Are you new to knowledge management? Want to learn about all the possibilities for making your organization smarter, more collaborative, innovative, and productive? Join our expert knowledge manager to gain insights and ideas for building a robust KM program in your organization—even if it is called by another name! This workshop highlights a range of potential enterprise KM activities being used in real organizations and shares how these activities are impacting the bottom line. It shows real KM practices and discusses various tools and techniques to give those new to KM a vision of what is possible in the enterprise.

Led by experienced KM practitioners, this workshop focuses on KM fundamentals, principles and concepts, specifically how to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of planning, problem solving, decision making, collaboration, continuity, innovation, and learning in any organization. They discuss using knowledge repositories/forums on SharePoint to maximize learning, innovation, and to support the decision-making cycle, mission, and vision; using online meetings and chat to enhance KM activities; KM tools to use as enablers such as SharePoint, online meetings, chat, OneNote, lessons learned/AARs, etc.; transforming knowledge-intensive activities into a knowledge process with related goals and objectives to support decision making; new knowledge creation (innovation), learning, and elearning tips; strategic knowledge gap analysis and knowledge audits; KM failures; applying KM as part of your daily business processes; and more. Gain insights, techniques, and best practices for making your daily business process more innovative, effective, and efficient using KM.

Expert knowledge is difficult to capture and transfer effectively because it involves deeply embedded skills that an expert may not be consciously aware of using and may not understand how to share. The challenge this poses is how to capture and transfer that knowledge among coworkers and external partners who need to work together on critical, high-stakes projects. Without effective knowledge transfer strategies, these valuable lessons learned and best practices are often lost. This is especially difficult with experts in niche specialties, when parties are geographically dispersed, and when the people who need the knowledge work in different organizations. The knowledge in each of these situations can be easily lost, yet it is knowledge essential to the success of the mission, especially in emergency situations such as responses to natural disaster events that are time-critical. Based on case studies of more than 200 top-level executives, engineers, and scientists at Fortune 500 companies; the military; and multiple government agencies, this workshop begins by offering a background of knowledge transfer and flow strategies and then offers effective processes for enhancing knowledge flow at all levels of organizations—both internally and externally. It covers the impact of internal vs. external parties on knowledge transfer, as well as maintaining knowledge flow when organizations are geographically dispersed. Best practices and tools are shared for capturing key knowledge, analyzing and documenting that knowledge, and multiple methods to transfer that key knowledge. The workshop provides an open forum for addressing individual challenges that participants are facing.

A good deal of knowledge use in organizations is not directly observable: It happens in interactions between people and is embedded in processes, tools, and artifacts. People are not necessarily good witnesses to their own knowledge needs. This workshop addresses the question of what counts for evidence in KM planning and measurement and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for gathering insight into KM gaps, needs and opportunities, to use in planning interventions and evaluating outcomes. It looks at examples, input from a global survey of knowledge managers on KM assessment methods, and ways you can create KM plans for the future.

Congratulations! You’ve just been given the responsibility for search at your organization! Perhaps there is a new initiative to improve search, or perhaps the previous search manager mysteriously disappeared; in any case, you’ve discovered that search is a deceptively tricky domain, and that the expectations of many of your stakeholders are difficult to meet or even to define. This workshop provides an orientation and exposure to the key issues, effective processes, and technology—independent of what brand of search engine you use. It provides lay-of-the-land information and approaches to get you off to a good start. Topics include getting started and where to find practical guidance in search management; kinds of tasks and roles involved in managing search; building a cross-functional team; assessing the current state of search; establishing a vision and creating a findability strategy; getting stakeholders together and constructively involved; discovering and managing expectations; top misconceptions about search and how to educate your organization; top five and next five tools and techniques for improving search; updates and improvements; and measuring search: KPIs, tools, and techniques for internal search engine optimization. If you have been in the search manager’s role for a while but feel like you are missing a grounding in successful practices and management techniques, this workshop is still useful.

Effective collaboration is the key for any organization that seeks to be highly functioning. Leading effective collaboration is a critical 21st-century skill. Yet collaboration is much misunderstood. Too often, senior management believes collaboration to be primarily about people being able to “play nicely with each other.” But effective collaboration requires much more than good social skills. It requires good design. Learn how to design an effective collaboration effort and how to lead it to success. The workshop covers the structural components and people processes of good collaboration, as well as the facilitation techniques that help collaborators work more effectively with each other. Get lots of tips and insights from our experienced practitioner!

The Knowledge Management Office of The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. has developed fun and interactive games to promote and educate large groups of employees about KM concepts. These interactive games are shared with employees at annual events called Learning Labs. After the games are developed and deployed at the Learning Lab events, they are reused by incorporating them into smaller KM introductory courses provided for new employees on a quarterly basis. The objective of this workshop is to describe and explain the development of KM Learning Lab games, and then to have the workshop participants actually experience one of the games called, KM Saves Time—The Case of the Perpetual Motion Tire, a game inspired by the classic board game, Clue. After the game is played by all workshop participants, an opportunity for questions and comments is provided.

Modern intranets are no longer restricted to just corporate communications and content. They play a much stronger role in meeting staff and business needs. While intranets are evolving at a rapid pace, they remain hidden away behind the firewall. It’s therefore hard for intranet and digital workplace teams to see what other leading organizations are doing. This workshop shares worldwide examples across five fundamental purposes: content, communications, culture, collaboration, and social activity. Register for this exclusive behind- the-firewall look at leading-edge intranets, and bring your hardest intranet questions to our experienced workshop leader!

Are you overwhelmed with the different possibilities of features and capabilities in Office 365 and wondering how to get started? If so, this workshop is definitely for you! Take a look at how Office 365 can help enable your knowledge management objectives by looking at the key capabilities and how they support business outcomes. Find out about the key tools available in Office 365 and explore deployment and adoption strategies so that you can ensure that you are successful—from planning to rollout to governance and adoption and everything in between. Get a good understanding of how you can plan your Office 365 deployment to maximize your KM objectives and a framework that you can apply when you get back to the office.

