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.

Many organizations are moving their intranet to SharePoint Online with a preference for delivering users out-of-the-box functionality. In this practical workshop, intranet and digital workplace experts walk you through a best practice approach for designing an intranet that will meet both organizational objectives and user needs while showcasing what can be delivered out of the box using examples from organizations across the globe. It covers the methodology and approaches for designing with the user and organization in mind, designing an enterprise front door that works, out-of-the-box deliverables highlighting real-world examples, options, and more.

When it comes to change, humans are at the center. Yet most organizational change management strategies forget their most important stakeholders—the ones most impacted and those with the power to impact change. Join this interactive workshop to learn and apply design thinking tools to unpack key change challenges, define stakeholders, leverage key change theories, and plan a path to engage and drive successful change in your organization. BYO current change problem and an open mind.

You have just been given the responsibility for managing search at your organization—so what's next? 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 discussed include getting started and finding practical guidance in search management; assessing the current state of search; tasks and roles involved in managing search; building a cross-functional team; getting stakeholders together and constructively involved; establishing a vision and findability strategy; managing expectations; top misconceptions and how to educate your organization; measuring search: and 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 also for you.

This interactive workshop takes participants through a scoping framework for conducting knowledge audits and/or KM assessments, based on the research for our speaker Lambe's new book. Learn how to set audit goals; understand the pros and cons of different audit and assessment models; and select appropriate models, instruments, and engagement methods to suit your goals. Lambe discusses the applicability of KM maturity models and the ISO 30401 Knowledge Management Systems Standard. This is a participatory workshop where participants listen, learn, and share their organizational experiences and situations in an audit scoping exercise.

Humans connect through stories, and KM is all about connecting people. Even so, many KM programs don’t utilize storytelling to drive adoption or teach the art of storytelling. This interactive workshop builds on a 2019 KMWorld storytelling workshop and adds the winning storyteller from that session, an attendee from the European Patent Office. Participants learn about storytelling through several fun activities, get a heightened awareness of the power of stories, and learn how to run storytelling workshops in their own organizations. A special focus is on the “KM Origin Story,” in which attendees learn about telling a story that makes the case for the magic of KM. Come and learn, and enjoy “story-listening,” as other KM practitioners tell their own tales.

Knowledge doesn’t manage itself. No matter how far AI evolves, knowledge, whether human or digital, will always need human curation. Given the accelerated growth of both explicit and hidden knowledge, having a reliable, consistent curation framework in place is more critical than ever. There is no shortage of tools and techniques for building knowledgebases and repositories, yet the question remains: “How do I design, build, and maintain a body of knowledge that’s easily accessible by me and others?” This workshop helps you to gain an understanding of the three main pillars of knowledge curation: 1) knowledge capture and transfer; 2) governance, including roles and responsibilities, vetting and assurance, performance monitoring, and incentives; and 3) architecture, including the tools, platforms, and processes 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 knowledge sources and recipients; 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 popular KMWorld speaker to take home an initial plan for setting up and implementing a world-class knowledge curation program for your organization.

This workshop focuses on tools and techniques for capturing knowledge and choosing the right interview techniques to pull out the knowledge you want or need. Learn how to get the conversation going, what to do when you get stuck, and how to test what you’re learning. Drawing upon ethnographic interviewing, which is used by anthropologists to understand cultures and peoples, learn a sequence of questions that can move from a broad understanding to a specific understanding. Building on ethnographic interviewing, learn how motivational interviewing, often used with patients with addiction, can be used to help you focus on the key pieces of knowledge that are critical—and what can be done to translate that knowledge into reusable forms. The workshop also highlights dialogue mapping, often applied to complex problems, and how it can help develop shared understanding, even when interviewing multiple experts at the same time.

