1. Making use of knowledge as a
critical and dynamic resource
in your workplace

2. About ACELG
• A unique collaboration of universities and
bodies committed to the advancement of
local government
• The centre's vision is for "world class local
government to meet the emerging
challenges of the 21st century"

3. ACELG's program areas
• Research and policy foresight
• Inovation and best practise
• Governance and strategic leadership
• Organisation capacity building
• Rural-remote and indigenous local
government
• Workforce development

4. Specific challenges facing local
government
• Diverse range of services
• Ageing workforce
• Legislative requirements
• Volume of records
• Diverse workforce –
– Education
– Literacy
– Computer skills

5. What do we know?
• There are known knowns. These are
things we know that we know. There are
known unknowns. That is to say, there are
things that we know we don't know. But
there are also unknown unknowns. There
are things we don't know we don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld

6. What do we know?
• Social media is increasingly being used
by local government but often in an "old
media way"
• Half of councils do not let staff access
social media/networks from work
• Community is looking to have
conversations with council, not recieve
press releases on their iphone

7. A word about Records
Management
• Use TRIM – or some other document
management system
• Records policy
• Legislative requirements
• Typical council
– 80,000 documents registered PA
– 5,037 subject based folders
– enormous thesaurus
– expensive monolithic system of management
which won't talk to any other system

8. How that is changing
• Planning alerts
• Fix my street
• Council Gripe

9. Other challenges
• Recent changes to freedom of information
act
• Need for web compliance with
accessability guidelines (no more PDF's?)
• All state and federal records departments
working on/developing guidelines fo
retention of social media records

10. BYOD
• Heard of it?
• Have a BYOD policy?
• Who does it?

11. It's the people stupid!
• How many of your colleagues in your
councils see themselves as "knowledge
workers"
• How many would see council as a
"knowledge organisation"?
• How many would term what they know as
knowledge?

12. Knowledge is
• Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or
something, which can include facts,
information, descriptions, or skills acquired
through experience or education. It can
refer to the theoretical or practical
understanding of a subject. It can be
implicit (as with practical skill or expertise)
or explicit (as with the theoretical
understanding of a subject); and it can be
more or less formal or systematic.

13. knowledge culture
• Create an environment where knowledge
of all shapes and sizes is shared
• Don't assume people only have
knowledge/skills in their work area
• Develop corporate online FAQ
• Encourage a culture of knowledge sharing
in a less formal way
• Value story telling and create opportunities
through intranets, brown bag talks etc

14. Encourage knowledge sharing
• Skills audit
• Environmental scans
• Develop internal communities of practice
• Play dates
• Conference reports
• Innovation programs
• Involve staff in development and delivery
of training

15. Build knowledge capabilities
• Don't assume that people know stuff -
• Use yammer - good practice for using
Twitter later
• Familiarisation with the internet is very
important
• Top results in Google search not the most
reliable!
• Problems often not where you expect
them

16. Give people tools
• Teach critical thinking
• Teach basic statistics - excel is scary!
• Access to professional networks

17. Retain existing knowledge
• Identify key potential retirees -
acknowledge expertise
• Allow CoP or or team to determine which
of a range of techniques they want to use:
– interview sessions,
– video,
– written work programs
– on site demonstrations
• Recognise the importance of the program
- peers and management