While the concept of the intranet as an “internal website” has done much to improve the quality and status of these sites, what is the vision for moving them forward in the age of social media? To be effective, intranets need to innovate,  to find new ways of meeting organizational needs. They must also become a valuable business tool that delivers tangible and visible benefits for the organization as a whole. This workshop provides practical approaches for managing and growing intranets. Central to this is the “6x2 methodology,” which offers a rigorous framework for intranet planning. This unique approach focuses on carefully scoping the next six months of work, to ensure that what is planned is not only achievable, but is also worth doing. Robertson discusses and illustrates many successful intranet implementations including winning entries of the global Intranet Innovation Awards.

Blogs were one of the initial social media and their influence continues to grow. They were the first social media to make it into Gartner’s “slope of enlightenment.” Gartner recently wrote, “Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices…. Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.” This interactive workshop helps you develop and refine your enterprise blogging strategy. It covers blogging best practices in 2009 and how to complement your blogging efforts with Twitter, the new emerging social media tool. New customer communication options opened up by Twitter are also explored.

This workshop shares practices and experiences in designing and deploying Web 2.0 programs for employee engagement.  It addresses: Web 2.0 governance and success strategies; best practices using blogs, wikis, Facebook applications; and integrated social media platforms to help evolve organization's talent competencies to align with the future workforce.  It is full of examples, tips, techniques and insights which are immediately applicable in any organization.

Organizations and individuals are increasingly pressured to do more with less, do things faster, and cheaper while at the same time be more creative. Few enterprises, however, are supplying their workers with the tools, much less the training and processes to accomplish this. PKM focuses on the capabilities and contributions of each and every knowledge worker and coupled with the emerging use of social networking tools, represents a significant opportunity to bring about transformative change in individual and enterprise productivity. This workshop looks at the successful habits, tools, methodologies, strategies, and techniques of knowledge work in a web and enterprise 2.0 world. It gives you tangible methods, tools and tips to increase your organization’s productivity.

The objective of information architecture (IA) is to design how information is created, structured and labeled to ensure a user experience that facilitates users in achieving their goals by finding information or completing a task in the most efficient manner. It describes how users navigate through the portal and how information managed by the solution is organized, ensuring that users are able to find the content they are looking for. Driven by purpose, IA for your portal is a tool that assists users in understanding and interacting with the solution. A well-designed IA does not guarantee the success of your KM or collaboration solution but a poorly designed one surely promises failure. This workshop focuses on approaches with three key elements of information architecture: site, page, and metadata architecture. These three elements ensure that the entire site is organized for “findability,” each page provides the optimal information for users, and all content is “tagged” with optimal attributes to support both browsing and searching for content. Use these strategies, tips and techniques to ensure your portal and collaboration solutions, particularly those based on SharePoint 2007, provide measurable business results and successful user experiences.

Poor search is one of the greatest sources of user frustration with websites and intranets. Worse yet, the inadequacies of search may be consigning these sites as a whole to failure. If users can’t find information when they need it, will they even come to the site? Organizations are now recognizing that search is a critical business tool on their intranet as well as on their websites. More than just a way to find documents or pages, search can directly support users completing their common tasks. Fundamentally, however, this is not a technology problem. Modern search engines have more than enough functionality to deliver a workable search solution. The current issues with search, however, stem from simply using the out-of-the-box installation. In practice, there is a key piece of design that must be done to create effective user interfaces, as well as to tune the search
engine behind the scenes. At the most basic level, this may only involve 2–3 days of work, although beyond that there are many more advanced approaches that can be considered. This workshop explores in-depth how to improve the design and effectiveness of search, providing best (and worst) practice examples throughout. Key information architecture principles are explored, including how “information scent” can be used to guide the design of search results pages.

Enjoy an interactive afternoon discussing social tools and knowledge sharing with a KM thought leader and practitioner who shares success stories of how organizations have introduced social media and other tools to their budget-conscious organizations; the practical approaches used; and the secrets of their success. Pollard looks at eight tools that improve work productivity, decisionmaking and innovation, connectivity, collaboration and knowledge transfer. He focuses on web 2.0 (aka social networking tools): people connectors that find and strengthen relationships, collaboration and communication.

Can’t find content inside of SharePoint? Many organizations struggle to organize their content and don’t understand the options for creating good information architecture. Find out how you can leverage taxonomy and metadata to improve navigation and search in your SharePoint portal. You’ll hear about techniques for implementing taxonomy and metadata using native SharePoint functionality. The workshop covers the tool’s limitations and potential solutions for complex taxonomic structures and faceted search, including custom development and third party add-ons. It discusses core SharePoint information architecture components, taxonomies out-of-the-box style, limitations & solutions for complex taxonomy, customization options and more.

Based on 10 years of research into the role of individuals in knowledge enabled organizations, this PKM workshop is a civics lesson for the learning organization. Getting every knowledge worker to bring their best to teams, organizations, communities, jobs and tasks depends on personal mastery of the values, practices skills and tools required to contribute their professional expertise to organizational learning and collective  outcomes. In practice, expertise is expressed through articulation and awareness, as well as interpersonal communication, and information literacy. Over the long term, a knowledge worker takes responsibility for the knowledge accumulated across his/her career and network. PKM has taken hold in organizations ranging from the military forces to law firms and technology manufacturers. This workshop demonstrates the value of personal KM—as a component of organizational KM and learning—with actionable models and frameworks. It provides many working examples in different types of organizations, lots of tips, and is immediately implementable in any organization.

This workshop focuses on how knowledge management (KM) can be incorporated into your human resources (HR) strategy to create new ways
for HR to add value. A knowledge advantage is a sustainable advantage. In today's knowledge driven economy, organizations must know how to
develop and implement knowledge based strategies. This hands-on workshop develops your understanding of KM concepts and how they apply to talent management to drive measurable business results. It presents a management tool to identify a set of critical skills to be maintained, to identify potential risks of losing critical skills, and to help develop plans to mitigate those risks. Join the discussion of using KM to increase employee engagement and lower organizational knowledge loss, designing and apply a knowledge based talent management strategy in your organization, developing a KM toolkit, and measuring the return on your knowledge management initiatives.