KM is often seen by operational managers as abstract, overly conceptual, and distantly related to the “real world” challenges of everyday work. These perceptions create significant communications and change management challenges for knowledge managers. In this half-day workshop, participants are introduced to a set of tools to support participatory KM diagnostic and planning exercises in which managers can be facilitated through simple diagnostics to identify where knowledge and information flows support or inhibit their effectiveness and then identify possible KM interventions for themselves. It’s designed to engage managers in identifying knowledge and information management needs in their own terms and to facilitate them through a process of identifying useful interventions.

In this highly interactive workshop you have the opportunity to create a plan for your intranet in 2012 using the wide range of tools, techniques and case studies that White has developed in more than a decade of global intranet consulting. There is particular focus on how to make a successful business case for investment in the year ahead. Creating your own personal agenda for the next year will help you make the most of KMWorld.

Knowledge and strategy are two big and fuzzy words. When you put them together you seem to get exponential fuzziness. This highly interactive workshop helps you figure out what your “knowledge” means for your organization — and what your knowledge strategy ought to be. An award-winning KM practitioner with more than 10 year’s experience in understanding knowledge strategy in both public and private sector organizations, Gordon Vala-Webb provides a framework for understanding your organization’s knowledge needs and options for what your knowledge strategy ought to be. Participants take home a framework for their knowledge strategy, an understanding of the different options, and the beginnings of a draft strategy.

This half-day intensive and interactive workshop, led by an experienced analyst and industry watcher, begins with a critical evaluation detailing SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses culled from customer experiences and hands-on testing. Through presentations and discussion, the workshop helps you figure out how, where, when, and why to use SharePoint and reviews how well SharePoint “fits” into different types and sizes of enterprises with different business objectives. The workshop offers candid, independent advice for both business and technology leaders. You can get SharePoint “training” nearly anywhere; join us for some real education to help you make strategic decisions about the platform.

This workshop identifies and explores the major factors leading to organizational success in the present and future CUCA — Change, Uncertainty, Complexity and Anxiety — environment. CUCA represents the challenge for all organizations to sustain efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability. This informal and interactive workshop combines brief presentations based on research and writings, including recent findings in neuroscience related to knowledge and learning, coupled with dialogue among participants and small group exercises — learning through action. It considers factors that lead to success and sustainability, including vision, knowledge management, culture, leadership, empowerment, and change management. Participants build an understanding of what makes their organization successful in terms of sustainability, and the leadership needed to successfully guide them into the future.

The key to driving greater business dexterity and responsiveness is driving greater productivity and decision speed among the middle tier of knowledge workers in organizations. The industry association AIIM gathered executives from leading technology providers with noted author and futurist Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm) to identify a social business road map for the future. This workshop reviews relevant social technologies then moves to indepth discussion of use cases and case studies. It describes how an organization can use the social business road map in the context of its particular operational objectives and regulatory environment, shares the eight steps in the road map, and explores how to apply them to your own organization, including a more detailed discussion of social media governance and how to ensure the organization implements social business processes responsibly.

This workshop covers in granular detail the full life cycle of four large-scale Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 ECM Initiatives. Errin O’Connor covers records management, e-discovery, records holds, and reverse engineering the organization’s retention schedules to develop a best practices set of content types. The workshop emphasizes the interaction with the organization’s records managers and the destructions workflows and/or workflows that were developed regarding the deletion of documents to meet not only the organization’s state and federal records retention requirements but also the Department of Defense Standards.

Gartner has predicted that by 2015, 25% of organizations will “routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.” Knowledge flows along established paths within organizations. To change or improve knowledge flow, it’s important to understand those current paths, which are often outside the formal organization structure. Social network analysis (SNA), along with its organizational counterpart organizational network analysis (ONA), provides a methodology to map these pathways to gain insights into how the organization really works. The methodology includes sensitivity to collecting data about people using different means, including surveys, using software to manage and analyze the data to create visual maps and detailed metrics. Metrics can provide information about the overall cohesiveness of the network as well as metrics about the roles that individuals play in the network, highlighting those who are in the best position to move around knowledge and ideas. This workshop covers the basic steps and tools used in the methodology with a hands-on case study. Bring your laptop and learn to download (free) tools. If your organization is not already using network analysis, or if you would like to understand more about this tool that has been helping knowledge managers for almost 10 years, then you should attend this highly interactive workshop.

Almost every organization has an intranet, but many suffer from a litany of complaints from staff that they can’t find what they need. To be valuable, intranets must have effective navigation and design that support common staff tasks. To achieve this, teams should take a “user-centered” approach to intranet design and redesign projects. Drawing on the best-selling book Designing Intranets: Creating Sites That Work, this workshop provides a practical toolkit of techniques and approaches. Via pragmatic discussions, handson activities and plenty of intranet screenshots, this workshop equips you to deliver an intranet that really works for staff. Key topics covered include design methodology that delivers a simple, usable intranet; exploration of key techniques, such as card sorting, tree testing and usability testing; intranet homepage design; personalization and targeting; and more.

This workshop, by a vendor-neutral consultant who has hands-on experience with a broad range of “out of the box,” open source, commercial and homegrown solutions, provides an overview of the latest in the enterprise search technology landscape. It reviews technologies currently on the market, discusses pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and specific suitabilities. Miles Kehoe shares case studies that illuminate how search technologies are leveraged in different types o organizations and provides a good introduction to and understanding of the enterprise search world.