Ron Young knowledge blog & follow my work

12th November 2023 - BSI Standards Conference

I attended the BSI Standards Conference on 9th November 2023, held at the Westminster Central Hall in London.

Here are my notes of the sessions I attended.

10.05 - 11.00 Opening Plenary Keynote: Gregg Williams, Editor-In-Chief at Wired & Editor of annual trend report: Wired World

Gregg quoted Neils Bohr, 100 years ago,  "Prediction is very difficult' and the future will be determined by human ingenuity.

We are wired for immediate reaction , not gradual change (this reminded me of the 'boiling frog' story from Professor Charles Handy)

Gregg stated that in the technology world its all about speed as the 'winner takes all'

Today 85% of teenagers in the USA have iPhones and so Apple are well entrenched, and Google are clear leaders with Google Search with an enormous gap before Bing search  etc

Technology would enable local manufacturing and have a significant effect on supply chains.

Genome technology has gone from $billions and thousands of people to $200 per genome.

We are told that estimates are to have 75 million jobs displaced and 135 million new jobs created

3D printing of wind turbines could be created on site. Now into 4D Printers that add the time dimension.

Airpods should be considered as a new platform

Augmented Reality progress  is significant

Drones are able to see the world in new ways

Elon Musk has used Twitter / X to train their AI (isn't hat heavily used for hate speech?)

UCL are considered world leaders in AI and Demis Hassabis, CEO at Google Deep Mind obtained a PhD there

11.10 - 12.10 Interactive Workshop 'Emerging Tech, regulation and standards

Panel across Human Rights / Regulator / Information Communications Office (ICO)

Regulation - UK Government White Paper to adapt and react rather than a National AI Strategy plus volunteer Standards like ISO 42001

The US Framework is very different to the UK Framework

The COPs (Community Model) is good for SME's as they don't have the bandwidth and resources to get involved in Standards 

lecturer at Loughborough Uni said the regulations and standards for Quantum Computing are different to other AI

There is little understanding for the new AI paradigm and so there will be conflict until there is a greater understanding

Treating AI as just a tech is wrong, as AI is a new form of intelligence and just like like human knowledge, AI affects everyone and everything we do 

13.20 - 14.20 Interactive Workshop BS ISO/IEC 42001 - AI Management Systems

The National Institute Science Technology (NIST) has an AI Risk Management Framework

The 42001 Standard involved 37 countries and 250 experts to gain global consensus (even though there are different national perspectives)

Operational AI and Strategic AI

ISO 42001 is scalable and risk driven

Note to myself: ensure the quotations I use are balanced fairly between positive and negative views of the safety of AI

Can AI write Standards? Answer is that it can write drafts to help but not the global consensus required

14.55 - 15.55 Closing Plenary Minister Kevin Hollinrake MP, parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Enterprise and Markets, Scott Steedman, DG Standards BSI, Matt Gantley, CExec, UK Accreditation Service, Dr Neil Stansfield, Head of Strategy and Head of Digital Sector, National Physics Laboratory

Minister - ultimately trading is based on Trust

Learn from School students who have been born with digital skills set (its a different thinking)

UK is the largest tech sector in the world

Scott Steedman - we have to be at the top table

UK has full access to EU Standards development and knowledge

Minister would like a 'mutual respect agreement' with EU23% goods to EC 77% elsewhere

Scott - take a systems led approach, co-design

Panel of different Institutions and we need more joined up, more coherent, integrated 'One Voice'

