Boston KM Forum

Thursday, June 19, 2008, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m, Jarg, (MetraTech Building), 330 Bear Hill Road, Suite 230, Waltham. Directions. Registration Form for Thursday.

SPEAKER: Phil Murray, Secretary and Co-founder, The Center for Semantic Excellence and Tom Bigda-Peyton, President and Co-founder, The Center for Semantic Excellence

TOPIC: The Center for Semantic Excellence (CES) is a new not-for-profit that helps stressed communities — single organizations as well as families of organizations in a domain — overcome barriers to productivity, progress, and competitiveness when those barriers seem most impenetrable. Those challenges are especially evident in such domains as healthcare, education, transportation, energy, and securities markets, where participants from business, government, and education all play critical roles.

Why “semantic” — a word that evokes splitting hairs or reeks of arcane computer technology? Because complex challenges involving multiple competing and complementary stakeholders can be addressed only by focusing first and foremost on meaning, not information or process. A “semantic approach” is not obscure or picayune; it’s a logical, structured, scalable, and inevitable way of addressing how we work, how we manage people and projects, and how we achieve measurable improvements in productivity and competitiveness in an environment awash in information.

In this presentation, members of the CSE will describe how the perspective of meaning (1) guides more effective research, (2) supports productive group encounters, (3) creates a navigable, easily visualized, and re-usable map of the community’s knowledge, and (4) aids in predicting how solutions will be accepted … and how to influence the acceptance of solutions.

We will then describe a healthcare scenario in which these principles are being applied.

BIOGRAPHY: Phil Murray has been designing and developing systems for turning information into meaning for over 20 years. At the Center for Semantic Excellence, Phil has developed the semantic technology underpinnings of an approach to solving complex, changing, socio-economic problems — often referred to as “wicked problems.” Phil also identifies and selects semantic technologies and practices to support CSE solutions, including the organization’s own web site, wiki, forum, and internal knowledgebase. Phil was most recently Chief Knowledge Architect at Aelera Corp. and, in a previous life, Chief Knowledge Officer at Network Solutions, Inc. Phil’s blog can be seen at: http://semanticadvantage.wordpress.com/

Tom Bigda-Peyton is an organizational consultant, researcher, and educator who has spent more than twenty years working with managers, teams, and organizations. Tom is the founder of Action Learning Systems, a research and consulting practice started in 1992 to help teams and organizations improve the quality and pace of on-the-job learning, recognize and manage transitions together, and create environments of shared leadership and accountability. He is also a founding partner of Third Ways, an organizational consulting group begun in 1998 to scale the action learning methodology and enrich it through interplay with other useful methods and approaches.

PLEASE Register even if you are not certain you can attend so we have an accurate estimate of attendees for handouts.

Registration Form for Thursday

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