Social computing in many ways is the technology that knowledge management has always needed. Its fragmented, networked connectivity matches the evolution of human decision-making. Along with promise, however, comes potential misuse. Crowds are rarely wise, despite the sound bite! Crowd sourcing used properly does not just mean any old collective process. This workshop examines some of the basic principles that underpin successful use of technology to augment, but not replace human decision-making. It looks at the differences between short- and long-term use of participatory techniques, the question of who should be involved and when in what combinations. It introduces basic ideas of governance in distributed environments and also associated issues of ethics and responsibility. Our experienced KM practitioner and consultant shares tips, some case studies and lessons learned, and suggests some good practices for engaging large groups. Delegates will leave with an understanding of the principles of distributed decision-making and a set of pragmatic open source methods to assist in their implementation.

During the last few years, White has been developing a Search Performance Benchmark (SPB) that enables organizations to judge the extent to which they are getting the best from their search application and where to prioritize future investment. The benchmark covers areas such as user requirements assessment, implementation of secure search, search log analysis, and the skills of the search support team. White presents a beta version of the benchmark at this workshop. Here's your chance to be the first to evaluate the SPB, use it to assess your own organization, and contribute to the final version. In addition, learn from the frank discussions about search investment and priorities for the future, information security for secure search, implementation of social search, performance of people search, result presentation, search log analysis, and search team skills.

The internet generation is already entering the workforce, but the old ways of managing are not working. How do you manage staff that assume an ability to connect with their peers and support networks 24/7? How do you adapt to not only cope with the changes in expectations but actually see them as opportunities to do more for less and possibly have fun doing so? With the connectivity afforded by the web, staff are able to connect with each other horizontally, finding out information and sharing knowledge faster than official systems can keep up, and increasingly expect to not only work in loose distributed teams but also to able to maintain connections with others outside the organization. Semple provides the context and strategies to make better judgments about managing the networked workforce to enhance knowledge sharing, looks at how online tools affect the way knowledge and information flows around the enterprise, shares practical steps to improve productivity and communication, helps you recognize opportunities to reinvent the role of middle management, and imparts his experience to assist you to make a compelling argument for bringing about positive changes in your organization with an effective ecology of tools. He facilitates interactive discussions about work and nonwork, engaging in online conversations, how to help your staff understand what their responsibilities are online, when they represent the company and when not, how to enlist their support as advocates for your work, and writing workable policies.

An effective intranet is a centralized information resource that is an up-to-date and trusted source of company information available and relevant to all parts of the business. Creating and maintaining a successful intranet requires negotiating and implementing a set of policies and procedures. Intranet governance is the set of roles, responsibilities and processes that needs to be put in place to guide the development and use of an intranet so that it remains consistent and cohesive as it evolves over time. This workshop provides an introduction to intranet governance requirements, benefits, and implementation strategies. It includes real-world examples from public sector and commercial organizations including the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, Dominion Resources, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Halliburton, Inter-American Development Bank, International Monetary Fund, NASA, Occidental Petroleum, Scottish Qualifications Authority, and SNC-Lavalin. Workshop leaders provide a practical methodology that allows you to begin managing the intranet in your own organization. Topics covered will include documenting intranet objectives, validating alignment with overall organizational goals, establishing and monitoring intranet content standards and good practices, creating rewards and penalties for nonconformance, establishing performance standards and intranet infrastructure, monitoring and improving intranet use and usability, defining job descriptions for intranet-related tasks, marketing the intranet, and more.

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. Robertson, a global intranet expert and author of an upcoming book on intranet design, provides a practical toolkit of techniques and approaches. Via pragmatic discussions, hands-on activities, and plenty of intranet screenshots, this workshop equips you to deliver an intranet that really works for staff.

Content technologies can be complicated and confusing. A Real Story Group analyst explains, without techno-speak, the essentials for business and project leaders. Join us for an interactive tour of search, web content management, ECM, document management, records management, DAM, and collaboration technologies. When and why would you need them? What makes them different? How does SharePoint fit in? How have experiences differed in the public and private sectors? Does open source matter? In addition to the basics, you will receive an unbiased overview of the vendor landscapes as they stand in 2010.

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 in 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. The workshop covers the basic steps and tools used in the methodology with a hands-on case study. Attendees should bring their laptops and are provided with information on how to download (free) tools prior to the event. 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 will be interested in attending this highly interactive workshop.

One of the biggest problem on today's websites and intranets is findability. Even as large companies have scaled up their investment in search and intranet development, one key ingredient is missing: the people. People are social, and people leverage social strategies to find information all the time-at work, with colleagues-to solve real problems. How do we add this social element into enterprise search systems? How do we know what to look for in search tools, services to add into the mix, and or design elements that will make an impact? Our experienced designer frame these relevant models of social search and walk though how to think through the problems to get to a more optimal solution. This will also include the potential benefits as well as the pitfalls that come along with some popular solutions (as well as how to counteract those pitfalls). You will learn to think and design through the considerations to augment findability with social search within the enterprise. He will discuss the tools necessary to understand search design, the benefits of social search, and how to work though real world problem sets interactively in the session, so those in the session will come away with the ability to apply what is learned to their work environment.

Have any of these held your organization back? Employee or middle-management resistance. Poor executive sponsorship. Corporate inertia and politics. These are the biggest obstacles to successful change in any organization. And KM is all about change. This highly interactive workshop is aimed at people just about to start leading or working on a KM project and who want to ensure the success of their project by overcoming these change killers. An award-winning KM practitioner with more than 10 years' experience in making change happen, Vala-Webb provides tools and templates and shares his strategies and techniques. Participants will leave the workshop with a much clearer understanding of how to communicate their project, a map of their own key stakeholders, a set of specific next steps to take, and usable tips/hints.

This workshop presents a strategy for applying semantic technology solutions across the enterprise. Highlighting semantic tools that are in use today, the workshop illustrates how typical content and search challenges are being met by enterprises in a number of vertical industries. In professional service and law firms, biotech and pharmaceutical, energy, and publishing focused enterprises, scores of companies are finding that excellent search depends on careful integration of content management, text mining and analytics tools.  Moulton defines, categorizes and examines real cases of implementation in which semantic tools contribute business and content retrieval benefits. Anecdotes are shared that underscore best practices, implementation and roll-out scenarios that work (or don't), showing how organizations get the most value out of technologies they have selected.  Filled with lots of practical tips and ideas.

Join us for drinks and hors d'oeuvres in a relaxed atmosphere as we kick off the start of this year's event. Open to all KMWorld, Enterprise Search Summit Fall, SharePoint Symposium, and Taxonomy Boot Camp conference attendees, speakers, and exhibitors.

Have some fun and meet lots of your colleagues in the KMWorld community. Using tools from knowledge management, taxonomy, and search to facilitate community building at KMWorld, you will enjoy learning some new techniques. Open to all KMWorld, Enterprise Search Summit Fall, SharePoint Symposium, and Taxonomy Boot Camp conference attendees, speakers, and exhibitors.