END

31st October 2023 - here is the AI Safety Summit: confirmed attendees 

Here is the UK AI Safety Summit confirmed attendees

Academia and civil society

• Ada Lovelace Institute

• Advanced Research and Invention Agency

• African Commission on Human and People’s Rights

• AI Now Institute

• Alan Turing Institute

• Algorithmic Justice League

• Alignment Research Center

• Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

• Blavatnik School of Government

• British Academy

• Brookings Institution

• Carnegie Endowment

• Centre for AI Safety

• Centre for Democracy and Technology

• Centre for Long-Term Resilience

• Centre for the Governance of AI

• Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Cohere for AI

• Collective Intelligence Project

• Columbia University

• Concordia AI

• ETH AI Center

• Future of Life Institute

• Institute for Advanced Study

• Liverpool John Moores University

• Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute

• Mozilla Foundation

• National University of Cordoba

• National University of Singapore

• Open Philanthropy

• Oxford Internet Institute

• Partnership on AI

• RAND Corporation

• Real ML

• Responsible AI UK

• Royal Society

• Stanford Cyber Policy Institute

• Stanford University

• Technology Innovation Institute

• Université de Montréal

• University College Cork

• University of Birmingham

• University of California, Berkeley

• University of Oxford

• University of Southern California

• University of Virginia

Governments

• Australia

• Brazil

• Canada

• China

• France

• Germany

• India

• Indonesia

• Ireland

• Israel

• Italy

• Japan

• Kenya

• Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

• Netherlands

• New Zealand

• Nigeria

• Republic of Korea

• Republic of the Philippines

• Rwanda

• Singapore

• Spain

• Switzerland

• Türkiye

• Ukraine

• United Arab Emirates

• United States of America

Industry and related organisations

• Adept

• Aleph Alpha

• Alibaba

• Amazon Web Services

• Anthropic

• Apollo Research

• ARM

• Cohere

• Conjecture

• Darktrace

• Databricks

• Eleuther AI

• Faculty AI

• Frontier Model Forum

• Google DeepMind

• Google

• Graphcore

• Helsing

• Hugging Face

• IBM

• Imbue

• Inflection AI

• Meta

• Microsoft

• Mistral

• Naver

• Nvidia

• Omidyar Group

• OpenAI

• Palantir

• Rise Networks

• Salesforce

• Samsung Electronics

• Scale AI

• Sony

• Stability AI

• techUK

• Tencent

• Trail of Bits

• XAI

Multilateral organisations

• Council of Europe

• European Commission

• Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI)

• International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

• UNESCO

• United Nations

Thursday 4th May 2023

I used to say 'Knowledge underpins everything we do', I now say 'Knowledge and AI underpins everything we will do in the next few years'

This week is quite extraordinary!

Our National TV stations in the UK, and Fortune Magazine, have all headlined Geoffrey Hinton, the grandfather of AI, who stated that he regrets his life work with AI because of bad actors !  See the Fortune Magazine article here too.

I am hoping to meet Geoffrey Hinton in Cambridge UK this month, where he told me that he is arranging to meet the leading AI team at Cambridge University to discuss this further.

I also woke up this morning to a youtube feed from Matt Schlicht who talks about "emerging humanity with autonomous agents to make the world a better place". I do hope he is right. In his video ' Forget ChatGPT, This AI Will Replace Humans - Guide to Autonomous Agents & Autopilot'  he briefly discusses:

1. What are Autonomous Agents?

2. Why Autonomous Agents are such a big opportunity?

3. How Autonomous Agents work?

4. The Future of Autonomous Agents, and  

5. How to build and use Autonomous Agents

Since my article appeared in 1998 in the American Business Journal 'The Future of Knowledge Management', I am still convinced that we will see Autonomous Intelligent Systems and Agents as key parts of all our knowledge work. I see many early adopters now, gaining significant advantage in their markets, and I see this as mainstream in all areas of knowledge work by 2030 latest. 

Wednesday 3rd May 2023

Stephen Wolfram and his views on AI's rapid progress and the 'Post Knowledge Work Era' 

Stephen Wolfram is a man I would like to interview. 35 years of experience in this domain shines through to me in continuous wise common sense statements. In his 1 hour 25 minutes video, being interviewed by Jason Calacanis, he talks about:

• The history of neural nets and parallels to the human brain

• Large Language Models (LLM's)

• Why the big jump?

