 I know that there are some kind of standards for information management for how to describe some elements, but nevertheless, necessity is to have a real international standard about knowledge management. Okay, please. Okay. Good morning, everybody. I cannot see the sun. I'm waiting to see the sun. Okay. I'm conscious of time, so I will try my best to present a status of the ISO global KM standard in 30 minutes if I can, but it depends on your interesting questions. So far as you know, on day one I talked about a rigorous methodology supported by the European Commission to focus us on critical knowledge assets and how we could measure and manage that, considering knowledge as a key asset, which indeed the ISO standard does. Yesterday, we looked at the work of the World Economic Forum on this notion of the fourth industrial revolution for advanced manufacturing across all sectors, and how these technologies, particularly machine intelligence, may or may not have an impact on the discipline of knowledge management. And today I'm going to talk about the work that's been done and where we are right now, which is the launch of a global knowledge management standard from ISO, International Standards Organization. I mentioned Peter Drucker, and I quoted Drucker earlier this week where he said, the most important role of management for the 21st century must be now to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker, and I hope that this standard will help the discipline and help us with increasing productivity in the area of knowledge work, better knowledge work for the organization, and better knowledge workers. So briefly in the standard, I've already mentioned to you that I came from a background of working initially with the UK government on a government white paper, which resulted in a national strategy to consider knowledge as a key knowledge, creativity, and innovation to be key for the UK's growth. And I briefly mentioned the knowledge asset management approach, all of these things you can Google, and I'm going to give you my email at the end of the presentation. If there's anything I've talked about these three days that you want to know deeper, please contact me, and I will give it to you. So standards, I actually started, I was appointed by the British Standards Institute to chair the BSI, KM Standards Committee, 24 experts in knowledge management. And we spent two years in the period 2001 to 2003 discussing a standard, and we concluded that it was too early for a standard. Maybe we couldn't get consensus, you know. You know what it's like when you get 20 experts together, you try to get consensus. Well, standards are based on global consensus, and what does that mean? It means that there must not be one sustained objection. If there is one sustained objection from any committee member, it cannot move forward. It's really tough. So you're not likely to get the most leading edge thinking in a standard. Let's be quite clear about that. What you are likely to get is the global consensus of experts in the field. And I think that's very useful. And so in 2003, we published a position statement at the British Standards Institution saying it's too early, technologies, methods, processes, strategies are developing so rapidly by the time you develop a standard, it will be out of date. Standards take on average three years to develop. They are reviewed every five years in the ISO, but they've changed significantly. So remember that I came from a position where we actually thought standards were not the right thing for knowledge management. But I persevered and I was also chairing the European group, what's called SEN. SEN is the European Standards Organization. And we did actually publish some very good documents. We published a framework for knowledge management. We published many books on culture, processes, methods, tools and technologies, all very useful and all of them are available to you on the web today. And in 2005, around the world, we started to see more countries committing to knowledge management standards and the most noticeable one would be Australia. And Australia produced their national standard for knowledge management in 2005. Very good standard. If you're interested in this and the history as well as the content, you can Google this. It's all available on the web. It's good stuff. But not much happened between 2005 from Australia and 2015. Went quiet. I did work with the Asian Productivity Organization, which if you like, is their de facto standard for Asia. They felt very strongly that the Asian culture is in some respects quite different. You know, we talk about knowledge sharing here and the benefits of sharing. Many Asian friends told me that they saw sharing as boasting, a different cultural attitude. Some people love to put everything into the computer as fast as they think. They're almost extensions of their thinking. Some people, again, many of my friends in Asia said once I put something in that computer, it's there forever. I'm not going to do that. There is a general attitude that you don't sort of boast. You don't put your head. And so the Asian Productivity Organization created a set of not official but de facto standards for Asia. And these books that I mentioned to you earlier in the week, all available to download, add them to your own resources for knowledge management. They're very good. They're some very good. Particularly if you look at all that I've mentioned. But let's now move on to ISO. Suddenly in 2014, things started to happen within the ISO and it happened in the area of human resource development. It happened because a technical committee was formed. And that was called TC260. And that is a technical committee that exists today for the production of 14,14 global HR standards. And five of them have already been published. One of the standards that this global committee felt was very important to the global standards was knowledge management. And that's where it was born, really, in that technical committee. Now I mentioned in the beginning of the week that in the early years of knowledge management, there was almost a fight between those that came from an HR perspective and said it's all about people and those that