Are you new to knowledge management? Want to learn about all the possibilities for making your organization smarter, more collaborative, innovative, and productive? Join our expert knowledge manager to gain insights and ideas for building a robust KM program in your organization—even if it is called by another name! This workshop highlights a range of potential enterprise KM activities being used in real organizations and shares how these activities are impacting the bottom line. It shows real KM practices and discusses various tools and techniques to give those new to KM a vision of what is possible in the enterprise.

Text analytics is becoming essential to any field that tries to utilize unstructured text, and yet confusion remains distinguishing it from text mining, the type of applications that can be built with text analytics, and best practices. This workshop, based on the speaker’s recent book, covers the entire field of text analytics including:

• The core capabilities of text mining, entity and fact extraction, auto-categorization, and sentiment analysis.

• The advanced techniques of machine and deep learning and how text analytics can make AI smarter.

• How to make the business case and how to set up the right people and content resources.

• An evaluation process to select the right text analytics software for your organization.

• An iterative development process that combines entity and fact extraction with categorization and sentiment analysis to add depth and intelligence to all the components.

• The range of types of applications that can be built with text analytics, from search to business intelligence to new uses of social media and AI.

The workshop utilizes exercises in auto-categorization, data extraction, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to deepen the participants’ appreciation for the practical process of building text analytics applications and, at the same time, exemplifies some of the key theoretical issues.

Transforming your organization into an enterprise of the future entails risk. Yet you can’t afford not to change. This workshop gives you tools, techniques, and practices for clearing your path to transformation by identifying and addressing the risks and opportunities you are likely to encounter, especially during turbulent times characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, and surprise. Benefit from a methodology that has evolved over the past 30 years and has been successfully applied in more than 50 private companies, government agencies, civil society organizations, and industry associations. Just as a financial audit ensures that processes are in place to provide accurate information concerning the fiscal status of an organization, a futures risk/opportunity audit improves your organization’s systemic capacity to identify and rapidly adapt to perceived risks and/or opportunities that may emerge in your competitive environment. Key outcomes include a strategic road map for increasing organizational agility to succeed even in turbulent times; enhanced strategic planning based on evidence that long-, mid-, and near-term challenges receive needed attention; improved strategic decision-making that considers possibly disruptive issues, rather than being based on narrowly defined or generally accepted versions of a probable future; an employee development program which includes knowledge-intensive skills such as complex thinking and systemic foresight; and many insights and good practices. Get what you need to transform your organization into an enterprise of the future.

Principles become powerful when experience transforms them from abstract concepts into familiar and useful tools. Rather than simply lecturing on KM principles, this workshop consists of three activities designed to let participants experience their use of KM principles in action. Participants leave with a deeper understanding of how simple principles can be used to guide their KM programs. After being introduced to key KM principles, attendees practice applying them, using both competition and collaboration in exercises they can easily replicate in their own training programs. Get experience in applying principles to improve performance; observe how unspoken barriers impede learning; learn new techniques to improve your KM program; and learn to recognize explicit KM indicators that hide in plain sight.

Expert knowledge is difficult to capture and transfer effectively, because it involves deeply embedded skills that an expert may not be consciously aware of using and may not understand how to share. The challenge this poses is how to capture and transfer that knowledge among co-workers and external partners who need to work together on critical, high-stakes projects. Without effective knowledge transfer strategies, these valuable lessons learned and best practices are often lost. This knowledge is essential to the success of the mission, especially in emergency situations such as responses to natural disaster events that are time-critical. This master class-style workshop is based on case studies of more than 200 top-level executives, engineers, and scientists at Fortune 500 companies, the military, and multiple government agencies. It discusses knowledge transfer and flow strategies and focuses on the challenges you bring from your organization. The workshop combines the power of an SME along with skilled colleagues from other organizations to offer effective processes for enhancing knowledge flow at all levels of organizations, both internally and externally. By working through your challenges, this workshop covers the impact of internal versus external parties on knowledge transfer, as well as maintaining knowledge flow when organizations are geographically dispersed. Best practices and tools are shared for capturing key knowledge, analyzing and documenting that knowledge, and multiple methods to transfer that key knowledge.

In this highly interactive workshop, attendees learn how “doctors of collaboration” diagnose key collaboration diseases and what remedial action they prescribe to bring each collaboration back into good health. Using a series of case studies from a variety of for-profit and nonprofit organizations to identify common collaboration challenges and a range of possible solutions to try in your own workplace, attendees gain lots of insights and ideas to take back to your practice. Attendees are welcome to bring their own examples of collaboration challenges to diagnose and discuss. Get ready, the doctor is in!

In response to a manager’s query about how to plan products, Alan Kay famously remarked, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” His answer invokes a paradox at the heart of design: We can’t know the future, yet it’s what we design for. If we hope to practice design successfully in an era of rapid change, we must get better at planning. To start, we must let go of “the plan” and embrace a dynamic way of planning that’s social, tangible, agile, and reflective. Engaging our colleagues and communities to align use cases, prototypes, and road maps with culture, governance, and process is critical, so in order to design sustainable programs, services, software, and experiences, we also need to design the context. Topics discussed include the relationships between planning, information architecture, and organizations; integrating planning with agile, lean, and design-thinking practices; tools and methods for individuals, teams, and cross-functional collaborations; roles involved; and how to plan while implementing, improvising, and learning. This interactive workshop shares a collaborative series of dynamic “planning together” exercises that invite us all to share stories, solve problems, and invent better pathways for strategic design.

Office 365 has become “the 800 pound gorilla” in many enterprise digital workplaces. Microsoft continues to innovate across the platform, but KM and digital workplace leaders typically struggle to gain full value from the platform. In this workshop, get a critical analysis on what Office 365 is ‘platform good’ at and where it is lagging. Learn when, where, and how you need to supplement native services with alternatives. Real Story Group analysts share results of their latest independent research, what they’re hearing from customers, and what the prognosis is for technology buyers under pressure.

