Knowledge Management

Part I - IESE and Fundación Iberoamericana del Conocimiento

Knowledge Management became part of my professional life by accident. In May 2000 I joined IESE Business School as a research assistant. My first project there consisted in writing a report on the knowledge management software tools for an executive education course.

While I was researching for the report I came across with an old friend from university, Daniel Marti, who was starting to be involved in what later has become the biggest online community for knowledge management issues in Spain and Latin America, gestiondelconocimiento.com.

Once the report was written in early summer 2000, I left IESE Business School to take some courses at the London School of Economics and spent a few months working at the New York University. At that time I did not see any possible convergence between knowledge management and the topic I was interested in, Development Economics. To my surprise, a few months later and back again at IESE Business School, I realized how important knowledge management was among development practitioners, and in particular within different projects at The World Bank. In 2001 I went there to work for a few months in their knowledge intern program.

Part of the report on knowledge management software tools was published at gestiondelconocimiento.com, where it had a great acceptance among its community and I was called in to give some seminars and courses about the topic. We founded the Fundación Iberoamericacna del Conocimiento and for a few years I was involved in its activities and became a board member. We organized major events and seminars on knowledge management in Spain, with internationally recognized knowledge management experts such as Leif Edvinsson.

At the same time I worked as a research assistant at the Information Systems Department of IESE Business School, as well as the Economics Department. I actively participated in the identification and writing of two cases on knowledge management for the Information Systems Department about a couple of leading companies operating in Spain, Union Fenosa and Siemens. The cases were presented at the Copenhagen Business School in September 2002 and the Cass Business School in London in June 2003. Both cases are now published at the European Case Clearinghouse. In 2005, the case on Knowledge Management at Siemens Spain won the category "Knowledge, Information & Communication Systems Management" in the 2005 ECCH/Business Week European Case Awards.

Part II - The World Bank

In late summer 2003 I rejoined the World Bank as a business analyst at the Information Solutions Group. There I worked one year for AiDA, a catalog of information on development activities found on the websites or internal information systems of major bilateral donors, multilateral development banks and UN agencies. We used IDML (International Development Markup Language) and an XML schema to integrate information from multiple sources to enable searching and retrieval from a common interface. That gave the user a single consolidated report including development activities of different agencies. My tasks involved XML harvesting process, the maintenance of codes, conducting usability tests and planning and coordinating the website redesign with the multi-agency management team and the technical team, creating use cases and quality assurance tests and processes.

I also became involved in the Local Project Database (LPD) development efforts. The Local Projects Database is a web-based tool for managing records on the projects and activities of development partners. It facilitates local information-sharing and coordination among these partners through a common system. My tasks with the LPD team included the tracking and recording of bugs in JIRA for digijava, ensuring that the LPD XML schema was compatible with the AiDA XML schema, and that a process was established to harvest data from the LPD into AiDA. The LPD platform is an Open Source project and can be found at Source Forge.

In fall 2004 I joined the Knowledge Management team of the Latin America and Caribbean Regional Office of The World Bank, where I coordinated the communication efforts of the unit, until summer 2005. Parallel to those activities, I became increasingly involved as a consultant with the team that creates the Spanish version of The World Bank site, bancomundial.org, both at the regional and global level.

My tasks at The World Bank enable me to use topics related both to knowledge management and Development Economics, having reached a fascinating convergence. They also give me a great deal of flexibility, allowing me to work off-site most of the time while using the latest collaboration technologies to interact with my team.