I remember Steve talking about one thing that made the CCs a team – their willingness to share what they knew and learned each and every day. You see, downhill skiing was (and in someways today still is) viewed as an individual sport not a team sport. The sport was dominated by Europeans. The Swiss and Austrian skiers of that time saw each other, including the teammates from their own countries, as competition. The CCs changed the way ski teams operated. Using technology (two way radios) the skiers that went down the hill ahead of you would call back up the hill with reports of the specific conditions a teammate was going to face.

As Steve puts it in the biography show, it was like saying “here’s how to run the course better – here’s how to beat me.” This collaboration contributed to their success on the world stage and accelerated their climb towards the top of the competitive field. Collaboration allowed them to accelerate their learning as a team and to change their pace of learning; out-pacing the competition. This helped them climb quickly through the ranks of world class skiers.

In our organizations today, sharing knowledge like this could greatly enhance our performance; even when we are in similar competitive positions. What if we turned our solo practices into team like the CCs did? What if we were as selfish?

In retrospect, with SARS, there was chatter on discussion boards that pointed to a problem in Asia that was puzzling health care workers. While there was no name for the problem at the time, the discussion was largely about symptoms and the associated problems. Interestingly, the response to SARS required an unprecedented collaboration between public health resources around the globe — another KM challenge.

A virtual network of epidemiologists brought together public health institutions, ministries of health, and WHO Country Offices to analyze the spread of SARS and to define appropriate public health measures. (Learning from SARS: Preparing for the Next Disease Outbreak — Workshop Summary, 2004, p. 44)

So, lessons from the SARS experience now influence how we respond to global health issues in a flat, interconnected world. Here is the online version of the book referenced above:

And here is a paper on SARS and the KM opportunity for public health — From SARS to systems: developing advanced knowledge management for public health. [Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004;100:149-56.]

Back to swine flu. Can information sources be used to predict an outbreak like swine flu?

Google’s flu trends uses a number of terms, in aggregate, to spot trends in flu enquireies on their site. They even developed a version specific to the Mexico outbreak. The spike on this chart in January and February precedes the recognition by public health authorities.

Similarly, Veratect, a small company in Washington state [@Veratrect on Twitter] claims to have spotted this flu outbreak and notified a number of its corporate clients in advance of the general public health warnings. They were even accused of not reporting this information to Mexico authorities.

The Associated Press reports …

Veratect Inc., a 2-year-old company with fewer than 50 employees, combines computer algorithms with human analysts to monitor online and off-line sources for hints of disease outbreaks and civil unrest worldwide. It tracks thousands of “events” each month — an odd case of respiratory illness, or a run on over-the-counter medicines, for example — then ranks them for severity and posts them on a subscription-only Web portal for clients who want early warnings.

The idea fueling Veratect and similar companies is that blogs, online chat rooms, Twitter feeds and news media and government Web sites are full of data that public health agencies could use to respond faster to problems like outbreaks of swine flu.

Detecting public health outbreaks and even foiling terrorism has become more and more an information problem. Data scattered on the web can be turned into information and ultimately knowledge with the right tools and lenses. Knowledge pattern recognition has become one of the great challenges for today’s organizations and for society.

Addendum (May 26, 2009): Here is another related article from Wired — This article refers to Veratect and also HealthMap.

The deliberate and systematic coordination of an organization’s people, technology, processes, and organizational structure in order to add value through reuse and innovation. This value is achieved through the feeding of valuable lessons learned and best practices into corporate memory in order to foster continued organizational learning.

The definition I prefer, however, is shorter and to the point – and partly courtesy of Bryan Davis. When asked “what is KM?” I usually respond “knowledge management is about making optimal use of an organization, group or individual’s knowledge assets“. While this is a simple definition, I like the notion of optimization (or as the Comprehensive Auditing Foundation frames it — this is about the three “E’s”: efficiency; economy; effectiveness). I also like the concept of “knowledge assets” which at it’s broadest includes people (human capital), the stuff that stays behind when everyone leaves on the elevator at the end of the day – things like software, hardware, databases, and intellectual property (patents, copyrights, trademarks) (structural capital), and relationships (relationship/social capital).

Feel free to use this definition anytime.

Enjoy.

Ben Franklin agreed. “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

We think our perspectives on knowledge are new. Think again.

If you have any old quotes / perspectives, please share them with us.

The presentation is on SlideShare (this time I edited it in advance to avoid the formatting problems).

Enjoy

I have posted the slides on SlideShare (if you have not explored SlideShare, I would encourage you to do so. A great place to find and share slides on almost any topic. Some of the slides are shared with a Creative Commons license – as I have done with this slide deck. Have fun exploring!)

[By the way, it took several tries to get this right on SlideShare. Seems that in reformatting slides for their website, they change fonts and alignment. Thanks Blaise for proofreading those slides and pointing that out.]

Some things heard around the table:

• KM can be linked to risk management – especially when the problem you are trying to deal with is an aging (soon to retire) workforce. This thought reminded me of work that others are doing around the subject of “knowledge continuity” – the basic idea here is that as the workforce ages, we are about to lose significant knowledge as the bomers retire.
• Many organizations are still trying to determine what to do with social media tools … try getting the older folks in your workplace to embrace social networking and social media tools.
• There is still work to be done to embrace and catch up with the tools that are out there … think about RSS and Enterprise Search.
• We are all struggling with Taxonomy and Knowledge Organization issues … very few of us have had break throughs in this area. Hmmm… maybe time for us to read David Weinberger‘s work “Everything is Miscellaneous” for some fresh thinking in this area.
• Content is still Queen (or King) and most of us have not done enough in this area.

J