Digital transformation efforts often stall due to lack of adoption. The technology is the easy part; helping people adapt takes time. People tackle growing knowledge work complexity using more technology, but with pre-Internet mental models, organizational structures, and leadership practice. Knowledge workers can master techniques to work more autonomously, discover and repurpose knowledge, and develop and gain value from engaging in networks. Leadership changes when individuals and leaders convene, align, and empower networks inside and outside of organizations. Network reputation and influence rather than control are hallmarks of leadership practice. This engaging workshop brings four important concepts and practices together to help practitioners, teams, and organizations thrive in a networked era. It includes exercises, activities and covers techniques for personal knowledge mastery (PKM), narrating work, initiating and supporting communities of practice, and enabling networked leadership. Organizations and structures that let all people cooperate and collaborate get work done. Organizations based on diversity, learning, and trust are better prepared to hack uncertainty and hedge risks. Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about making connections. Techniques shared in this workshop help make better connections.

Congratulations! You’ve just been given the responsibility for search at your organization! Perhaps there is a new initiative to improve search, or perhaps the previous search manager mysteriously disappeared; in any case, you’ve discovered that search is a deceptively tricky domain, and that the expectations of many of your stakeholders are difficult to meet or even to define. This workshop provides an orientation and exposure to the key issues, effective processes, and technology—independent of what brand of search engine you use. It provides lay-of-the-land information and approaches to get you off to a good start. Topics include getting started and where to find practical guidance in search management; kinds of tasks and roles involved in managing search; building a cross-functional team; assessing the current state of search; establishing a vision and creating a findability strategy; getting stakeholders together and constructively involved; discovering and managing expectations; top misconceptions about search and how to educate your organization; top five and next five tools and techniques for improving search; updates and improvements; and measuring search: KPIs, tools, and techniques for internal search engine optimization. If you have been in the search manager’s role for a while but feel like you are missing a grounding in successful practices and management techniques, this workshop is still useful.

Teams are now the unit of learning within organizations. That is where problems are solved and innovation occurs. But if team members don’t feel safe to openly say what they see happening or what is working and not working, then learning doesn’t take place and improvements are fewer. Organizations depend on employee knowledge to boost current and future performance. Yet, there is solid evidence that in team or group settings, employees too often choose silence over challenging ideas. They refrain from offering their own ideas that, if heard, could significantly increase the group’s effectiveness. In this workshop, Nancy Dixon identifies steps that a team leader can take to make team conversations safe and productive.

This workshop, by a KM pioneer and popular KMWorld speaker, focuses on how to build a successful KM strategy and revitalize knowledge sharing within your organization. Dave Snowden, our engaging workshop leader, takes participants through a step-by-step approach to rethinking the role of the KM function within an organization. It includes creating a decision/information flow map to understand the natural flows of knowledge; defining micro-projects that directly link to the decision support needs of senior executives; mapping the current flow paths for knowledge within the organization; and finding natural ways to manage the knowledge of the aging workforce as well as the IT-enabled apprenticeship. Using real-world examples, Snowden shares winning strategies and insights to rejuvenate your knowledge-sharing practices. Always fresh and filled with interesting stories, this workshop continues to stand out with our audience!

Go where most cannot—behind the wall of many organizations to peek at their leading-edge intranets and digital workspaces. Modern intranets are no longer restricted to just corporate communications and content. They play a much stronger role in meeting staff and business needs. Meanwhile, new digital workplaces and spaces are being propelled into existence with the adoption of modern platforms such as Office 365, Workplace by Facebook, and others. While intranets and digital workplaces are evolving at a rapid pace, they remain hidden away behind the firewall, where it’s hard for teams to see what other leading organizations are doing. This workshop shares worldwide examples across five fundamental purposes: content, communications, culture, collaboration, and business activity. Register for this exclusive behind-the-firewall look at leading-edge solutions, and bring your hardest intranet questions to our experienced workshop leader!

Knowledge doesn’t manage itself. No matter how far AI evolves, knowledge, whether human or digital, will always need human curation. Knowledge curation is one of the least-understood aspects of KM. Yet given the accelerated growth of both explicit and hidden knowledge, especially in large datasets, knowledge curation is more critical than ever. There is no shortage of tools and techniques for building knowledgebases and repositories, yet the question remains, “How do I design, build, and maintain a body of knowledge that’s easily accessible by myself and others?” This workshop helps you to gain an understanding of the three main pillars of knowledge curation: 1) knowledge capture and transfer; 2) governance, including roles and responsibilities, assurance, performance monitoring, and incentives; and 3) architecture, including the tools, platforms, and processes for putting it all together. Some key elements include how to determine what knowledge is worth capturing and in what form; reconcile different world views, mental models, and learning modalities, especially among mentors and mentees; determine which tools and approaches are appropriate for different types of knowledge; integrate the various tools and approaches into a single system; vet knowledge and keep it up-to-date; and make knowledge flow and grow, from a single individual to an entire community of experts and practitioners. Join our experienced KM expert and take home an initial plan for setting up and implementing a world-class knowledge curation program for your organization.

KM is an action-oriented domain built on collaboration, trust, and multidisciplinary teams. Successful KM implementations support leadership efforts to create, transfer, exchange, share, and so much more. Through these actions, many organizations have successfully moved toward the near utopian knowledge environment. This collaborative and interactive workshop focuses on how to engage people to achieve organizational objectives, explores a number of action-oriented activities that support learning, overcoming ego, knowledge sharing, and team development. Learn how to put the action back in KM with topics like these: applying the team development process, collaborative decision making, establishing and achieving team goals, and applying knowledge-sharing techniques.

KM practices at Shell are well-proven to be working for many problem solving cases and replication of good practices. The KM success stories, totaling more than $300 million, are generally categorized as continuous improvement cases. However, Shell has much bigger qualitative and quantitative expectations from KM practices and this requires developing new scenarios for the future of effective communities. Participants learn to apply the scenario building skills developed at Shell. Manders explains the changing context of the workforce and business environment, how to identify the driving forces and by using a broad set of key drivers to depict the future KM scenarios. He covers many aspects from decision support, drive for innovation, crowdsourcing, changing organization culture and liquid workforce and how KM can be an enabling force in these dynamics. Participate in the workshop to co-develop a number of potential scenarios for the future of KM which can be used to build and test your KM strategies in your community or organization.