This workshop focuses on the lifecycles and workflow processes that knowledge engineers require to effectively manage complex and large volumes of knowledge. Knowledge assets represent diverse types of information, such as terminologies, information models, data elements, quality metrics, protocols, decision support rules, policies, etc. Content vendors provide collections of knowledge assets for different domains, but companies have to ensure that all active knowledge assets are integrated with delivery workflows. Systematic processes for asset review and curation are necessary including consistently updating and tracking changes. Speakers provide an introduction to the most important knowledge management activities including the need to catalogue and index knowledge assets, author and track asset metadata, manage relationships and dependencies among assets, import and export assets to/from various information systems, validate structural and semantic integrity when assets change, and implement a comprehensive asset lifecycle process. Get KM best practices, in combination with examples, challenges, and lessons learned from the extensive practical experience of speakers. Simple examples from the healthcare domain are used to illustrate the lifecycle and process management aspects.

During the last 3 decades, many organizations have built communities of practice (CoPs), and they play many roles: hosting forums for members to draw on the knowledge of more senior staff, collectively developing technical procedures and innovations, managing mentoring relationships, sponsoring discussions for collectively thinking through particularly difficult technical issues, and building relationships between their members. People are the center of CoPs, and technology is a background enabler. In today’s virtual and remote working world, technology platforms are being honed to adapt to the world in which we currently live and connect. These platforms thrive on thoughtful exchange in a practice becoming known as "working out loud." Sharing ideas and perspectives in new ways allows us to work things out together or cast our nets wider for support. Our experienced community leader discusses community fundamentals and foundations; 10 key principles for successful CoPs; types of communities and examples of their use; community culture; community management, including creation; and preventing redundant communities as well as roles, goals, and measurements. Get new insights for your communities, share your experiences with your colleagues, and take your CoPs to the next level.

This high-demand workshop, given by a KM pioneer and popular KMWorld speaker, focuses on how to build a successful KM strategy and revitalize knowledge sharing within your organization. Snowden, our workshop leader, engages participants, taking them 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. Always fresh and filled with interesting stories, this workshop continues to stand out with our audience!

The volume of human knowledge is growing. But machine knowledge is growing even faster. And the accelerated pace of both is taxing the limits of traditional KM. Machine learning platforms are valuable tools for discovering hidden patterns and trends. But they often provide little or no insight into how new knowledge is generated, or when a model or algorithm is no longer valid and increases risk. How many of your business decisions are automated? How many business rules does your organization have? How many are incorrect, outdated, or no longer used? How secure are they? What social amplification risks are inherent in your organization’s decision processes? If you can’t answer these questions, it’s a sign you need to start incorporating knowledge governance into your organization. This workshop illustrates how to build a top-level governance model, along with a plan for implementation, including how you’ll measure results and make adjustments along the way. Learn the seven major facets of knowledge governance, how to align them with overall corporate governance; and, most importantly, how to evaluate the range of possible social impacts, positive and negative. Get a sneak preview of what’s coming with respect to emerging technologies you’ll need to be closely watching, and how those technologies will place even greater demand on having a sound knowledge governance model in place.

The old saying, “This ain’t my first rodeo” carries the connotation that the speaker has experience and is ready for a situation. But like any learning, mistakes would have been made along the way, and the lessons that were learned form the basis of the knowledge. This workshop is a partnership between three KMers from Texas with a combined 52 years of experience in knowledge management who have gained wisdom by learning from failures while also seizing serendipities. They work with participants, whether it’s their first rodeo or not, to crowdsource the biggest barriers being faced by their KM programs today and facilitate the co-creation of solutions to remove those barriers, focusing not only on what works, but what doesn’t. Have fun as you gain insights into other participants’ programs and immediately implementable ideas to stay on that bucking bronco.

Findability is much more than technology. It needs to be the combination of culture, communication, and technology, as well as how your content is organized. This workshop discusses the most important success factors of enterprise search in Microsoft 365: team—roles and responsibilities, search metrics, risk management, governance, search lifecycle, as well as how to implement it well. Molnar uses a case study to go through all the steps to enable you to create an actionable plan for your organization. She discusses the culture of information sharing, user adoption, and search champions as well as communication: before, during and after the go-live. She touches on technology: Search Engine 101—crawling, content processing, index management, query management; user experience; intelligent search as well as information quality and architecture; content structure, tagging and taxonomies; how Viva Topics and SharePoint Syntex can help to achieve better findability; and multi-lingual environments.