Knowledge doesn’t manage itself. No matter how far AI evolves, knowledge, whether human or digital, will always need human curation. Knowledge curation is one of the least understood aspects of KM. Yet given the accelerated growth of both explicit and hidden knowledge, especially in large datasets, knowledge curation is more critical than ever. You’ve seen no shortage of tools and techniques for building knowledge bases and repositories. Yet the question remains, “How do I design, build, and maintain a body of knowledge that’s easily accessible by myself and others?” This workshop helps to do just that. Gain an understanding of the four main pillars of knowledge curation: 1) the source of the knowledge (you and other subject matter experts); 2) the knowledge itself; 3) the people receiving the knowledge; and 4) the platform and process for putting it all together. Some key elements include how to: determine what knowledge is worth capturing and in what form; reconcile different world views, mental models, and learning modalities, especially among mentors and mentees; determine which tools and approaches are appropriate for different types of knowledge; integrate the various tools and approaches into a single system; vet knowledge and keep it up-to-date; and make knowledge flow and grow, from a single individual to an entire community of experts and practitioners. Join our experienced KM expert and take home an initial plan for setting up and implementing a knowledge curation program for your organization.

Most organizations that practice knowledge management (KM) make some effort to measure the health of their programs by using activity measures to assess how many employees use KM approaches and tools, how often they use them, and how satisfied they are. Organizations with more mature KM programs, however, go beyond simply tracking activity. A more sophisticated approach, called value path measurement, involves evaluating how KM activities influence business processes and outcomes. In other words, is participation translating into results? Tracing links between knowledge sharing and key cost, quality, and efficiency metrics goes a long way toward proving that KM is a value-added business process that yields a positive ROI. This interactive workshop gives participants tools and techniques to define the value path for their KM programs and approaches. It begins with a brief overview of the importance of measuring the impact of KM—why it matters—then moves through a series of activities to define the value path and identify the business measures that support the value path.

This workshop, by a KM pioneer and popular KMWorld speaker, focuses on how to build a successful KM strategy and revitalize knowledge sharing within your organization. Dave Snowden, our engaging workshop leader, takes participants through a step-by-step approach to rethinking the role of the KM function within an organization. It includes creating a decision/information flow map to understand the natural flows of knowledge; defining micro-projects that directly link to the decision support needs of senior executives; mapping the current flow paths for knowledge within the organization; and finding natural ways to manage the knowledge of the aging workforce as well as the IT-enabled apprenticeship. Using real-world examples, Snowden shares winning strategies and insights to rejuvenate your knowledge-sharing practices.

Innovation, a leading attribute of knowledge management, drives organizational success and builds industry leaders.  Accidental innovation, the chance that experience, information, and process improvement come together in a perfect mix is exciting, but rare. Innovation communities are a strategic, and sustainable method for accelerating innovation, mitigating change risk, and empowering employees.  This interactive workshop* engages participants to connect, share, and work toward breakthrough ideas.  Additional exploration will include developing a roadmap for knowledge management and innovation in your own organizational strategy and communicating this value to decision makers.

*Participants are requested to bring their own device in the form of a phone, laptop, or tablet to maximize the engagement experience. 

We are well into the long-anticipated wave of retirements and accompanying efforts to transfer critical knowledge before it goes out the door. A fair amount of knowledge, in the form of lessons learned stories, checklists, rules, and formulas, has already been transferred. While useful, these approaches work primarily at the surface level, addressing what to do only in specific situations. Such methods have proven to be ineffective in complex, rapidly changing environments. This workshop draws upon a growing body of research in cognitive neuroscience, backed by more than a decade of field experience in transferring knowledge at a deep structure level. It focuses on identifying and operating on the underlying thought and decision processes that went into building the knowledge in the first place. Experience the six steps of deep learning: thinking, observing, enumerating, expressing, assessing, and adjusting. Increase your powers of observation by viewing situations from multiple perspectives. Connect the dots and see the big picture. Break detrimental learning habits that are holding you and your team back. Build and grow your personal body of knowledge and improve your ability to communicate what you’ve learned so others may benefit. In addition to the worksheets and handouts, receive a complimentary copy of the book: Deep Learning Manual: The Knowledge Explorer’s Guide to Self-Discovery in Education, Work, and Life.

Analytics to Overcome Information Overload, Get Real Value From Social Media, and Add Big(ger) Text to Big Data Text analytics (text mining, noun phrase extraction, auto-categorization, auto-summarization, and social media or sentiment analysis) is becoming essential to any field that utilizes or tries to understand unstructured text. To develop both practical applications and deeper research results requires the development of a text analytics platform that incorporates the integration of all of these techniques. This workshop, based on a recent book, takes attendees through the entire process of creating a text analytics platform including basic analytics techniques from deep learning/machine learning, rule building and how to integrate them using a modular approach, making the business case and the people and content resources needed, an evaluation process to select the right text analytics software for your organization, an iterative development process that combines entity and fact extraction with categorization, and sentiment analysis to add depth and intelligence to all the components. It uses case studies to illustrate these processes and shares the range of applications that can be built with text analytics, from advanced expertise applications to new uses of social media.

Search is one of the most powerful and useful workloads in SharePoint, and is used by everyone; but too often it fails—largely due to poor understanding of how to apply it and deploy it well. This workshop focuses on the search capabilities of SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint Online and how to match them to a variety of search needs and strategies. Attendees get tips and tricks they can apply immediately. We share effective techniques in the context of case studies and practical tips. Attendees gain an understanding of how to apply SharePoint search capabilities successfully, as well as what pitfalls to avoid. Bring your search challenges to work through them in a “clinic” format. In the process, we cover the key capabilities of SharePoint search and how to apply them successfully. If you are willing to show your system to other attendees, contact the instructor to work through some issues ahead of time and use them as examples.

Change management is a critical people process for any organization that seeks to excel. Unfortunately, good change management is hard to find. Most of us have been on the receiving end of at least one unnecessarily painful change management process. Yet it does not need to be this way! In this workshop, basically a field guide for agents of change, learn ways of leading a change effort that take less of a toll on the people and processes involved. Filled with tips and practical techniques, participants learn how to be more effective agents of change in the field.