Have you ever built a slick KM solution or collaboration tool that no one uses? We have and survived to tell the tale. New knowledge-sharing processes can fail if the resistance to change is greater than the ability to bridge the gap between the new process and the target people. Without a meaningful understanding of “What’s in it for me?” employees don’t readily contribute to knowledge-sharing circles. And because they don’t immediately see the value of sharing, contributing content in more formal environments is often done as an afterthought. Engagement strategies that include effective communication tactics entice users to try something new and help remove barriers to adoption. This engagement workshop focuses on how to identify and select appropriate engagement strategies based on target audiences and desired results. It includes playing the KM experiential learning game, The Journey to the Lost Gold of Atlantis. The primary goal of the game from a KM perspective is to create “aha” moments where each individual sees how his or her behavior either enables or hinders the flow of knowledge and ultimately the impact this has on how the company makes money or the ROI. With help from workshop leaders, get your executive and employee km engagement strategy to use in your organization to improve engagement.

*Participants are requested to bring their own device in the form of a phone, laptop, or tablet to maximize the engagement experience.

This exciting and interactive workshop discusses what you need to know to get ready for the future that is already here. It discusses the different kinds of AI and their use cases, looks at some cool tools, and talks about how you would choose a vendor and or tool to work in your organization and KM program.

Are you overwhelmed with the different possibilities of features and capabilities in Office 365 and wondering how to get started? If so, this workshop is for you! Take a look at how Office 365 can help enable your knowledge management objectives by looking at its key capabilities and how they support KM outcomes. Learn what is possible and practical with Office 365, and explore strategies to ensure that you are successful.

Creating value from KM initiatives depends entirely on user adoption by changing behaviors and beliefs. Learning and knowledge initiatives benefit from classical change management efforts using the transformation road maps common to IT implementations. But real knowledge sharing requires cultural changes that can only be catalyzed through entrepreneurial engagement at all levels of the organization. Any change effort is delicate, and KM programs are especially vulnerable because knowledge sharing can only be voluntary. A design-thinking approach can tap into the initiative and innovation latent in every employee. This update of a popular and practical workshop combines both the coordinating and catalyzing perspectives with real-world experience and advice. Learn the basic components of any successful change program; practice assessing and addressing challenges and opportunities in your organization; and tap into the latest thinking in organizational change. Come prepared to discuss your own unique situations and learn from your peers in facilitated, interactive discussions and exercises.

Search is one of the most powerful and useful workloads in SharePoint, and is used by everyone; but too often it fails—largely due to poor understanding of how to apply it and deploy it well. This workshop focuses on the search capabilities of SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint Online and how to match them to a variety of search needs and strategies. Attendees get tips and tricks they can apply immediately. We share effective techniques in the context of case studies and practical tips. Attendees gain an understanding of how to apply SharePoint search capabilities successfully, as well as what pitfalls to avoid. Bring your search challenges to work through them in a “clinic” format. In the process, we cover the key capabilities of SharePoint search and how to apply them successfully. If you are willing to show your system to other attendees, contact the instructor to work through some issues ahead of time and use them as examples.

Join us for the Enterprise Solutions Showcase Grand Opening reception. Explore the latest products and services from the top companies in the marketplace while enjoying flavorful fare and drink. Open to all conference attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

Sharing knowledge for enterprise success requires entrepreneurial skills, new ways of thinking and operating, continuous learning, and change. There are many new tools available to help, but it is the people and the culture of an organization that determines its ultimate success. Wilkinson interviewed 200 of today’s top entrepreneurs, including the founders of Airbnb, LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Yelp, Dropbox, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Chipotle, Under Armour, Spanx, Jetblue, and Revolution Foods, to distill what it takes to go from startup to scale in our rapidly changing economy. As leaders reinvent their approaches to digital transformation for organization survival in this economy, they can learn these fundamental skills, practice them, and pass them on. Join our accomplished researcher and speaker as she shares her framework and provides ways to master the skills that underlie entrepreneurial success.

The information industry is abuzz with excitement about emerging and maturing technologies often grouped under the ubiquitous yet nebulous rubric of AI, or with nascent disruptive technologies such as blockchain, which may be poised to migrate from the confines of cryptocurrencies and cultivate business applications in other diverse activities such as records management. The growth of big data applications has produced a tectonic shift across the information landscape, challenging enterprises to rationalize the collision between information science and data science. Within some industries linked data, ontologies, and the semantic web have had a major impact, whereas in other industries these technologies are perceived as academic or over-engineered. As practicing taxonomists, information users and organizers, our fundamental goal is to organize enterprise knowledge and make information searchable and discoverable. How do we decide which technologies are fit-for-purpose for our specific enterprise? What tools and techniques should we be working with today, versus those we need to be aware of for potential adoption tomorrow? Clarke surveys industry trends before honing-in on common practical applications and tools that taxonomists and others need to do their job.

The KM journey in Shell is heading for a new turn. Manders discusses how KM developed and evolved over the past 15 years and zooms in on recent experiences with implementing a complete set of KM tools, processes and Working Out Loud behaviors. He talks about how KM in Shell realized $300 million value in the last couple of years, how they aim to triple the impact by 2020, and what other qualitative and quantitative impact they have made in Shell’s communities. Learnings, as well as structures and practices shared, as well as the next step in their journey: moving KM under the Organizational Development function in HR, describing the logic behind this decision, objectives, and expectations. Manders discusses future developments envisioned to further improve the KM capability in Shell. To learn more about Shell’s techniques plan to take workshop 16 on developing scenarios!

This session explores the impact of AI and IoT on KM, as machines get better and better at sensing the environment, comprehending content, interpreting signals, and anticipating needs. It slices through the hype on AI as a universal job disruptor and looks at how the bigger threat and benefit comes not for high-level cognitive computing, but from very specific skills that eventually outpace the ability of humans to understand what the technology is actually doing. Rasmus explores how sensors extend human reach in terms of distance, simultaneity, types, and volume of data and discusses how the new challenge for KM is not capturing insights from the past, but figuring out how to deal with insights that change based on conditions that may occur in microseconds. He looks at traditional KM and how many of its aspects remain valid even under the new conditions, but why we may lose funding and focus in favor of the need to manage AI and IoT programs. Get a better sense of how the overall world of work is changing and what it means for people who value knowledge, discovery, and curation.

