Knowledge and strategy are two big and fuzzy words. When you put them together, you seem to get exponential fuzziness. This highly interactive workshop helps you figure out what your “knowledge” means for your organization—and what your knowledge strategy ought to be. An award-winning KM practitioner with more than 10 years’ experience in understanding knowledge strategy in both public and private sector organizations, Gordon Vala-Webb provides a framework for understanding your organization’s knowledge needs and options for what your knowledge strategy ought to be. Participants take home a framework for their knowledge strategy, an understanding of the different options, and the beginnings of a draft strategy.

Open source search technologies are finally becoming viable alternatives for enterprise search, but not all open source projects are created equal—and not all are free. This workshop takes you on a deep tour of open source enter- prise search platforms available today and helps you understand the strengths and liabilities of each. It also helps you understand what it takes to success- fully implement and manage open source enterprise search including which features are needed for a successful enterprise search implementation, which open source platforms are enterprise-ready, what skills you will need in-house and which you can contract out, what capabilities may be missing and how to fill the gaps. It looks at whether open source search can save you money and how you can integrate open source search with your enterprise content. The workshop provides brief demonstrations of each major open source search platform, as well as open source and commercial tools that extend the basic search capability. It covers capabilities such as faceted search, security and access control, scalability, and ongoing search operations. This workshop will help you determine if your organization is ready for open source search or whether a commercial search platform is a better option.

While traditional KM approaches continue to face challenges, social technologies in the public domain are sparking organic knowledge networks, hinting at the many promises of Enterprise 2.0. Unfortunately, E2.0 adoption behind the firewall remains severely constrained, facing cultural barriers anchored in silo-thinking and a deeply held bias for control. Collaborators seeking to share knowledge must work against the grain. This workshop identifies multiple barriers to the flow of knowledge in organizations and explores specific steps necessary to achieve breakthroughs. For this to happen KM must evolve, with less focus on structured repositories (echoing the silo model) and more focus on enabling generative conversations. It stimulates us, as KM practitioners, to reframe our thinking, recognizing the need to support movement of unstructured content in daily business work flows, embedding KM in business processes, at last deploying SECI in practice and implementing Nonaka’s “ba” and Argyris’ “double loops” as solution elements. See how to pattern thinking around the flow of insights among diverse stakeholders, and rec- ognize—whether convenient or not—the true demands for exchange that exist on both sides of the firewall. Learning and the sharing of knowledge are intrinsically organic. It’s time for KM to embrace this, adapting and evolving with the accelerated demands of the 21st century, and remaining open to possibilities of a new KM paradigm.

The focus of this workshop is how to choose and integrate the latest social media tools and technologies into your intranet to foster better collaboration, engagement, and measurable results. Given the runaway popularity of Twitter, Mashups, Facebook, blogs, and many other web-based forms of communications and networking, perhaps you have been wondering about the possibilities and the risks for your organization? Join this interactive workshop and learn proven ways of identifying the right technologies, or social media platforms, such as Yammer, Google Docs, Jive, Igloo, and Newsgator, to achieve your organization’s strategic objectives. Learn how 1,400-plus organizations from all around the world are using Intranet 2.0 tools as the results of a Social Intranet Study (sponsored by IABC) are shared, providing an exclusive look into how and to what extent organizations of all sizes are using social media on their intranets. The global perspective of the survey allows you to develop a new understanding and appreciation for Intranet 2.0 tools. Review case study examples of blogs, wikis, and other social media tools from IBM, Cisco, Sony, Siemens, and others. Gain knowledge from lessons learned and key recommendations for undertaking an Intranet 2.0 and internal branding initiative. This workshop is jam-packed with insights and ideas for creating your Intranet 2.0!

This workshop by a longtime KM practitioner provides a step-by-step technique for conducting a knowledge audit to assess KM needs and opportunities in any organization. It helps you understand the different forms of organizational knowledge and their matching strategies, provides the keys to building and analyzing activity-based knowledge maps, and gives you the confidence to develop recommendations for operational KM interventions based on knowledge maps.

Is your organization held back by employee or middle-management resistance, poor executive sponsorship, or corporate inertia and politics? These are the biggest obstacles to successful change in any organization. And knowledge management (KM) is all about change. This highly interactive workshop is aimed at people just about to start leading or working on a KM project 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, Gordon 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.

To thrive in today’s global economy, leaders understand that they must quickly capitalize on the know-how that hides inside their organizations or networks—in the teams, processes and experts that comprise them. However, approaches such as documentation, After Action Reviews, brainstorming, and even social media tools, still leave gaps—knowledge blind spots, mismatches, and jails. This session teaches an approach that addresses these problems without breaking the bank. “Knowledge Jam” uses facilitated conversation to cross boundaries, surface usable insights, and put knowledge to work. Knowledge Jam is both planned and improvisational. Real-time capture, desktop sharing, and shared sense-making improve the output quality and commitment to it. Knowledge Jam complements crowd-sourcing and the other connectivity strengths of social media. Explore (and justify) applications for Knowledge Jam in your work. Imagine the “competency of convening” as a new competitive advantage. Get practical experience facilitating a conversation-based knowledge transfer method. Learn how the disciplines of facilitation, conversation, and translation put new insights into practice, not just repositories. Learn how organizations are using conversation-based knowledge-transfer along with social media for executive successions, offshoring effectiveness, smoothing mergers and acquisitions, new product development, and network performance.

Intranets are regularly redesigned, but the same complaints often persist: I can’t find anything! This half-day workshop provides a practical toolkit of techniques to ensure intranets of all types are both usable and useful. It includes many screenshots and real-world examples and is relevant for those on SharePoint, web content management systems, or social intranet tools. Take home lots of strategies, ideas, and techniques to create more effective intranets.

Many organizations struggle to organize content and are often unaware of the options available for creating successful information architectures. This workshop is designed to provide participants with the basic skills necessary to leverage taxonomy and metadata to improve navigation and search within a SharePoint environment. Techniques for implementing taxonomy and metadata using native SharePoint functionality are explored as is coverage of the tool’s limitations along with potential solutions for the integration and management of complex taxonomic structures. Additional topics include faceted search, custom development, and third-party add-ons.

Virtual teams are commonplace these days, with one or more members working in a different location, time zone or country. White brings 30 years of business experience gained in nearly 40 countries to this highly interactive workshop focused on using virtual teams and communities as productively as possible. Among the topics included: working effectively with audio, web, and video conferencing; how to build, manage, and motivate virtual teams and communities; and how to address issues relating to language and cultural differences.

This year we're offering a new Executive Workshop that will be held in conjunction with KMWorld 2012. Created in partnership with Real Story Group, this separately priced event will provide attendees with crucial information needed to stay competitive in today's technology-filled workplace. Find out more and register for this special event below.

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