Text analytics utilizes multiple components: different types of software and methods, different kinds and scales of content, different kinds of knowledge models, and different kinds of applications and their associated business goals. Putting everything together is not a simple task, but it is essential to put everything together in the right way. This workshop, using multiple real-world examples, shows how to merge all the pieces into successful applications. Learn what kinds of software are best for what kinds of content and applications; what knowledge models work best for different applications; when to use AI and when to avoid AI; and, most of all, how to put the pieces together. It covers basic text analytics techniques, from deep learning/machine learning to sophisticated semantic rule building, and how to integrate them; an iterative development process for entity and fact extraction, sentiment analysis, and categorization (the brains of the outfit); multiple real-life applications from a variety of industries; and utilizing some of the leading text analytics software. Even if you have already started a TA initiative, learn something new and valuable while interacting with colleagues.

We are wired for story. Storytelling uses story as a communication strategy. Story Thinking uses story as an operational strategy. Carl Jung said: “You are in a story, whether you know it or not.” As a requested topic in the KM Global Network Advanced Methodologies course, Story Thinking goes beyond the foundations of story psychology and focuses on applications for KMers. Specific approaches and exercises are included to support strategies around KM systems, cultures, leadership, knowledge sharing, project documentation, evaluation, and continuous improvement. Direct comparisons are shown between story structure as our fundamental sense-making framework and popular certifications, like Six Sigma DMAIC, Design Thinking, Change Management, Project Management, Kahneman, Kolb, Kotter, and Kubler-Ross.

Knowledge management, sales enablement, ecommerce, personalization, and other information-rich enterprise capabilities require a robust information foundation. Defining an information model which reflects strategic business goals, addresses the current set of the technology stack, and represents the needs of internal and external users allows organizations to develop new capabilities and greatly improve information nimbleness. This immersive workshop provides practical tactics for designing, building and maintaining taxonomies, metadata, and ontologies that are the foundation of your information infrastructure. Based on hard-won lessons learned from work with Fortune 50 enterprises and leading ecommerce sites, this workshop provides information modeling basics: a foundation to start creating a consistent vocabulary within your organization that addresses unique needs of large enterprises. It shares a framework for shifting to an enterprise information model that meets the needs of your enterprise and the individual business units, systems, user profiles, and interfaces. It discusses the impacts of a project on technology, governance, workflows, marketing, analytics, search, compliance, and the interaction with master data management. It includes examples and case studies of large-scale enterprise projects.

Powell discusses the ongoing tension between two fundamentally different approaches to KM—codification and personalization. While the former is document-centric, the latter has at its core personal networks and communities. Pioneering knowledge theorist Peter Drucker observed that, “Knowledge is a specifically human resource. It is not found in books, [which] contain information.” While it is tempting to manage information as if it were knowledge, it is a grave mistake. This is primarily because that while knowledge is organic and dynamic—always changing, always growing—information is essentially inanimate and static. The overarching purpose of enterprise knowledge is solving management problems—for example, minimizing obstacles that impair the organization’s performance. Such problems are essentially dynamic. They change continually, often in ways that are unpredictable. Powell discusses strategies for organizations to ensure the ongoing currency and relevance of knowledge, mechanisms that allow knowledge to continually regauge its focus as the enterprise faces change driven by internal and/or external forces.

Our popular and experienced KM practitioner facilitates a fresh look at what could be/should be/is included in a KM program. Based on his survey of the KM community, he created a list of 261 possible elements of a KM program spanning people, processes, and technologies. This workshop reviews those topics and uses them to identify the key components of KM programs, from those just beginning to those who are very sophisticated. Join this group of colleagues to get insights for developing, growing, or adjusting your KM program.