In this highly interactive workshop you have the opportunity to create a plan for your intranet in 2012 using the wide range of tools, techniques and case studies that White has developed in more than a decade of global intranet consulting. There is particular focus on how to make a successful business case for investment in the year ahead. Creating your own personal agenda for the next year will help you make the most of KMWorld.

This half-day intensive and interactive workshop, led by an experienced analyst and industry watcher, begins with a critical evaluation detailing SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses culled from customer experiences and hands-on testing. Through presentations and discussion, the workshop helps you figure out how, where, when, and why to use SharePoint and reviews how well SharePoint “fits” into different types and sizes of enterprises with different business objectives. The workshop offers candid, independent advice for both business and technology leaders. You can get SharePoint “training” nearly anywhere; join us for some real education to help you make strategic decisions about the platform.

The key to driving greater business dexterity and responsiveness is driving greater productivity and decision speed among the middle tier of knowledge workers in organizations. The industry association AIIM gathered executives from leading technology providers with noted author and futurist Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm) to identify a social business road map for the future. This workshop reviews relevant social technologies then moves to indepth discussion of use cases and case studies. It describes how an organization can use the social business road map in the context of its particular operational objectives and regulatory environment, shares the eight steps in the road map, and explores how to apply them to your own organization, including a more detailed discussion of social media governance and how to ensure the organization implements social business processes responsibly.

Gartner has predicted that by 2015, 25% of organizations will “routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.” Knowledge flows along established paths within 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), along with 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, 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 metrics about the roles that individuals play in the network, highlighting those who are in the best position to move around knowledge and ideas. This workshop covers the basic steps and tools used in the methodology with a hands-on case study. Bring your laptop and learn to download (free) tools. 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, then you should attend this highly interactive workshop.

This workshop, by a vendor-neutral consultant who has hands-on experience with a broad range of “out of the box,” open source, commercial and homegrown solutions, provides an overview of the latest in the enterprise search technology landscape. It reviews technologies currently on the market, discusses pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and specific suitabilities. Miles Kehoe shares case studies that illuminate how search technologies are leveraged in different types o organizations and provides a good introduction to and understanding of the enterprise search world.

Your company has a huge wealth of knowledge and expertise available across the enterprise, but you find this difficult to navigate and have little time to make sense of it all. Somewhere out there is what you're looking for, but it's like finding a needle in a haystack. You don't have much time, so instead you call someone you know, hoping he or she can point you in the right direction. Sound familiar? Now imagine a role-based workspace that finds the needles for you. It knows what you're working on and what you're interested in and suggests to you the most relevant information. It connects you to the right experts and to similar people doing similar work. It brings together all the tools and information you need to do your job effectively in one location. This workshop reviews a proven approach to designing and implementing role-based workspaces, as well as driving behavioral changes to improve productivity. It shares examples from several companies, the effort it took, the benefits that were achieved and the lessons learned so that you can apply this approach in your organization.

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.

The old “do and don’t” rules are no longer workable in today’s digital workplace. When the traditional intranet and social computing come together inside the enterprise, it is a whole new ball game. Although some of the old principles still hold true, the new social dimension requires new ways of thinking. There are new stakeholders to take into account. People have new expectations. Steering this constantly evolving environment over the next few years requires a rethink of fundamental principles. Flexibility and enablement need to be balanced with organizational goals and accountability. Communicators, IT managers, and HR practitioners are moving into leadership roles — leading rather than managing. Letting go is easy if you have the right framework and governance mechanisms in place. Participants will leave this workshop with models, examples and decision-making tools to enable them to make the right decisions for their organizations and establish meaningful frameworks and workable mechanisms that empower people and drive business.

If you’re a SharePoint power user who needs to take over a SharePoint farm, this session is for you. It provides a rapid, content-rich introduction to architecture, installation, upgrade, administration, troubleshooting, and optimization. Based on more than 10 years in the field designing and supporting enterprise SharePoint installations, Christopher McNulty goes through a live upgrade, sets up search and security, troubleshoots a slow SQL server and a “bad” web part, and more! It includes the seven best and seven worst practices for running an enterprise SharePoint farm and highlights the most common end user support requests and resolutions.

While the distinction between information and knowledge has often been misused, there is an essential truth that knowledge is richer and deeper than simple information. In the early days of KM, there were numerous attempts to utilize information technologies and approaches (search, taxonomies, etc.) for knowledge sharing, and the results were not pretty. However, today, with a rich array of text analytics and knowledge platform software, we are in a position to support real knowledge creation and sharing, but only if we approach it with the right foundation. That foundation is based on a concept of a semantic infrastructure, an infrastructure needed to support all the ways in which people in organizations use language and meaning. This workshop explores the essential characteristics of creating, refining, and applying a semantic infrastructure for rich knowledge sharing. It starts with how to do a knowledge audit designed to create a platform for knowledge networks that provides the means for enhanced communication within and among self-defined social groups. It then looks at a range of text analytics tools including text mining, auto-categorization, entity and fact extraction, summarization, sentiment analysis, and how these tools can now go beyond mere information applications to form the basis of a range of knowledge-sharing apps.