This hands-on learning experience engages participants, through discussion exercises and other activities, to apply design thinking to relevant and real knowledge needs within their organizations. It covers the essential principles, procedures, and tools leaders need to innovate in their KM initiatives, including insights definition, ideation, disciplined collaboration, and experimentation/execution. Working in teams, participants start by defining the critical knowledge necessary to drive optimal outcomes tailored to their organizational needs. After selecting a specific knowledge gap, tools and templates are shared to learn and practice generating unique insights about unmet customer needs, provoking existing rivers of thinking to generate unique ideas and executing innovate ideas as disciplined experiments to manage risk and maximize learning. Discover the techniques and behaviors that support client-driven innovation to be able to share them with your team.

Schlumberger has more than 2 decades of KM experience and custom-built KM tools. Communities of practice and discussion forums are the backbone of a thriving knowledge-sharing environment that delivers daily business value. In 2016, Yammer was launched alongside these existing tools. Hear how Yammer and other software tools worked together and later merged to deliver better value with minimal business interruption. The UNICEF team shares how it reinvigorated its decade-old Yammer network, growing it from a stagnant 1,000 monthly users to more than 5,600 in a span of 18 months. It wasn’t with bots, and it wasn’t a tech-focused solution. UNICEF’s Learning and KM team created a brand new way of talking about collaboration with its proprietary “BUILD” model—a simple process of making collaboration relatable to the staff’s work for children across the globe. Learn how to accelerate your own internal collaboration programs with simple, meaningful changes that matter.

The AI hype is rapidly exploding into C-suites of organizations around the world and with good reason; the promise is compelling. The convergence of AI, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning and cognitive platforms allows employees to focus their attention on exception processing and higher-value work while digital labor manages low-value, repetitive tasks. While the debate as to whether digital labor will add or eliminate jobs is ongoing, what’s important in today’s enterprise is how digital and human labor can be integrated to improve efficiency and drive innovation. Using real-world examples, this session covers how machine processing, when guided by human knowledge, curation and control, provides assisted intelligence (AI) to organizations which want to streamline processes, reduce operating costs, and improve ROI.

Got a favorite KM topic or knowledge sharing challenge you want to debate with our fast-thinking, long-time KM pro and practitioner? The speedy repartee, leading edge thinking and insights will astound you during this session! Always popular, Snowden, who loves debating, will provide both fun and entertainment as well as spark discussion and new thoughts. Join us! Bring your statement and see what happens in this interactive session.

This global leader in oil and gas projects, technologies, systems, and services, with 40,000- plus employees operating in 48 countries, launched its first KM initiative in 2010. Senior management envisioned a workplace in which employees could continuously deliver additional value through global collaboration and experience-sharing and transfer critical knowledge from the soon-to-retire Baby Boomers. The merger between Technip and FMC further increased the demand for the portfolio of KM services and placed a renewed importance on the program’s underlying mission—to connect people and leverage their collective experience. The KM program grew to encompass five global centers of excellence to serve the enterprise: communities of practice and structured collaboration, enterprise wiki and surveys, multimedia and e-learning, facilitated knowledge-sharing meetings and events, and knowledge architecture (workflow, search, taxonomy, dashboard and Sharepoint expertise). The program has been successful in connecting and aligning global teams to reduce costs, improve efficiency, increase employees’ awareness of available resources and ensure employees have the information they need to do their jobs effectively. Get tips and techniques to use in your organization!

AI technology is destined to change this world beyond our current imagination, even in a world that is creating tons of new knowledge every second. The rate of new knowledge creation has never been seen before and will increase exponentially with time. An organization has to take advantage of outside as well as inside knowledge to keep ahead of its competition. It needs to be agile and change at a rapid pace to cope with new knowledge and connect people with organizational as well as outside knowledge. Human brains have astonishing processing powers but can analyze known information only. When datasets are too large and decision nodes are many, human brains require AI to help make the best decisions. AI can uncover the unknown and empower people to make right decisions. Get ideal scenarios for using AI in a KM program, advantages and drawbacks of AI, ideal AI KM candidates, and new AI-based KM ideas.

Designed to empower participants to create a change culture that supports making their organization’s vision into a reality, this session incorporates two exercises with the end goal for participants to complete a worksheet to put knowledge gained into action. Exercise 1: What are we trying to achieve and why? Whether you are the change sponsor or a change agent/project manager tasked with driving the change effort, developing a compelling and clearly articulated business case for the change and envisioned impact is key. Learn how to create the foundation for the organization to undertake change by defining the case for change in alignment with its mission and vision. KM tools and techniques are instrumental for collaboration, and creating and sustaining a shared understanding of the case for change. For geographically disbursed organizations, having the requisite tools for managing knowledge is even more important. Exercise 2: How can we operationalize the change vision and who needs to be part of it? Now that the business case for change is understood along with expected outcomes, we must now co-create and build-ownership of the change by determining which stakeholder groups will be impacted and how. Take a pulse check on stakeholder perceptions and support them to successfully navigate the change journey from current to future state. Use insights from the stakeholder impact analysis to develop change communication messages and determine the types of information the stakeholders will require to operate successfully in the new environment.

Dutch yacht builder Feadship is recognised as the world leader in the field of pure custom superyachts. With deep roots dating back to 1849, it has built fame and success on continuous innovation, with each of the yachts in their fleet setting a new standard in terms of craftsmanship, design, engineering, and construction. KM plays an essential role in this innovation, known as “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” Scientific research has shown time and again that knowledge and the management thereof are crucial to how innovative a company is and how well it deploys that innovation. This talk shares how a leading global shipbuilding company uses elementary principles of KM to foster innovation. It includes KM practices, a clear KM framework, a practical KM maturity model, a knowledge map of the organization, and various methods that affect the knowledge value chain. It also identifies the critical success factors that facilitate the organization’s rich, collaborative knowledge culture, enabling Feadship to stay at the forefront of global innovation in its field as well as future challenges.

