How would you change your process, technologies, and culture to increase organizational performance, effectiveness, innovation, and the bottom line? We asked each of our KM thought leaders this question. Their responses provide tips, strategies, and models for the audience to use to hack KM in their organizations!

As we move into an era of increasing disruption of our working worlds, blockchain-enabled business models, the principles of marginal capacity businesses such as AirBnB spreading to other sectors, and the ongoing and increasingly sophisticated march of automation, how are we, as increasingly stressed and time-poor individuals, going to add value? We need to think harder and share better. Knowledge has long been acknowledged as a primary resource in our organisations, but thus far, most of our attempts at managing it better have tinkered at the edges of existing ways of working and time-worn processes. If we are going to add value in the future, we are going to have to have more impact, and the way to have more impact is to have better ideas that are more positive. The way to do this is to think harder and get better at sharing our insights with others. Semple explores how to find the time, the energy, and the ways to think harder and better about work. He shares tips on how best to share those ideas more effectively with more people.

Swissmedic is an expert organisation; its employees knowledge workers. As a learning organization, Swissmedic has a strong commitment to KM. From the development of continuing training for managers through human resource processes to intranet design, the KM perspective is an integral consideration in all activities. With its headquarters currently being refurbished, Swissmedic considered the impact the design of a new office layout has on knowledge workers on a day-to-day basis and how KM activities could be promoted and reinforced through workplace management. This case study shows how aspects of KM can be used within the organization as a means of steering change processes. It assesses the role of workplace design with respect to various aspects of KM (e.g., knowledge distribution) and collaboration in interdisciplinary teams and illustrates the added value of directly involving knowledge managers when workplace changes happen.

Knowledge—and hence the people behind it—are the one and only asset in most organizations. Hear how several organizations approached the underlying processes supporting that asset. FNSS Defense Systems, a joint venture of BAE Systems and Nurol Group, is a private defense company designing and producing armed land vehicles, the market and export leader in Turkey. In deciding to improve its management of knowledge, hear how the company used product lifecycle management software to customize its KM infrastructure, build a master plan, and more.

Organizations have been deploying new digital work platforms and services the past few years. Quite often we hear that the tools don’t matter that much, just get one and use it. Adding a community manager and digital transformation specialists helps, but the tools don’t seem to do what is needed. The question is constantly, “Do the tools fit our needs?” and also “We see value, but it seems like it isn’t quite right.” Well, not only is getting the right help important, it is important to right fit the tools to the needs and uses. The uses and needs can be complex and diverse. This session helps break down the diversity, enabling the dimensions and their elements to be viewed properly so what is relevant for your organization can be seen through the use of social lenses. Using the lenses as a diagnostic tool to understand what works and fits and where there are gaps and needs helps bring clarity. But, greater clarity is provided when pairing the lenses to view different perspectives clearly.

This is particularly helpful for improving use and knowledge flows through the organization’s understanding of the right fit of tool(s) and services. Using the lenses to see the relevant dimensions and how they intersect not only helps organizations understand the needs for today, but works as a valuable method for framing an adaptive road map for the coming years. Having clarity to see the smaller actual pieces enables sensing their changes in order to adjust and adapt with more clarity of understanding.

During the past three years, the Port of Antwerp Authority designed a new process for generic knowledge work, supported with new kinds of tools. Our concept got awarded in Washington, which was a true confirmation, but it also started of an important change project. The people factor (new skills, culture, communication) in change was underestimated. Hear about the dilemmas, disruption, tools, and trajectory and coping mechanisms.  It's a process of thought and action combined in design, learning, experimentation and especially perseverance. Filled with tips and insights!

In this high-speed digital era, organizations have to deal with high volumes of structured and unstructured data. New digital tools are being developed to help analyze and visualize this vast amount of data; however, many challenges still remain. Meza shares a knowledge/data management strategy for identifying, organizing, analyzing, and visualizing your critical data to improve organizational decision making. Aasman discusses how graphs and KM have gained significant visibility with the rebirth of artificial intelligence and the emergence of cognitive computing. He discusses recent collaborations with Montefiore Health System, Intel, Cloudera, and Cisco to improve a patient’s knowledge around the probabilities of their future health status. The knowledge creation stems from the capability to combine the probability space (statistical patient data) with a knowledgebase of comprehensive medical codes and a unified terminology system. The confluence knowledge via machine learning, semantics, visual querying, graph databases, and Big Data not only displays links between objects, but also quantifies the probability of their occurrence.

The desire to learn, grow, and contribute in meaningful ways is a part of the human psyche. When people connect, share knowledge, tap collective intelligence, and collaborate on decision making in the workplace, they can achieve high levels of performance. Research suggests that employees who actively share knowledge through social communities and corresponding social technologies have a wider support base, learn faster, and have greater access to information. As a result, networked employees report higher job and employer satisfaction, benefitting both the employee and the workplace. Social business tools can power these interactions, enabling employee engagement, innovation, and productivity. This session outlines how organizations can use social learning as part of a multifaceted approach to building high-performing workplaces. It discusses how social learning can empower and engage employees and engender enterprise-wide innovation, and explores how employees can build new skills and expertise through social community memberships, discussion forums, on-demand learning, and blogs.

Physical water coolers are known for facilitating idea sharing, so it’s surprising that so many companies resist having a virtual water cooler on their employee social platforms, a place where employees can feel free to talk about whatever they want. On the surface, it might look like a giant, highly visible waste of time and resources. But collaboration software vendors often counter by arguing that having a water cooler increases employee engagement and speeds adoption by creating a fun way for employees to become familiar with the tool’s features and to develop skills that can transfer to more productive collaborative efforts. Beyond those benefits, Pearce shares how Lexmark has found that the water cooler adds value at a strategic, organizational level. A vibrant, active water cooler contains a ready audience that is a microcosm of the entire organization. Because anyone can talk about anything, readership is drawn from all areas of the business. Lexmark regularly attracts about 25% of its employee base, and internal studies have shown that its demographics mirror those of the overall company, both geographically and functionally. So it has become a great venue for surveying attitudes and testing out ideas requiring input from the whole company. It is also used to surface patterns of interest. Pearce reviews and categorizes the posts made there to identify topic themes, leading to the identification of specific topics that would otherwise have gone unnoticed and the spin-off of immediately successful collaboration spaces dedicated to those topics.

This panel shares their experiences and tips for change management. Ottavi discusses a recent engagement with Cisco which saved money and improved efficiencies. Cadena talks about how knowledge coaching/mentoring can ensure adoption of KM. Willinger discusses leveraging change management to drive success in a SharePoint intranet.