came from an IT perspective and said no, no, no, you can't reach out without technology. And so there were some people who were initially concerned that this was coming from global HR standards. But ISO have determined that this standard I'm about to talk about for knowledge management is completely standalone. Although it will be one of a series of 14 global HR standards, it is also, in its own right, a completely separate standard for those who might be concerned about its origins. ISO insists that when they develop a global standard, that it takes about three years minimum, four years maximum, that we have true global representation and true global meetings. So it kicked off in Galveston, Texas, in November 2015. And typically, ISO formed this work group, international work group. And I was asked by the British Standards Institute, would I once again chair the BSI Committee to act as a mirror committee to ISO, and to go and be represented on the ISO Committee for BSI? My role was to ensure that BSI were happy, that the UK National Standards Authority liked what was being developed globally. So that's my role. I'm today on the ISO Committee, but I also chair the BSI Committee from a national standards point of view. So it started in Texas, and then after the USA, it moved to Europe in Berlin, and that was in May 2016. Another round of talks, plenum talks, on the development of these standards. And in 2016, last year in September, we went to Singapore to encourage more Asian participation as well. Finally, just to complete the history, we finished the draft standard in London in May this year. It's actually finished as a draft standard, but I'll explain the next step in a moment. So bear in mind that standard development, it is essential that standards committees have representatives from government, representatives from industry, representatives from academia, representatives from small companies, like on our committee in the UK. We have the Federation of Small Businesses, 60,000 member country. Big organizations are represented. And of course, KM practitioners, so-called experts, people who are working with the implementation of this on a daily basis. So one of the key roles that ISO are very good at and the BSI is to ensure that the committee is balanced in representation amongst all of these stakeholders. And I'm learning every day, I've been involved with BSI standards, but now at last I understand how ISO develop standards. They have their own vocabulary as well. They don't talk about stakeholders now, they talk about interested parties. So you have to learn the language first that's reflected in the standard. But it's very good. There's a very good vocabulary we can all refer to. A lot of good thinking has gone into this. So let's talk about that particular standard. And first of all, why do we need a standard? Well, generally speaking, there are lots of good reasons for standards. And of course here, and the IAEA standards are vital. You mentioned at the beginning of the week that information and knowledge must be managed as a resource according to the IAEA safety standards quite rightly. Very important. However, what I'm going to talk about today is a knowledge management standard, not necessarily a safety standard, although there will be overlaps for managing information and knowledge for safety reasons as well as for other reasons. Why ISO? Some people love standards. Some people hate them. Some industries must abide by them for obvious reasons. Safety, security, like you know well. But there are some industries that can choose if they want to or don't. There are 164 national standards bodies around the world. And ISO engage all of them. How many ISO standards do you think exists? Give me a guess. There will be a prize. Thousands? Get closer. Come on. Around a thousand. Or lower than 1,000. Higher. Higher. One more. One more last higher guess. 10,000. That's not bad. In 2012, there were 19,200. You're going to say 20. Too late. Too late. There's 20,000 standards. ISO standards. It's like a religion. It's like a religion. Some of this I rather like. For example, ISOs say that standards are practical tools for sustainable economic development. They could be the very powerful tools for environmental development. Social development. Standards, international standards, and this is a global standard, can better facilitate trade. Do you know what the first standard was ever in the world? Actually, the first standard was developed by the British Standards Institution. That's why I'm here saying it. I get my British flag out. It was a standard for railway gauges. In 1906, in the UK, you would have different railway gauge sizes in the north of England and the south and the east and the west, and railroads couldn't do this. That was the very, very first BSI standard that kicked off the standards work. Greenwich meantime. Could be. Greenwich meantime. But even today, there are different railway gauges across different countries. I read that China, actually, they've worked it out. They actually put some freight trains that went from Beijing to London on the same railway tracks. But there are certain countries in the world where you have to stop. I lived for 10 years in southwest France. We would often go across to Barcelona on a train from Carcassonne to Barcelona. We would travel for an hour and then we'd have to wait for two and a half hours as they widened the gauges. Think about our world today if there wasn't a standard for the worldwide web. TCP, IP, HTTP. Think of our world if we didn't have a standard for telecommunications. Think of our world if we didn't have a standard for international space and so on and so on and so on. The other thing I like about standards is they claim that the ISO standard is a tool to spread knowledge. I would consider standards to be knowledge assets, you see, and in the categories of human knowledge assets and structural that I talked about and the standards we saw earlier in the week, the three safety standards. To me they are highly valuable structural knowledge assets. So ISOs say they are a tool to disseminate, to spread knowledge and to share good management and conformity assessment practices. That's what they say, but