Have you ever built a slick KM solution or collaboration tool that no one uses? We have and survived to tell the tale. New knowledge-sharing processes can fail if the resistance to change is greater than the ability to bridge the gap between the new process and the target people. Without a meaningful understanding of “What’s in it for me?” employees don’t readily contribute to knowledge-sharing circles. And because they don’t immediately see the value of sharing, contributing content in more formal environments is often done as an afterthought. Engagement strategies that include effective communication tactics entice users to try something new and help remove barriers to adoption. This engagement workshop focuses on how to identify and select appropriate engagement strategies based on target audiences and desired results. It includes playing the KM Experiential Learning Game, The Journey to the Lost Gold of Atlantis. The primary goal of the game from a KM perspective is to create “aha” moments where each individual sees how his or her behavior either enables or hinders the flow of knowledge and ultimately the impact this has on how the company makes money or the ROI. With help from workshop leaders, get your Executive and Employee KM Engagement Strategy to use in your organization to improve engagement.

*Participants are requested to bring their own device in the form of a phone, laptop, or tablet to maximize the engagement experience. 

Creating value from learning and knowledge initiatives depends entirely on user adoption by changing behaviors and beliefs. As complex social systems, human organizations cannot be programmed—they can only be hacked. KM initiatives can benefit from coordinated change management efforts using the transformation road maps common to IT implementations. But real knowledge sharing requires cultural changes that can only be catalyzed through deeper engagement at all levels of the organization. Any change effort is delicate, and KM programs are especially vulnerable because knowledge sharing can only be voluntary. This popular and practical workshop combines both the coordinating and catalyzing perspectives with real-world experience and advice. Learn the basic components of any successful change program; practice assessing and addressing challenges and opportunities in your organization; and look ahead to the latest thinking in organizational change. Come prepared to discuss your own unique situations and learn from your peers in facilitated, interactive discussions and exercises.

This workshop is for those who want to improve user experience, enhance services, expand brand loyalty, and grow revenue. It teaches the audience how to change organizational problems into innovative solutions through a human-centered design approach called design thinking. It covers transitioning through the phases of inspiration, ideation, and implementation; establishing an agile approach to fail fast to succeed sooner; and the importance of customer journey map design that shows your client where they are today to where they need to be in the future. Get insights to inspire innovation, learn to produce high-quality products and services through a human-centered approach, and understand how focusing on the user establishes an enviable competitive advantage.

The speed that information and idea flows into and through an organization is critical to its survival in our volatile and digitally-transforming world. In this interactive workshop, learn how to bring a slow-moving, zombie-like organization back to life. The workshop leader is an innovative KM practitioner and thought leader who has literally written the book on building smarter organizations. Practical takeaways include how to tell if your organization is in trouble, what to do to accelerate the speed of communication, the value of visual management, and how to make large-scale changes by starting small. Full of tips and techniques, come get lots of tricks to try in your organization!

Communication is the only way anything gets done. How come we are not better at it? In a post-Trump, post-truth world, being cautious is the least-safe option. Robust engagement with stakeholders, staff, and the public and getting your story out there confidently, early, and appropriately is the best way to be safe and protect your reputation. But in most cases the outside is going faster than the inside, and this needs to change. To do so requires being increasingly agile and effective at communicating with each other. The barriers to this are partly technological but primarily cultural and behavioral. It is therefore those cultural and behavioral aspects of communicating in a connected world on which Semple focuses. Join the former BBC CKO and author as he shares tools and techniques for improving communication in your organization. He illustrates these with real-world examples of how organizations are improving their communication and excelling at sharing knowledge within their enterprise.

The Forge is a Belgian consulting firm that supports teams in increasing their innovative capacity. We talk of an innovative culture if the team succeeds in offering an environment that stimulates its members to ideate and design new processes and products as answers to new and old problems. For the past 3 decades, lots of scientific research has been done on these issues. How can we build that culture—this stimulating environment? The Forge has translated this knowledge in handy tools and techniques that you can use in your team, but the key finding is that it is the quality of team and corporate communication that is the engine of innovation. This workshop is based on an award-winning work practice for knowledge workers, called adaptive or collaborative case management, which fundamentally changes how virtual teams work with information—creating a context in which they “extremely work out loud.” This process combined with principles for the increase of team innovation capacity, prompted joint experiments focusing on the innovation capacity of virtual teams using the collaborative case practice. Get the findings of this research and apply it in your own team.

People are at the core of knowledge-sharing—the key to high functioning organizations. In John Seely Brown’s words, “We participate, therefore we are.” New and emerging technology can only enhance learning, sharing, and decision making to create successful organizations. Join our inspiring and knowledgeable speaker as he shares his view of the future of people and tech working together to share knowledge and create winning organizations.

Text analytics and auto-categorization tend to present themselves to the world as esoteric disciplines supported by complex expert systems. Users are immediately confronted by a jargon-wall built with terminology from computational linguistics, such as “tokenization,” “lemmatization,” and “NLP.” At past KMWorld/Taxonomy Bootcamp events, some practitioners who are attempting to get started with autocategorization projects have voiced a common set of frustrations. Categorizing content shouldn’t require an advanced degree in linguistics. Categorization rules should be simple and transparent. Rules development and taxonomy development should be coextensive rather than separate activities. Rules should be easy to edit, and it should be possible to understand quickly and precisely how changes to taxonomy and rules impact document categorization. This talk explores these issues from a design and user-experience perspective. It outlines a manifesto for demystifying text analytics and for simplifying the process of auto-categorization. The manifesto is aimed at a constituency of content owners and taxonomists and hopes to help them take ownership of the categorization process so they can better control the search and discovery experience for their end users.

The majority of research concludes millennials differ from their generational predecessors, and can be characterized by social consciousness. The Micro Focus KM program took that special workforce trait into account by stressing the value of sharing, endorsing attitudes and creating an environment that encourages employees to want to publicly share. Micro Focus Services’ project teams are made up of consultants who are the brightest experts in a particular domain. Big egos tend to protect knowledge and ensure they remain the go-to-person in their subject area. As an antidote, the KM Office focused on embedding knowledge sharing as a desired behavior in the organization’s culture. Sharing should be perceived as critical to the business and as such should be measured in the annual employee’s performance review. Micro Focus Services provides a gamified point-based recognition program with awards for reuse and contribution best practices. The recognition program is able to hit the right buttons for the Services team and opens up the stage for them to show their pride – being the expert in a specific topic and the person to rely on when an issue needs to be resolved. Especially today, when the software services’ business lives with a younger workforce that is used to counting “likes” and “star ratings”. The session demonstrates the tools and techniques used for the recognition program, collaborative content creation and curation, social communities and building on the intrinsic motivation to share.