Pittman starts off by discussing the many subfields that make up AI and then looks at how various industries are using it to achieve incredible results. The Raytion speaker shows how machine-learning can be applied for sentiment analysis of unstructured data in the context of social media using an example of a large telecommunications organization. Guarino believes AI is already having a significant impact for the U.S. government (including defense and intelligence community uses cases) and is also providing game-changing capabilities for global enterprises in a range of industries, including financial services, healthcare and all areas of technology. She provides real-world examples of how AI is driving measurable benefits today in a range of industry sectors, discusses the importance of Explainable AI to regulated industries, where being able to justify the reasoning behind algorithmic decisions is essential.

Learn tactics and initiatives used by successful KM practitioners around the world as Eng shares insights from the research and findings of one-on-one interviews with KM program managers for 19 KM programs on five continents. Hear about the similarities and differences among these programs as well as both innovative tactics and significant challenges faced by these KM program managers. Our speaker also identifies the major factors needed for a successful KM program and explores the skill set that every KM program manager should cultivate for success.

Today’s leading organizations recognize the value that a practical, yet innovative KM strategy can have on their effectiveness and future success. KM often doesn’t get a seat at the table because there are common misunderstandings about what knowledge management even is, or organizational leaders are skeptical about its benefits because they’ve been burned by previous failed efforts. Having a KM champion within an organization can help connect those in need of KM solutions with the experts, tools, processes, and know-how to improve collaboration and knowledge flow between team members and departments. Syed shares how he has communicated the value of KM to the senior leaders of his organization and gained their buy-in to incorporate KM initiatives into their overall strategic plan. Hear how he developed a KM strategy for the service desk team and used this initiative to spread the word up and across the organization about the benefits that a well-designed taxonomy, content strategy, enterprise search, and a culture of collaboration can have on the productivity and engagement of its workforce.

Noble explains how NLP (natural language processing) and advanced recommendation engines are delivering intelligent solutions for knowledge-sharing and demonstrates a real example of a cognitive assistant illustrating how it can seamlessly be a part of our everyday lives. Baumgartel discusses whether knowledge workers can outsmart AI and machine learning bots and the practices that may need to be embraced in order to outsmart machines! The M-Files team provides the steps for an AI-powered digital assistant road map: Establishing content in context by breaking down data silos and creating organized data across a company begins with content, and AI holds the key to creating content in context; implementing logical helpers that take spell/grammar check prompts to the next level by understanding and applying keen insight to the contextualized information and providing “logical” assistance; providing document categorization with information extraction, allowing AI to proactively assist with business-critical information, automatically managing information on the back end to send users relevant content and to accompany it with intelligent suggestions at appropriate times.

Longtime KM vets share their knowledge of KM strategies, practices, failures, and more. They discuss lessons learned from the trenches, how to sell KM, learning from failure and how to effectively communicate KM. There is lots of time for audience participation, so come with your challenges, failures, and questions, and ask our experienced practitioners!

Stop by the Enterprise Solutions Showcase after a full day of stimulating conference sessions to mix and mingle with other conference attendees, speakers, and our conference sponsors.

KMWorld magazine is proud to sponsor the KMWorld 2018 Promise & Reality Awards which are designed to celebrate the success stories of knowledge management. See page 31 for details. The global Intranet Innovation Awards, run by Step Two, uncover and share leading edge intranets. Focusing on individual enhancements that demonstrate business value, the Intranet Innovation Awards help every team deliver a better site.

While it may not occur to us on a daily basis, there is a widespread cultural tendency toward quick decisions and quick action. This pattern has resulted in many of society’s greatest successes, but even more of its failures. We have begun to reward speed over quality, and the negative effects suffered in both our personal and professional lives are potentially catastrophic. Pontefract proposes a return to balance between the three components of productive thought—dreaming, deciding, and doing—combining creative, critical, and applied thinking. “Open thinking” is a cyclical process in which creativity is encouraged; critiquing leads to better decisions; and thoughtful action delivers positive, sustainable results. Get tips and techniques to use in your organization!

Sriram surfaces ideas on how the world’s biggest and most innovative companies transform customer and employee experiences. Learn how the best and brightest organizations take a human-first approach to finally meet the transformational promise of Big Data by delivering moments of clarity to employees and customers alike through engaging digital experiences.

Becoming information-driven enables key stakeholders within an organization to leverage all available enterprise data and content to gain the best possible understanding of the meaning and insights it carries. Connecting enterprise data along topical lines across all available sources provides people with the collective knowledge and expertise of the organization in context. This is especially valuable for data-intensive companies that are geographically dispersed with lots of content in multiple data repositories. By connecting people with relevant knowledge and expertise, the overall performance of the organization increases. Parker discusses the challenges preventing data-intensive organizations from becoming “information-driven” how insight engines help organizations solve these challenges and multiply the business benefits, and the current state and the future possibilities of insight engines.

The reason for employee engagement is the passionate pursuit of a better customer experience. Being people-centric isn’t a new concept, but KM and digital workplace tools that can make it a reality have advanced significantly in recent years. Hear case studies of what a people-centric organization looks like; how your knowledge, processes, people, and culture have to align; and organizational disciplines that result in the best employee and customer engagement. Go beyond technology solutions to learn how to drive change, even transformation, in your business. Learn how to leverage knowledge, analytics, process, and relationships to lead your organization to create more engagement both internally and externally.

The digital age should make us, knowledge workers, geographically independent of our homes, offices, and crowded cities. Isn’t proximity redefined by continuous connectivity and ubiquitous information? Finding answers from a machine or in a virtual meeting has never been easier, so much so that, by now, connectivity should have made colocation a necessity of the past. In reality, widespread telework, digital nomadism, and the seamless creation of value across long distances have yet to materialize. A recent array of studies even suggest that innovation and knowledge creation in the 21st century depend more and more on the colocation of knowledge workers in overcrowded, expensive urban hubs. Why is this? If location-neutral professions seem within reach, the conditions have yet to be met so that seamless collaboration and global innovation can really happen. Starting this revolution is a job for KM. While making the case for the inevitable rise of distributed workplaces, this talk examines what distance means for innovation before proposing concrete KM strategies and techniques to conquer space and save the day!

Collaboration and efficient business processes are key to organizational success. Back again this year to discuss using out of the box (OOB) features of SharePoint to facilitate KM activities across their organization, speakers share more of their favorites. They have implemented these solutions numerous times to make their multiple SharePoint platforms vital tools to facilitate day-to-day business processes, both internally and with their customers. Get useful tips and tricks for using OOB SharePoint solutions that have been instrumental in solving real business problems. Implementing this type of low-cost, no-code solution has allowed the speakers to transform their SharePoint platforms well beyond simple document storage repositories, without burdensome development efforts.

