Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. Well here I am, so go ahead, ask your questions, but don't wait very long answers because we just finished with diner and wine !

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. Good afternoon Mr Buntinx, This is Mr Konrad Cassar Naudi from Lernia, Gothenburg, Sweden

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. Hi Konrad, do you have a question related to KM or to e-learning ?

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. First of all it was a very interesting and instructive morning. My question is: What is the role that customers play in a successful KM?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. What do you understand with customers ?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. All our users at Siemens can be considered as customers.

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. Both internal and external customers!

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. In that case their role is very important because the system lives only if they participate

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. In our case the customers are indeed internal users, and asz I just said their participation is vital

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. We call it a "give away" take away" system; so thy can take what they need but if they nether give away there will soon be nothing to share

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. sorry for the wrong spelling at some times but I try to type very fast

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. We have some special cases where we also share some of our knowledge, project related, with the external customer for which the project is done

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. Can you give a specific example?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. Let me give you a challenge, try to type faster and more than I do, otherwise I will be the only one to type

AIKE/Guest Good afternoon, Mr Buntinx and discussion partners. In your input of this morning, you raised the issues of motivation, lack of confidence and the notion that knowledge equals power. Have you encountered similar kinds of issues in Siemens Learning Valley and what kind of solutions did you find ?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. For the example, without giving names, we have some knowledge sharing with a customer in North Africa where we conduct a project together with other partners, all of which make use of our central system

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. How should one safeguard knowledge from subcontractors and consultants who have been engaged in an assignment?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. Hi AIKE, to your question : yes we encountered those issues in the Siemens Learning valley; there are still people (managers) who have the feeling to lose some of their control, thus their power when their collaborators spend too much time in sharing their knowledge with colleagues from other business units

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. How is the concept of Knowledge Management related to other concepts or philosophies on optimising the performance of business operations such as the case of TQM (Total Quality Management) or QQFD(Quality Function Deployment)?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. to Lernia : or you don't give access to these people or you ask them to sign a non-disclosure engagement

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. How can one see that progress is being made in KM?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. to HRDA : what a complex question !; as everything is knowledge, and as quality is in everything, both are of course closely related

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. to HRDA : in our case we have 2 communities of which one is called "knowledge and innovation mgt" and the other " quality mgt" and there is a close link between them

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. to lernia : progress is made when more and more people become member of the community , when the amount of contributions is still increasing, when the amount of hits onto the contributions is increasing, when the quality of contributions is improving

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. do you have a long question on which I can answer by "yes" or "no" ?

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. Do you like Bruges?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. yes

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. thanks for that innovating question

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. do you practice knowledge mgt already ?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. do you start some communities already ?

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. Not yet

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. This conference will hopefully be a "kick-off" !

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. In some cultures knowledge is power to the holder. Any ideas about how you encourage knowledge sharing in such organisational cultures?

CNFPC Ettelbruck2.. What do you think about the conference this morning and its potential impact on training centers???

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. indeed, this will be the premises of starting communities with the help of your supporting tool "exemplo"

CNFPC Ettelbruck2.. No idea?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. I think that "knowledge is power" is imbedded in all the cultures

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. so the way to encourage is to recognize the people who are ready to share this knowledge, and by the way we always tell our colleagues that nowadays, k sharing is power

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. to CNFPC : I hope that the meeting of this morning is going to boost your behavior of sharing and exemplo is certainly going to help you to do this

CNFPC Ettelbruck2.. THX

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. What kind of rewards can we give to our employees for knowledge sharing?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. the best reward is recognition (names of publishers are known by all the other members of the community, it is a way to put your head out of the water !)

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. other possibilities are financial reward at the end of the year or incentives like books, travels, ... but this doesn't work at long term, because the people start th contribute without quality at a certain time , only to be one of the largest contributor

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. To CNFPC, the conference was interesting, it raised some important issues, but to have an impact on training centers the decision makers must take the ideas seriously and involve their people in the change process

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. thanks to HRDA to enter the discussion with CNFPC

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. this is really how k sharing works

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. by the way, you're right

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. Who has actually "invented" KM?

AIKE/Guest As Frederic pointed out in his presentation about how VDAB will implement the idea of KS and KM: by putting it in the job description - that is one very concrete way of letting employees know that KS is important

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. When the Egyptians learned how to build pyramids, when the Greek stored their literature in the library of Alexandria, this was already KM, no ?

Mr. Alain Buntinx/G.. so the invention of km is a nowadays invention of the wording, but in fact km exists since the beginning of earth

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. in the enterprises, the IT people appropriated the wording and changed what the used to call "information mgt" into "km";

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. more important is k sharing and all you have to do to stimulate people to share

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. to AIKE : you're perfectly right

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. km of course existed since time immemorial, otherwise no progress could be made, but I think what is required here is to enable people to remember again what KM really is and how rewarding it can be. One must not forget how fulfilling it can be to be able to offer

Lernia, Sweden/Gu.. For me KM reminds me of quality systems like ISO 9000. Is that so?

