TFPL Connect: Cash is tight, KIM is core

The final TFPL Connect event for 2010 looked at the impact of the current economic climate with presentations from consulting firms and a business school.

But first the preliminaries.

There were some changes from previous events. The new venue was the Grand Connaught Rooms, which I suspect most consultants have been to at some time. I think this was my third or fourth event there.

The bigger change was the new tfpl logo. I rather liked the previous orange block which was both striking and simple. This new one looks a little washed out to me and also too busy with the name fighting for contention with the artwork and two strap-lines.

Some things don't change though and the pre-talk networking was most welcome. The champagne helped too.

TFPL Connect is somewhat dated relying still on the presentation format, rather than group collaboration, but they do attract some good speakers so I can put up with being talked at. And by "good" here I mean people who have real knowledge of the subject in hand and have something useful to say about it.

The talk by Philip Weinberg of McKinsey gave some interesting insights on how they position and use KM within the company but more interesting were the glimpses of life within the company with comments like it is not necessary to always work late in the office, you can go home and work from there.

Jane McKenzie of Henley Business School presented some analysis of KM adoption which showed no great changes over the last three years and the private sector being much more enthusiastic about collaboration than the public sector.

The view presented of Enterprise 2.0 was more gimmicky than useful with concepts like the Agile Archipelago in the Anthropocene Era (seriously!).

There were some nuggets in the presentations but the relentless being talked to got to me and my interest waned at times. It's partially because of this that it has taken me over a month to pull together my few thoughts from the event.

So not the best TFPL Connect event but, overall, good enough to make me want to come back for more.