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.

Led by experienced KM practitioners, this workshop focuses on KM fundamentals, principles and concepts, specifically how to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of planning, problem solving, decision making, collaboration, continuity, innovation, and learning in any organization. They discuss using knowledge repositories/forums on SharePoint to maximize learning, innovation, and to support the decision-making cycle, mission, and vision; using online meetings and chat to enhance KM activities; KM tools to use as enablers such as SharePoint, online meetings, chat, OneNote, lessons learned/AARs, etc.; transforming knowledge-intensive activities into a knowledge process with related goals and objectives to support decision making; new knowledge creation (innovation), learning, and elearning tips; strategic knowledge gap analysis and knowledge audits; KM failures; applying KM as part of your daily business processes; and more. Gain insights, techniques, and best practices for making your daily business process more innovative, effective, and efficient using KM.

Expert knowledge is difficult to capture and transfer effectively because it involves deeply embedded skills that an expert may not be consciously aware of using and may not understand how to share. The challenge this poses is how to capture and transfer that knowledge among coworkers and external partners who need to work together on critical, high-stakes projects. Without effective knowledge transfer strategies, these valuable lessons learned and best practices are often lost. This is especially difficult with experts in niche specialties, when parties are geographically dispersed, and when the people who need the knowledge work in different organizations. The knowledge in each of these situations can be easily lost, yet it is knowledge essential to the success of the mission, especially in emergency situations such as responses to natural disaster events that are time-critical. Based on case studies of more than 200 top-level executives, engineers, and scientists at Fortune 500 companies; the military; and multiple government agencies, this workshop begins by offering a background of knowledge transfer and flow strategies and then offers effective processes for enhancing knowledge flow at all levels of organizations—both internally and externally. It covers the impact of internal vs. external parties on knowledge transfer, as well as maintaining knowledge flow when organizations are geographically dispersed. Best practices and tools are shared for capturing key knowledge, analyzing and documenting that knowledge, and multiple methods to transfer that key knowledge. The workshop provides an open forum for addressing individual challenges that participants are facing.

A good deal of knowledge use in organizations is not directly observable: It happens in interactions between people and is embedded in processes, tools, and artifacts. People are not necessarily good witnesses to their own knowledge needs. This workshop addresses the question of what counts for evidence in KM planning and measurement and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for gathering insight into KM gaps, needs and opportunities, to use in planning interventions and evaluating outcomes. It looks at examples, input from a global survey of knowledge managers on KM assessment methods, and ways you can create KM plans for the future.

Congratulations! You’ve just been given the responsibility for search at your organization! 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 include getting started and where to find practical guidance in search management; kinds of tasks and roles involved in managing search; building a cross-functional team; assessing the current state of search; establishing a vision and creating a findability strategy; getting stakeholders together and constructively involved; discovering and managing expectations; top misconceptions about search and how to educate your organization; top five and next five tools and techniques for improving search; updates and improvements; and measuring search: 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 still useful.

Effective collaboration is the key for any organization that seeks to be highly functioning. Leading effective collaboration is a critical 21st-century skill. Yet collaboration is much misunderstood. Too often, senior management believes collaboration to be primarily about people being able to “play nicely with each other.” But effective collaboration requires much more than good social skills. It requires good design. Learn how to design an effective collaboration effort and how to lead it to success. The workshop covers the structural components and people processes of good collaboration, as well as the facilitation techniques that help collaborators work more effectively with each other. Get lots of tips and insights from our experienced practitioner!

The Knowledge Management Office of The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. has developed fun and interactive games to promote and educate large groups of employees about KM concepts. These interactive games are shared with employees at annual events called Learning Labs. After the games are developed and deployed at the Learning Lab events, they are reused by incorporating them into smaller KM introductory courses provided for new employees on a quarterly basis. The objective of this workshop is to describe and explain the development of KM Learning Lab games, and then to have the workshop participants actually experience one of the games called, KM Saves Time—The Case of the Perpetual Motion Tire, a game inspired by the classic board game, Clue. After the game is played by all workshop participants, an opportunity for questions and comments is provided.

Modern intranets are no longer restricted to just corporate communications and content. They play a much stronger role in meeting staff and business needs. While intranets are evolving at a rapid pace, they remain hidden away behind the firewall. It’s therefore hard for intranet and digital workplace teams to see what other leading organizations are doing. This workshop shares worldwide examples across five fundamental purposes: content, communications, culture, collaboration, and social activity. Register for this exclusive behind- the-firewall look at leading-edge intranets, and bring your hardest intranet questions to our experienced workshop leader!

Are you overwhelmed with the different possibilities of features and capabilities in Office 365 and wondering how to get started? If so, this workshop is definitely for you! Take a look at how Office 365 can help enable your knowledge management objectives by looking at the key capabilities and how they support business outcomes. Find out about the key tools available in Office 365 and explore deployment and adoption strategies so that you can ensure that you are successful—from planning to rollout to governance and adoption and everything in between. Get a good understanding of how you can plan your Office 365 deployment to maximize your KM objectives and a framework that you can apply when you get back to the office.