  • the corpus that the LLM are now trained on

  • the evolution of computing power and massive storage

  • language models

• How ChatGPT works

• Natural language Processing

• Transformers

• Emergent behaviour

• Generative AI

• Ethics for autonomous systems

• Societal matters and employment / jobs

• The Post Knowledge Work era

• The Creative Era

Friday 29th July 2022

Tribute to James Lovelock (1919 - 2022)

I would like to pay tribute to James Lovelock who passed away yesterday aged 103 years.

Certainly, for me, he was one of the most inspirational thinkers on the planet and such a marvellous man.

In 1979 he developed the book, ‘Gaia – a new look at life on Earth’, co-developed with Lynn Margulis. At that time, I was a small organic farmer and member of the Soil Association in Thaxted, Essex, UK and the Gaia hypothesis proposed a synergistic, self-regulating, complex system to maintain life on Earth. The ideas came shortly after the formation of NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This thinking and ideas resonated so deeply and became a key part of my attitude to life.

His achievements since then have been extraordinary. Not only was he one of the greatest environmental thinkers and inventors, but even as recently as 2019 he produced the book ‘Novascene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’. I was simply glued to that book until I had read it all. In this book, James Lovelock took a further look at life on Earth and proposes that Artificial Intelligence is becoming the dominant new life form in the evolution of intelligence. This prospect may delight or horrify you, and he has certainly focused us on the ethical design and use of autonomous intelligent systems.

If you are not familiar with the remarkable thinking and achievements of James Lovelock, here is a link to an 8 minute video that says it better than I ever could. The video is ‘How to save humankind (according to James Lovelock) from the Economist. Take a look. Naturally, of course, you may not necessarily agree with all his thinking, but I guarantee that his ideas will make you think deeply.

James Lovelock will be missed by many. Towards the end of this short video, he was asked about his achievements as an inventor at 102 years of age. He said, “My father was inventing when he was two weeks from dying, so I only hope to follow his example.”

17th June 2022

Knowledge Asset Management - The Future is Here

Presentation to the Institute of Asset Management Global Conference 16th June 2022

Please feedback/comment/contact me here

Friday 10th June 2022

Video of the whole proceedings for the 3rd Smart Cities Forum  at American University in the Emirates

There were some great presentations made throughout the day.

My presentation on' Knowledge Asset Management and Smart Cities' starts at 3hrs.19mins.20secs and ends at  3hrs.47mins (28 minutes)

 Smart Cities for Smart Living.mp4

Monday 30th May 2022

American University in the Emirates

I am delighted to be speaking at the American University in the Emirates event '3rd Smart Cities Forum' on 8th June 2022

Under the Patronage of Dubai Blockchain Center (DBCC)

College of Computer Information Technology (CCIT) &

College of Business Administration (COBA)

jointly present

3rd Smart Cities Forum 

Further conference details here 

Saturday 21st May 2022

Unicom Workshop - Knowledge Asset Management

My next virtual workshop on Knowledge Asset Management will be on 15th June 2022, organised by Unicom Seminars, London.

Trevor Lui, Managing Director of Knowledge Associates Hong Kong will also be making a presentation at the same conference, on 16th June 2022 entitled 'Embedding knowledge management into the operational business processes'. Here is a 3 minute video from Trevor and I, introducing both our sessions

Saturday 7th May 2022

Ineffective communications and inadequate knowledge

I was reminded yesterday, as a result of a request from a very large global organisation that was seeking to improve communications and retention of critical knowledge, of a webinar I conducted with the BSI in London two years ago. I talked about the root cause for most problems in organisations today being ineffective communications and inadequate knowledge. I claim that if you improve communications or knowledge management by just 5% across the organisation, you will see many of the surface problems, which are really symptoms of the root causes, simply disappear. I talk about this for 4 minutes in the video timeline 4m.40secs to 8mins 30 seconds below:

Tuesday 26th April 2022

Frustrated with The Future of Knowledge Management in 1999

Today, after a very long walk and deep reflection, I realised again some fundamental principles that I have always known about my work in knowledge management, since 1993, but failed to act on fully. So the frustration has been growing to the point of explosion, again, where I now feel that I must act. And I think I may have a workable action plan this time around because I suddenly feel so much more relaxed and more content with my work.

