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 knowledge management. Participants learn to apply the scenario-building skills developed at Shell. Willem 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 future KM scenarios. He covers many aspects from decision support, drive for innovation, crowdsourcing, changing organization culture, and liquid workforce to how KM can be an enabling force in these dynamics. Get a number of potential scenarios for the future of KM which can be used to build and test KM strategies within 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.

Sharing knowledge for enterprise success requires entrepreneurial skills, new ways of thinking and operating, continuous learning, and change. There are many new tools available, but it is the people and the culture of an organization that determine its ultimate success. Wilkinson interviewed 200 of today’s top entrepreneurs 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 about emerging and maturing technologies often grouped under the ubiquitous rubric of AI, or with disruptive technologies such as blockchain, which may be poised to migrate from cryptocurrencies and cultivate business applications in other diverse activities. The growth of big data applications has produced a shift across the information landscape, challenging enterprises to rationalize the collision between information science and data science. Industries such as linked data, ontologies, and the semantic web have been impacted; in other industries, these technologies are perceived as academic. Clarke surveys industry trends before honing-in on practical applications and tools that taxonomists and others need to do their job.

So much hype surrounds artificial intelligence (AI) for knowledge management (KM) and search, but is it just a myth, or can AI technologies really impact our space? Kamran Khan breaks down the facts and walks you through how AI solutions such as natural language processing (NLP) are game-changers for better search and collaboration. Citing actual customer examples, Khan, along with Accenture’s Tracey Seward, explores why these are becoming essential tools for many new business functions and how to leverage them in your KM projects to discover and unlock more value from your unstructured data.

Voice search seems to be in the ascendance. Simek discusses EY’s experience in implementing voice search and NLP using Bing Voice API and Microsoft’s LUIS app. The complex process involved the approach to the implementation, challenges encountered, how these challenges were addressed, change management topics, and the inevitable next steps. Hear about an actual case study regarding search and search metrics.

Running analytical queries across a large corpus of data, especially in parallel, normally requires an Apache Spark cluster. But that requires a big investment. What if you could perform high-end analytics without having to use Spark? Solr Streaming Expressions could be your new best friend. Solr’s Parallel SQL Interface is the heart of the system, which then enables logistic regression, parallel relational algebra, machine learning, anomaly detection, text classification, and more. Hoeffel surveys available capabilities.

Enterprise search is challenging and implementing search, whether it’s upgrading an existing product, introducing a brand-new product, or tweaking the capabilities of your installed search, requires extensive planning. As expectations regarding search expand and as new types of information become searchable, the pressure is on to engage on both a tactical and strategic level to put search at the forefront of the enterprise’s digital future. One example is Systemware Content Cloud Find Engine.

We’ve seen a great deal of innovation in the past few years, from bots to machine learning, AI, graphs, and cognitive services, all turbo-charged by rising cloud adoption. One important advance is visual search, which takes a radically different approach from existing offerings to solve relevancy problems by determining context from images. The usage of search is changing, indicating where future potentials for search optimization lies. Our experts help you look to the future.

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!

Hayes 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. Parker discusses the challenges preventing data-intensive organizations from becoming “information-driven” and the current state and future possibilities of insight engines.

With an enterprise search experience that had been around since 2011, Ubisoft decided it was time for a revamp. To make the most of this opportunity, it wanted to use a full user-centered approach. Cacace describes the revamp process from end-to-end, including leveraging user research, personas, impact maps, benchmarks, and user testing. She also talks about feedback received after launch.

It’s been a knotty problem for years: How do you provide valuable results when users don’t know what they want? Problems include ambiguous query terms, a huge number of matching results, focusing on core areas, and avoiding embarrassment. Machine learning can now help with analyzing queries’ content and use interactions, then boosting or dropping based on attributes, ordering facets, and diverse results. Adding to Rappoport’s analysis, Selvaraj discusses how search personalization matches search results to search queries using machine learning models that are trained to match intent with content.

The concept of conversation search can influence search engine product decisions. Baumgartel reviews the current relationship between chatbots and search for customers who engage in ecommerce and support. He compares the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and looks for a path that will combine them in an optimal way. Chatbot and other conversational search tools can change search engine implementation processes.

As we look for new solutions to old problems, it’s helpful to check in with some search and discovery experts for their views. We also welcome participation from attendees to shed light on the evolution of search and discovery.

Many organizations don’t know what to expect from search and therefore don’t invest in it at all. Many want to have “quick wins” instead of committing to a long-term strategy: They want to implement changes or enhancements that require minimal effort to drive business value in the short term. Thus, they may overlook the importance of choosing or replacing a search platform. Miles Kehoe provides practical advice on determining how to make search work to support your organization’s business strategy.

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.

Two case studies, one from Medtronic and the other from Intel, present concrete examples of how knowledge is discovered within companies. Medtronic has a Findability Program, which provides a living, breathing experience to help employees search and find resources and connect with internal experts. Intel created an enterprise information model to describe and define its core information assets.

We’ve all heard it: Search sucks. But it doesn’t need to. The Microsoft Services KM team took a new look at everything it’s doing and build a road map that includes a new UX, Azure cognitive search, and virtual user profiles. They even took some time to see what their users really wanted. The result, they hope, is that the expansion of search capabilities and incorporation of machine learning will meet the primary business requirement of improving search for a very diverse audience.

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.

To create “smarter search” in today’s search engines, it’s imperative to understand what our users are looking for, the kinds of questions that interested them in the past, previous attempts to satisfy the search question, and what others felt were successful answers. An 80% relevance gain can be found in a combination of collaborative filtering recommender systems wired through your search engine and simple supervised machine learning for query intent classification.

Technology creates enormous opportunities for search, but it also raises issues about security, privacy, and ethics. Join our exciting panel discussion about the issues most relevant to today’s enterprise search and discovery environment.

Most organizations have massive quantities of valuable information locked in both structured and unstructured content. Queue the data lake, which allows organizations to acquire, store, and analyze disparate content from across the enterprise. Data lakes comprise data acquisition, storage, and analytical tools to allow organizations to break down information silos to generate insights from a diverse set of content. Nelson discusses the challenges and potential of handling massive quantities of diverse content in a data lake while exploring current customer examples of data lakes.

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!