The speed at which organizations learn and innovate must equal the rate of change in the marketplace. This is the new reality of business survival in a flat world. Companies need a means to rapidly sense, organize, collaborate, produce a result, and move on. They need new organizational structures that support complexity, agility, rapid learning, and personal growth. An entirely new enterprise model is needed. This workshop shows how to realistically assess your organization’s ability to perform in a flat world, and how to begin to make the transition to an agile, global, knowledge-based enterprise. Specifically, you will learn how to determine organizational strengths and weaknesses in responding to rapid changes in the marketplace, develop a prioritized list of key focus areas needed to reach a sustained level of high performance, choose the right strategies for leading the transformation to an “enterprise of the future.” The methodology presented is the result of more than 20 years of university-level research and field work and touches on business intelligence for sense-and-respond organizations; knowledge integration; critical decision processes; attracting, retaining, and growing knowledge workers; high-speed learning and innovation. Managers of organizations looking to hire, retain, and grow a diverse knowledge workforce, while striving to remain competitive in the global market place, will particularly want to attend.

Search engines (SEs) may seem like a black box: Queries go in, answers come out. But they’re just software, and the more you know, the more you can tune your search engine to solve your users’ real information needs. This session describes the various aspects of search — index structure, robot spiders and other indexers, query parsing, retrieval, relevance ranking and designing usable search interfaces — describing common problems and best practices. It covers the critical success factors (CSFs) for successful implementations of enterprise SEs and suggestions for choosing a search engine or evaluating an existing one.

How do you get over the great “intranet divide” and join the class of companies whose intranets are considered essential — the natural way of working — and not simply “useful”? And once you’re there, how do you continue to innovate and improve? This interactive workshop is based on the consolidated results of a 2006 survey of approximately 50 large, complex (often global) organizations from around the world. It looks at the intranet state of the art and identifies what factors differentiate companies where the intranet is considered essential — the way of doing business — and companies where the intranet is just useful. Using survey results, participants will compare their organizations’ strategies to those reported in the survey, exchange views and experiences, and gain insights into handling decision-making, budgeting, measurement and evaluation, governance, language and translation policies, home page strategies, collaboration policies, management and resources, processes and applications in the intranet.

While it is easy to be amazed by all the features offered by a portal, it can be very hard to make the decision for a specific system and to understand the rapidly changing market. This intensive half-day tutorial, led by the author of CMS Watch’s “Enterprise Portals Report,” provides a step-by-step review and roadmap for product selection. It covers:

• the current marketplace

•   different categories, architectures, features, and price ranges

•   important vendor intangibles

•   best practices in selecting a portal

•   why portal projects fail and how to avoid it from the onset

With this vendor-neutral tutorial, Boye provides a balanced view, enabling you and your team to make a better and more informed technology decision.

Knowledge management must directly support key business functions in meeting their strategic business goals and objectives and clearly impact the top and bottom line. Generic tools and processes, document repositories, and taxonomies are a good foundation, but until business-function knowledge-specific tools and processes are identified, designed, and implemented, KM will continually be struggling for relevance and survival as a strategic partner within organizations.

This workshop provides strategies and frameworks for KM as a partner with each business function in the organization, embracing the business goals and objectives as KM’s own. This means working hand in hand and becoming part of the extended business function team. Value is created directly at the business function level, in real dollars, allowing concrete ROI from KM’s contributions. In this workshop, you will learn to apply cutting-edge concepts and interactive processes around a real business function and become a key strategic partner by understanding key business functions goals and objectives; identifying key knowledge needs; co-designing tools, structures and processes to address those needs; and actively supporting and facilitating the processes.

Knowledge workers today are leading and working on the edge in markets and battlefields that are constantly changing. In a world where a new entrant can leapfrog market leaders in a single bound, knowledge workers need to learn faster from everything they do to stay relevant and ahead of the competition. Organizations ranging from British Petroleum to the U.S. Army to the Defense Intelligence Agency are applying proven practices and tools to develop self-aware, adaptive knowledge leaders and workers to successfully do business and perform missions they have never been trained for in markets and on battlefields that are constantly changing. This companion workshop to the morning workshop Building the Enterprise of the Future trains and coaches participants in the same techniques used by these leading organizations to learn quickly from every project, task, or activity they undertake. The methods and techniques covered in this workshop have been delivered and honed through application in more than 50 public and private sector organizations over the last 10 years. In addition to training individuals to improve their own performance as knowledge workers, this workshop provides methods for team and group application. Team leaders, project managers, and KM practitioners responsible for leading and delivering flawless execution on work activities, projects, and programs will particularly want to attend.

This workshop moves from the requirements specification to selecting the search engine/appliance and to actually making it work post-installation. White provides an overview of current intranet search software and search appliances. Filled with tips and strategies, this workshop provides a step-by-step framework for selecting and implementing intranet search in your environment. In addition to discussing the various options and types of search tools available, it focuses on implementation. It looks at usability issues, highlighting the importance of understanding how people search when designing search interfaces. The issues of upgrading intranet search to enterprise-wide search are also covered.

For many organizations, Microsoft SharePoint already is or will be the software of choice for developing intranets in the age of portals. This workshop goes beyond a mere description of SharePoint’s current and coming functionality and delves into how to get the most out of this powerful software. St. Clair comes armed with a set of tools and practices that will help you design an intranet using SharePoint. Particular attention is paid to taxonomy development, navigation, security, personalization, content modeling and management, and incorporating a governance structure. Participants learn just how far they can go in configuring the software without going too far down the road to customization.

End-user development can be thought of as do-it-yourself computing in a business setting. It’s the cutting edge of a major shift in the Web 2.0 world from centralized to localized information management, from providers to users. Instead of being tolerated or disparaged by IT staff (who sometimes call it “shadow computing”), it’s emerging as a viable development option. This workshop illustrates end-user development with real-world examples, provides step-by-step guides to how and why it’s done, and explores the implications for knowledge managers, corporate taxonomists, and intranet developers.

This half-day workshop introduces the concepts and tools of ONA. It articulates the business uses of ONA, describes actual cases in which ONA proved useful in a KM context; identifies the methods and tools that are in the ONA toolkit; distinguishes between social networking analysis (SNA), ONA, and social software; and discusses how to leverage social networks in organizations to enhance knowledge flows. Using real-world examples, speakers make the case for using ONA in your organization and provide a step-by-step process for implementation.