Virtualized data centers, cloud infrastructures, and virtual desktop environments are gaining critical mass in the enterprise. While there are many compelling benefits associated with this trend, one emerging and serious challenge is the search and retrieval of large datasets residing in enterprise private clouds and other virtual environments. Hear how organizations are solving these challenges and driving revenues for their organizations.

Hear about the business impact of the Rolls Royce KM 2-day global event to engage with employees company-wide in learning and sharing how to improve efficiency and/or effectiveness through KM. Rogers shares her story of overhauling Cargill’s vintage research and development document system to meet the needs of a new, KM 2.0 world. The stakes are high to protect intellectual property, and at the same time, corporations emphasize collaboration and knowledge sharing, and practitioners expect “Google like” search. Hear how Cargill used advanced technical capabilities such as search and workflow and the adaptation of an old-fashioned hierarchical thesaurus to support search. Hendrix discusses the tools, processes, and behaviors needed to have a successful implementation of KM on a mega project. She shares successes and challenges in using SharePoint for knowledge sharing, communication and collaboration, in the After Action Review process, Lessons Learned, Site Visits, and more.

Malloy talks about surfing the knowledge wave as he shares a case study about a surf-inspired fitness company, SURFSET, that is using Bloomfire, a people-driven knowledge base, to provide the latest information, training, and programming to their worldwide network of studio owners, instructors and individuals. Hear how they brought their training course virtual, enabling them to quickly expand and maintain quality control, as well as foster engagement and healthy communication among their community of providers.

Vertal discusses the business benefits that can be gained through building employee communities and shares a case study about an innovative consumer products company that took steps to adopt a Liferay-based social intranet solution in a successful effort to enhance their employee work experience. Hear how this modern intranet has helped bring much-needed features to their employees’ fingertips, resulting in improved knowledge sharing, employee interaction and feedback, and findability of people and information.

Berry explains how companies including Harris Corporation, KeyBank, L’Oreal and Tokyo Electron are radically transforming by leveraging knowledge to become more relevant and responsive to their customers. She explains how search & relevance technology allows these companies to harness information and experts from highly fragmented information sources to inject more relevant knowledge into customer service interactions, personalize online experiences, and radically boost knowledge management initiatives.

As one of the world’s largest engineering, procurement, and construction companies, Bechtel Corp. operates through five global business units and 140 countries. With a mobile global workforce and concurrent mega-projects, Bechtel’s IT team needed a more user-enabled infrastructure to support the automation, maintenance, and execution of it business processes and workflows. This session covers the use cases and challenges the company faced as it transitioned from an in-house developed form and workflow tool to a full featured commercial business process management tool. It addresses the challenges faced including user awareness, user acceptance, business acceptance, and roll out. Bennett shares both the best and worst practices that were encountered during the transition to a more efficient, effective, and “mobile user-enabled” system. He shares how Bechtel is deploying BPM technology to improve its business processes and knowledge sharing, gaining greater visibility and insight into those business processes and subsequently optimizing them.

Microblogging platforms as knowledge-sharing conduits are having much success in building social organizations. Hear from two practitioners who have participated in large-scale global implementations of Jive and Yammer. They share strategies for getting buy-in and choosing a tool, provide tips and techniques for implementation and adoption, demonstrate the capability, and discuss challenges and learnings from their experiences.

What’s under the hood in the enterprise intranet? This informative session lets you peek behind the firewall of leading-edge intranets from a number of different industries and includes award-winning sites from the 2013 Intranet Innovation Awards. These case studies of successful, active intranets provide ideas and insights to apply in your organization.

Virtual teams are commonplace these days, with one or more members working in a different location, time zone or country. Using his global experience in working with many organizations, White discusses working effectively with audio, web, and video conferencing; how to build, manage, and motivate virtual teams and communities; and how to address issues related to language and cultural differences.

From brainstorming to other idea-generation tools to tips for changing internal enterprise culture (the biggest barrier to innovation), this session is filled with insights and ideas for ramping up innovation in any organization. Innovation does require determination and commitment, working to discover new needs, and creating change in a safe, comfortable environment. Our innovation expert shares lots of techniques for you to try in your organization.

This talk describes how MWH, a global leader in wet infrastructure, uses “clever thinking” to distinguish itself with customers and separate itself from competitors in a rapidly changing business environment. It describes how individuals can distinguish themselves through clever thinking, which research on innovation suggests isn’t inherent talent. It can be developed through discipline and practice. Drawing on this research and interviews with managers and technical experts from a variety of fields, this talk describes the mechanisms of individual and organizational clever thinking: increased situational awareness, deeply understanding the science and principles that underlie the diagnosis and decisions, and generating unusual “just right” solutions. Using practical, hands-on examples, speakers share the “thinking tools and techniques” that improve the clever application of knowledge not by setting standards or best practices, but by guiding good thinking.

Companies in every industry try to create environments that foster breakthrough new products and services, but few can evaluate the overall effectiveness of their innovation process. Faced with numerous business and operational challenges—from innovation objectives poorly aligned to corporate strategy to disconnected innovation data management—companies are too often making decisions about innovation based on incomplete and disparate information. Companies that focus on “running innovation like a business”— using a balanced scorecard approach—are more likely to drive real, measurable value for their shareholders. Gutierrez outlines the most effective strategies he’s found to institutionalize a more integrated innovation approach, from the front-end of innovation through in-market results.