KMWorld Message

Speaker Spotlight: Stan Garfield

In a recent Q&A, KMWorld 2012 speaker, Stan Garfield, shared his tips and insight into the future of the industry and we'd like to share them with you. Stan is based in Detroit, Michigan as the Community Evangelist in the Global Consulting Knowledge Management Group of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited.

Our theme for KMWorld 2012 is Knowledge Sharing & Learning, what are your top two tips for organizations wanting to improve these processes?

  1. Survey your organization to determine the single most useful thing that you can do to make life easier in the areas of information, knowledge, and learning. Then quickly implement a practical improvement that addresses the most frequently cited need.

  2. If your organization has an enterprise social network (ESN), help users understand when and how to use it productively. For example, I use an acronym (SAFARIS) to help people remember the best uses - share, ask, find, answer, recognize, inform, and suggest. If you don't have an ESN, check to see if employees are using a free service such as Socialcast or Yammer. You may be surprised to find that they are, and you can engage with the users to determine how to take advantage of their activity. If you have multiple ESNs or multiple instances of one ESN, work to reduce to a single network so that everyone can connect in one place.

What do you think will be the biggest challenges for knowledge managers in 2013?

  1. Moving beyond the traditional knowledge repository to more social ways of knowledge sharing.

  2. Enabling knowledge sharing to take advantage of continuously evolving mobile technologies.

  3. Integrating internal systems with external tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook so that people can use an external tool and have it automatically update the internal ones.

What is the most exciting thing you have seen/heard that could help organizations with knowledge sharing and learning for a more productive workforces and better bottom line?

Communities are becoming mainstream. Major organizations and brands are engaging with their target audiences through online communities, monitoring social media, and responding to their customers in real time. These same approaches can be used effectively within organizations to become less bureaucratic, more aware and responsive, and better connected across organizational boundaries.

Stan will be participating in the following sessions:

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Stan Garfield