Keynote Speakers

Prof. Karl-Erik Sveiby

Prof. Karl-Erik Sveiby is often described as one of the "founding fathers" of Knowledge Management, having pioneered many of the fundamental concepts. He is the principal of Sveiby Knowledge Associates and Professor in Knowledge Management at the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki . In 1986 he published his first book in Swedish, "Kunskapsföretaget", in which he explored how to manage the rapidly growing "Knowledge Companies", organisations that have no traditional production, only the knowledge and the creativity of their employees. It became an instant bestseller and he became the source of inspiration of the very early "Swedish movement" in knowledge management in both research and practice. His book published 1990 (Sw. "Kunskapsledning") was the world´s first with "Knowledge Management" in the title.

Being owner and a manager of a publishing company for 15 years, which he was instrumental in developing into Sweden 's largest in trade press Ekonomi & Teknik Förlag, he recognised the need to measure the intangible assets, and he went on pioneering accounting practices for intangible assets, testing them in his own company. Today he is researcher, developer of tools and methodologies and advisor to corporations and governments worldwide. He has researched in the fields of knowledge management, intellectual capital and intangible assets since the early 1980s making him one of the original leading lights.

Prof. Dave Snowden

Prof. Dave Snowden has been one of the leading figures in the movement towards integration of humanistic approaches to knowledge management with appropriate technology and process design. Well known for his work on the role of narrative and sense making, he is an entertaining speaker and a formidable realist, and one of the few thought leaders who can bring together the academic and practitioner perspectives into a single, comprehensible purview.

He is Founder of the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity which focuses on the development of the theory and practice of social complexity.  The Centre spun off from IBM in July 2005 to allow it greater freedom to explore new transdiciplinary and participatory approaches to research and the creation of an open source approach to management consultancy. The Cynefin framework which lies at the heart of the approach has been recognized by several commentators as one of the first practical application of complexity theory to management science and builds on earlier pioneering work in Knowledge Management.

A native of Wales , he was formerly a Director in the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management where he led programmes on complexity and narrative. He pioneered the use of narrative as a means of knowledge disclosure and cross-cultural understanding. He is a leading keynote speaker at major conferences around the world and is known for his iconoclastic style, pragmatic cynicism and extensive use of stories to communicate what would otherwise be difficult concepts. Tom Stewart, the new editor of Harvard Business Review in his latest book states in the context of tacit knowledge "Dave Snowden, the best thinker I've found on the subject ..." although by way of counter he also comments "he is Welsh and a bit mad".

Dave Snowden has an MBA from Middlesex University and a BA in Philosophy from Lancaster University . He is adjunct Professor of Knowledge Management at the University of Canberra , an honorary fellow in knowledge management at the University of Warwick , Adjunct Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and MiNE Fellow at the Universita Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore in Italy .  He teaches on various university programmes throughout the world.  He regularly consults at the board level with some of the world's largest companies as well as to Government and NGOs and was recently appointed as an advisor on sense making to the Singaporean Ministry of Defence. In addition he sits on a number of advisory and other bodies including the British Standards Institute committee on standards for Knowledge Management.

Dr. Usama Fayyad

Dr. Usama Fayyad is Chief Data Officer and Senior Vice-President at Yahoo Inc, the largest Internet portal in the world. Prior to joining Yahoo he served as President and CEO of DMX Group, a data mining services company that delivers advanced predictive and strategic data applications to some of the world's largest organizations. He started DMX Group after founding digiMine, Inc. (now Revenue Science Inc.) in early 2000 and served as its President and CEO until mid-2003. digiMine is a venture-funded company focused on data mining and business intelligence hosted solutions that are delivered on demand over the internet. Dr. Fayyad grew the company to over 100 employees and raised $45 million of capital from top venture and institutional investors. Prior to digiMine, Dr. Fayyad founded and led Microsoft Research's Data Mining & Exploration Group. At Microsoft he also led the development of data mining components within Microsoft products, including SQL Server 2000. From 1989 to 1995, Dr. Fayyad was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, where he founded and grew a multi-million dollar advanced research program to develop data mining systems for the analysis of large scientific databases. This work solved some significant scientific problems and earned him numerous awards including the most distinguished excellence award from Caltech/JPL and a U.S. Government Medal from NASA. Dr. Fayyad has published over 150 technical articles and is co-editor of two books on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. He is very active in the KDD community and has served as program co-chair of KDD-94 and KDD-95 (the 1st International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) and as general chair of KDD-96 and KDD-99. He is Editor-in-Chief of the scientific technical journal: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. He is a Director of the ACM Special Interest Group on knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) and Editor-in-Chief of its newsletter: SIGKDD Explorations. He serves on several Editorial Boards including the Communications of the ACM and Artificial Intelligence Magazine. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from The University of Michigan Ann Arbor in Computer Science and Engineering. He holds two BSE's in engineering, M.Sc. in Mathematics, and MSE in Computer Engineering.

