Biography
Ken Megill is a fully qualified knowledge manager, with education, training, and experience with the relevant principles and technologies used to manage knowledge. He is a problem solver with the practical skills and experience to guide organizations through the transition to the knowledge age.
He has had four successful careers:
A PHILOSOPHER
As a professional philosopher, he was a successful teacher and researcher. His professional training is from Yale University as well as two years post-graduate study in German universities. He published more than a dozen articles in philosophical academic journals. In 1970 Free Press/Macmillan published his original and comprehensive treatment of democratic theory. He was one of the first National Endowment for Humanities Fellow and the first professional philosopher to be invited by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In Budapest he met regularly with the esteemed philosopher Georg Lukacs and worked with Lukacs' associates who became known as the Budapest School. The work he did has recently been discovered in China where he was invited to visit and to to give lectures. In the second edition of his book Thinking for a Living, he integrates some of his philosophical work in developing a theory for knowledge management.
TRADE UNIONIST
Throughout his time as an academic he was active in the anti-war and racial justice movements in Florida and nationally. Along with several of his colleagues at the University of Florida he was dismissed for his political views and activities. After leaving the faculty he worked full-time organizing the United Faculty of Florida (UFF), a trade union that today represents more than thirty thousand faculty and professional employees in Florida.
As a union president in a hostile environment he was active in the labor movement at local, state and national levels. In 1982 he worked for a year at the National Education Association (NEA) developing a communications program for its higher education members. As a result of his recommendation, NEA established Thought and Action, a peer-reviewed journal that today has a readership of 180,000, making it one of the largest academic journals in the world.
RECORDS AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGER
During his work at the National Education Association (NEA), he became interested in how an organization manages its information and how to apply appropriate technologies to information management. In 1986 he received a Masters of Science in Library and Information Science (MSLS) and later became a Certified Records Manger (CRM) and a Certified Archivist (CA).
He was the first professional records manager at the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Administrator of National Banks for the US federal government. He automated the operations of the Central File Room and spent a year working with other OCC staff to develop a data dictionary for banking. He began a fifteen year working relationship with Cuadra Associates and assisted them in developing the first software for managing electronic records.
He was a faculty member at the School of Library and Information Science at the Catholic University of America where he developed a certificate program for information resource managers in the federal government. He spent two decades as a working professional in records management for a number of organizations including leading a three year project to establish an integrated digital environment at the United States Air Force. He spoke widely at local and national associations. He continued writing and his books on records management and knowledge management are both now in their second edition.
A Business Man
In 1989, Ken Megill and his partner, Lawrence Tan, opened the first full-service Malaysian and Singaporean restaurant on the East Coast of the United States. He played an active role in managing the business which was successful for twenty years. He continues to be an officer and owner of Tan, Inc, a corporation that now manages commercial property in Washington DC.
In 2003 he and Lawrence Tan established Knowledge Applications Services to enable him to put his theoretical work into practice. Since then he has worked with the National Mediation Board (NMB), a government agency managing labor-management relationships in the airline and railway industry to establish the first all-electronic record system in a federal agency.
Ken is, at bottom, a leader and a teacher who excels in working with organizations and people to make technology an empowering tool. He believes -- and practices -- the basic principles of successful technological advancement:
1. Business needs must drive technology, not the other way around.
2. We must do more than simply do dumb things faster.
To contact Ken Megill, please click here.