The issue of tags and categories is one of the main issues currently facing knowledge management and social meaning. In effect, we are continuing to use old ways. We like categories, so even when we are trying to express dynamic relationships, we stick to them. We increase the number and give equal status, but we are still looking for truth linked to the validity of a tag. With this dependence on categories, and more specifically the assumption of common meaning in language, the use of tags remains one of the main challenges to progress in social computing. We place too much significance on the symbolic nature of language and fail to realize dependency on context if we are to gain meaning. Snowden discusses some new ways of dealing with the issue and suggests ways in which we can create context-rich approaches to organizing and interpreting our knowledge. He also takes a controversial look forward and forecasts where we may be going in the future.

In this era of hyperlinked information, it’s clear that many organizations have been ignoring the rapidly increasing growth and impact of the networked knowledge worker. And, it’s likely that most organizations now have competency profiles for most or all employees, supplemented by learning contracts or maps and programs focused on growing competency, responsiveness, and effectiveness. Organizations have software, databases, knowledge work applications and ways of codifying skills and competencies. Today, there are great opportunities to use some of the new Web- or software-based capabilities to enhance and optimize flexibility and responsiveness. Learn about developing a “wired” organization chart based on peoples’ competencies and availability, an alternate form of an organization chart whereby employee profiles can be pulled together using tags, learning maps, or contracts, and then used to focus the best available skills and project or engagement at any given time.

Our experienced KM practitioner, storyteller, and consultant shares secrets from his new book about how to get enduring enthusiasm for change whatever the change happens to be. He describes nine ways to elicit desire for change and provides many real-world examples to emphasize his points.

Changing customer demands, shortages of skilled workers, and ongoing financial constraints are challenging most organizations. The healthcare sector faces these pressures while also serving a population that lives longer and requires more costly treatments and related medical technologies. Maintaining effective workplace environments and cultures in healthcare is critical to ensuring that the health needs of our communities are sustained as we navigate the complexities of our changing times. Come hear how mass narrative capture helped one healthcare organization manage through a period of low morale compounded by a crisis and intense public pressure. Narrative and workplace stories define an organization’s culture but also provide a way to see multiple perspectives on challenging issues. It was by making sense of how healthcare providers, management, as well as patients and families, collectively experience their system that solutions for effecting change were identified.

The foundation of many software applications and business processes are rooted in a structure where employees are based in one (or several) discrete locations with a distinct and well-understood corporate hierarchy. Today’s world, characterized by faster rates of change, deeper relationships with partners, suppliers, and customers, and employees that have networks across the company demands new tools and processes. To support this dramatic shift, the role of IT has shifted from facilities-based computing to providing the foundation that enables employees to collaborate and share information across the company. Hear Google’s ideas about what the next generation of collaboration looks like and how organizations can deliver the tools and technologies to maximize productivity.

Many of the concepts supporting Web 2.0 (and KM 2.0) center on context. Developing context requires that unstructured information, including text, audio visual and video data, imagery, and geospatial data, be appropriately processed to formulate the necessary metadata to drive such context. Web 2.0 and KM 2.0 technologies need to seek context without waiting for human intervention. Rather they must, at a minimum, invoke or even provoke human intervention and interaction when necessary and offer a range of suggestions as to how context might be achieved. This session focuses on building advanced indexing systems for Web 2.0 and KM 2.0 that automatically seek and generate context. It discusses the importance of building context through the automatic generation of metadata and describes a systems architecture for developing a much broader data indexing capability for both enterprise intranet, extranet, and the public World Wide Web.

This session describes how one engineering and construction company builds its projects in virtual environments first to facilitate conversation between technical and nontechnical constituents and to accelerate decision making. It builds each phase of the construction to facilitate a rapid knowledge transfer between engineers, construction managers, and the actual workers on site and with each step of the project execution. This talk moves beyond visualization of engineering projects and into the elements of storytelling, integrated data management, innovation, group learning, etc., and is highly stimulating visually.

Replacement session. Description to follow.

This session demonstrates how information can be mashed up, remixed and shared to create new information products and services. Huffman looks inside the enterprise and shows how National Geographic has implemented and integrated RSS, blogs, wikis, and mind mapping on its intranet and collaborative work initiatives. Huffman shares the National Geographic story, lessons learned, and practical steps for getting started.

IBM has one of the largest and most powerful intranets in the world. It provides over 300,000 employees around the globe with tens of millions of pages of information to help them find the people, products, services, and answers they need to make IBM successful. Any employee or group can create dynamic pages such as blogs, wikis, and forum postings to share their knowledge with the rest of the organization. Through a combination of search, social bookmarking, and tagging, IBM is working to keep the exponentially increasing content under control and easily accessible while actively promoting the creativity and innovation of its employees. Levirne discusses the challenges in deploying enterprise search across its large and dynamic intranet, and the principles used to improve information sharing, employee decision making, and productivity while reducing time wasted scouring for answers or duplicating effort.

Sheehan reflects on 7 years’ worth of strategy development, technology implementation, social networking, and the occasional best-practice award received by Arup. He explores the key drivers of knowledge strategy and explains how a range of people, process, and technology solutions were successfully implemented in line with a rapidly evolving business strategy. In recent years, he has started to explore the increasing opportunities for knowledge sharing created by meaning-based computing and talks about the opportunities and impact on the future of organizational knowledge strategy and implementation. Egan discusses the parallel changes in technology that support organizations such as Arup and others.

This session highlights how FAST customers have found new sources of business value in innovative applications of search technology

This session is a practical guide for creating and sustaining networks at work and around the world. It is filled with tips, techniques and tales of successful implementations.

Sales Enablement has fast evolved into a collaborative process which allows you to connect your sales team with marketers, subject matter experts and corporate executives to produce and push the best content to front-line salespeople for any specific situation. Hear about the latest in Sales Enablement trends, technologies and business practices that are driving significant improvements in corporate performance including a framework for defining and prioritizing, tactics and key Web 2.0 technologies.