and how the interactions of interlocking conversations being continually and collaborative reshaped leads to thoughts and actions being aligned (i.e. nest) within an organizational hierarchy. That alignment helps a company to move forward purposefully and strongly towards common agreed goals, whilst creating both a space for quietness and transparency for new idea value chains to emerge.
My talk was followed by Thomas Purves who started with an example of how the BarCamp wiki provides the community framework for templating approaches from one city and event to the next, and gave a great example “The Trouble With Yeast” of how his company Firestoker create the environment for emergent behavior in a company in the Food and Packaged Goods industry.
The KM SHOWCASE PRESENTERS were as follows:
- Paula Galassi – Dofasco Communities of Practice
- Sanjay Pathak- Accenture
- Meaghan Stovel McKnight – Bell Canada
- Michael Herman – Microsoft Sharepoint
- Martin Cleaver – Wikis & Blogs
- Thomas Purves – Firestoker
- Matthew Eby – RIM – Blackberry
It was a fun night: as I’m sure the others will attest if their persistent vanity searches alert them. 
