close CKO Summit 2004             TFPL’s third CKO Summit for the public sector 25-27 April 2004, Bath Priory, Bath, UK Joined-up knowledge strategies Considerable knowledge focused activity - some successes, some failures - and considerable learning is happening across the public sector. To capture, share and expand this learning we invited a group of the most experienced knowledge leaders in the public sector to spend two days in the Bath Priory to reflect, share their experiences, discuss their challenges, identify future opportunities and incorporate some new ideas into their existing plans. Participants were carefully selected to represent a wide cross section of organisations and different approaches to knowledge management. The participants submitted topics they wished to discuss and explore. These were built into a programme of parallel group discussions and feedback sessions and the learnings from each group were shared and validated with all the participants. The key learnings from the two days contribute to the Executive Report and we thank the participants for allowing us to publish and share their insights. We considered the Knowledge Proposition, developed by private sector knowledge practitioners at TFPL’s sixth annual private sector CKO summit. The Knowledge Proposition is that: significant additional stakeholder value and competitive advantage will be derived if the expertise, information and ideas of employees, partners and customers are continually developed and used in all business and decision-making processes. The consensus was that the Proposition would be valid and valuable in the public sector, with amendments necessary to make it more effective. The core Proposition for the public sector is: The pursuit of excellence in public services will be significantly enhanced if the expertise, information, ideas and networks of employees, partners and customers are continually developed and used in all business decision and policy making processes. The group also assessed the Knowledge Framework, contained within the Knowledge Proposition, which helps in aligning knowledge interventions to business objectives. The private sector group suggested focusing knowledge interventions on the three primary orientations of a company - customer intimacy, product leadership and operational excellence - where to be successful an organisation needs to perform well in each of these areas but is likely to need to excel in one. The public sector knowledge leaders agreed that policy innovation would be more appropriate than product innovation, that customer insight might be better than customer intimacy, and that it is vital to build corporate social responsibility into the model. We discussed the role and value of communities and networks, their differences and the purposes they serve, and whether they could be effective in exchanging experiences, sharing learning and building knowledge and expertise. The discussion led to the identification of how to sell their benefits to organisations, how to start and nurture them and pitfalls to be avoided. We agreed that without identifying objectives and goals it would be difficult to evaluate their benefits and success or failure. Common to all the participants is the reality that the public sector is facing a number of legislative requirements relating to information and data, and that these have considerable implications for their organisations. In terms of implementation there was agreement that there might be a temptation to do the “minimum required”. However, we considered that it would be advantageous to use the resources available to build them into a much more valuable enterprise wide approach to knowledge and information management. KM and compliance are perhaps not natural partners but if KM is working well people will understand the implications of managing information. Copies of the full Executive Report of CKO Summit - "CKO Summit - Public Sector - Report 2004" - are available free of charge by completing our report order form.              close