Are you new to knowledge management? Want to learn about all the possibilities for making your organization smarter, more collaborative, innovative, and productive? Join our expert knowledge manager to gain insights and ideas for building a robust KM program in your organization even if it is called another name! This workshop highlights a range of potential enterprise KM activities being used in real organizations and shares how these activities are impacting the bottom line. It shows real KM practices and discusses various tools and techniques to give those new to KM a vision of what is possible in the enterprise.

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 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.

Governance is definitely the hot topic for SharePoint intranet deployments.A good governance plan is “necessary but not sufficient” to ensure solution success.You still have to ensure that the governance plan is applied, which means your plan needs to be realistic and “consumable.” This workshop provides a practical approach for developing successful intranet and collaboration solution governance plans, step-by-step guidance to make sure you cover all your bases, suggested approaches for delivering consumable guidance, and templates, and examples you can immediately apply in your own organization.

The retirement wave everyone has been predicting has arrived. In many organizations, mentoring is catching on as a means of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next, but often with disappointing results. One generation believes people should “figure it out on their own.” Another speaks in the language of case histories, diagrams, manuals and reports, while yet another speaks in 140-character tweets and video clips. Bringing these different worlds together is no easy task. And knowledge loss no longer involves only retiring employees. Anybody with critical knowledge can leave at a moment’s notice. This interactive workshop includes the do’s and don’ts of setting up and running a successful mentoring program, how to make men- toring a habitual part of your organization’s culture, the right way to use technology to support mentoring, how to answer that ever-burning objection: “I don’t have time for this!,” which knowledge transfer methods (job shadowing, storytelling, etc.) work best in what situations, the difference between mentoring, training and coaching, and how these can work together, best practices for matching mentors and mentees, how to help a mentee make the transition to mentor, how to evaluate your mentoring program and what to do when it’s not working. Workshop facilitators draw from more than 8 decades of combined experience in mentoring, along with empirical data collected from recent mentoring programs currently underway.

This fast-paced workshop looks at how organizations are evolving toward digital workplaces. It discusses the latest trends, early adopters, and what they are doing differently. McConnell provides a model and a method for evaluating your intranet/digital workplace and identifying your priority areas. She shows how to create personas that highlight the needs of people, businesses, and organizations and illustrates how to get management’s attention by presenting results in business-focused ways. She defines success criteria and tips including 5 common obstacles and how to overcome them. Join the workshop and take home models and tools to use in your organization.

This workshop, by a KM pioneer and popular KMWorld speaker, focuses on how to build a successful KM strategy and revitalize knowledge sharing within your organization. Dave Snowden, our engaging workshop leader, takes participants through a step-by-step approach to rethinking the role of the KM function in an organization. It includes creating a decision/information flow map to understand the natural flows of knowledge; defining micro-projects that directly link to the decision support needs of senior executives; mapping the current flow paths for knowledge within the organization; and finding natural ways to manage the knowledge of the aging workforce as well as the IT- enabled apprenticeship. Using real-world examples, Snowden shares winning strategies and insights to rejuvenate your knowledge-sharing practices.

Innovation is one of the desired outcomes of knowledge management, but it can be elusive. KM activities such as collaboration, sharing knowledge and expertise, metadata, and taxonomy, can all be illustrated through creative activities, activities, which in turn inspire employee engagement and innovation. The purpose of infusing creativity in KM is to enhance innovation, productivity, collaboration, employee engagement, thought leadership, and sense of community, among other benefits. Learn how creativity, innovation, and KM intersect by being introduced to the ideas and concepts of creativity and seeing illustrations of how they enhance and inspire innovation and employee engagement. This is a hands-on, interactive workshop, so come prepared to engage in an experience that takes you outside the usual knowledge management box to discover the benefits of creative KM.

Today’s flow of work already runs through a complex array of systems of record: ERP, CRM, order management, procurement, document management, intranet, and our old “frienemy,” email. Employees are now adding to this mix by bringing in requirements and expectation levels to the workplace that are based on their experiences in the consumer world. For example, they want to bring their own devices (BYOD), and cannot understand why they can’t collaborate, search, and connect to business applications while on the move. This workshop focuses on the practicalities that enterprises face when tackling the issue of developing and managing a social workplace. It shares what Real Story Group is hearing from customers, what is working, what is not, and what the prognosis is for IT directors under pressure. This should prove to be a particularly informative and essential session to attend. Questions addressed include: What is the digital workplace? What’s the business benefit of the social layer? How can companies get started without massive investment in custom development? How can these social workplace tools integrate with existing platforms (such as SharePoint or SAP) in the enterprise? What are the issues when integrating cloud-based platforms with legacy on-premise solutions? The workshop also presents a market analysis of the leading vendors and suppliers including those of cloud-based collaboration systems, and discusses best practices for selection and implementation of digital workplace technologies.

One challenge facing organizations today is how to capture and transfer knowledge from departing experts to their successors. This is especially difficult at senior levels in organizations and with positions that are niche specialties. The knowledge in each of these areas is so specialized that only a few people have the knowledge, yet it’s knowledge essential to the organization. Tacit knowledge is difficult to capture and transfer effectively, because it involves deeply embedded skills that the expert may not be consciously aware of using. While many organizations have learned to capture tacit knowledge at lower levels of the organization successfully, they still struggle with transferring the senior-level and specialty knowledge. This workshop is based on a case study of more than 30 top-level executives, engineers, and scientists at Fortune 500 companies. It offers an effective process for enhancing knowledge transfer at the senior levels of organizations, including methods to capture tacit knowledge more effectively and efficiently and empower leaders to retrieve that knowledge in a way that promotes effective learning. The workshop covers the impact of levels of expertise on knowledge transfer and the challenges of transferring knowledge from experts to less-experienced individuals. Best practices and tools are shared for capturing key specialty knowledge, analyzing and documenting key knowledge, and finding multiple methods to transfer knowledge.

SharePoint’s versatility makes it the ideal tool for managing a wide range of information,knowledge,and business processes. Learn from an expert with more than 50 successful SharePoint implementations how to translate ideas into actions, principles, and decisions that will drive your implementation forward and keep it focused on what the business values. The workshop provides the strategy and roadmap for using SharePoint and shares many real-world examples and practices.