This session highlights the non-technical side in the journey of developing a new customer- facing collaborative extranet environment. Hear about the successes, as well as the lessons learned, in the speakers’ journey to develop a secure and robust SharePoint-based extranet environment to replace a legacy system and surrounding business processes that had been in place for years. Speakers share what worked well and where they underestimated. They cover some of the non-technical side of areas that are key to the success of any KM project, such as collaborating with cross-functional teams, executive sponsorship, designing with the customer in mind, and change management. Get lots of tips and ideas from their engaging presentation!

When it comes to KM, the role of people can’t be underestimated. Without people, there is no knowledge to manage. In industry, learning systems have allowed people to connect in new ways. This new medium for sharing information has made organizations more successful and learning more robust. Within this environment, there also is the risk of overworking your experts, most of whom have responsibilities beyond sharing knowledge with colleagues. How do you minimize expert exhaustion and keep these employees engaged without overworking them? The solution comes down to simple collaboration and knowledge sharing strategies. Rose talks about the reasons expert exhaustion occurs, why it is a problem, and how organizations can implement a culture of robust knowledge without inadvertently burning out employees.

This panel of client case studies of successful knowledge sharing in high-functioning organizations and communities. Smartlogic’s CEO uses live customer projects to explain how to automatically process the volume and variety of data, insist on veracity to drive quality insights from data, and use machine learning and AI in combination with information discipline. Byrd illustrates how curated micro-content accelerates learning and shares a sample micro-learning deployment strategy and action plan. Armstrong addresses why BPM (business process management) is the backbone to digital transformation and continuous improvement programs. Using relatable scenarios, tips and tools, real-world lessons learned and compelling case studies, he focuses on why and how a business transformation platform is the future of KM and how to better leverage the work that is already being done.

KOC is the fourth-largest crude oil exporter in the world, managing highly complex, multimillion- dollar projects during the last 80 years. Managing critical project knowledge is vital to the success of the project and the organization. Driven by KOC’s 2030 strategy, the multidimensional approach to project knowledge sharing is evolving to be the knowledge- sharing model in KOC. It integrates with various organizational process and policies. Each project engagement generates a lot of learnings that need to be factored in when new projects are initiated to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Many times, these learnings are localized and remain as “tacit knowledge,” leading to scope rework, schedule overrun, adjustment orders, and claims. While KOC follows an asset based organization structure, with a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic workforce, a larger chunk of the work is carried out through complex, long-term project engagement, diffusion of ‘learnings’ across assets. Hear about their lessons learned solution. Then hear how the KOC-Training and Career Development Group performs a customer satisfaction study, seeking feedback from internal customers about improving service demands. As their workforce is rapidly becoming more multigenerational, Millennials now make up more than 40% of the workforce, impacting work behaviors and communication dynamics. Identifying the challenges and opportunities for their talent management strategy, KOC decided to introduce some disruptive initiatives to the behaviors to induce organizational change, and generate trust of the power of social computing within an organization comfortable with traditional learning and communication tools. Guzman discusses developing the innovative services learning community, applying KM and open innovation approaches to foster spaces for employees to be part of knowledge flow, embedding a culture of social learning based on collaboration and trusted communication, and lessons learned on how the enterprise IT capabilities were key enablers enhancing agile networking solutions supported by mobile applications to boost knowledge and expertise advice on a click. She shares their road map and secrets of how employees developed new mindsets and skills as well as benefits from learning and development opportunities.

Rebuilding aging portals is a daunting task. Years of accumulated knowledge and information are stored in portals that have become too big and too convoluted to function efficiently. The potential value of the information stored there is clear, but cleaning portals up and transforming them into a modern, flexible, and scalable digital workspace is no small feat. Our speakers discuss devising and executing a program to transform a dinosaur of a portal into an active hub of multilateral information exchange, describing how they did it and what they learned along the way. This includes the structured and patterned approach to redesign and rebuild the old portal in a systematic and predictable way; the role of internal social networks as tools for both communication and collaboration; the role of information items and contextual search as building blocks of information repositories; introducing the concepts of portal transformation to content owners who were initially resistant and functionally fixed; and selling the large information management project to C-level executives. Merck (known as MSD outside of the U.S. and Canada) is a global biopharmaceutical company whose mission is to discover, develop, and provide innovative products and services that save and improve lives around the world. Hear how it implemented a KM strategy for self-service that considered user experience-driven technology, as well as a change execution management methodology that included process, people, and content. Get tips and success factors on the case for change and the holistic solution for an IT self-service portal that included people, process, content, and technology components.

The idea of the “customer experience” is a powerful one, and it’s a strategic consideration for most big organizations. As a result, we’ve seen a huge degree of customer-centric digital transformation. Within the enterprise, the concept of the “employee experience” is equally powerful. Going beyond basic usability and UX, it takes a holistic view of how solutions are designed and delivered. This practical session outlines how digital workplace professionals and projects can use the employee experience as a strategic driver for change. Real-world examples of great employee experiences from around the globe are shared.

