Delphi Group's International Knowledge Management Executive Summit 1998

If you've never visited Coronado, off the coast of San Diego California, you owe it to yourself to make the journey. As lovely as it was, it seemed somehow restless -- maybe it was the attack helicopters from the nearby Navy base, buzzing the sand beach. Or maybe it was the sense of discontinuity produced by the diverse audience who occupied the Hotel del Coronado for 4 days in June talking about best practices in managing corporate knowledge.

As the site for the International Knowledge Management Executive Summit, put together by the Delphi Group, it made a perfect setting for a gathering of knowledge managers to discuss how personnel in their organizations were using knowledge management (KM) practices to create a sense of continuity and speed decision-making enterprisewide. But, for all the substantive presentations I saw (I even delivered one on Knowledge Management as a Framework for Competitive Intelligence) the diversity of the audience, and their expectations of what they'd find made for some equally diverse reactions to the program.

The exhibition hall was well-laid-out with the majority of vendors selling "software solutions" (unfettered by the knowledge that the real KM boom is in services), and a few CPA's cum management consultants cum software companies (boy, that sounds familiar) speaking sagely about the "recovery from BPR". The keynotes were pretty exciting: Bob Buckman walks the walk and knows well the warfare that takes place on the front lines of the marketplace; Dr. Peter Drucker's charming delivery of that universal truth, "...it is everyone's job to educate and teach each other about their knowledge speciality. We have to be knoweldge teachers to become learning organizations..."; and Tom Koulopoulos' magnum opus PowerPoint slideshow blew my puny slides out of the water -- but, I enjoyed his explanation of how to unlease the power of corporate knowledge and organizational memory to create corporate instinct.

Plus, I got the usual great Free Stuff conferences always provide a country boy from Wisconsin -- I got baseball caps, backpacks, free services and software (oh, the software), but I never did find out who won the cool PalmPilot III's they were giving away -- must've been one of those industrious show-goers that made it to every single booth and got 'em to sign your attendance sheet.

Even though I'm poking a little fun here, I was genuinely impressed with some of the software that was being brought to market -- scalable enterprise systems that brought together all of the criteria of effective knowledge managers from such vendors as Fulcrum, Dataware, and Excalibur, among others. Interestingly, these systems package many of the same features Aurora's custom-written products have provided. With a mix of security features, interfaces, data feeds, expert identifiers and file convertions that makes it hard to decide between them, it certainly looks like there is bound to be some consolidation in this market. The real wackiness here was Lotus Development -- now, I've never personally been a Notes/Domino fan -- but, for Lotus to show up with Notes and Domino as a "knowledge management solution" makes me wonder what could possibly be next?

The attendees themselves were the powerhouse elite of the world of knowledge managers -- at lunch the first day, I sat at a table with over a BILLION dollars worth of IT budget. That's right, with a "B"... seven other people... I insisted upon totalling it up. But, feedback was decidedly mixed -- some opinions changing throughout the week from "I really don't know why I'm here, it's not for me" to "boy, what a great conference" by weeks-end.

The best part of any conference is, naturally, the networking opportunities -- from the software developer to the CEO to the consultant -- all were universally interested in getting past the reengineering that had sacked organizations years earlier, and get the right information to the right people at the right time.

From a competitive intelligence perspective, our perspective, this is central to the decision making process -- in fact, it allows for a great deal of automation in decision making... not just fast, but instant. That's what CI is all about right, at least at the strategic level. We're all familiar with "information overload" -- at the tactical level, KM adds value to the CI function by managing the firehose of information often delivered to the intelligence consumer, and turning it into the drinking fountain they're looking for.

In my own final eval, only one thing is certain, CI managers and analysts will discover that in order to continue to add-value to their organizational decision making, the KM tools that are only today emerging will need to be incorporated into their specialized approach. Even if they don't, their rivals will. And, since we all know that, "knowledge is the only sustainable form of competitive advantage", those organizations that compete and win, will be those that stem the tide of information and make better use of the intelligence that counts, and fulfill their customers' needs to beat the competition.

Thanks Delphi... see you next year.