Discovering strategies for a modern digital workplace at KMWorld Connect 2021

At KMWorld Connect 2021, Scott Parker, director, product marketing, Sinequa, presented a keynote titled, “Tying Knowledge to Action: Strategies for a Modern Digital Workplace.” For at least a decade, people have struggled to understand why finding information at work is so much harder than it is outside of work. These problems intensified in 2020, as remote work strained the technologies and processes that connect employees to knowledge and one another.

Parker outlined the major trends around knowledge discovery and enterprise search, priorities for leading knowledge-centric organizations, and the business improvements expected this year and beyond.

KMWorld Connect 2021 is going on this week, November 15 -18, with workshops on Friday, November 19. On-demand replays of sessions will be available for a limited time to registered attendees and many presenters are also making their slide decks available through the conference portal. For more information, go to www.kmworld.com/conference/2021. Access to session archives will be available on or about November 29, 2021, so be sure to check back for on-demand replays. 

Knowledge is more siloed then ever before and the solution to a lot of this chaos is encapsulated by this fashionable term “digital workplace” which has many definitions, but one of the best, said Parker, is from Gartner: “The Digital Workplace enables new, more effective ways of working; raises employee engagement and agility; and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies.”

People are dealing with information in different ways; by Sinequa’s count, employees on average each have about 35 job-critical applications they use on a daily basis.

“At Sinequa,” said Parker, “not a day goes by in which we don’t have a conversation about the digital workplace and that is because we provide an intelligent search platform that organizations use to make their digital workplace intelligent.”

To realize value quickly, organizations are looking for a comprehensive and packaged technology to help them move quickly without sacrificing context, without sacrificing quality. What these organizations effectively do is they shield themselves from the cost and complexity of it, integration.

According to a survey fielded by APQC in partnership with Sinequa, 50% of respondents have confusion over where information is stored, and 45% say there are too many disconnected systems. When workplaces don’t work, it’s harder to find people and know-how, and a lack of knowledge directly impacts productivity, Parker noted.

The top technologies for knowledge-centric companies today are:

• Team collaboration/digital workplace apps
• Intelligent/AI-driven search
• AI to recommend content or knowledge assets
• Knowledge graph/relational databases
• RPA/automated workflows 

Search success is dependent on a range of technologies and practices and there is no one singled combination of strategies, said Parker.

Sinequa’s intelligent search platform is:

Complete: to ingest, enrich, and organize content from any source, format or language

Intelligent: to augment human intelligence with NLP and deep learning

Flexible: to deploy on premise and or in private or public clouds

Intuitive: to provide a cohesive user experience with a modular UI on any device with multiple touchpoints

Contextual: for personalized insight apps for employees, contextualized to the task at hand.