My frustration started in 1999 when my article was published in the European American Business Journal entitled 'The Future of Knowledge Management'. I started by saying that "This article describes the case for the future of 'extraordinary' knowledge management by first describing what we sometimes refer to as 'ordinary' knowledge management, before introducing the radical and fundamentally new knowledge management capabilities that we believe organisations will understand, absorb, and implement within the next 10 years." I stated that the critical question, at that time was "Will the good and extraordinary work that is going on in knowledge management show results quickly enough to convince the critical mass of organisations that they must urgently pursue this, or will the massive and mediocre bandwagon ultimately convince organisations that knowledge management is nothing too special, and relegate it to 'yet another initiative'? And are we likely to throw the baby out with the bathwater? 

I remarked that "We keep hearing many, although not all, knowledge management consultants, practitioners and presenters at conferences make the remark that: "there is nothing new about knowledge management". They are quite right and also quite wrong. In current thinking they are correct - we have been developing knowledge since the dawn of humankind." "In new thinking, however, they are quite wrong. They have not themselves understood what this new phenomena of knowledge management is really about yet, because what we are doing now simply wasn't possible just a few years ago, and it has had a remarkable impact on individual and organisational knowledge management and performance."

 ... " I firmly believe that the business community will gradually embrace and implement the new extraordinary knowledge management methods, tools and techniques over the next five to ten years. Clearly the early adopters will gain a significant advantage - until the extraordinary then become the ordinary."  

I was wrong then! My frustration continued.

Reviewing The Future of Knowledge Management in 2008

Subsequently, I developed a simple website www.knowledge-management-online (it's still live on the web today because several Universities still use this resource in their KM training programmes). I stated "Today, 9 years later in August 2008, I decided to rewrite this article. Where is Knowledge Management (KM) going in the next ten years? What did I get right in 1999? What did I get wrong and what have I learned from this? What are the challenges for knowledge driven organisations if they are to thrive in the global knowledge economy in the next 10 years? I restated the case for ordinary and extraordinary knowledge management. You can read 'The Future of Knowledge Management 2008' here.

I concluded in that article "I say the same today as I said in the article in 1999, with the same degree of conviction. If you are considering improving the knowledge management in your organisation, whatever stage you are at, and if you wish to use consultants to advise and assist you, I strongly recommend that you ask them to demonstrate how they are, themselves, personally practicing knowledge management on a daily basis.

Is it ordinary knowledge management?

Is it extraordinary knowledge management?

If it is neither, then run away as fast as you can!

The future of knowledge management. over the next few years, may be shaped accordingly.

Today, in April 2022 I am frustrated because there are still, in my opinion, too many ordinary knowledge management cases and not enough extraordinary and compelling knowledge management cases, although they have started to grow faster in this past few years. 

The Future of Knowledge Management April 2022

The answer for me, to satisfy my frustration, is to further develop this knowledge platform, where I can demonstrate how I practice what I still consider to be extraordinary knowledge management strategies, competence development, methods, innovative processes, tools and techniques today, in my daily life, personally; in collaborative teams; as an organisation based in Cambridge UK; and globally through our Knowledge Associates companies in the eight key regions of the world. This may not work for you at all! Alternatively, this may be exactly what you are looking for. Or you may like to try to do a few of the things we do in our daily knowledge work.

So, at last, my action plan is to simply demonstrate, far more than before, how I work, learn and improve, and the benefits I gain daily, rather than just intellectual concepts.