Knowledge doesn’t manage itself. No matter how far AI evolves, knowledge, whether human or digital, will always need human curation. Knowledge curation is one of the least understood aspects of KM. Yet given the accelerated growth of both explicit and hidden knowledge, especially in large datasets, knowledge curation is more critical than ever. You’ve seen no shortage of tools and techniques for building knowledge bases and repositories. Yet the question remains, “How do I design, build, and maintain a body of knowledge that’s easily accessible by myself and others?” This workshop helps to do just that. Gain an understanding of the four main pillars of knowledge curation: 1) the source of the knowledge (you and other subject matter experts); 2) the knowledge itself; 3) the people receiving the knowledge; and 4) the platform and process 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 mentors and mentees; 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 take home an initial plan for setting up and implementing a knowledge curation program for your organization.

Most organizations that practice knowledge management (KM) make some effort to measure the health of their programs by using activity measures to assess how many employees use KM approaches and tools, how often they use them, and how satisfied they are. Organizations with more mature KM programs, however, go beyond simply tracking activity. A more sophisticated approach, called value path measurement, involves evaluating how KM activities influence business processes and outcomes. In other words, is participation translating into results? Tracing links between knowledge sharing and key cost, quality, and efficiency metrics goes a long way toward proving that KM is a value-added business process that yields a positive ROI. This interactive workshop gives participants tools and techniques to define the value path for their KM programs and approaches. It begins with a brief overview of the importance of measuring the impact of KM—why it matters—then moves through a series of activities to define the value path and identify the business measures that support the value path.

This workshop, by a KM pioneer and popular KMWorld speaker, focuses on how to build a successful KM strategy and revitalize knowledge sharing within your organization. Dave Snowden, our engaging workshop leader, takes participants 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.

Innovation, a leading attribute of knowledge management, drives organizational success and builds industry leaders.  Accidental innovation, the chance that experience, information, and process improvement come together in a perfect mix is exciting, but rare. Innovation communities are a strategic, and sustainable method for accelerating innovation, mitigating change risk, and empowering employees.  This interactive workshop* engages participants to connect, share, and work toward breakthrough ideas.  Additional exploration will include developing a roadmap for knowledge management and innovation in your own organizational strategy and communicating this value to decision makers.

*Participants are requested to bring their own device in the form of a phone, laptop, or tablet to maximize the engagement experience. 

We are well into the long-anticipated wave of retirements and accompanying efforts to transfer critical knowledge before it goes out the door. A fair amount of knowledge, in the form of lessons learned stories, checklists, rules, and formulas, has already been transferred. While useful, these approaches work primarily at the surface level, addressing what to do only in specific situations. Such methods have proven to be ineffective in complex, rapidly changing environments. This workshop draws upon a growing body of research in cognitive neuroscience, backed by more than a decade of field experience in transferring knowledge at a deep structure level. It focuses on identifying and operating on the underlying thought and decision processes that went into building the knowledge in the first place. Experience the six steps of deep learning: thinking, observing, enumerating, expressing, assessing, and adjusting. Increase your powers of observation by viewing situations from multiple perspectives. Connect the dots and see the big picture. Break detrimental learning habits that are holding you and your team back. Build and grow your personal body of knowledge and improve your ability to communicate what you’ve learned so others may benefit. In addition to the worksheets and handouts, receive a complimentary copy of the book: Deep Learning Manual: The Knowledge Explorer’s Guide to Self-Discovery in Education, Work, and Life.

Analytics to Overcome Information Overload, Get Real Value From Social Media, and Add Big(ger) Text to Big Data Text analytics (text mining, noun phrase extraction, auto-categorization, auto-summarization, and social media or sentiment analysis) is becoming essential to any field that utilizes or tries to understand unstructured text. To develop both practical applications and deeper research results requires the development of a text analytics platform that incorporates the integration of all of these techniques. This workshop, based on a recent book, takes attendees through the entire process of creating a text analytics platform including basic analytics techniques from deep learning/machine learning, rule building and how to integrate them using a modular approach, making the business case and the people and content resources needed, an evaluation process to select the right text analytics software for your organization, an iterative development process that combines entity and fact extraction with categorization, and sentiment analysis to add depth and intelligence to all the components. It uses case studies to illustrate these processes and shares the range of applications that can be built with text analytics, from advanced expertise applications to new uses of social media.

Search is one of the most powerful and useful workloads in SharePoint, and is used by everyone; but too often it fails—largely due to poor understanding of how to apply it and deploy it well. This workshop focuses on the search capabilities of SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint Online and how to match them to a variety of search needs and strategies. Attendees get tips and tricks they can apply immediately. We share effective techniques in the context of case studies and practical tips. Attendees gain an understanding of how to apply SharePoint search capabilities successfully, as well as what pitfalls to avoid. Bring your search challenges to work through them in a “clinic” format. In the process, we cover the key capabilities of SharePoint search and how to apply them successfully. If you are willing to show your system to other attendees, contact the instructor to work through some issues ahead of time and use them as examples.

