“Knowledge is becoming inextricable from — literally unthinkable without — the network that enables it. In fact, knowledge is now a property of the network, and the network embraces businesses, governments, media, museums, curated collections, and minds in communication. But, because the properties of the Net include overwhelming abundance, unmasterable messiness, and unending disagreements, the challenge of building networked knowledge is not simple.” So says Weinberger, who shares his insights on how the concept of knowledge is changing and how we can facilitate its sharing for organizational learning, collaboration, innovation, and more.

How do you guide employees to follow knowledge management best practices? How do you answer employees’ most frequent questions on information sharing and KM toolkits? How do you ensure that communications are aligned with strategy and resonate across business units? Speakers review strategies and techniques as well as experience and lessons learned in their organizational efforts to communicate KM practice.

So many KM practitioners, academics, and vendors use as the framework for their work the data, information, knowledge and wisdom (DIKW) pyramid. Invariably, it leads them astray and causes much harm. Hear from an experienced KM practitioner why the DIKW pyramid’s siren call is so pernicious and must be resisted. Come to learn and explore what the alternatives might be that can set your KM program free. Add your voice to the discussion!

One of the most common challenges organizations face today is the loss of knowledge due to employee retirement and the need to transfer and retain the critical knowledge possessed by these employees. Hear from one of the largest energy companies in Brazil, which is challenged with 40% of its workforce eligible to retire in less than 2 years. It used KM techniques together with talent management and learning tools including knowledge maps, scoring types of knowledge, individual knowledge transfer and retention plans, and more. Then hear about the knowledge transfer strategy used at PG&E as Lamb demonstrates some of the tools and methodologies his company has used. Come learn about the tools and frameworks applied in these organizations and hear their lessons learned to use in your organizations.

Launching internally facing social-business platforms is critical for collaborative organizations. This session features three examples. PwC wanted an innovative answer to get its teams collaborating and to connect its experts around the world — 170,000 people in 150 countries. Javed and Barnes discuss the strategies, design, and implementation behind Alion’s successful social networking and globalized KM SharePoint environment catering to executives (C- Levels), mid-level managers, developers, analysts, and end users. Deloitte uses various social media tools including DeloittePeopleNetwork (a proprietary global profiling system) and microblogging to create its social networking platform. Hear from each organization about what it took, how they built buy-in and adoption, measured value, user experience, lessons learned, tips, and more as they share their experiences and secrets to success!

Knowledge management can seem to be a costly endeavor and difficult to implement. Employees and management don’t often see the benefit, fearing that if they share their knowledge, their own personal impact is minimized. Find out how one organization built its knowledge hub using E2.0 tools — blogs, wikis, IMs, and communities of practice — to drive a culture change, improving collaboration and increasing knowledge sharing across all of IT.

You have invested a significant amount in developing an internal collaboration capability around SharePoint, but your business needs to reach beyond the firewall to collaborate with a network of business partners and share content. To facilitate information sharing with outside parties, your team may be using consumer-grade tools not sanctioned by IT. Balancing the need to provide business users with flexible collaboration tools in a way that meets your information governance policies is a challenge. Join Lees and learn about best practices from organizations who have implemented cloud-based solutions to leverage their existing SharePoint investments. Nelson looks at building a search system for both public-facing and internal search applications which use the cloud for search. He discusses technology and architecture design decisions, the choice of user interface functions, the use and enhancement of metadata, relevancy tuning approaches - including the use of link analysis, and shares many lessons learned in providing search results excellence.

This session illustrates the best practices that facilitated learning and working together in three different organizations, the lessons learned, and plans for the future that can help you imagine how your organization can apply similar principles to increase learning and engage stakeholders. The first talk highlights the U.S. Army’s efforts to incorporate lessons learned into soldier training, leader development, and education programs to build an agile and adaptive operating force to meet rapidly evolving adversaries. It discusses knowledge networks and professional forums as key enablers for capturing and sharing lessons learned, best practices (labeled tactics, techniques, procedure, or TTPs), and “knowledge nuggets.” Marcus discusses how regional communities of practice foster learning and improve knowledge flow throughout the entire organization. She illustrates how these processes are integrated into daily work to support and provide linkages to the firm’s goals and provides tips for engaging all the various levels of personnel in KM, from the office managing partners who run each office down to the newest hire. The USAID team talks about a new venture to encourage the agency to learn, to work together and with partners, and to build adaptive models that allow for responsiveness to changing circumstances.

Enterprises that learn fast stay ahead of their competitors and have better bottom lines.  Hear from our industry experts and get insights to apply in our organization.  Hrabovsky discusses building search applications In the cloud and how ex.fm, a social music discovery service, implemented a  new cloud-based search application. He touches on how to get up and running with search in the cloud, the technological costs and benefits versus open source and other alternatives, cost and performance optimization techniques, and working with large datasets.  Maser shares real world examples of how taxonomy and metadata solutions are making organizations smarter and more productive. Kaplan explains how filling in the information gaps that exist across an organization is key to working smarter and faster. He describes how precise, relevant content can be made instantly available whenever and wherever it's needed to support a business process - and how that generates maximum value from existing technologies.

The FAA is evolving into a performance-based organization. It doesn’t happen overnight, as organizational cultures are inherently resistant to change. Despite such difficulties, FAA employees have adapted to changes in technology, methods, processes, and leadership. Providing safe and efficient air services to the flying public remains the paramount goal of the agency as it moves toward next generation air transportation. Hear about the company’s Lessons Learned (LL) and how it responds to the need of minimizing duplicative mistakes, eliminating the tendency commonly know as “reinventing the wheel,” and transitioning to a new culture as a learning organization. LL is making employee action more efficient as the organization transitions to a new way of doing business, encourages the sharing of experiences between groups through communities of practices, and facilitates the development of better-defined processes so that employees can understand each other’s work, integrate activities when possible, and collaborate to achieve organizational excellence.