Prof. Zhongtuo Wang

Zhongtuo Wang is the professor of School of Management , Dalian University of Technology (DUT), head of the PhD Program of Systems Engineering, director of Research Center of Knowledge Science and Technology, DUT He is the member of Chinese Academy of Engineering. He was the vice-president of Systems Engineering Society of China.

In fifties of last century, he joined the department of Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology. As the founder of Department of Control Engineering of DUT, he made a lot of contributions to the teaching and research works in the field of Optimizing control and Computer applications. In the year of 1977, he moved to the area of Systems Engineering. As one of the originators of PhD Program and research works of Systems Engineering in China and founder of Institute of Systems Engineering DUT , he devoted himself to the task of theoretical research in decision analysis, complex adaptive system and network optimization. As a leader he has organized a lot of projects of applying methodology and techniques of Systems Engineering to the Chinese economic and engineering endeavors, including the strategic analysis of regional economic development, production planning of the petroleum refinery, planning and scheduling of the construction projects, and impact of information technology to the management transformation. A the same time, he organized the education task of MS and PhD program of Systems Engineering and Management Science in DUT.

In the years 1986-1988, he worked in International lnstitute for Applied Systems Analysis (lIASA) in Vienna , Austria as research scholar and head of international collaborative project and known internationally for his contribution. He has published 10 books and 9 translations and more than 150 papers and reports. He received 2 national awards, 9 awards from ministries of Chinese government. He is now working in Knowledge Management and Technological Innovation.

Prof. Leif Edvinsson

Prof. Leif Edvinsson is the world's leading expert on Intellectual Capital (IC). He has been Vice President and the world's first Corporate Director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia of Stockholm, Sweden and has held the world’s first professorship on Intellectual Capital at Lund University Sweden since 2000.

Prof. Edvinsson has been a key contributor to the theory of IC and oversaw the creation of the world's first corporate Intellectual Capital Annual Report. In 1996 he was awarded both by American Productivity and Quality centre, USA and Business Intelligence, UK for his pioneering work on IC. Prof. Edvinsson formerly was senior vice president for training and development of S-E Bank, and president and chairman of Consultus AB , a Stockholm-based consulting company.

In light of his work in both training and IC, Prof. Edvinsson has been a special advisor on service trade to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is also special advisor to the United Nations International Trade Centre and is a co-founder of the Swedish Coalition of Service Industries. Prof. Edvinsson holds an MBA from the University of California , Berkeley . He is the author of numerous articles on the service industry and Intellectual Capital. He is a regular speaker before such organizations as the BBC, CIO, Conference Board, Economist, Handelsblatt, Insead, IMD, and the American Productivity and Quality Centre. He is listed in the Who's Who list of the world.

In March 1997, Prof. Edvinsson launched together with Michael S. Malone the book on Intellectual Capital called "Realizing Your Company's True Value by Finding Its Hidden Brainpower". In January 1998, he won the prestigious 'Brain of the year' award, in competition with the likes of Bill Gates and Paul McCartney. Prof. Edvinsson follows in the footsteps of illustrious former winners such as Gary Kasparov (World Chess Champion), Prof. Stephen Hawking, and the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. In 2000, he was also listed in the Top 20 list of the most admired Knowledge Leaders in the world.

Patrick Lambe

One of Asia’s most respected knowledge management practitioners, Mr Patrick Lambe was originally trained and worked in Library Science. He arrived in KM via a second career in training and development, and has spent the last fifteen years based in Singapore.

Mr Lambe is a widely respected Asia Pacific KM professional with good links into KM practice and theory in Europe and the USA. His Master’s degree from University College London is in Information Studies and Librarianship, and he has worked as a professional librarian, as a trainer and instructional designer, and as a business manager in operational and strategic roles. He has been active in the field of knowledge management and e-learning since 1998, and in 2002 founded his own consulting and research firm, Straits Knowledge with a partner. He speaks and writes internationally, keynoting at the ACT-KM Public Sector KM Conference in Canberra in October 2004, and appearing in Bizmedia’s new Global Knowledge Review as a regular contributing author. He is the author of The Blind Tour Guide: Surviving and Prospering in the New Economy (Times, 2002). He is currently working on a book about Taxonomies for Knowledge Managers