essentially ISO are saying that they represent a global consensus of the state of the art. So that's what we have. For this subject, knowledge management, we now have global consensus on the state of the art. What do we mean by knowledge management? Where does it start? Where does it finish? How does it impact with information management? How does it impact with innovation management, etc., etc. At least we have consensus at the moment, for the moment, because once the experts have developed the draft standard, which has now happened, in probably one or two weeks' time, I did hope by today that it hasn't happened, in one or two weeks' time anybody in the world can download this draft standard for a public consultation period of 12 weeks. So if any of you are interested in influencing this standard, please, please, it can all be done through the web, you can download the draft standard, you can comment online, and then we as a committee are getting back together in November and we have to process the public comments. After that's been processed, it becomes a published standard at the beginning of next year. Although many people will act on the draft standard in a couple of weeks' time, they will consider that the principles in the standard are something they should start to work with now. So there are many reasons for why we need standards. I, in the initially doubted standards, to be frank, as I said, in 2001 to 2003, I thought you can't have a standard for KM. And I think it was because I saw at that time, as many of us did, it was just simply a set of good practices, guidelines and best practices, and as they were changing, what's the point? But we missed something very important. We missed, we didn't realize that there's something more important than good and best practices, and that is identifying and implementing the effective principles of knowledge management. Because although practices can change, and although technologies can change, principles, if they're true principles, shouldn't change or change far less. I remember in Cambridge, I rather like this, I got this from the applied mathematics and theoretical physics people. And although that's to do with quantum field theory and atoms and things, I like that diagram because it, to me, I use it when I'm teaching to talk about principles because I consider the outer area where there's lots and lots of different things changing, the technologies, the technologies to support knowledge management, as we all know, are changing rapidly. Technologies change by the day, technologies are growing exponentially. And it's good to focus on technologies. We have to, there's major advantage in seizing on certain technologies. Look what happened when the mobile phone came out. It even changed cultures, you know, tools can change culture quite rapidly. The mobile phone changed the way we all communicate around the world rapidly. There are times when you can just focus on new emerging technologies and adopt them to great advantage. But we have to bear in mind that to keep on top of that, they're changing all the time. But as we go closer within, things get a bit more stable, and this is where we get the processes and the best practice, or the good practices, they will change. We're always looking at ways to improve our business processes by using the best tools and technologies and strategies, but they will not change as quickly, perhaps, as the technologies are thrust upon us. And then as we get into the center, I like to think people as well. People, but people will join organizations and leave. And I've learned a lot about this 100-year life cycle of a nuclear power plant and four generations just to maintain that, and the need for retention and transfer of knowledge. But people nonetheless will change. But the principles, if we could identify what are the fundamental principles of effective knowledge management, then the people, the processes and the technologies, which will change, can all still better support the fundamental principles. And that's why I like that diagram to try and do it that way. So ISO principles. This is what switched me on. This is where I decided in 2014 when they said, would I come back and chair the BSI Committee and go on the ISO Committee? Initially I questioned it and they said it's principles-led. ISO have completely changed their attitude to principles. I beg your pardon, their attitude to standards development. If you ask many people around the world standards, they will use words like compliance, which is important, especially with things like safety. They will use words like prescriptive. And historically, ISO standards have been very prescriptive. If you wanted to get certification for an ISO standard, you have to comply. The auditor would come along periodically, tick the boxes, ensure that you are complying according to the standard and get your re-certification. And it's got that sort of, that's how many people view standards. So when they looked at knowledge management, they thought, no, no, no, the last thing knowledge management should be is prescriptive. But ISO recognized just a few years ago something quite fundamental, that they had to change the development of standards from prescriptive to principles-driven. And that's what it's all about now. ISO standards are principles-driven. The job of the experts is to identify the principles, in our case, effective knowledge management, and the principles of effective management systems. So ISO actually developed a standard for effective management systems, whether it's quality management, knowledge management, asset management, information management, management systems, there are some effective principles for that. Every single ISO standard must have those management principles embedded in it, as well as the principles of the subject that we're dealing with. So principles of risk-based thinking are standard in every ISO standard from now. Principles of effective leadership, monitoring, measuring, reporting, all the aspects that we've discussed for effective management are embedded in every ISO standard. So I bought into that and I joined the committee, because I figured that now we might get it right. So what we actually have for this