Tag Archives: knowledge management

KNOWvember20 Showcase is underway

Happy KNOWvember20 – will you been inspired to try something new?

Library and knowledge staff across the country have been showcasing their work mobilising evidence and knowledge during the month of November.

“As a result of this session I will look at how we can use learn at lunch type sessions or coffee conversations within the team and linking in with OD workstreams” Participant at KNOWvember20 Showcase

This year, more than any other, has highlighted the benefits of mobilising evidence and knowledge as part of the required response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  A series of presentations on the 2nd November re-enforced this where we heard about the work of the NHS England and NHS Improvement Beneficial Change Network that used knowledge management activities to capture the innovations and changes that occurred in health and care delivery as a consequence of the Covid pandemic.  Stephen Ayre shared how he had used the conversation café format at George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust to support staff wellbeing and Tracey Pratchett described how the premortem technique* had been used at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS FT to learn valuable lessons about the first wave of the pandemic.

*Klein (2007) Performing a Project Premortem. HBR https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-prem

Some of us are also trying to move ahead with projects established just before Covid hit.  We heard from Deena Maggs who described how she worked collaboratively with others in the Kings Fund to get agreement for her project to manage the corporate memory of the organisation.  Whereas Preeti Puligari from Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust continued to run the QI poster competition to encourage the spread of good practice across her trust.  We heard about how the library became involved and the opportunities that involvement presented for the library and knowledge service. During this session we also held a mini Peer Assist – using the questions from the peer assist technique to learn more from our speakers.  Further details about the session with links to all the presentations can be found in the virtual delegate pack.

four cartoon people sat around a table with a gingham tablecloth

A knowledge café was held on the 12th November which, prompted by an interesting talk by Karen McFarlane the CILIP representative on the committee preparing the BS/ ISO 30401 Knowledge Management Systems, led to conversations about how to use the standard, develop skills and knowledge to make knowledge management part of our standard business offer.  Karen provided a useful overview to the standard and explained how it could be used to internally audit KM practice.  She then moved on to tell us more about CILIP’s knowledge management chartership and there was lots of interest in the chat function about this.  Karen’s presentation, plus links to further information about CILIP Knowledge Management Chartership are available in the Virtual Delegate Pack.

Further events lined-up for KNOWvember20.

On the 17th November 12:30 join the #ukmedlibs chat for a discussion  to share ideas, think about good practice and discuss creative solutions to mobilise knowledge effectively online and during a pandemic.

The 20th November at 11am will consider how we can influence a culture of learning and knowledge sharing in our organisations.   We will hear from speakers sharing the knowledge management initiatives they have been involved with, conduct the first part of an appreciative inquiry into what has gone well for others introducing KM, hold an After Action Review to discover what has worked or not worked well for two knowledge managers and hold a knowledge exchange to find out more about the NHSE/I Beneficial Change Unit.

The 30th November is the last of our recorded webinar sessions and we are excited to be joined by Nicola Millard, Principal Innovation Partner, BT Enterprise who will insp

four cartoon people stading around an over-sized fish in a bowl of water

ire us to consider the ways we live and work in a a future where technology is instrumental.  We will follow this with a virtual fishbowl conversation to further explore the points made by Nicola.

Starting from this week we will also be inviting library and knowledge specialists to record interviews with each other about the work they have been doing to mobilise evidence and knowledge in their organisations.  This could be small scale holding of randomised coffee trials to full-blown implementation of knowledge management strategies.  You can watch the first of these interviews with Sarah Lewis at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, on the  KNOWvember20 YouTube Channel.  Here you will also find all the recorded talks from the sessions held throughout November plus interviews with knowledge managers working in other NHS and non-NHS sectors.

Be inspired and tell us what you have been doing to mobilise evidence and knowledge.

KM to KM – Knowledge Management to Knowledge Mobilisation: a trend?

A reflection from David Stewart

“Knowledge Management (KM), what’s that then?” A question I used to dread. That “crunch” moment in the lift when a very senior person asks you a question that really takes more than 30 seconds to answer. I had never heard of knowledge management until the later 1990s; it certainly did not feature in my librarianship course in 1981, but then neither did computers!

