The Second Annual Southern California Knowledge Management Forum

A lot has happened since we last posted on the CSUN KM Blog. It's about time to tell you a little of what is going on in the program.

The second “cohort” of students is now half-way the KM Master’s degree program at CSUN. The 19 students are mostly mid career professionals looking for an educational opportunity that allows them to advance in their career, or in some cases return to the job market. The students come from across the US and have widely varied backgrounds including the US Military, the oil industry, aerospace, academia and consulting.

Most recently sixteen CSUN students, faculty and staff participated in the Second Annual Southern California Knowledge Management Forum, which was held on Pepperdine University Drescher Graduate Campus September 9 - 11, 2008. The Conference Theme was Evolution of Knowledge for Value Creation.

CSUN KM Faculty member Kiho Soho was one of the coordinators for the event, helping with the event design and orchestration.

CSUN KM student (& Pratt Whitney Rockedyne employee) Rick Ladd talked about the effective application of Web 2.0 tools and how they are impacting our ability to collaborate at all levels of the organization.

Below Rick shows the yin and the yang of the use of the Web 2.0 tools and quotes from Marshall McLuhan “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us...”

Professor Dione Zell, from CSUN talked about what Social Network Analysis can tell us about the effectiveness of organizations and the vital importance of relationships - it's not just the connections...it is the relationships that people have

Mary Gonzales, from the first CSUN KM cohort, and Jim Wolff, from the current cohort chaired sessions during the conference. Their biggest challenge was in finding the right speakers for their sessions…and they did an outstanding job. Captain Ralph Soule, US Navy, one of their speakers, gave an incredible talk entitled full contact mentoring for high performance. Captain Soule not only had great techniques for mentoring, including allowing junior officers to shadow him for an entire week, while providing them a notebook full of some of his favorite articles to discuss during the week; but he also had one of my favorite slides, which was captioned “I need someone well versed in the art of torture---do you know PowerPoint?”



Finally for more on the actual conferencje check out http://www.ericmackonline.com/ where one of CSUN's KM program students Eric Mack blogged about the confernce.

-Allan Crawford