This panel of leading supporters of KM shares insights in a far-ranging discussion of client case studies of successful knowledge-sharing in high-functioning organizations and communities. Barendrecht discusses the future of work and KM with intelligent collaboration and technology disruption. He talks about new disruptive technologies that are changing KM practices, shares a model for managing digital transformation and some examples from various industries.  Passmore discusses how the introduction of intelligent knowledge management systems can improve productivity and simplify organizational information management. He talks about the role of the “intelligent intranet” in highly regulated environments and how it enables the dissemination of the right information to staff and stakeholders while ensuring the process of creation, curation and governance is simple and efficient.  Gearhard discusses how traditional methods of finding and connecting information are based on search and retrieval of individual documents and bits of information requiring the end user to understand the relationship of the data to create the needed connections to do their job while AI-enabling technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) enable creation of a Digital Thread allowing for a connected view of information and creating efficiencies within many different workstreams.  Learn how leading organizations are applying these technologies to seamlessly make answers and insights available to knowledge workers in order to radically improve first-time fix rates, support response times, time-to-market of new products, on-boarding of new employees and more. 

After a very successful launch of Fulton’s SharePoint-based intranet (The HUB) in 2016 replacing an aging 1990s era collection of poorly managed web pages, the work to develop the next generation of The HUB is underway with a collaborative approach to ensure a user-centric design. Taking an “‘under-the-radar” approach to fit into everyone’s schedule to avoid the need to engage the corporate project management prioritization process, the group includes a user experience expert, SharePoint team, change management leader, and the KM team. Starting by setting design standards, developing user journeys, benchmarking with top intranets, and the customer facing website, the team quickly developed a collaborative working relationship not often found in a traditionally hierarchical, conservative enterprise. During the design period, continuous improvement was a key change management technique to ensure user engagement in the next-gen intranet with full KM capabilities. Get the strategy and techniques used by the design team, learn from their experience, and take home solid insights.

This panel of leading supporters on KM shares insights in a far-ranging discussion of client case studies illustrating successful knowledge sharing in large and small organizations and communities.  Elias talks about the transition in mind set and approach when moving from successful team sharing towards true enterprise collaboration. He draws on lessons learned during his many years of leading E-Business and CRM initiatives at Morgan Stanley and upon the insights developed while seeing organizations adopt Semlr, his current start-up. Gorman disccusses how digitizing documents and data means advanced capture hardware and software and a platform that supports KM with security, automation and case management tools. He shares how a partnership with Next Phase Solutions and Hyland frees information trapped in paper and silos to drive efficient processes and good decision-making. See how the pieces of a content services platform can deliver cutting edge process improvement as it streamlines knowledge flows in your organization. Hahn discusses how customer service AI works and shares the real-world business impact it created in several organizations.

As organizations invest in upgrading information-centric legacy systems to the cloud that include collaborative capabilities, leaders expect these investments to improve how their people work and collaborate. They voice outcomes they expect such as improved knowledge sharing, decision making and learning. PwC hosts an esteemed panel of KM experts to discuss the practical implications of organizations wanting to improve collaborative intelligence. They define collaborative intelligence as harnessing the power of people working in organizational networks in all forms. The panel members each bring deep knowledge and experience of how collaborative intelligence can be achieved, enhanced, and act as the lever to bring results to another level. Collaborative work calls upon many skills and includes teaming behaviors, emotional intelligence, stimulating diversity of thought and communicating with purpose. These tap into levers that move the intangibles in an organization. The facilitated panel shares their personal experiences from corporate settings, Federal agencies, academic and international organizations including sharing specific case study examples of the struggles and successes of optimizing collaborative intelligence.

As enterprises transition from traditional intranets to employee-centric digital workplaces, technology decisions around employee experience become more —but also more significant. How do you make the right choice for your particular needs? This fast-paced session by an experienced industry analyst offers an adaptive methodology for making effective strategic and technology decisions. Learn a modern approach to evaluating and selecting the right digital workplace technology that will save you time and money, as well as reduce risks!

Nielsen is a global information company with 44,000 employees worldwide. In 2016, Nielsen decided to move from Microsoft business software to Google’s G Suite, ending the use of SharePoint for KM. This session offers a practical case study in how one division at Nielsen used the company’s move away from SharePoint as an opportunity to reinvent and modernize its internal knowledgebase using the Atlassian suite. Discussion focuses on ways to manage knowledge as a product, including defining scope and audience, using analytics to set priorities, and using support requests as a feedback loop to continually improve. Our experienced speaker shares examples of how the new format has enabled greater collaboration and created an environment where knowledge can constantly evolve.

Marshall discusses how adult learning principles guide the development of training courses designed for adults, take into account that adults bring life experience and knowledge to the learning environment, and that they prefer self-directed learning. They are more likely to participate in training that is goal-oriented and centered around real-life problems. Learn how incorporating all learning styles can greatly enhance your KM efforts and make the task of getting people on board with change easier and more effective. Saudi Aramco is a very big and diverse company that has manifested challenges to connect employees to the right knowledge assets (explicit or social) efficiently to boost learning and collaboration. When the company conducted the KM Maturity assessment corporate-wide, it highlighted the shortcoming of a ready platform to easily connect people to their desired knowledge. The solution was the role-based knowledge map (RBKM) of organizations, a new methodology to establish the link between knowledge assets and employees through the platform of roles. Roles can span organizations to connect similar jobs together and draw the contextual knowledge around it, proactively. Based on the RBKM, CoPs, documents, videos, courses, Wiki pages, experts, and events and announcements are mapped together in front of the employees in a KM portal to boost learning, collaboration, and operational efficiency. Hear how the challenge was met to establish a new process from the fragmented responsibility of KM functions around the company. Get insights and ideas to deploy in your organization.