now are principles led with two types of principles. The principles of effective knowledge management, the principles of effective management, and there is something called annex SL. If this turns you on, annex SL is a document you can download from ISO.org, which shows you the principles of effective management for any system that have to be embedded in every standard in the future. There's another very good reason as well. Every standard has to have the same principles of management. So if your organization is interested in safety management and quality management and asset management and knowledge management, you can integrate them in a much easier way, because they're all based on the same principles-led framework. Does that make sense? So management system standards called MSS. Every standard has to be scoped correctly with the proper references. Every standard has to have terms and definitions. It has to have a paragraph that shows that it's not one size fits all. A knowledge management standard is not one size fits all. The context of the organization is important. Every organization will have a different context. Therefore this has to be adaptable to the organization. Leadership, planning, support, operation, performance, evaluation, improvement. All good management principles are embedded within this standard and every other one. So I was thinking about this and I was thinking so what standards would really be effective for knowledge? And I've just come up with a few of them. I'm sure there may will be more in the 20,000 that exist. But the ones that struck me as the most important, if your organization is seeking to become world-class, if it's seeking business excellence, if it's seeking to be best at what it does with knowledge, clearly the ISO knowledge management standard, which is called ISO 30401, is key. That standard, as you can see, is under development on the left-hand side. It's about to go into public consultation within the next week or two. I talked about assets, knowledge as an intangible asset. If you like that approach, which is just one approach to effective knowledge management, take a look at the published standard that exists today, which is ISO 55001. That was published in 2014. That is the standard that talks about a strategic asset management plan, whether you like it or hate it. I like it. I think it adds value to looking at knowledge and intangible assets. In 2015, the most popular ISO standard in the world, which is ISO 9001, quality management, most people have heard of that one. I don't know how many organizations, but vast number of organizations around the world use this. They introduced for the first time in their standard in 2015 a new clause on organizational knowledge. If you want quality management certification, you have to demonstrate or show that you recognize your organizational knowledge. There is a risk management standard, and there is an innovation management standard, which is under development. There are two others that I just wanted to refer to at the bottom. Because it comes from a human resource family, there is another standard under development called 30414, which is human capital reporting. I'm on that committee as a liaison officer. I'm on the committee for the quality management as well, just so I can liaise with the knowledge management, and we're not repeating the same things. They have got some excellent measurements there already to measure and report on human capital, as well as structural capital, which is an asset management. So I can see all of this converging. I'm not going to talk about any of these others in detail. You're going to hear more about them during the week anyway. All I wanted to say briefly, conscious of time, is that in each of these standards, the management principles are embedded. And so if I was to take asset management, for example, as an example, embedded in that standard is this Plan-Do-Check Act. It's fundamental to every standard. It's just part of the whole thing. You can download these wonderful PDFs if you're interested in standards, and it will show you how, even for intangible assets, how these management principles are embedded and risk-based thinking is embedded. The knowledge management standard, which is the one which you're most interested in, I can't give you a copy of it today. You've got to wait for a week or two until you can download it, otherwise I get shot. But what I can do is read little bits. This is the structure of the contents page, and that basically says that very briefly, there is an introductory phase to the standard, which is the purpose of the standard. What is the purpose of the standard? I'll read it. It's for knowledge management. It's to support organizations to develop and manage systems that effectively promote and enable value creation through knowledge. That's the purpose. The intent of the standard, the KM standard, is to set sound KM principles as, for two reasons, to set sound KM principles. A, as guidance for organizations that aim to be competent in optimizing the value of organizational knowledge. That's the key thing, to help organizations create value from knowledge, whether they go for certification or not. The ISO are not a certification body. There are other recognized bodies. ISO are only interested if you take their standard as a tool and it helps you with the creation of value through knowledge. Secondly, it is also a basis of evaluation and recognizing such competent organizations by recognized certification bodies. That's essentially what it is. It then goes into why KM is important. It talks about the guiding principles. It talks about the boundaries and then it has all the management system standards there. That's briefly what it is. That's all I've got time for. I hope it's given you an insight into the development of ISO global standards. It's here now. There is consensus. Take a look at it. If there's anything you violently object to or agree with, you have an opportunity to comment on this for the 12-week public consultation purposes. And then it will probably be published shortly after the Committees have processed that towards the end of this year or the beginning of next year. Thank you for your attention.