Boston Knowledge Management Forum at Bentley University
A Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM,
LaCava Campus Center, Executive Dining Room,
Bentley Univ. Waltham, MA (Bldg. B52/B53 on Map) Directions
$50 Pre-Registration Deadline June 25 [click here to register and pay online OR bring cash/check; $60 for walk-ins with no pre-registration] The fee, includes a light breakfast and full lunch.
Moderator, Larry Chait, Managing Partner of Chait & Associates, former CKO of A. D. Little
Each of us functions across multiple cultures in our own small ways every day. There’s the teenage culture, the older adult culture, and the Boomer culture. There’s the urban culture, the sub-urban culture, and the more rural culture. And there’s the book-club culture, the non-profit culture, and the government-services culture. We live, communicate, and share knowledge in these non-exclusive cultures.
Multiple cultures also exist within any of the larger enterprises in which we work. The boundaries may be geographic—like north/south or US/China. Or they may be around language—where a concept or word, when translated, can have a very different meaning. Or they may be cross-discipline, like R&D/Marketing, or even chemist/physicist.
As we know from our last Bentley program, we are increasingly working on virtual teams. In fact, teams by their very nature can enable and promote cross-cultural work. In some organizations, cross-cultural teams thrive; yet in others, they are problematic or chaotic.
What are the challenges—and opportunities—in cross-cultural teams? How have different organizations and teams recognized them and dealt with them successfully to maximize team potential? How do organizations build teams across disciplines like R&D and marketing, across linguistic cultures, and across geographies? What are organizations doing to address these issues today?
Among the session leaders will be:
- Sue Newell, Professor of Management, Bentley University, whose research focuses on understanding how knowledge is transferred and innovation fostered within and across organizations
- Pascal Marmier, Director/Consul, swissnex Boston, Consulate of Switzerland will share ideas about working across cultures based on his work at the crossroads of may different systems and thought processes
- Barry Camson, Principal at BarryCamson.com, is an organization development consultant who guides organizations to be more effective in transferring knowledge across cultures; his recent highly interactive session at a Thursday KMF meeting was so well received, we’ve asked him to do a version of it at this event
- Joseph Carrabis, CRO and founder, NextStage Global and NextStage Evolution whose specialties include understanding and designing for various behaviors. Among his research topics are social networks and branding for products and companies.
- Dale Hoopingarner, Manager of eServices Operations at EMC Corporation
Please join us for what promises to be yet another great Symposium!
Link to program readings
Camson on Culture Gap
8:00- 8:30 Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:30- Opening and Introductions
Presentations
Managing knowledge across boundaries, Sue Newell, Professor of Management, Bentley University
A variety of cultural boundaries influence knowledge sharing within and across organizations. Knowledge boundaries are created by practice divisions and differences; that is, divisions and differences across communities in terms of the focus of their work practices and/or what they consider to be the ‘normal’ way of doing something. Communities exist at multiple levels, so multiple sources of knowledge boundaries exist, including boundaries created by differences in multiple cultures, including national, disciplinary/departmental, organizational, and even demographic. Depending on the degree and scope of differences across practice communities, the knowledge boundary will be more or less significant, thus defining whether knowledge can be easily transferred—or whether it will need to be transformed to create a shared understanding as a precursor to knowledge sharing. In this talk, we will consider these different types of knowledge boundaries and consider the implications for sharing knowledge within and across project teams (virtual or otherwise). Examples will be discussed from a research project that was focused on biomedical innovation. PRESENTATION
swissnex, a global knowledge network spanning across disciplines in science and technology, Pascal Marmier, Director and Consul of Switzerland at swissnex Boston PRESENTATION
With 5 locations in key science hotspots around the world, the swissnex network is a example of collaboration across cultures and disciplines from a small country. As science, technology and innovation continue to be leading forces for growth, governments, businesses and academic institutions need to work together to advance new breakthroughs. This talk will propose a model for collaboration and explore some of the organizational challenges of building a new type of collaboration.
Sharing and Absorbing Knowledge Across Organizational and Global Cultures, Barry Camson, Principal at BarryCamson.com
Knowledge has to move across cultural boundaries in our work processes, whether they be individual, group, discipline, organizational, national or generational in nature. An unfortunate outcome is that often knowledge is ineffectively set out, misconstrued, or disregarded entirely because its cultural context is not understood. Having cultural context can be as important as the content knowledge itself. Barry Camson will talk about what individuals and organizations can do to be effective in transferring and utilizing knowledge across cultures. He will share both cognitive and experiential approaches that facilitate knowledge transfer, giving responses to the various resistances that occur in efforts to transfer and utilize knowledge. The presentation will reference Barry’s work with the U.S. Intelligence Community on cross-cultural knowledge transfer.
Lessons Learned in Evolving High-Tech Knowledge Management: Expanding to a Global Support Model, Dale Hoopingarner, Manager of eServices Operations at EMC Corporation
You Don’t Speak English, Do You? (Knowledge Management in the Multicultural Workspace). Joseph Carrabis, Founder and CEO, NextStage Global and NextStage Evolution
Joseph Carrabis shares his experiences helping a major multinational transition from a group of antagonistic regional offices to a coordinated whole by recognizing common ground while sharing diverse problems.