The idea of the customer experience is a powerful one, and it’s a strategic consideration for most big organizations. As a result, we’ve seen a huge degree of customer-centric digital transformation. Within the enterprise, the concept of the digital employee experience (DEX) is equally powerful. Going beyond basic usability and UX, this takes a holistic view of how solutions are designed and delivered. Office 365 is bringing enormous amounts of new capabilities into the enterprise, but with it comes the potential for confusion and complexity. To achieve both project success and strategic benefits, Office 365 projects should make use of the concept DEX. This practical session outlines how digital workplace professionals and projects can use DEX as a strategic driver for change, shares real world examples of great employee experiences from around the globe, and provides a road map for future initiatives.

Microsoft and EY have teamed up to innovate on knowledge programs for several years, both for EY employees, and their clients. Microsoft pioneered the idea of the digital workplace almost 20 years ago. Now Microsoft and EY have pushed forward into operations and customers, spanning the breadth of enterprise tools from Office 365, Teams, Yammer, and SharePoint to Cortana robots, workplace analytics, and image recognition. Speakers share two examples of EY-Microsoft collaborations across operations and customers: 1.) Using Microsoft’s cognitive services and natural language processing to disambiguate search queries, improving relevance and accelerating content retrieval paired with activating new Office 365-based collaboration capabilities that transform creating and sharing content; and 2.) Working in a media and entertainment company with product testing delays, using Robotic Process Automation, built on Microsoft Cortana’s machine learning and analytics, to bring a manual process into the digital workplace, improving testing accuracy to 92%. Join EY and Microsoft speakers as they share the high points and low points of incorporating cognitive and robotic technologies to build bold new knowledge cultures.

Transforming your organization into an enterprise of the future entails risk. This talk presents the basic steps involved in conducting a Futures Risk/Opportunity Audit, along with observed systemic improvements in agility and resilience. The audit is particularly valuable as the business, economic, and political climate becomes increasingly more turbulent. The audit and its accompanying methodology have evolved over the past 30 years and have been successfully applied in more than 50 private companies, government agencies, civil society organizations, and industry associations. Case examples showing the following types of outcomes are discussed: increased organizational agility for navigating and succeeding in turbulent times; enhanced strategic planning resulting from an evidence-based approach; improved strategic decision making based on foresight, rather than on narrowly defined or generally accepted versions of a probable future; building a knowledge workforce of the future through development of skills such as complex thinking and systemic foresight.

This is the 13th year of the Global Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards. With an awards ceremony at KMWorld for the North American winners, this session is a chance to see what they’ve actually delivered. Be prepared to see creative, inspirational and valuable ideas, many of which you can apply on your own intranet or digital workplace.

The first story shares a case study of how Gazprom Neft (a 70,000-staff oil and gas company from Russia) started and evolved their KM efforts, specifically for upstream. It covers cultural, IT landscape, and process specifics of the organization and how it bypassed the obstacles met. Then, look inside Shire’s struggle to tame the content chaos and its quest to develop a streamlined process for managing internal and external information. This happy story reveals KM leaders engaged with other department leaders, building relationships with core end users, and evolving their mission to meet the critical needs of their R&D organization. From both stories, hear lessons learned, strategic ideas, and tactical tips to align KM with business needs and priorities.

Join your colleagues at the end of the day for an informal debriefing and meet with other attendees who have similar interests. Enjoy some great networking, stimulating discussions, and a chance to interact with outstanding conference speakers and moderators. This event is open to all conference attendees. Cash bar will be available.

Organizations can use game design techniques to fully engage customers, partners, and employees. When it is well-implemented, gamification can transform a work culture by cultivating deep emotional connections, high levels of active participation, and long-term relationships that drive knowledge-sharing, learning and business value. Enterprises can utilize strategy games, simulation games, and role-playing games as a means to teach, drive operational efficiencies, and innovate. Find out how organizations have embraced social collaboration using playful design to reap tremendous value; grab tips and tools to build a learning culture; and learn how to engage your community!

Semantic enhanced artificial intelligence is based on the fusion of semantic technologies and machine learning. Our leader in the field discusses six core aspects of semantic-enhanced AI and why semantics should be a fundamental element of any AI strategy. He looks into concrete examples and shares how to increase precision of machine learning tasks by semantic enrichment. Semantic AI is the next-generation artificial intelligence. Understand how machine learning (ML) can help to extend knowledge graphs, and in return, how knowledge graphs can help to improve ML algorithms. This integrated approach ultimately leads to systems that work like self-optimizing machines after an initial setup phase, while being transparent to the underlying knowledge models.

Answers are the key exchange between customer and provider in support, service, and sales, yet that intersection is wrought with friction when information isn’t readily available, context is unknown, and time is of the essence. AI-driven technologies such as natural language processing, machine learning, and text analytics can help reduce the friction and create more satisfying experiences for both customer and vendor, across any touchpoint, ensuring the most precise answer is delivered every time. Johnson explores how and shares real-world outcomes from Fortune 1000 companies.

Participate in our popular interactive knowledge café, where you can share your KM challenges with colleagues and KM practitioners. Each table has a KM industry mentor and topic; you will have time to visit at least three different tables during the morning. Meet and learn in this intimate networking atmosphere with thought leaders and practitioners of the KM industry!

Based on the Cynefin framework, a leading sensemaker tool built on a foundation of complex adaptive theory, this facilitated exploration into knowledge systems and flows is designed specifically for government practitioners and provides a pragmatic means to recognize that different types of systems require different leadership strategies. Used extensively in the Agile, Lean, and Kanban Communities, This Tool Bridges The Gap Between It And Both Strategic And Operational Leadership. Combining quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methods, it can be applied to areas such as strategy development in a complex environment, industry/market/culture assessment; customer satisfaction and loyalty; operational and/or organizational resilience; early detection of weak signals in organizations, cultures, populations, or marketplaces; and organizational culture and change through self-descriptive awareness. Switching from a fail-safe design mindset to one based on safe-to-fail experimentation creates a more resilient approach to managing uncertainty. Join this exploration and get an overview of methods and models; techniques to support decision making and strategy development in complex, uncertain, and changing environments; practical, real-world success stories and case studies from projects around the world; insights into dealing with a chaotic world; and lots of resources for further reading.

AI is on the highest rung of the IT agenda. But how does it support professionals’ needs for insights in decision-making? Mayer looks at text analytics, the particular strand of AI that deals with language, the essential vehicle for professional knowledge. Through examples of its impact in insurance, media and the sciences, he illustrates “the art of the possible” and how you can make AI part of your knowledge practice’s roadmap.

