More than ever, IT is being held accountable for protecting valuable business information and intellectual property. Meanwhile, users are demanding better technology that provides the straightforward and intuitive characteristics of consumer technology for sharing content, collaborating with others and accessing information from mobile devices.  Hear from Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck and a key Box client about how cloud-based solutions provide companies of all sizes with the ability to meet the demands of end users, lower total cost of key applications, while still protecting corporate information.

“Thus spoke St. Alia-of-the-Knife: ‘The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin god dess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness.’” This is KM. Snowden uses the learning and insight in sci ence fiction and fantasy to spark insights for KM professionals. From the spice agony of the Reverend Mothers in Frank Herbert’s Dune, to the hermaphro dite society of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and the rapid social and physical evolution of the grendels Legacy of Heorot by Niven and others. He discusses how to use technology to augment human decision making, how to distribute cognition by engaging the entire workforce in decision making and how to build the modern apprenticeship by creating dynamic, not static knowledge bases.

The business case for building the 21st-century collaborative enterprise has a lot more to it than increased sharing and productivity, or better knowledge management. Whether you are in a B2B or a B2C industry, thanks to the social web, customer and prospect expectations around relevancy, expertise, latency, and quality of engagement are dramatically changing today. Not only does that compel those on the front lines such as marketing, sales, and support teams to respond in new ways, but it also requires the best minds across the larger ecosystem (customers, employees, partners, and suppliers) to collaborate, to innovate, and to serve this new customer more effectively. Sameer Patel addresses key changes in customer dynamics, relevant inefficiencies of current value chain based operational models, and how knowledge managers are best positioned to help their organizations compete effectively in the 21st century.

Filled with lots of examples, MetLife speakers discuss their KM model based on “fit” with the business, plus the implementation of its four core elements — governance/strategy, people focus, knowledge quality, and access. The Microsoft team shares their KM strategies for transforming 45K global field sales force through change management, information discovery improvement with wiki technology, business process automation, and more.

The principles and practices of great leadership are timeless. But powerful new drivers for business value and growth are requiring even the greatest leaders to add some new skills, competencies, and behaviors to their toolkit. Kent Greenes explores knowledge leadership, leadership that creates demand for leveraging the collective experience of stakeholders along the entire value chain and beyond, to impact an institution’s mission. Specifically, he addresses the new drivers and enablers for impacting performance, including ambiguity and complexity of operational environments, working with a 4generation workforce, and the rapid uptake of social networking and communication. He illustrates the emerging practices of knowledge leadership, social learning and knowledge transfer in the Army and private sectors to prompt conversation among the audience to get people engaged and thinking about new possibilities for their own organizations.

Have you ever wondered why the organizations we work in seem to be like dim-witted sheep: just doing what they did last year and following along with the rest of the herd? Have you resented the fact that year after year they seem to demand more and more work from you — with less and less fun (and the same pay). An award-winning KM practitioner with more than 10 years’ experience in understanding large and complex public and private sector organizations, Gordon Vala-Webb helps you understand why many large organizations are like that and how you can help transform your company into a sheep that flies. Just imagine the enormous possibilities (commercial and otherwise) should you succeed!

The emergence of complexity science offers a transformational way to view organizations. The traditional mechanistic view is linear, top-down, planned and operates based on an assumption of predictable outcomes. This view is becoming increasingly irrelevant as the rate of change that organizations experience (and, therefore, must adapt

to) increases exponentially. Complexity science exposes patterns, exchanges, emergence, and self-organization; it is more like an ecosystem that is interacting, evolving, and adapting. This introduction to complexity theory and the complex adaptive system view of organizations brings to light more relevant ways to leverage and influence patterns through knowledge management initiatives in order to help organizations adapt, increase capability, and ultimately sustain and thrive in the ever-changing environment. This session helps you set aside your current mental models and try on a new lens!

A critical business goal of Chubb Commercial and Specialty Insurance is to provide underwriters with easily accessible, credible information to support risk assessment, product selection and pricing decisions. Additionally, account servicing staff need information supporting loss control and policy processing decisions. Rick Cantor discusses the past, present and future of Chubb’s intranet design and operation, including best practices and lessons learned. He covers staff engagement best practices and lessons learned with regard to design, organization, taxonomy and navigation; Chubb’s strategic use of metadata to meet four primary needs — content context, life cycle, placement, and special handling; and examples to demonstrate the importance of metrics and measurement.

This interactive and informative session shares examples of leading-edge intranets from a number of different industries and includes award-winning sites from the 2011 Intranet Innovations Awards. These case studies of successful, active intranets provide ideas and insights to apply in your organization.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), a US Defense Department's liaison with allies and friendly nations, recently was compelled to confront a unique problem:  The 17 discrete web sites under its management were complex, difficult to maintain, and susceptible to a myriad of usability issues. Further, shrinking DSCA budgets threatened the maintenance and development costs needed to support the 17 sites. DSCA determined that the best solution was to migrate all its properties to a single site, while strengthening the platform's scalability.  The result is GlobalNET, a central web site for security and defense professionals around the world to communicate for security studies and security-related institutions, based on Acquia's Managed Cloud service. Our first speaker discusses the impact and the collaborative features.

Wahl focuses on several case studies presenting best practices and lessons learned for taxonomy and usability applicable to any organization.

The Enterprise Solutions Showcase will feature the top companies in the KM, CM, search, taxonomy, and intranets marketplace, offering attendees an opportunity to explore the latest product and service solutions. If you are looking for a particular product, evaluating competing systems, or keeping up with the latest developments, be sure to visit the Enterprise Solutions Showcase.