Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

Today the Knowledge for Development Partnership (K4D) initiative released an updated version of the ' Agenda Knowledge for Development ', which formulates 14 "knowledge goals" meant to supplement the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and strengthen the Agenda 2030 from a Knowledge Management perspective. The updated version includes one added Goal 14 ‘The arts and culture are central to knowledge societies', as well as 57 added statements (in addition to the 73 statements in the previous edition) from knowledge management practitioners in development across the world, including my own. I've already shared on this blog my reflections on the role that I believe Artificial Intelligence will play in Knowledge Management in the coming years , and I've re-iterated my view on this in my statement for K4D which is now featured under Part II of this document (page 84), "Statements on Knowledge for Development" next to the statements from 130...

Innovations are driven by risk-takers. Part of UNDP’s role in innovation is to provide the space for risk-takers to develop and test their ideas. And it turns out that sometimes these are not individuals, but entire programmes! The Pacific Risk Resilience Programme (PRRP) covers the Pacific countries of Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu, and takes an unusual approach within UNDP’s programme portfolio. Now in its fourth year, it didn’t exactly follow the standard programming approach in which a challenge and a development model is identified in the beginning, and a set of interventions is designed that would then be rolled out over the course of the next years, with clear activities and results prescribed for each year. Instead, PRRP didn’t actually describe the model or the interventions themselves at all. Instead, they let the model emerge over time by running sprints of interventions and evaluating them frequently, something that is known in the information technology world as...

I recently came across this blog post by a start-up that is developing an Artificial Intelligence that is being trained to read and write at the level of a specialized human analyst and produce briefings in human language based on a set of different information resources. It’s just one example of many different companies that are currently working on this challenge. The obvious clients are intelligence agencies, governments, or news agencies, but eventually this will enter all of our everyday work very soon. I thoroughly believe that this is what knowledge management in large organizations will look like in 10-15 years from now. In my organization, we’re challenged daily to consolidate the key lessons and insights from all our country-level programmes and experiences, lest meaningfully combine them with information, trends and insights from the larger development sector. We complain that we’re overwhelmed by the information overload that social media, Yammer and knowledge network...