If there is sufficient interest in what I am doing, I will be motivated to share my thoughts and ideas for The Future of Knowledge Management 2022 to 2030, especially with regard to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 2030 Vision and 'Decade of Action Report.

The good news for me is that my frustration has gone.

I would be very pleased if you wish to contact me through this website with your comments and any feedback or if you would like to know more.

Thursday 14th April 2022

Institute of Asset Management Global Conference 2022

Today I was delighted to be informed by the Institute of Asset Management that my paper “THE FUTURE IS HERE - KNOWLEDGE ASSET MANAGEMENT 2022”  has been selected for presentation at the 2022 IAM Global Virtual Conference. I am excited to share my insights and our thought leading work on the latest developments knowledge asset management with the global audience. This will be the fourth year that I have presented knowledge asset management in IAM national and international conferences.

Conference being held on virtual platform.

Date: Wednesday 15 June and Thursday 16 June

More conference details will follow from the IAM shortly.

https://theiam.org/events/iam-global-conference-2022/

Monday, 11th April 2022

Today I finalised a 15 page paper, entitled 'KNOWLEDGE ASSET MANAGEMENT - LEVERAGING THE WORLD'S KNOWLEDGE'.

It is available to order now and it will be available in the KA Store to download from 18th April 2022 at

https://www.knowledge-associates.com/solutions/store

The paper is adapted from my forthcoming book 'Global Knowledge - driven by knowledge asset management'.

Friday 8th April 2022

Today I was reminded that it was in April 2022 that I recorded the podcast with the Project Management Institute, USA, together with Peter Merrill, 'Creating Standards for Knowledge and Innovation Management.

Creating Standards for Knowledge and Innovation Management

Listen to this episode from Center Stage: The Voice of The Project Economy on Spotify. Peter Merrill is leading the development of the ISO Management System Standard on innovation management; Ron Young chaired the BSI Standard committee and was part of the ISO Working Group that developed the Management System Standard on knowledge management. In this episode of Center Stage, they talk with PMI Chief Customer Officer Joe Cahill about how you standardize such abstract concepts.They explain that the standards focus on establishing enablement systems that can be managed. “We’re not trying to hug an elephant,” as Merrill says, a system is a set of elements which we manage so that they link together. Young explained that standards are based on a set of principles of good leadership and management and contain critical success factors for managing innovation and knowledge. They discussed how organizations can evolve from simply identifying lessons from a project, to actually learning those lessons, changing behavior’s and truly deriving value from project knowledge. Beyond the standards, Merrill and Young discuss the value of diversity and inclusion, and the role of artificial intelligence in knowledge creation. They conclude by sharing the visionary idea that we are moving into a knowledge economy where scarcity of resources is no longer the primary driver and where collaboration begins to supersede competition. 

Monday 4th April 2022

I had occasion to view a 30 minute video interview I did with Ed Hoffmann for Columbia University, New York, in the Summer of 2021

as part of the 'Building Knowledge Strategy and Services' programme.

Columbia IKS Ed Hoffman Ron Young 31052021

This is "Columbia IKS Ed Hoffman Ron Young 31052021" by Ron Young on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

15th March 2022

Here is a podcast I did for the American Quality Society series 'Innovation in Action'  entitled Knowledge Management, interviewed  by Peter Merrill, an ISO expert in Quality and Innovation

Knowledge Management with Ron Young

Listen to this episode from Innovation in Action on Spotify. How do we become more effective at creating, sharing, transferring, and managing knowledge? Knowledge management expert Ron Young shares critical KM principles and the single best KM practice, explains the differences between tacit and explicit knowledge, and shares insights about the influence of technology and artificial intelligence on knowledge management.

10th March 2022

Launch of KCPC and First Advisory Board Meeting

I am very honoured indeed, to be invited today to be a part of this Global Advisory Board for  'Knowledge Creation Principles Consortium' KCPC, Japan .