It is becoming obvious that young scientists and community activists are taking the power out of the hands of big, multilateral institutions, or even their own governments, and placing it in the palm of their own hands. Hear case studies and best practices from the U.N., humanitarian agencies, and environmental groups about how climate data influences the placement of refugee camps, how environmental crews triangulate cleanup efforts based on community feedback of data, and how NASA and satellite data is combating climate change at the grassroots/local level. No longer are academics in charge of data and knowledge—talented and committed amateurs are collecting it, sharing it, and, increasingly, interpreting it. They would say Earth doesn’t have 10 years to wait for a U.N. report—they’re taking back knowledge through freeware and publicly accessible data.

This session reveals recent trends and data from Forrester Research in the area of content management. The market is shifting quickly to cloud services for content management and collaboration. See where the market is going, how firms are re-thinking their ECM road maps, and how the rise of AI and analytics is creating new use cases.

Corporations of all sizes are trying to act like a startup, but their existing organizational structures are set up to reject that mindset, resulting in a lack of knowledge-sharing and collaboration, opportunities lost, and fears of disruption. Our experienced speakers explore how to create internal startup teams, develop leaders who can keep them accountable, and set up organizational structures that enable these teams to flourish.

One of the core activities of a global pharma/biotech company is submitting a global dossier to health authorities in order to provide access to innovative medications to patients around the world. This process is complex, global in nature; has technical, process, people, and system components; and requires cross-functional expert teams to create novel solutions to unexpected challenges along the 18-month pathway to health authority approval after a 10-year R & D journey. While each global team and its specific submission path are unique in nature, a team’s ability to capitalize on implicit know-how is critical to success, quality, and sustainability of the team’s way of working. This talk describes the ongoing journey of institutionalizing the body of knowledge generated by all cross-functional teams on their journey to providing breakthrough medication to patients so that organizational learning can enable a faster, more sustainable and high-quality delivery of novel drugs to patients around the world.

Rinehart discusses the identification of legacy business data sources and how to align business processes in building new integrated KM applications. He covers data dictionaries, business process alignment, and how to tackle enterprise integration of data and information to create decision-making dashboards. Clarke talks about knowledge sweeps and demonstrating value for product development. A knowledge sweep, or KSweep, is a cyclical KM research methodology used at Goodyear in support of product development.

It involves direct customer interaction with KM specialists that occurs either in person, or via a telecommunications software product such as Skype. Once a KSweep is initiated, internal and external database queries are conducted in a collaborative manner. Search results are organized and stored within a SharePoint site. Additional KSweep iterations may follow based on customer feedback. After a designated time period, KSweep customers are asked to confirm either internal knowledge reuse or external knowledge discovery based on engaging in this KM service. Hear the results of Goodyear’s disciplined experiment using KSweep.

One of the central KM challenges has been, and continues to be, how to “know what we know.” Traditional approaches have focused on creating searchable user profiles. All too often these profiles have not realized their potential due to lack of data because they depend on user input and never really represent “what we know,” but rather “what we think we know” as a result of people’s inherent biases in how they describe their expertise. With offices in 29 countries and four official working languages, the IADB used natural language processing techniques to experiment with 1,000 employees in building two locator systems that compare multiple data, corroborate the evidence on how well an employee actually “knows” something, and create a proxy representation of that tacit knowledge. Field discusses the timely sharing of knowledge to benefit both client and support agent. Even with automation, people are still our main knowledge asset. A collaborative business culture breeds the desire to help and contribute. Willing volunteers who see the fruit of their effort are much more likely to assist in future endeavors. Hear how Siemens benefits from its people, business strategy and Salesforce.com process capabilities to empower the wider community for problem-solving efficiency and at the same time increase engagement from knowledge contributors.

Our speakers present a practical, approachable means of embedding KM principles and techniques along the project lifecycle. Specific examples and tips are discussed to help boost project management skills and embed KM practices throughout the organization by targeting initiatives and areas that may already be receiving committed budget, attention, and resources. In addition, a value proposition for information professionals working in an embedded or hybrid role is considered. Also hear how PATH, a Seattle-based global health nonprofit organization, approached aligning project management activities within a KM and capacity framework. The outcome of this activity created a culture of next-level knowledge- sharing at the project and program level. PATH’s Project Lifecycle, an enterprise KM initiative focusing on program activities, embedded project management, KM, and records management into standardized processes learned from successful projects. Get PATH’s methodology and hear about the challenges and successes of enterprise KM projects.

When responding to technical queries it is imperative to push the content to the end users as quickly as possible. Going from the average time of 80-plus days to article approval to 14 days was the result of letting the community of contributors be their own linguistic police where only the technical accuracy needed to be approved. Hear more about how happy parties all around and a more efficient process were initiated. Donze discusses the evolution of ECM (enterprise content management), where deep, embedded, and regulated processes and policies are pressured by user choice, leading to a new wave of applications across ECM. He covers how user/IT decision-making power rebalanced, beginning with the invention of the smartphone through the proliferation of easy-to-adopt alternative SaaS applications like Slack, Dropbox, and Google Drive and how poor UX in enterprise tools can put companies at risk of non-compliance through “shadow IT” and then makes ECM predictions for 2019 and beyond.

While predictions of job loss and wrenching changes seem to get the  headlines, a more integrated view of how cognitive and AI tools work WITH people in a new organizational construct is likely to give forward thinking organizations the benefits of AI without nearly as much of the organizational disruption as is being predicted. Drawing on Deloitte research and case examples, Jooste shares thoughts on how knowledge and digitization teams are channeling disruption into value. 

The intersection of knowledge sharing and new ways of learning and training is having an impact on how connected your employees feel to your organization at large. Moneypenny demonstrates how using video, social networks, and content collaboration together empowers knowledge practitioners and experts and people across the organization to engage with each other. Foster a culture of curiosity and share learning and best practices, while improving employee experience.

What are the chances of three thought leaders meeting in the same room, at the same terminal, in the same airport, in the same city by coincidence? Hear their story and many more as they discuss the impact of social media, organizational culture, machine learning, demographics and more!