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. to HRDA : you're right again, sharing your k with people you know is a real pleasure, with people you don't know it is not always so easy

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. to lernia : km is something else than ISO9000, of course tit will be helpful to follow the ISO prescriptions when doing km

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. first you make an inventory of existing k in the company, than you find out what k you will need in the near future, you build the k gap out of it and than you structure your existing k and you create action teams to fill the k gap

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. but don't forget that before managing k , you have to be able and volunteer to share the k you have

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. To Lernia- I believe that KM is a very different concept to ISO because it relies much more heavily on the people factor and less so on the process factor. In fact I would even suggest that emotional intelligence and creativity which are direct human qualities are prime determining factors for KS

AIKE/Guest I agree with Gregoris: In 2000, four persons from my organisation's middle or high management left the organisation. They left CD-roms, documents and a lot of papers and information behind, but we never realized the amount of knowledge and experience they took with them in terms of contacts, networks, "ways to act and work" that you get only from "doing". The ISO 9000 didn't help our organisation at all when trying to retrieve even a little of that tacit knowledge

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. to HRDA : no comment, I fully agree

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. to AIKE : this is the reason why e.g. in the communities related to our accounts, we ask the members to fill in the list of their contacts, the tips and tricks that they practice in their daily behavior, ... of course not all of them do it, but now we want to bring it in their personal evaluation in order to boost the process

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. no chat partners in other countries and associations ????????????????

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. It was mentioned in the seminar the importance of NOT censoring and NOT criticizing. The importance of trust was also emphasized. In organisations with a centralised management systems this is quite difficult. What suggestions do you have about this?

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. trust indeed is of most importance; face to face meetings help building trust, references to trusted people is another way to extend trust

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. but on another way, if you are a member of newsgroups on the internet, you don't know th people with whom you might share some of your k, how far do you mind about trust ?

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. no questions anymore ? tired ???

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. It seems that KS is divided in two distinct part. One is KS among people of the same organisation and the second among people in a network outside the organisation. It is important to incorporate the two, otherwise you can find an organisation with a lot of "experts" but not sharing knowledge for the benefit of the organisation. Do you believe this to be a real danger?

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. in any case, the organisation must know what part of k may be shared outside the organisation; some of your k can also be sold outside, some k is vital for the organisation s.a. r&d f.i.

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. so, you may not have only one community with people from the organisation and outside the organisation, unless you specified very well what will be the sharing rules

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. we at siemens even have a lot of cop's which are closed user groups where only the identified members can enter and share their specific k

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. and as our k sharing platform is located on our intranet no one else than siemens people can enter the application

HRDA-Gregoris/Gu.. Time for us to say goodbye. Thank you for all the knowledge sharing which we shall save and share with our colleagues.

VDAB_12, Brugge/.. ?

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. you're welcome, I wish you a lot of success in ks and km, working with exemplo

VDAB_12, Brugge/.. thx

rob husken colo/Gu.. In Exemplo we have just started t try and build a (grand) database in which all EVTA-members and related organisations can insert their good/best practices in their fields of knowledge and interests of vocational training and the labor market. We already have now about one thousand participants ( logged in individuals) that can put their knowledge or information in their expert fields on the extranet or make a search in this database. In our opinion it is not only important to reach as many as possible participants, because these participants can differ a great deal in their organisational and cultural working areas ( from governmental policymaking or –executing organisations to private providers in vocational training in the labor market). These different (cultural and organisational) participants can insert their good/best practices in a huge and maybe too grand database. We therefore like to make a plea for organising more virtual communities of practice and communities of cultural backgrounds, where the participants not only can search for "knowledge or information" but also can search and meet for their soul mates and meet colleagues in their own fields of interests and expertise ( Like the discussion Forums as 'cutting the diamond' now) We therefore need not only a database of good practices but we also need (urgently) a better description of the different member organisations and their working cultures. Besides that we also need a well defined and equipped and classified definition or database on the actual participants in Exemplo. In the Who is Who tab we now find to little information on the persons and their backgrounds. We also like to search and find related souls in common working fields. What can You state to that plea?

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. hi rob, give me some time to read your question please

rob husken colo/Gu.. I´ll wait

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. I have the feeling that you are right with your plea, but I'm in a difficult position to tell more about what the organisation has , or not, to do

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. I'll give the keyboard to Mr . Geers to more info

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. Hi Rob, I think you and I have already worked together to what requirements the who is who should answer.

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. Alain buntinx can perhaps tell you what the who is who is like

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. Our who's who is build automatically when people register for the first time in the application

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. then it is filled automatically when thy contribute, at the end a complete view is given on the way the person contributes, its centers of interest, the netmeeting address, a picture if wanted, a survey on all communities of which he/she is a member, ...

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. they also have the possibility to enter themselves a description of their formal education, of their experiences and skills which can be used as keywords to find them back in the organization

rob husken colo/Gu.. that´ s right, you remembered: I conclude now that in Exemplo till now we had too little attention for these automatically generated information about the participants is given. We were focused on the good/best practices and not looking enough for the right persons

rob husken colo/Gu.. I would like to get some more information about the possibilities of your (Alain) who is who topic and see if it could be applied in Exemplo? could you give some information on this to Frederic? then we can maybe use it for the proposed adaptation?

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. we were just discussing it with frederic, so wait and see !

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. can we stop the chat now or do you have some more questions ?

rob husken colo/Gu.. I contact frederic after this weekend. I don’t want to spoil your drinks/reception after this hard and interesting day. Good weekend all.

Mr. Alain Buntinx /G.. you're welcome, drink is probably waiting for us as you say. Bye, have a good week-end