Change management is a critical people process for any organization that seeks to excel. Unfortunately, good change management is hard to find. Most of us have been on the receiving end of at least one unnecessarily painful change management process. Yet it does not need to be this way! In this workshop, basically a field guide for agents of change, learn ways of leading a change effort that take less of a toll on the people and processes involved. Filled with tips and practical techniques, participants learn how to be more effective agents of change in the field.

Have you ever built a slick KM solution or collaboration tool that no one uses? We have and survived to tell the tale. New knowledge-sharing processes can fail if the resistance to change is greater than the ability to bridge the gap between the new process and the target people. Without a meaningful understanding of “What’s in it for me?” employees don’t readily contribute to knowledge-sharing circles. And because they don’t immediately see the value of sharing, contributing content in more formal environments is often done as an afterthought. Engagement strategies that include effective communication tactics entice users to try something new and help remove barriers to adoption. This engagement workshop focuses on how to identify and select appropriate engagement strategies based on target audiences and desired results. It includes playing the KM Experiential Learning Game, The Journey to the Lost Gold of Atlantis. The primary goal of the game from a KM perspective is to create “aha” moments where each individual sees how his or her behavior either enables or hinders the flow of knowledge and ultimately the impact this has on how the company makes money or the ROI. With help from workshop leaders, get your Executive and Employee KM Engagement Strategy to use in your organization to improve engagement.

*Participants are requested to bring their own device in the form of a phone, laptop, or tablet to maximize the engagement experience. 

Creating value from learning and knowledge initiatives depends entirely on user adoption by changing behaviors and beliefs. As complex social systems, human organizations cannot be programmed—they can only be hacked. KM initiatives can benefit from coordinated change management efforts using the transformation road maps common to IT implementations. But real knowledge sharing requires cultural changes that can only be catalyzed through deeper engagement at all levels of the organization. Any change effort is delicate, and KM programs are especially vulnerable because knowledge sharing can only be voluntary. This popular and practical workshop combines both the coordinating and catalyzing perspectives with real-world experience and advice. Learn the basic components of any successful change program; practice assessing and addressing challenges and opportunities in your organization; and look ahead to the latest thinking in organizational change. Come prepared to discuss your own unique situations and learn from your peers in facilitated, interactive discussions and exercises.

This workshop is for those who want to improve user experience, enhance services, expand brand loyalty, and grow revenue. It teaches the audience how to change organizational problems into innovative solutions through a human-centered design approach called design thinking. It covers transitioning through the phases of inspiration, ideation, and implementation; establishing an agile approach to fail fast to succeed sooner; and the importance of customer journey map design that shows your client where they are today to where they need to be in the future. Get insights to inspire innovation, learn to produce high-quality products and services through a human-centered approach, and understand how focusing on the user establishes an enviable competitive advantage.

The speed that information and idea flows into and through an organization is critical to its survival in our volatile and digitally-transforming world. In this interactive workshop, learn how to bring a slow-moving, zombie-like organization back to life. The workshop leader is an innovative KM practitioner and thought leader who has literally written the book on building smarter organizations. Practical takeaways include how to tell if your organization is in trouble, what to do to accelerate the speed of communication, the value of visual management, and how to make large-scale changes by starting small. Full of tips and techniques, come get lots of tricks to try in your organization!

Communication is the only way anything gets done. How come we are not better at it? In a post-Trump, post-truth world, being cautious is the least-safe option. Robust engagement with stakeholders, staff, and the public and getting your story out there confidently, early, and appropriately is the best way to be safe and protect your reputation. But in most cases the outside is going faster than the inside, and this needs to change. To do so requires being increasingly agile and effective at communicating with each other. The barriers to this are partly technological but primarily cultural and behavioral. It is therefore those cultural and behavioral aspects of communicating in a connected world on which Semple focuses. Join the former BBC CKO and author as he shares tools and techniques for improving communication in your organization. He illustrates these with real-world examples of how organizations are improving their communication and excelling at sharing knowledge within their enterprise.

The Forge is a Belgian consulting firm that supports teams in increasing their innovative capacity. We talk of an innovative culture if the team succeeds in offering an environment that stimulates its members to ideate and design new processes and products as answers to new and old problems. For the past 3 decades, lots of scientific research has been done on these issues. How can we build that culture—this stimulating environment? The Forge has translated this knowledge in handy tools and techniques that you can use in your team, but the key finding is that it is the quality of team and corporate communication that is the engine of innovation. This workshop is based on an award-winning work practice for knowledge workers, called adaptive or collaborative case management, which fundamentally changes how virtual teams work with information—creating a context in which they “extremely work out loud.” This process combined with principles for the increase of team innovation capacity, prompted joint experiments focusing on the innovation capacity of virtual teams using the collaborative case practice. Get the findings of this research and apply it in your own team.