The majority of research concludes millennials differ from their generational predecessors, and can be characterized by social consciousness. The Micro Focus KM program took that special workforce trait into account by stressing the value of sharing, endorsing attitudes and creating an environment that encourages employees to want to publicly share. Micro Focus Services’ project teams are made up of consultants who are the brightest experts in a particular domain. Big egos tend to protect knowledge and ensure they remain the go-to-person in their subject area. As an antidote, the KM Office focused on embedding knowledge sharing as a desired behavior in the organization’s culture. Sharing should be perceived as critical to the business and as such should be measured in the annual employee’s performance review. Micro Focus Services provides a gamified point-based recognition program with awards for reuse and contribution best practices. The recognition program is able to hit the right buttons for the Services team and opens up the stage for them to show their pride – being the expert in a specific topic and the person to rely on when an issue needs to be resolved. Especially today, when the software services’ business lives with a younger workforce that is used to counting “likes” and “star ratings”. The session demonstrates the tools and techniques used for the recognition program, collaborative content creation and curation, social communities and building on the intrinsic motivation to share.

This session highlights the non-technical side in the journey of developing a new customer- facing collaborative extranet environment. Hear about the successes, as well as the lessons learned, in the speakers’ journey to develop a secure and robust SharePoint-based extranet environment to replace a legacy system and surrounding business processes that had been in place for years. Speakers share what worked well and where they underestimated. They cover some of the non-technical side of areas that are key to the success of any KM project, such as collaborating with cross-functional teams, executive sponsorship, designing with the customer in mind, and change management. Get lots of tips and ideas from their engaging presentation!

When it comes to KM, the role of people can’t be underestimated. Without people, there is no knowledge to manage. In industry, learning systems have allowed people to connect in new ways. This new medium for sharing information has made organizations more successful and learning more robust. Within this environment, there also is the risk of overworking your experts, most of whom have responsibilities beyond sharing knowledge with colleagues. How do you minimize expert exhaustion and keep these employees engaged without overworking them? The solution comes down to simple collaboration and knowledge sharing strategies. Rose talks about the reasons expert exhaustion occurs, why it is a problem, and how organizations can implement a culture of robust knowledge without inadvertently burning out employees.

This panel of client case studies of successful knowledge sharing in high-functioning organizations and communities. Smartlogic’s CEO uses live customer projects to explain how to automatically process the volume and variety of data, insist on veracity to drive quality insights from data, and use machine learning and AI in combination with information discipline. Byrd illustrates how curated micro-content accelerates learning and shares a sample micro-learning deployment strategy and action plan. Armstrong addresses why BPM (business process management) is the backbone to digital transformation and continuous improvement programs. Using relatable scenarios, tips and tools, real-world lessons learned and compelling case studies, he focuses on why and how a business transformation platform is the future of KM and how to better leverage the work that is already being done.

KOC is the fourth-largest crude oil exporter in the world, managing highly complex, multimillion- dollar projects during the last 80 years. Managing critical project knowledge is vital to the success of the project and the organization. Driven by KOC’s 2030 strategy, the multidimensional approach to project knowledge sharing is evolving to be the knowledge- sharing model in KOC. It integrates with various organizational process and policies. Each project engagement generates a lot of learnings that need to be factored in when new projects are initiated to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Many times, these learnings are localized and remain as “tacit knowledge,” leading to scope rework, schedule overrun, adjustment orders, and claims. While KOC follows an asset based organization structure, with a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic workforce, a larger chunk of the work is carried out through complex, long-term project engagement, diffusion of ‘learnings’ across assets. Hear about their lessons learned solution. Then hear how the KOC-Training and Career Development Group performs a customer satisfaction study, seeking feedback from internal customers about improving service demands. As their workforce is rapidly becoming more multigenerational, Millennials now make up more than 40% of the workforce, impacting work behaviors and communication dynamics. Identifying the challenges and opportunities for their talent management strategy, KOC decided to introduce some disruptive initiatives to the behaviors to induce organizational change, and generate trust of the power of social computing within an organization comfortable with traditional learning and communication tools. Guzman discusses developing the innovative services learning community, applying KM and open innovation approaches to foster spaces for employees to be part of knowledge flow, embedding a culture of social learning based on collaboration and trusted communication, and lessons learned on how the enterprise IT capabilities were key enablers enhancing agile networking solutions supported by mobile applications to boost knowledge and expertise advice on a click. She shares their road map and secrets of how employees developed new mindsets and skills as well as benefits from learning and development opportunities.