Once I heard the term, I started to try to find out more. There was a bewildering array of theoretical articles some of which promised to supercharge our workplace; others were very dismissive; “knowledge can’t be managed” I collected them together and soon had two box files full and was none the wiser. Then someone pointed me to a local academic, Dr Jim Hughes at Salford University who was lecturing in KM. Jim ran a whole series of seminars for North West NHS librarians in the early 2000s, helping us to understand where it came from and what it might be. We also worked with Dr Chris Mimnagh, a GP and commissioner who was very enthusiastic about the potential of KM. Chris now works with The Innovation Agency in the North West.

Over the next fifteen years KM appeared to come and go, sometimes being treated as a “nice to have” and not a priority in financially constrained times. Nevertheless, it became an important strand as we wrote and published Knowledge for Healthcare in December 2014. The Mobilising Evidence and Knowledge workstream has been our programme for bringing Knowledge Management to the centre of our offer into the healthcare system. This firmly twins our long-established role in disseminating and providing access to evidence from research and practice with a corporate responsibility to better manage and use knowledge and shared learning.

Five years on, and reviewing what we have achieved, I believe we have moved significantly on the KM front. Almost all NHS library and knowledge services (note that we now refer to knowledge services  as an integral part of our function) have been able to demonstrate, via their Library Quality Assurance Framework (LQAF) returns, that they are actively involved in some aspect of KM within their trust. We have recently published a new edition of the KM Framework postcards describing learning before, during and after techniques; more and more of us can run a knowledge café and understand what the goldfish bowl technique is. More NHS organisations are using the Health Education England self-assessment tool to assess how well they are using evidence and organisational knowledge, working with health library and knowledge specialists to prioritise KM activities.  We are about to initiate market research on potential demand for an e-qualification in KM for NHS staff.

I believe we are in a very different KM space than even five years ago. Listen to my recent Webinar on the background and context of Quality and Improvement Outcome Four of the new Quality and Improvement Outcomes Framework where I say that KM “will become the every-day core of what we do” – delivering Knowledge and Library Services to ensure that organisational knowledge and best evidence are mobilised to achieve excellent healthcare and health improvement.

David Stewart, Head of Library and Knowledge Services North, Directorate of Innovation and Transformation, Health Education England

 

 

What is the use of Knowledge Management in a time of crisis?

On the 19th May CILIP held an online conference event exploring the role of knowledge management during a time of disruption and crisis, such as the pandemic of Covid-19 that we are currently living through.

Perspectives were shared by knowledge management specialists working in local and national government, overseas, finance, utilities and healthcare organisations.

As Nick Poole, CEO of CILIP, describes in his article Knowledge Management in a time of crisis, lessons learned from COVID-19, even at this ‘event’ phase of COVID-19

“Knowledge Management has already shown its value in helping our society and our economy adapt to its strange new circumstances.”

It was interesting to hear how in each of the different industries featured, techniques of knowledge management were recognised as adding value to working experiences.

Some thought provoking questions were shared  during the event to consider the ongoing part knowledge management can play at this time and in the gradual recovery phase still to come.

  • How do you/your organisation handle measurement and celebrating successes? How is it different from others?
  • How do you persuade management to support KM initiatives?
  • How do you improve knowledge sharing across geographical and cultural differences?
  • How do you handle misinformation/knowledge, poor quality information/knowledge and overload?
  • What have we learned from the crisis that will be useful for everyday practice?

Slides from the KM in a time of crisis

Narrated presentation about KM in a time of crisis in healthcare by Louise Goswami and Alison Day
https://kfh.libraryservices.nhs.uk/tag/knowledge-management/
kfh.libraryservices.nhs.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-50
131443
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CL7JAYNQ3GZJR4BECZM3F7DMN4P7I5LC
<urn:uuid:ff3885d5-3b45-4ca3-a417-054f6a514659>
2020-12-02T19:17:56Z
52.155.162.90
text/html
sha1:6BXKJEXZEOKQP7HHL3TKCVHJH2FIBCUF
<urn:uuid:bd77b8c4-d8f7-4177-a2d3-3fd961270770>
https://kfh.libraryservices.nhs.uk/tag/knowledge-management/
response
<urn:uuid:dab0aa16-cebc-4534-b148-e08f5d94020e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-50
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-195.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/