3:15 - 4:30 - Wrap Up with Larry Chait PRESENTATION
After meeting posts
[Room is available for audience to network until 4:30 pm]
Registration
Speaker Biographies
Barry Camson is an organization development consultant working with Fortune 200 companies and large government agencies address the organizational aspects of technology implementation. Most recently he has worked with British Petroleum in a global deployment of “Field of The Future,” virtual, digital technology. In the Knowledge Management space, Mr. Camson guides organizations to be more effective in transferring knowledge across cultures. Mr. Camson has presented at the Babson College Working Knowledge Forum and co-authored a paper on cross-cultural knowledge management with Larry Prusak. Barry blogs on collaboration and knowledge management at www.barrycamson.com.
Joseph Carrabis is Founder and CRO of The NextStage Companies (NextStage Evolution, NextStage Global and NextStage Analytics), companies that specialize in helping clients improve their marketing efforts and understand customer behavior. Carrabis has authored 25 books and over 500 articles in five areas of expertise: cultural anthropology, database technology and methods, information mechanics, language acquisition, learning and education theory, mathematics, social network topologies, and psycholinguistic Among the topics of his articles are cultural-knowledge modeling, equine management, knowledge studies and applications, library science, martial arts, myth and folklore, and neurolinguistic, psychodynamic and psychosocial modeling. He has written for iMediaConnections, AllBusiness.com, BizMediaScience, PersonalLifeMedia, That Think You Do and TheAnalyticsEcology. Carrabis is a Senior Research Fellow and Board Advisory Member for the Society for New Communications Research, a Founder, Senior Researcher and Director of Predictive Analytics for the Center for Semantic Excellence and a member of Scientists Without Borders. Carrabis has been a lead speaker, guest presenter and panelist at several industry, trade and academic conferences and conventions. Carrabis was recently awarded a patent for NextStage’s Evolution Technology, a broad patent creating a new field of technology and applications. Evolution Technology allows any programmable device to understand human thought and respond accordingly.
Dale Hoopingarner has held a wide variety of technical positions in the computer industry, including applications and systems development, and positions in data center and customer service management. His particular areas of expertise are in call center operation and knowledge management. As Manager of eServices Operations at EMC in Hopkinton, Mass., Dale is responsible for support of the company’s online service tools. Dale joined EMC in 1994. Dale was recognized for his expertise in knowledge management by being named to the Year 2000 “Service 25″ list by IT Support News. He was also a contributor to Leading with Knowledge: Knowledge Management Practices in Global Infotech Companies (Tata McGraw-Hill; Madanmohan Rao, Editor). Prior to joining EMC, Mr. Hoopingarner worked at IBM Corporation in positions that included application and systems software development, and data center management positions that included responsibilities for systems performance management, application development and storage management. Mr. Hoopingarner holds a Bachelors degree in computer science from Michigan State U. and a Masters degree in computer science from Binghamton U., where he studied simulation and high performance and fault-tolerant computer systems.
Pascal Marmier is the Director and Consul of Switzerland at swissnex Boston, a unique private-public partnership dedicated to facilitating collaboration between New England, Eastern Canada and Switzerland in all fields related to science, technology and innovation. Pascal was previously in charge of innovation and entrepreneurship at swissnex Boston helping Swiss entrepreneurs with US business development and working closely with Swiss decision-makers on policy decisions related to innovation. As a project manager, he has also developed international collaborative programs in the fields of sustainability, nanotechnology, and life sciences. Pascal holds an LL.M in US Business Law from Boston University and he is admitted to the New York bar. Previously, he worked as an attorney on international transactions with KPMG. He obtained his JD (licence en droit) and Master in Law from University of Lausanne in 1995. He recently graduated from the Sloan Fellows program at MIT Sloan School of Management with an MBA focusing on topics such as sustainability, innovation, organizational design, negotiation and leadership. Here you can read a recent interview with Pascal.
Sue Newell is the Cammarata Professor of Management, Bentley University, US and a part-time Professor of Information Management at Warwick University, UK. She has a BSc and PhD from Cardiff University, UK. Sue is currently the PhD Director at Bentley. Sue’s research focuses on understanding the relationships between innovation, knowledge and organisational networking (ikon)—primarily from an organisational theory perspective. She was one of the founding members of ikon, a research centre based at Warwick University. She has been involved in many of the ikon projects and has recently completed a project titled ‘The evolution of biomedical knowledge: interactive innovation in the UK and US’. She is also involved in research which focuses on exploring the implementation and use of packaged information systems, for example to support distributed project work or health records. Her research emphasises a critical, practice-based understanding of the social aspects of innovation, change, knowledge management and inter-firm networked relations. Sue has published over 80 journal articles in the areas of organization studies, management and information systems, as well as numerous books and book chapters.
EXHIBITORS: N/A
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Advance registration is required to be eligible for the $50 for the full-day rate. Registration includes continental breakfast and lunch. After filling out the registration form, you may elect to pay using PayPal or you can mail your check to the address provided. Make the check payable to Boston KM Forum. We would appreciate prepayment to speed the on-site registration process. Note that this event is heavily subsidized by The Boston KM Forum to keep the cost within the reach of all KM practitioners. For walk-ins, $60 at the door, cash or check only. Click here to register.
Boston KM Forum wishes to thank the
Bentley University, Elkin B. McCallum Graduate School of Business
for its continued support of the KM series.
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