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.

Organizations have been shifting how work is done, moving from working in documents and email to collaboration/social/systems of engagement platforms that are part of their digital transformation. This shift not only improves efficiency in work but improves knowledge capture for reuse. Organizations have many options and variations, and making sense of them without a guide is challenging. This workshop provides a tool, the foundational social lenses, to see the problems and issues better in order to understand an organization’s needs as well as to see the paths forward far more clearly. Those who have gone through this workshop have stated they wish they had this understand- ing and ability to see their needs and way forward many years back. Vendors have found value in these lenses to better understand gaps and areas that could use improvement with clarity to better design and develop solutions. Join this workshop and grab a wonderful tool to find the way forward and improve knowledge flows.

This workshop focuses on the search capabilities of SharePoint 2013 and how to match them to a variety of search needs and strategies. Attendees get deep-dive information about the architecture, search capabilities, and tools—including content capture and enrichment, ranking models and relevancy, query rules, result templates, and management tools. Fried illustrates these capabilities with real case studies and examples. Learn what’s possible, what’s easy, and what to watch out for with SharePoint 2013 search. Take home knowledge of what this new search technology is, what you can do with it, what its limitations are, and how to overcome them, as well as a set of resources you can apply as you get deeper. Understand common patterns connecting business and information strategy and how to relate them to search scenarios, search capabilities, and search-driven applications that can be fielded successfully and economically. Gain an understanding of how to apply SharePoint 2013 search capabilities successfully and how to con- struct search-driven applications with this platform, as well as what pitfalls to avoid. Get a peek forward into where SharePoint search is going and how to be in a good position as it continues to evolve.

Text analytics is a platform technology having a profound impact on everything from taxonomy development and application to enterprise search and search-based applications and KM initiatives such as expertise location and social media-based collaborative communities. However, to get the maximum value from text analytics requires a broad, enterprise-wide perspective and approach. This workshop covers all you need to know to build a text analytics foundation for a complete range of applications: the basic analytic techniques from machine learning to sophisticated rule building; a survey of the vendor space of text analytics, including new social media companies; an evaluation process of the right text analytics software for your organization; an iterative development process and how to overcome issues; types of applications that can be built with text analytics; and many case studies of the most exciting new applications of text analytics.

The Future is already here and evenly distributed among the global members of the Change Agents Worldwide (CAWW) network. This half day workshop shares their secrets: how they work, their values, how they adopt/adapt/ exapt new ways of working with their global team. A team of Change Agents discuss leading organizational concepts such as: new models for organizational design, the power of self-organization, social and organizational network analysis, and more. They’ll talk about the cornerstone of what makes their networked organization work: transparency, trust, authenticity, and a culture of sharing and cooperation. The CAWW network exemplifies how social and operational integration yields iterative improvements in responding to customers, working collaboratively with partners, and creating value in the marketplace. The workshop also talks about what supports their work: SWARMS, Pods, Cookie Jars, Green Rooms, and other new processes based on agile and self-organizing principles.

KM only matters if knowledge is shared in ways that build organizational value. “If you build it they will come” is a poor mantra for KM programs. Too many initiatives struggle because they focus on technical implementation but neglect the realities of organizational behaviors and beliefs. This is true of almost any enterprise program, such as ERP, but KM is especially susceptible because knowledge sharing can only be voluntary. In this practical, interactive workshop:

• See why proactive “change management” makes such a difference in user adoption and ROI.
• Learn the basic components of any change management program.
• Practice how to assess and address challenges and opportunities in your organization.
• Engage in a forward-looking discussion about the latest thinking in organizational change.

This fast-paced workshop shares customer research from the noted analyst firm Real Story Group on significant digital workplace technology and provides a framework for buyers to assess technology choices based on their particular needs. Specifically, it provides a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a road map for evaluating technology vendors. It clarifies architectural choices in an increasingly confusing marketplace where standards remain more promise than reality. Gingras and Byrne address the practicalities that enterprises face when tackling the issue of developing and managing a social workplace. They share what analysts are hearing from customers, what is working, what is not and what the prognosis is for technology buyers who are under pressure.

Microsoft made a huge step forward in integrating search into the SharePoint platform, and, for many, SharePoint 2013 will be one of the best platforms available for enterprise search. But successful enterprise search projects need more than technology; they need effective approaches and practices. SharePoint 2013 provides enormous flexibility for tailoring—making it important to understand where the fuzzy boundary between configuration and customisation lies in real-world projects and important to judge what to change and what to leave alone. Search projects can go poorly or can go very well. This workshop offers patterns, practices, and guidance to ensure success. Bring your challenges. Questions addressed in this interactive, scenario-driven, workshop include the following:

• What are good practices and approaches to take in a search project? What tends to trip up these projects?
• What are the common customization patterns for SharePoint 2013? When is out of the box sufficient, and where do projects need to configure, extend, and add on?
• If you are already using FS4SP, or are thinking about a migration to SharePoint 2013, how should you approach it? If you are using another search engine, what should you consider?
• What kind of skills, training, and resources are needed for a successful project and ongoing maintenance?
• How should search be successfully operated and grown once in production? What could be a long-term strategy to make the most out of your search investments?

Knowledge flows along established paths in organizations. To change or improve knowledge flow, it’s important to understand those current paths—which are often outside the formal organization structure. Social network analysis (SNA) and its organizational counterpart organizational network analysis (ONA) provides a methodology to map these pathways to gain insights into how the organization really works. The methodology includes sensitivity to collecting data about people using different means, including surveys, and using software to manage and analyze the data to create visual maps and detailed metrics. Metrics can provide information about the overall cohesiveness of the network as well as the roles that individuals play in the network, highlighting those who are in the best position to move knowledge and ideas around. The workshop covers the basic steps and tools used in the methodology with a hands-on case study. Bring your laptop to take advantage of free tools. Gartner has predicted that by 2015, 25% of organizations will “routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.” If your organization is not already using network analysis, or if you would like to understand more about this tool that has been helping knowledge managers for almost 10 years, you will want to attend this highly interactive workshop.

The great retirement wave has finally arrived. Large numbers of employees with 30 or more years of experience are leaving the workforce, taking their knowledge with them. This is happening at a time when budgets are tight, demographics are shifting, and the speed of change in the marketplace is accelerating. In many organizations, mentoring is catching on as a means of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next, but often with disappointing results. This workshop focuses on how to develop and implement a structured mentoring program aimed at guiding mentors and mentees through a structured, agile-based process that makes the best use of everyone’s time, ensuring the whole process accommodates personal satisfaction and growth for both mentors and mentees. It includes the do’s and don’ts of setting up and running a successful mentoring program; problems that are most likely to arise and how to resolve them; which knowledge transfer methods work best in what situations; the difference between mentoring, training, and coaching and how they can work together; best practices for matching mentors and mentees; how to help a mentee make the transition to mentor; and how to evaluate your mentoring program and what to do when it’s not working.