KCPC  Advisory Board

Thankfully, the following 12 global experts agreed to be the advisors for the Consortium (in alphabetical order).

· Jin Chen (Professor, Tsinghua University, China)

· Janamitra Devan Chief (Strategy Officer, NEOM; Former Vice-President, The World Bank, currently in Saudi Arabia)

· Leif Edvinsson (Professor, Lund University, Sweden)

· Edward Hoffman (Strategic Advisor, Project Management Institute; Former Chief Knowledge Officer, NASA, USA)

· Paul Lous Iske (Professor, Maastricht University, Netherland)

· Ikujiro Nonaka (Professor Emeritus, Hitotsubashi University, Japan)

· Hiroyuki Ogino (Professor, Sophia University, Japan)

· Laurence Prusak (Lecturer, Columbia University; Former Executive Director of IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, USA)

· Susann Roth (Advisor and Chief of Knowledge Advisory Services Center, Asian Development Bank, Philippines)

· Mieko Tsuyuki (Dean, Chuo Business School, Japan)

· Steve Vogel (Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

· Ronald Young (CEO, Knowledge Associates International, UK

February 2022

Dubai Municipality Knowledge Connect

It was great fun to be invited as a keynote speaker to the Dubai Municipality EXPO to share my work with 'Building Knowledge and Innovation Capital'

30th November 2021

UK Government Kickstart Scheme to employ 8 youngsters for 6 months and develop their digital skills

We enjoyed giving 8 youngsters the opportunity to form and work in a Digital Transformation Team together. Some friction, of course, (team forming-storming-norming- performing) and much creativity and enthusiasm.

18th January 2021

The Role of Organisational Culture in Effective Knowledge Management

youtube.com/watch?v=wzHzsnKcZLs

May 26th 2018

I am grateful for that

7th February 2018

Kuwait Knowledge Economy Forum

15th November 2017

Knowledge Asset Management Masterclass

Melbourne, Australia

11 - 13th September 2017

Nuclear Knowledge Management 

International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Joint ICTP - IAEA School of Nuclear Knowledge  Management

I spent a week  delivering three lectures, together with Larry Prusak, at the  International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy.

Here are my three lectures in the series

Day 1 - 11th September 2017 Managing Critical Knowledge Assets

Day 2 - Examples of KM Projects: Strategy, measurement and results, key lessons learned

Day 3 - 13th September 2017 ISO Standards Development

December 6th 2016

Do we need to teach the younger social media generation basic information management principles?

KM Asia Hong Kong

November 13th 2016

Three Paradigms of Knowledge Management

Nuclear Knowledge Management Conference

UN International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna

12th September 2016

Why do we need to manage our knowledge assets and not just knowledge?

August 20th 2016

How can you measure knowledge assets?

August 18th 2016

Strategic and Operational Knowledge Assets - Ford 2021

August 18th 2016

Where does knowledge reside?

August 17th 2016

The 'Knowledge Driven Spiral of increased Business Value'

August 15th 2016

What's the difference between information assets and knowledge assets?

August 12th 2016

Whats the difference between information and knowledge?

14 - 17 June 2016

Mongolia Television Interview on the Global Knowledge Economy

Here is a TV interview I did to discuss what the Global Knowledge Economy is and it's possible impact for Mongolia.

April 2016

Global Overview of Knowledge Management

Rosatom Knowledge Management Forum (together with UN IAEA, Vienna)

April 10th 2014

Ron Young piloting Boeing 737, London Heathrow, Take off, circuit and landing

April 23rd 2011

Ron Young teaching people to juggle at KM Singapore

July 2009

We trade our knowledge

I remember this conversation with David Gurteen in 2009 at a Knowledge Management Conference.

Here is Davids reply.

19th November 2006

Discover What You Know, Lotus Knowledge Management

This video says, in just over 2 minutes, what many knowledge management educators try to say in several hours

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