This mini-workshop features a number of practitioners who share their experiences and tips for using SharePoint to support KM in the digital workplaces within their organizations. Lean KM in engineering and process development is focused on efficient use of knowledge and Thorpe introduces the key practices from A3 Thinking to the creation of reusable knowledge. He emphasizes developing the ability of leaders in the organization to recognize and mentor the process and building a KM platform to allow teams to quickly find and reuse the knowledge captured as they solve problems. He shares how Intel’s Manufacturing Validation Engineering organization has scaled these practices across its 5,000-person workforce, the challenges faced in developing SharePoint-based KM tools to facilitate the adoption of these practices in Intel teams, and the internal KM rules developed based on precedents shared by other members of the KMWorld community. KM in Deere is taking shape with various aspects being piloted in different functions including CoPs, new employee on-boarding process, training scorecard, skill assessment, knowledge leadership path, engineering knowledge vault, etc. Bapat discusses developing a skill set assessment system (SSAS) and dashboard for manufacturing engineering (ME) to put a more user-friendly, low-maintenance, and sustainable process in place. He describes how Deere used SharePoint and Tableau as tools, how the system allows locating the experts in specific skills in ME organization, and how these are used to achieve a KM objective of highlighting the mix of skills available to the organization and enabling findability of specific skill experts. Collaboration and efficient business processes are key to organizational success, and NASCO speakers share how they have used out-of-the-box features of SharePoint to facilitate KM activities across their organization and provide solutions for real business problems such as moving its SharePoint platform beyond simple document storage to connecting the vital tools and business processes employees use on a day-to-day basis. Don’t operate SharePoint flying blind says Fried, who explores the role of analytics and reporting in the world of SharePoint portals and intranets. He looks into the value of SharePoint analytics and the insight it brings to organizations; how analytics have changed through the versions of SharePoint 2010, 2013, and SharePoint 2016—sometimes not for the better; what’s available online and on-prem and how this is evolving in the Microsoft road map; what options are available beyond out-of-the-box reports—building your own, and add-on dashboards and reports. He shares real-world examples, shows how people actually use analytics, and demos some of the tools available. Take away new ways to manage business processes or content while greatly reducing reliance on manual intervention using SharePoint tools and the tips from our speakers.

This is a continuation of B103.

For 11 years, the global Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards have uncovered and shared remarkable solutions. This year is no exception! See the best of this year’s winners from the U.S., Europe, and beyond. They range from small ideas to entire platforms, giving something for everyone to take away. Ismail discusses the challenges of developing a rigorous and robust, efficient and effective digital workplace environment in a multi-cultural, decentralized organization and what means and methods can be used to create a viable digital workplace. A variety of different tools are recognized, such as the intranet, internal and external collaboration platforms, and enterprise search.

This mini-workshop begins with our popular storyteller, Snowden, who shares tips and techniques for getting the most out of narrative stories as well as real-world examples where stories have made a significant impact on their communities. This is followed by two more examples. Lolland-Faster (100.000 inhabitants) are two islands in the southern part of Denmark suffering for decades under an unmerited bad image. The media is always inclined to cover the region very negatively, which has generated a collective frustration and low self-esteem. Sydendal highlights an initiative that began gathering all the inhabitants and friends (now 24,000-plus) of the area in a Facebook group. The initiative asked them to collect and share positive stories about themselves and the region. They created a Love Storm archive/library with positive personal stories/photos, etc., to remind journalists and residents of the fantastic resources the islands have, which has led to a new strong sense of pride and love in the region and thousands of posts, comments, and Likes. In 2016, Save the Children embarked on a new global strategy, Ambition for Children 2030. One of the key areas of focus for this strategy is maximizing the use of organizational knowledge to improve program quality and staff efficiency. Hear how a team of two connected 25,000 employees of a global NGO with Workplace by Facebook

This is a continuation of session C201.

Come play KMJeopardy! Have fun and get practical insights based on case studies and anecdotes that address the 12 most common hacks in KM. You choose your most urgent challenges from the game board (in three categories: people, process, technology). Real-life examples from the speaker’s 15 years experience in KM, as well as from the conference and attendees, then inspire you to hack your chosen challenge. Walk away with actionable learnings (yes—and prizes).

Our first speaker is responsible for the overall KM strategy, planning, and implementation as well as influencing and leading change in the organization by optimizing the integration and functioning of the organization’s components (personnel, technology, network, facilities, and processes). He discusses the tools and solutions used in the Executive Engagement Application, an initiative developed to synchronize the engagements of seven general officers who travel to 38 countries in the Asia-Pacific region with interactions with U.S. elected officials, think tanks organizations, academia, and supporters. In addition, the application captures and creates a repository so it is an effective collaboration tool which also archives the products prepared to facilitate the engagement. Cannon, who sits on the DOD/Joint KM Working Group, discusses how KM is performed in a combined/joint environment. He shares tips and techniques for making KM work successfully.

Any global or geographically distributed organization has many collaboration-related KM challenges including not reinventing the wheel, delivering knowledge to the right people at the right time, delivering results faster, delivering quality products or services, reusing recommended practices, not repeating mistakes, keeping employees informed, and minimizing change impact. A collaborative organization is in a better position to address these challenges. And to improve collaboration, the organization needs to address gaps by improving internal networking, building trust, addressing what’s in it for me, building creative mass, and engaging employees. The first presentation describes how NPS’s Common Learning Portal allows members of the NPS workforce to find formal training, informal learning resources, and Communities of Learning (CoL) all on one website. Due to the decentralized culture, CoL on the site are grass roots in nature—any logged-in user may create one. The grassroots approach is empowering and maximizes flexibility, but also creates logistical challenges. Hear how the portal team helps each community facilitator to clearly define the group’s purpose and a technical strategy for achieving the purpose, ranging from an online community to supplement a formal training to a collaborative work group facilitating organizational culture change. Get tips on implementation, the most common user stories which organically emerged for NPS CoL, specific strategies which NPS has employed to support communities, and how you can identify strategies to support your organization’s CoL. Chandel discusses how Red Hat, an open source software leader, is developed by global communities and people who collaborate to develop Red Hat software at no cost. He shares how Red Hat Services’ KM program uses open source strategy to make the KM initiatives successful, build trust among employees, develop collaborative culture, and deliver quality results. He also talks about collaboration challenges and how Red Hat addressed them to create a global collaborative organization.

Our popular writers, speakers, and authors of Wow, Woo, Win: Service Design, Strategy & the Art of Customer Delight look at how customer experience and service design can enhance knowledge sharing and success in organizations. They discuss the importance of designing your organization around service and offer clear, practical strategies based on the idea that the design of services is markedly different than manufacturing. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it’s the experience that makes the difference. To provide great experiences that keep customers coming back, organizations or KM programs must design services with as much care as design products. Service design is proactive—it is about delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy. Our speakers share with you how to create “Aha” moments when the customer makes a positive judgment, and to avoid “Ow” moments. They provide tips on how you and customers create a bank of trust, fueled by knowledge of each other’s skills and preferences.

