Many of us work with colleagues overseas or in various parts of South Africa and beyond.  TitanPad (http://titanpad.com) provides an application for facilitating this that is independent of operating system.  There are several choices, so it is possible to customise to suit different purposes.  TitanPad includes a blog.  Perhaps the principal use of TitanPad will be for the sharing of documents on which several people wish to coordinate work.  The main advantage over other systems, such as GoogleDocs, is that it is set up to allow work in real time.  Each member of a group viewing a document will see the document and any changes being made, as they happen. Each person working on the document is assigned a different colour, and their changes are highlighted with the designated colour, and are easy to track; there is a “time-slider” feature so that it is possible to move back and forth through successive stages of the document. Additionally, a “whiteboard” feature allows open discussion with other members of the group — which is useful if several people are trying to develop an idea.  At any point, one can download a copy of the document for off-line use.  Some users have commented that the need to scroll through long documents to find a set of words is tedious and have asked for a “jump to” feature to be added.  Let us hope that the designers (a team of IT professionals located in Austria) listen and continue to develop this useful service.

We are noticing a trend especially in public sector organisations here in South Africa to institutionalise knowledge championship roles as part of knowledge management implementation initiatives. Part-time or full time KM champions are appointed at divisional level to create awareness and interest in KM; assess and communicate knowledge needs; match and connect knowledge requirements with sources; build or augment repositories: and act as links between divisional and institutional KM activities. Several government institutions have already trained KM champions and have completed full blown KM strategies. Leaders in the field include the City of Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape Provincial government. In both cases formal Innovation and KM groups have been established at the institutional level to provide leadership, training and support. Having been involved in providing some of the training we would be interested to learn about other instances of and approaches to formalised public sector KM not only in Africa but elsewhere as well.

Although the world financial crisis has abated and the global economy is recovering, this recovery remains brittle and volatile. Sub-Saharan Africa, although initially not as hard hit has not escaped the effects – particularly countries like South Africa, where our financial markets are extensively integrated into global financial markets. What can Governments in Africa do to speed up this recovery? The Knowlead Team suggests that, other than the financial amelioration that is already being instituted, Governments in Africa can fruitfully engage with Knowledge Management practices to not only bring about a more rapid economic turnaround, but also to confront the many patent inefficiencies in government.

It is heartening to note that some positive signals, such as provided by Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi^1, have been sent out from the public sector in Africa:

The 21st Century African public service has to be a learning organisation, a learning organisation in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about, where the organisation encourages new ways of thinking, where the collective vision of creating the best is liberated, and where everybody continuously learns how to learn together.

Developing countries are thus not necessarily reluctant to embark on implementing KM in the public sector, but as the World Bank has stated, wary of the challenge and their lack of experience and knowledge to do so. This provides a clear signal to encourage African Governments to proactively engage with KM training. We should further strategise innovatively and, as Sinclair (2006) puts it, adopt “stealth KM” by alerting African Governments of the many KM success stories from other parts of the world and the benefit of leveraging a country’s embedded knowledge.

¹Address in 2007 as South Africa’s Minister of Public Service and Administration to the African Management Development Institutes Network Conference