In the 19th century, in most developed countries, the health of the population was transformed by the provision of clean clear water. In the 21st century knowledge is the analogue of water, and citizens and professionals both need and have a right to easy access to best current knowledge. If public health is defined as the organised efforts of society, then the provision of a clean clear knowledge service is the responsibility of public health.

The Director of Public Health for a population should worry as much about the quality of knowledge being delivered to the population as the quality of water. They should think about remote populations or populations without access to the Internet, the modern equivalent of the water system.

Unlike water, however, knowledge changes every year and it is therefore essential for the Public Health Service to make sure that people have access to best current knowledge, taking steps to manage new knowledge and make sure it is put into action. It is not possible for the individual public health professional to do this, any more than it is possible for the individual public health professional to create clean clear water except with a great deal of effort boiling and filtering. That requires action at community level or state level or national level, but ensuring that the population, including all the professionals working within it, enjoy the benefits of clean clear knowledge is a public health responsibility.

The session will focus on the exploration of cultural factors in organizations that can foster or create barriers to knowledge identification, creation and sharing. Lessons learned from natural experiments that have failed as well as have been successful involving inter-organizational communities of practice will be shared. Results from an evaluation of a virtual community of practice for street and outreach nurses will be highlighted. Participants will work through a short case study to identify strategies to address barriers and promote solutions to foster an organizational culture to support knowledge management.

The Montérégie Regional Health Authority (Agence de la santé et des services sociaux) is responsible for planning, financing and evaluating the health and social services delivered to 1.4 million people. In an effort to improve the performance of the delivery system, the Regional Health Authority has put forward a strategy to maximize the use of evidence in its different decision-making processes. This concurrent session will be an occasion to present the different “volets de la stratégie” and share with the participants the lessons learned from three years of implementation.

Many decision makers may still consider the world’s health information to be overwhelming. However, modern evidence-based information tools, including “systems, summaries, synopses, syntheses, and studies”, are making it possible to be alerted to new evidence as it becomes available and to find current best evidence when needed.

Everyone in health care is aware of evidence: the need for it, the lack of it, the challenge of it. Patients want reassurance that they are getting quality care. Practitioners want knowledge that is current, relevant, accessible and useful. Policy makers want proof that resources go to best practices. Most health care practitioners would like to incorporate better evidence into their practices, but knowing where to look, what to trust, or how to connect evidence with practice can seem onerous. An easier starting point can be facilitated sharing of questions, problems, and experience. By empowering communities of practitioners with tools for better organizing their “internal evidence,” evidence literacy skills emerge that can help identify, assess and apply “external evidence.” This presentation will share insights gained from initiatives where communities of practitioners use integrated information environments to access knowledge services, knowledge management and shared problem-solving tools.

The know-how and really good information of our experts at all levels drive performance and innovation in our organizations. So it is strategic to share and leverage really good information and know-how. Now define knowledge. Add management. Add technology tools. Clarity just disappeared. The Government of Alberta learned some essential concepts, good practices and swamps to avoid in its knowledge management initiatives over the past eight years. You will get the knowledge summary. Start with: it’s 80% about people and 20% about tools.

This talk will focus on the intersections between library/information science and knowledge management in the day-to-day practice of public health professionals, with a discussion of examples and applications that showcase the ways in which the tools and techniques of one field-library/information science—are harnessed for successful use in the real world of practice in the other field—public health. Both time-honoured traditional techniques and cutting-edge technologies will be described, with an emphasis on specific problem areas in public health.

The central question of this presentation will be: “How do we create or increase value from the use of knowledge?” We will contend that knowledge transfer is an incomplete concept and we will advocate the more comprehensive concept of knowledge management as a value creation process which includes knowledge transfer and additional concepts into an integrated conceptual framework that leads to the derivation of business models. We will suggest that organizations transforming knowledge in order to create value achieve four functions performed as a sequential four-stage process that involves: identification of knowledge-based opportunities; conversion of knowledge-based opportunities into new or improved products, services and practices; communication of the developed knowledge to other units in your organization or to other organizations; and appropriation of the value of the communicated knowledge through implementation or commercialization.

Knowledge and technology transfer organizations could benefit from the use of a road map that would help them to identify some overall direction regarding how they might improve their practices regarding the identification, transformation, communication and appropriation of knowledge-based opportunities, and therefore to improve their knowledge business transfer models. We will conclude by comparing strengths and weaknesses of different knowledge transfer model strategies that currently operate in Canada.

Participants in this presentation will gain insight into the steps involved and factors to consider when developing a knowledge management website. Steps include: audience analysis, setting goals and objectives, web best-practices and usability, developing and managing content, and evaluation. Live examples including: online collaborative workspaces, content management and delivery systems and techniques, managing bilingual content, online evaluation and analytics will be demonstrated throughout the presentation.

In every organization, knowledge production is central to what keeps it alive. However, sharing that knowledge within and across borders is difficult if not often challenging. While systems can be developed to aid in addressing these challenges, systems rarely if ever speak to the more confounding aspects of knowledge discovery and sharing, aspects rooted deep in an organization’s culture or its culture of practice. This presentation will discuss cultural attributes of knowledge sharing and discovery at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a means of highlighting potential knowledge management challenges across public health.

The effectiveness of knowledge management depends on the knowledge being managed. If we are not producing the knowledge we need to be successful in our work, changing culture, process, and technology will be of limited value. Drawing on recent research in the field, this session will explore two kinds of tacit knowledge that are underrepresented in public health’s knowledge base: the knowledge of people who are directly experiencing public health problems and the knowledge of front-line public health practitioners. Methods for obtaining this tacit knowledge and for combining it with explicit public health knowledge will also be presented.

A number of evidence-to-policy partnerships are beginning to experiment with producing policy briefs that start with a policy issue and work backwards to mobilize research evidence about ways of framing the policy issue, the magnitude of the challenges linked to the policy issue, policy options to address these challenges, and implementation strategies. These partnerships are also beginning to experiment with organizing deliberative dialogues at which senior government officials and key stakeholders (including civil society groups) participate in a discussion about how to address a particular policy issue. A policy brief will be a key input to the deliberative dialogues, but so too will be local knowledge about on-the-ground realities and constraints, values, interest group dynamics, and institutional constraints. The presentation will describe both these innovative approaches and their formative evaluation.

The churn associated with "reinventing the wheel" can be a frustrating experience for under-resourced, yet well-meaning leaders / teams of KM initiatives. Too often during the course of a KM implementation, we ask ourselves "how can we better apply KM principles to implement KM business and technology solutions?"

Using a Deloitte KM framework, best practices and lessons learned will be extracted from case studies (national and international health service organizations) to demonstrate the critical success factors for implementing knowledge management business solutions. These best practices will provide strategic and tactical advice that can be applied to all your KM initiatives.

This concluding keynote presentation will build on the themes and ideas presented by the other speakers at the conference. The goal is to consider ways to develop effective knowledge management initiatives by building on these ideas and highlighting a number of the underlying assumptions and principles of knowledge management that have emerged from research and practice. Increasingly, we recognize the complexity of knowledge management. For example, the conference themes of culture, content, process and technology could also have included strategy, leadership, structures, human processes, decision making, work and physical design, to mention a few. Within each of these themes we see tensions and challenges, as well as opportunities for the future.