People are at the core of knowledge-sharing—the key to high functioning organizations. In John Seely Brown’s words, “We participate, therefore we are.” New and emerging technology can only enhance learning, sharing, and decision making to create successful organizations. Join our inspiring and knowledgeable speaker as he shares his view of the future of people and tech working together to share knowledge and create winning organizations.

Text analytics and auto-categorization tend to present themselves to the world as esoteric disciplines supported by complex expert systems. Users are immediately confronted by a jargon-wall built with terminology from computational linguistics, such as “tokenization,” “lemmatization,” and “NLP.” At past KMWorld/Taxonomy Bootcamp events, some practitioners who are attempting to get started with autocategorization projects have voiced a common set of frustrations. Categorizing content shouldn’t require an advanced degree in linguistics. Categorization rules should be simple and transparent. Rules development and taxonomy development should be coextensive rather than separate activities. Rules should be easy to edit, and it should be possible to understand quickly and precisely how changes to taxonomy and rules impact document categorization. This talk explores these issues from a design and user-experience perspective. It outlines a manifesto for demystifying text analytics and for simplifying the process of auto-categorization. The manifesto is aimed at a constituency of content owners and taxonomists and hopes to help them take ownership of the categorization process so they can better control the search and discovery experience for their end users.

Our popular writers, speakers, and authors of Wow, Woo, Win: Service Design, Strategy & the Art of Customer Delight look at how customer experience and service design can enhance knowledge sharing and success in organizations. They discuss the importance of designing your organization around service and offer clear, practical strategies based on the idea that the design of services is markedly different than manufacturing. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it’s the experience that makes the difference. To provide great experiences that keep customers coming back, organizations or KM programs must design services with as much care as design products. Service design is proactive—it is about delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy. Our speakers share with you how to create “Aha” moments when the customer makes a positive judgment, and to avoid “Ow” moments. They provide tips on how you and customers create a bank of trust, fueled by knowledge of each other’s skills and preferences.

Everyone who engages with your organization is in search of something, whether it’s products, services, people, or support. Too much of their time is spent sifting through useless information. New advances in machine learning and AI technology, combined with contextual search, are finally bringing relevance to every interaction and are making knowledge management a key driver of real business results. See real-world examples of the impact that increased maturity has made on innovative companies. Learn actionable steps to increase the relevance of your organization and start positively impacting your bottom line.

Communities of practice are a great way to develop expertise and innovation around specific interests. By infusing intelligence into many experiences and demonstrating some recent advances in Office 365 you’ll see how to leverage tacit and explicit knowledge in different ways as well as reuse and build upon the work of others. Our speaker has extensive experience in enterprise collaboration systems and currently leads intelligent search and discovery for Microsoft 365.  Expect lots of tips & examples for improving your KM initiatives.

For a KM initiative to be successful, knowledge managers must secure the support of senior leaders before implementation. Early top management buy-in results in funding, resources, advocacy, usage, broad organizational support, and success—the program yields its expected benefits, KM is spoken of and written about positively by leaders, stakeholders, and users. Hear from our long-time KM practitioner about proven practices illustrated by real-world examples for securing resources, active participation, and ongoing advocacy from top leadership. Get lots of tips for leading an effective, sustainable KM program that is seen as essential to the success of companies in different industries, of different sizes, and with different cultures.

For more than a decade, search technology has been used as the primary access point to the mountains of knowledge and data sitting behind an organization’s firewall. As environments evolve to account for private and public clouds, search is evolving beyond just the box to an API for human information. Will Hayes explores that evolution and talks about how search technologies and professionals play a key role in the enterprise cloud migration strategy.

Participate in our popular interactive knowledge café, where you can share your KM challenges with colleagues and KM practitioners. Each table has a KM industry mentor and topic; you will have time to visit at least three different tables during the morning. Meet and learn in this intimate networking atmosphere with thought leaders and practitioners of the KM industry!

If you are a believer in the data-driven organization (or even just curious) and have ever wondered what could happen if you cleverly combined the power of data collection, indexing, text mining, search, and machine learning into a unified platform and applied it within the enterprise, this talk is for you! Come learn about the state of cognitive search and analytics technology and how it is enabling great companies across a wide swath of industries to amplify mission-critical expertise within their business in a surprisingly short amount of time. Our speaker illustrates the technology in action with real-world examples.

In recent years, document-centric search over information has been extended with the use of graph-based content and data models. The implementation of semantic knowledge graphs in enterprises is not only improving search in a traditional sense, but opens up a path of integrating all types of data sources in a most agile way. Linked data technologies have matured in recent years and can now be used as the basis for numerous critical tasks in enterprise information management. Hilger discusses how standards-based graph databases can be used for information integration, document classification, data analytics, and information visualization tasks. He shares how a semantic knowledge graph can be used to develop analytics applications on top of enterprise data lakes and illustrates how a large pharmaceutical company makes use of graph-based technologies to gain new insights into its research work from unified views and semantic search over heterogeneous data sources.

At the cross-section of innovation, open data, and education, our speaker, a former government KM practitioner, shares her thoughts about the challenges and opportunities for organizations and communities in the coming years. She discusses empowering members of our communities and improving services using new tech like AI, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, Internet of Things, predictive analytics, gamification, and more. How will people interact and share knowledge over the next decade? Are we moving toward anticipatory knowledge delivery (just enough, just in time, just for me), being in the flow of work at the teachable moment, establishing trust in a virtual environment, and learning from peer-to-peer marketplaces like Airbnb and Uber? Our longtime KM practitioner shares her insights about the evolving digital transformation of every part of our world and hints at the magic sauce we need for a successful future!