Everyone who engages with your organization is in search of something, whether it’s products, services, people, or support. Too much of their time is spent sifting through useless information. New advances in machine learning and AI technology, combined with contextual search, are finally bringing relevance to every interaction and are making knowledge management a key driver of real business results. See real-world examples of the impact that increased maturity has made on innovative companies. Learn actionable steps to increase the relevance of your organization and start positively impacting your bottom line.

Communities of practice are a great way to develop expertise and innovation around specific interests. By infusing intelligence into many experiences and demonstrating some recent advances in Office 365 you’ll see how to leverage tacit and explicit knowledge in different ways as well as reuse and build upon the work of others. Our speaker has extensive experience in enterprise collaboration systems and currently leads intelligent search and discovery for Microsoft 365.  Expect lots of tips & examples for improving your KM initiatives.

Our experienced speaker provides tips and techniques for making everyday knowledgeintensive activities more process-driven, effective, efficient, and innovative by mitigating daily friction, confusion, and underperformance. Using KM fundamentals, concepts, leadership, and models to enhance knowledge creation, he explains how the capture and sharing of declarative and procedural knowledge, problem-solving, decision making, planning, collaboration, continuity, innovation, and learning are enhanced. He discusses the tools supporting applications, from using knowledge repositories/forums on SharePoint to maximize learning to the use of chat, online meetings, OneNote, etc., to enhance knowledge sharing, innovation, and after-action reviews. He shares how they transform knowledge-intensive activities into knowledge processes with related goals and objectives supporting the organization’s mission and vision. Get lots of insights and ideas to use in your environment.

USACE is implementing an enterprise-wide, integrated KM strategy and program to promote and drive quality and improved performance standards across the organization. This talk shares its plan of approaches, methods, and tools to enable best practices and promote the flow of actionable information and knowledge within and across the enterprise. It covers the successes and setbacks the Corps of Engineers has faced as it attempts to increase its KM maturity faster than any other government organization. It offers stories, examples, and lessons learned about building relationships, creating an enterprise-wide community of KM practitioners, communicating the value of KM for getting senior leader buy-in and a step-bystep program methodology. Get lots of tips and insights from our knowledgeable speakers.

In an industry where regulations abound, often stifling even the notion of knowledge sharing, Fulton Financial Corp.—the holding company of a network of 200-plus bank branches—has broken out of the mold and has fully embraced KM. The enterprise-wide vision of KM has been thoughtfully and thoroughly supported and cascaded from the executive suite throughout the organization, resulting in a step change improvement in employee access to expertise. The KM focus isn’t simply on content, expertise, and collaboration; it aims to improve customer satisfaction, profitability, and growth and create more effective operations. To achieve those objectives, Fulton’s KM strategy is closely tied to the corporation’s strategic initiatives group and process improvement efforts. Lee and Groff share the organization’s vision, strategy, tactics, and lessons learned from the very beginning of the journey. Hear how the organization is using the corporation’s expertise to support the ultimate goal of excellence in service to its constituency—both internal as well as external customers.

Melendez, the lead internal consultant for implementing the professional knowledge transfer program at Saudi Aramco, discusses the structured, phased, and continuous approach to mitigating risk associated with an alarming amount of retiring experts. The program began with an assessment of an organization’s functions and activities and an identification of those with the expertise. It produces structured knowledge transfer/training plans between the provider and the recipient of knowledge. Different than traditional training plans, it is positioned as a mechanism to support business continuity and ensures redundancy with critical knowledge, which supports young professional development and organizational efficiency. The program, in its 8th year, continues to evolve and mature; it is practiced in more than 60% of the company’s departments, both professional and industrial workforces. Hear about the evidence of value generated, and pick up tips to use in your organization. Mohn discusses the knowledge continuity cycles as a framework for basic KM at the State Department, where every person starting a new job has to go through three basic knowledge transfer moments: on-boarding, to learn about the organization and the job; enriching the knowledgebase; and the departure continuity meeting, where knowledge is captured before the departing person leaves. These moments become standard procedure for organizations if they have the leadership’s buy-in and create knowledge artifacts such as Knowledge Continuity Records and “Tacit Knowledge Transfer” to the team members of the departing person. These artifacts persist through generations of staff.

Our first speaker discusses using the lenses as a diagnostic tool to understand what works and fits and where there are gaps and needs helps bring clarity to business and social transformation. This is particularly helpful for improving use and knowledge flows through the organization’s understanding of the right fit of tool(s) and services. Using the lenses to see the relevant dimensions and how they intersect not only helps organizations understand the needs for today, but works as a valuable method for framing an adaptive road map for the coming years. Having clarity to see the smaller actual pieces enables sensing their changes in order to adjust and adapt with more clarity of understanding. Janzen talks about a leading North American Pet Insurance’s process improvement initiative which recognized the importance of embracing process thinking and empowering a new company culture, while improving its customer engagement. This case study demonstrates the steps taken to achieve business transformation, fostering processes while building a collaborative and knowledge-sharing culture. Janzen discusses the challenges of automating a claims fulfillment process, embracing process thinking and an agile approach, in addition to the challenge of transforming both processes and culture. The result is an innovative solution that facilitates process improvement, creates a knowledge-sharing culture, while providing a customer first focus. The third presentation talks of an innovative culture if the team succeeds in offering an environment that stimulates its members to ideate and design new processes and products as answers to new and old problems. Hear about some handy tools and techniques that you can use in your team, about a process (adaptive or collaborative case management) that works and fundamentally changes how virtual teams work with information—creating a context in which they “extremely work out loud.”

Join your colleagues at the end of the day for an informal debriefing and meet with other attendees who have similar interests. Enjoy some great networking, stimulating discussions, and a chance to interact with some of the outstanding conference speakers and moderators. Open to all conference attendees.

As enterprises transition from traditional intranets to employee-centric digital workplaces, technology decisions around employee experience become more complex — but also more significant. How do you make the right choice for your particular needs? This fast-paced session by and experienced industry analyst offers an adaptive methodology for making effective strategic and technology decisions. Learn a modern approach to evaluating and selecting digital workplace technology that will save you time and money, as well as reduce risks!

