KM certification

I've been looking into KM certification for some time. There will be Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM)course offered by STI Knowledge and the Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals in the Denver area. If anyone has experience with this organization or certification, please let me kow.

RFP on KM

AwwaRF has just issued an RFP titled "Organizational Development Needed To Implement A Knowledge Management Strategy At Water Utilities."

The project objectives include: 1) identify the benefits and costs of implementing a knowledge management (KM) initiative, 2) investigate and identify organizational development factors (e.g., culture, core planning processes, communications, rewards, etc.) critical to the success of implementing a knowledge management (KM) initiative, and 3) develop a tool kit for drinking water utilities to evaluate and develop their organizational cultures so that they are supportive of successful implementation of KM strategies and initiatives.

Maximum funding from AwwaRF is $300,000 and proposals are due by May 19.

KM update

With so many things going on its hard to keep my blog updated. Here's a small sampling.

• Obtained agreement among managers on our priorities for KM activities.
  
• Purchased a MS LiveMeetings virtual meeting room. We can now host web conferences for up to 250 participants and are in the process of planning 4 webcasts for this year. We can also use this tool for smaller, interactive meetings. More on this as planning gets underway.
  
• We have developed an internal team to develop a strategy to get our researchers (external) to start submitting content on our collaborative site. This strategy will tie together people, processes and technology in order to achieve a larger goal of getting updated content on the web. The first step is getting our content submitted directly into our CMS.
  
• Our collaborative site was hacked into. It seems like some industrious hacker used our collaborative site (which is being hosted externally) as a pass through. We lost access to our project files for two days while this was being addressed.
  
• Moving forward on a project to document the past successes of our organization. We're using a contractor to interview some of our past researchers and industry leaders to document this mostly anecdotal information.

The list goes on, but I better get back to work.

Technology at work and home

I've learned a lot about blogging, through this blog. Now at home, I've started another blog focused on my hobby songwriting. I've even designed my own website which hopefully will be launched later this week. What's amazing is that after getting over the initial technology fear and reluctance, I now have little hesitation with the technology.

My work experiences supported my home activities and I'm now finding that my home experience is paying dividends here at work. I now know how the web functions, the challenges in linking, and numerous little tips that I've learned through my endless calls to customer support.

I've also learned the value of good technical support. At home, I'm the webmaster, technical writer and producer of the product (songwriting). Doing all these tasks, limits my effectiveness at producing the product. Hopefully that will change once everything is running, but now it's time (or sleep) that I can little afford to lose.

RoboCow - effective way to get the message out

The name RoboCow immediately made me curious. I had to go look and ended up seeing an amazing knowledge tool.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada was extremely creative on a very dry topic (no pun intended), protecting drinking water. By using flash media and a great title, they effectively got their message out to a large audience. I got 803 hits when I entered the word "Robocow" on Google.

Check it out and think how this information has traditionally been transferred.