Corporations of all sizes are trying to act like a startup, but their existing organizational structures are set up to reject that mindset, resulting in a lack of knowledge-sharing and collaboration, opportunities lost, and fears of disruption. Our experienced speakers explore how to create internal startup teams, develop leaders who can keep them accountable, and set up organizational structures that enable these teams to flourish.

One of the central KM challenges has been, and continues to be, how to “know what we know.” Traditional approaches have focused on creating searchable user profiles. All too often these profiles have not realized their potential due to lack of data because they depend on user input and never really represent “what we know,” but rather “what we think we know” as a result of people’s inherent biases in how they describe their expertise. With offices in 29 countries and four official working languages, the IADB used natural language processing techniques to experiment with 1,000 employees in building two locator systems that compare multiple data, corroborate the evidence on how well an employee actually “knows” something, and create a proxy representation of that tacit knowledge. Field discusses the timely sharing of knowledge to benefit both client and support agent. Even with automation, people are still our main knowledge asset. A collaborative business culture breeds the desire to help and contribute. Willing volunteers who see the fruit of their effort are much more likely to assist in future endeavors. Hear how Siemens benefits from its people, business strategy and Salesforce.com process capabilities to empower the wider community for problem-solving efficiency and at the same time increase engagement from knowledge contributors.

While predictions of job loss and wrenching changes seem to get the  headlines, a more integrated view of how cognitive and AI tools work WITH people in a new organizational construct is likely to give forward thinking organizations the benefits of AI without nearly as much of the organizational disruption as is being predicted. Drawing on Deloitte research and case examples, Jooste shares thoughts on how knowledge and digitization teams are channeling disruption into value.