What are chatbots? What is conversational UI? Why are experts calling chatbots “the next big thing for internal communications”? Through live demos and examples, learn how you can use chatbots to deploy a mobile intranet that is far more effective than ever before. Highlights include demos of eight different chatbots, a look at six core use cases for chatbots, 10 reasons why chatbots will power the next generation of mobile intranets, how advances in AI have made modern chatbots possible, and why the speech-bubble interface is a chatbot’s greatest advantage.

This mini-workshop features a number of experts who share techniques, tools, and tips for improving your KM practices.Hanleydiscuses some of the multiple ways to connect and collaborate in Office 365—Teams, Groups, SharePoint, Yammer, Email—and provides guidance and a framework to help you make the right choices for your organization to help your users get real work done in a hyper-connected world.Stormvingetalks about intelligent swarming, sometimes called “collaboration of steroids,” a new way of aligning resources to work. It removes the traditional tiers of support and calls on the collective experience of a “swarm” of analysts for improved operational efficiency, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Stormvinge shares how integration goals can help optimize collaboration and collective ownership of knowledge and how a KM strategy such as intelligent swarming can help with skills development, optimizing people’s ability to create value and improve customer success through improved problem solving. Goodfellowprovides search strategy tips and talks about the benefits of adding ‘where” to the “who, what, when” of search.Connorsdiscusses theuse of digital technology, knowledge management and applied AI to deliver business strategy.  He shares the success strategies for several clients so you will take away lots of ideas and insights. Chamberslooks at modern intranets and discusses what it takes to launch a successful intranet, bringing together elements such as apps, social, analytics, personalization and more into a perfectly integrated hub. He illustrates with business case studies from Egon Zehnder and Hershey’s, who have benefited from digital workplace integration. 

This is a continuation of session B203.

Agile is on everyone’s mind today, as more and more organizations are eager to reap the benefits of rapid iterations using customer-centric approaches. Organizations tend to run to Scrum first because it is the most recognized agile framework. But is Scrum always the right answer for a team and a business? Araya discusses the types of scenarios and projects in which Scrum may not be a good fit. She shares other frameworks—including Kanban and Scrumban—as potential alternatives to consider to ensure teams and projects select the right fit and can deliver great software efficiently. Some considerations include organizational culture, size of teams, team composition, types of work, industry requirements, overall project size, and type of project. Go back to your organizations and confidently select the right frameworks for your current and future roles and projects—and explain to management why the framework chosen is appropriate.

Join your colleagues at the end of the day for an informal debriefing and meet with other attendees who have similar interests. Enjoy some great networking, stimulating discussions, and a chance to interact with some of the outstanding conference speakers and moderators. Open to all conference attendees.

Marken explores different ways of thinking, from professional poker and chess players to provoke, challenge, and inspire business leaders. In discussion with professional poker player Alec Torelli, she looks at the interplay between analytics and intuition in decision making in today’s workplace. They talk about a high-stakes game that ended in a surprise that all the math experts would not have expected because Torelli relied on his intuition. In a world full of data-driven decision making, is intuition dead? They explore this idea and its applications to business decision making. Marken and chess grandmaster Sam Shankland then explore the concept of bold risk-taking through a discussion of the 1972 chess championship between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, who took the entire chess world by storm when he opened with a new move, C4, despite a lifetime of having successfully played E4 as his opening move. While this move caught Spassky by surprise and demonstrated Fischer willingness to play in Spassky’s turf, it also was an objectively smart move, as Fischer went on to win the match. This and other case studies share lessons from chess and business on bold risk-taking.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” famously attributed to the late business guru Peter Drucker, perfectly states the need for an organization’s culture to be aligned with its strategic objectives for there to be any hope of fully realizing them. Culture is tribal and pervasive. And, it can vary depending on the group, environment, or objectives. But, this powerful and often unconscious set of forces that influences both individual and collective behavior can be harnessed to drive culture change and reinforce shared values within an organization or project team. Speakers explore examples of “epic culture fails” resulting from strategy that neglected the cultural component, then impart seven tips to drive outcomes that leverage culture to support organizational- or project-based strategy. These tactics can be used to support a company or project team’s core values and culture while creating synergies with strategic initiatives and shortening the time to adoption. Aligning the strategy of whatever it is you are trying to do with the culture of whoever it is you are working with is paramount. It can mean the difference between success and failure. Culture doesn’t have to eat strategy for breakfast; they can be harnessed together to create organizational strength and a better overall customer outcome.

Dixon explains four factors that are critical for a team to learn and then illustrates those factors with a case study of an agile, innovative, and empowered team. Organizations increasingly rely on teams, both virtual and co-located, to carry out strategic and operational tasks. Teams have become the unit of learning in an organization. Individual learning is necessary, but it is teams that are responsible for taking action by creating products and delivering service. Teams need to learn in order to detect changes in the environment, learn about and respond to customers’ requirements, improve team members’ collective understanding of a situation, and discover unexpected consequences of their previous actions. To happen, team learning requires more than holding an occasional AAR. Get tips and techniques for improving team learning in your organization.

Organizations are under tremendous pressure from increased competition, volatile political shifts, and digital transformation. To survive, they need to be able to quickly understand what is going on and make faster, and better, decisions. Knowledge repositories just aren’t going to cut it any more. Come hear a seasoned KM practitioner with an engaging presentation that offers a new way to look at KM along with interesting research and practical ways you can deliver even more value to your organization.

Former head of KM with the BBC, Semple believes in conversations and leads our panel on a far-ranging discussion of change, culture and learning as we all aspire to an outbreak of common sense on our journey for knowledge sharing and creating sustainable, high-functioning organizations and communities.

Join your colleagues at the end of the day for an informal debriefing and meet with other attendees who have similar interests. Enjoy some great networking, stimulating discussions, and a chance to interact with some of the outstanding conference speakers and moderators. Open to all conference attendees.

For a KM initiative to be successful, knowledge managers must secure the support of senior leaders before implementation. Early top management buy-in results in funding, resources, advocacy, usage, broad organizational support, and success—the program yields its expected benefits, KM is spoken of and written about positively by leaders, stakeholders, and users. Hear from our long-time KM practitioner about proven practices illustrated by real-world examples for securing resources, active participation, and ongoing advocacy from top leadership. Get lots of tips for leading an effective, sustainable KM program that is seen as essential to the success of companies in different industries, of different sizes, and with different cultures.

For more than a decade, search technology has been used as the primary access point to the mountains of knowledge and data sitting behind an organization’s firewall. As environments evolve to account for private and public clouds, search is evolving beyond just the box to an API for human information. Will Hayes explores that evolution and talks about how search technologies and professionals play a key role in the enterprise cloud migration strategy.

Participate in our popular interactive knowledge café, where you can share your KM challenges with colleagues and KM practitioners. Each table has a KM industry mentor and topic; you will have time to visit at least three different tables during the morning. Meet and learn in this intimate networking atmosphere with thought leaders and practitioners of the KM industry!

If you are a believer in the data-driven organization (or even just curious) and have ever wondered what could happen if you cleverly combined the power of data collection, indexing, text mining, search, and machine learning into a unified platform and applied it within the enterprise, this talk is for you! Come learn about the state of cognitive search and analytics technology and how it is enabling great companies across a wide swath of industries to amplify mission-critical expertise within their business in a surprisingly short amount of time. Our speaker illustrates the technology in action with real-world examples.

Companies that embrace agile management learn to connect everyone and everything … all the time. They deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale. Starting in the software development industry, agile is now sparking dramatic improvements in quality, innovation, and speed-to-market in all kinds of companies. It enables a team, a unit, or an enterprise to nimbly adapt and upgrade products and services to meet rapidly changing technology and customer needs. And the process is applicable anywhere—companies don’t need to be born agile, like Spotify. Even centuries-old Barclays is making the transition and reaping rewards. Filled with examples from every sector, Denning shows the value of being agile, explains how it relates to sharing knowledge in any organization, and provides tips for making your organization more agile.

Hoglund focuses on the comprehensive set of metrics developed to measure the success of a digital workplace program. These metrics range from the base level of measuring adoption of the technology to the more meaningful measures of the digital behaviors of people and then the most important metric of correlating these behaviors to key business outcomes, such as employee engagement scores. Hoglund covers which metrics were adopted and why and how these might vary from company to company; provides a live demo of how readily available Clarke talks about the knowledge management office (KMO) of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and their challenge to find metrics and measures to highlight their value to senior leaders.

Every KM program today needs quantitative proof to expand engagement and get resourced.  This discussion looks at approaches to “the math of KM,” and how we credibly make the case for KM's impact on productivity, innovation, and revenue. The best value-realization approaches for KM investments are both qualitative and quantitative -- and nearly all involve some extrapolation to get to dollars and cents. Pugh shares experiences of Fidelity and Intel, discusses testimonials, benchmarks, and the knowledge asset reuse valuation.

Most companies struggle to find ways to embed innovation into their business. This talk shares the journey of establishing a grassroots movement—a journey fueled by innovation, knowledge sharing, and learnings, and the critical success factors discovered along the way.

There are proven techniques for improving the performance of teams and collaborative work. Our experienced speaker discusses helpful tools for every collaborator’s toolkit: how to foster productive working relationships in a team, enable better knowledge sharing, preempt conflict, resolve conflict, and support consensus. Use these insights to learn how to become a better leader of productive teams and future-proof yourself and your organization.

This session explains cognitive computing and shares a number of real-world examples of how it is making a difference in knowledge sharing in several organizations.

This session highlights Forrester’s recent research in the ECM market as well as adjacent fields. Get the top five trends shaping ECM for 2017–2018.

Understanding how to evolve a knowledge sharing environment can be fraught with danger when expressed needs do not match up with the reality of what is actually happening in an organization. Implementing new tools and approaches can go seriously awry without an understanding of what organizational knowledge is being shared and how. Social network analysis can be an effective tool for understanding what information flows through an organization as well as how it flows. Cervone discusses how one university used social network analysis to better enable knowledge transfer, collaboration, and business processes by uncovering patterns in knowledge transfer that are not easily observable. Barker, a World Bank Digital Strategy Veteran, shares how to successfully sell and implement a business case that Digital Asset Management (DAM) is mission critical. He discusses clear indicators that your company is ready for a DAM solution, how digital assets can pose major liabilities, building the business case that DAM should be a standard within your organization, lessons from the World Bank experience including how the DAM investment paid for itself in less than a year, ROI benchmarking, and business transformation. He also highlights the latest advancements in DAM, including 360 media, video drones, geotagged jpg data, tools for uploading to make mobile field work easier, AI for automated keywording, and more.

Organizations tend to laud their accomplishments, but often forget that organizational growth comes from learning from failures. However, to first learn from failures, your organization has to acknowledge them. In this frank discussion with two seasoned KM veterans, learn how to develop a culture that is not only willing to discuss failure, but embrace it and use it to drive operational excellence and growth.

In recent years, document-centric search over information has been extended with the use of graph-based content and data models. The implementation of semantic knowledge graphs in enterprises is not only improving search in a traditional sense, but opens up a path of integrating all types of data sources in a most agile way. Linked data technologies have matured in recent years and can now be used as the basis for numerous critical tasks in enterprise information management. Hilger discusses how standards-based graph databases can be used for information integration, document classification, data analytics, and information visualization tasks. He shares how a semantic knowledge graph can be used to develop analytics applications on top of enterprise data lakes and illustrates how a large pharmaceutical company makes use of graph-based technologies to gain new insights into its research work from unified views and semantic search over heterogeneous data sources.

At the cross-section of innovation, open data, and education, our speaker, a former government KM practitioner, shares her thoughts about the challenges and opportunities for organizations and communities in the coming years. She discusses empowering members of our communities and improving services using new tech like AI, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, Internet of Things, predictive analytics, gamification, and more. How will people interact and share knowledge over the next decade? Are we moving toward anticipatory knowledge delivery (just enough, just in time, just for me), being in the flow of work at the teachable moment, establishing trust in a virtual environment, and learning from peer-to-peer marketplaces like Airbnb and Uber? Our longtime KM practitioner shares her insights about the evolving digital transformation of every part of our world and hints at the magic sauce we need for a successful future!