Our popular writers, speakers, and authors of Wow, Woo, Win: Service Design, Strategy & the Art of Customer Delight look at how customer experience and service design can enhance knowledge sharing and success in organizations. They discuss the importance of designing your organization around service and offer clear, practical strategies based on the idea that the design of services is markedly different than manufacturing. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it’s the experience that makes the difference. To provide great experiences that keep customers coming back, organizations or KM programs must design services with as much care as design products. Service design is proactive—it is about delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy. Our speakers share with you how to create “Aha” moments when the customer makes a positive judgment, and to avoid “Ow” moments. They provide tips on how you and customers create a bank of trust, fueled by knowledge of each other’s skills and preferences.

Everyone who engages with your organization is in search of something, whether it’s products, services, people, or support. Too much of their time is spent sifting through useless information. New advances in machine learning and AI technology, combined with contextual search, are finally bringing relevance to every interaction and are making knowledge management a key driver of real business results. See real-world examples of the impact that increased maturity has made on innovative companies. Learn actionable steps to increase the relevance of your organization and start positively impacting your bottom line.

Communities of practice are a great way to develop expertise and innovation around specific interests. By infusing intelligence into many experiences and demonstrating some recent advances in Office 365 you’ll see how to leverage tacit and explicit knowledge in different ways as well as reuse and build upon the work of others. Our speaker has extensive experience in enterprise collaboration systems and currently leads intelligent search and discovery for Microsoft 365.  Expect lots of tips & examples for improving your KM initiatives.

With the recently published book Deep Text: Using Text Analytics to Overcome Information Overload, Get Real Value From Social Media, and Add Big(ger) Text to Big Data as a guide, author Tom Reamy provides an extensive overview of the whole field of text analytics: What is text analytics, how to get started, development best practices, latest applications, and building an enterprise text analytics platform. The talk ends with a look at current and future trends that promise to dramatically enhance our ability to utilize text with new techniques and applications.

Text analytics emerged in the mid-2000s, a collection of technologies, solutions, and practices aimed at meeting a diversity of business challenges. A decade in, what’s new and promising, what’s tried-and-true, and what’s on the horizon? Sentiment, identity, personality, and intent, extracted from text: All are now part of the data science mix. How has the market evolved—both demand and supply—and how should practitioners, solution providers, business analysts, and investors stay on top of developments? Text Analytics Market Insights helps all interested parties understand what’s working and what’s next, to enable them to extract the greatest value from text analytics.

For a KM initiative to be successful, knowledge managers must secure the support of senior leaders before implementation. Early top management buy-in results in funding, resources, advocacy, usage, broad organizational support, and success— the program yields its expected benefits, KM is spoken of and written about positively by leaders, stakeholders, and users. Hear from our long-time KM practitioner about proven practices illustrated by real-world examples for securing resources, active participation, and ongoing advocacy from top leadership. Get lots of tips for leading an effective, sustainable KM program that is seen as essential to the success of companies in different industries, of different sizes, and with different cultures.

For more than a decade, search technology has been used as the primary access point to the mountains of knowledge and data sitting behind an organization’s firewall. As environments evolve to account for private and public clouds, search is evolving beyond just the box to an API for human information. Will Hayes explores that evolution and talks about how search technologies and professionals play a key role in the enterprise cloud migration strategy.

If you are a believer in the data-driven organization (or even just curious) and have ever wondered what could happen if you cleverly combined the power of data collection, indexing, text mining, search, and machine learning into a unified platform and applied it within the enterprise, this talk is for you! Come learn about the state of cognitive search and analytics technology and how it is enabling great companies across a wide swath of industries to amplify mission-critical expertise within their business in a surprisingly short amount of time. Our speaker illustrates the technology in action with real-world examples.

Artificial intelligence is transforming text analytics. However, most AI algorithms still lack the ability to understand text data that is different from what is encountered during training. This becomes a critical issue when algorithms encounter unfamiliar words, misspellings, acronyms, or words in a different language. The solution? Transfer learning -- the ability for an AI system to take what it has learned in one situation and apply it to new and different situations. But is transfer learning ready for business deployment, or is it still an emerging technology? How can it be used in text analytics today? Havasi will discuss how transfer learning can be applied to text analytics across multiple industries.

Some technologies such as IBM Watson are being touted as AI. In response, there are new AI offerings from the large enterprise software companies as well as many startup companies. But is this AI or automation? This talk discusses the difference and argues that these offerings use entity extraction and business rules rather than AI. However, there are real opportunities to use this new technology to automate content tagging.

Text analytics can discover and add underlying structure to content, providing some remarkable new capabilities for the enterprise. This session focuses on the discovery of relationships between data and the population of graph databases and graph search. There are now more than 30 graph databases on the market, ranging from neo4j to SQL Server 2017, and graph search has become mainstream (including Lucene 6, the Microsoft Graph and many more). Text analytics is important for these to provide value to organizations.

NLP and entity extractors make up an important part of our use cases in cognitive computing. We discuss how terminology systems and knowledge bases are used in combination with NLP and entity extractors to greatly enrich the contents of our data infrastructures.

A panel of four text analytics experts answer questions that have been gathered before the conference, during the conference, and some additional questions from the program chair and sponsors.

This talk describes work that the IBM Taxonomy Squad has done to develop an enterprise-scale service that automates the extraction of entities and the generation of meaningful metadata. We cover the approach that was taken to design a solution architecture that leverages a corporate knowledgebase and integrates best-of-breed services in taxonomy and ontology management, NLP, machine learning, text annotation, and entity extraction.

The promise of machine learning has become a practical reality in today’s enterprise, but companies often struggle with implementation or reliable results. One fundamental issue is the common “garbage in, garbage out” problem. Poor input stems from the lack of clean data or unclear results from unstructured data analysis feeding machine learning models. Well-built taxonomies powering clear text analytics rules are an important infrastructure need often overlooked in data science activities. Come learn more about the role of taxonomy and text analytics as sources of clean data for machine learning.

Machine learning techniques can be used effectively for a wide variety of text analysis scenarios, such as reputation monitoring on social media, fraud detection, patent analysis, and e-Discovery. But to apply them well, you need to understand where the limits and pitfalls are in the technology, and you need to understand your data and the problem you are trying to solve. This session outlines an approach that uses text analytics to help understand the characteristics of your data, followed by selection and tuning of linguistic and statistical processing and machine learning parameters to address the application at hand. We highlight three real-world projects that used this approach and show how they worked, what went right and wrong, and how they evolved over time.

Government agencies face tremendous challenges daily. This includes providing services to ensure a safe, livable environment; making informed spending decisions; and regulating a healthy economy. The data that supports these missions is exploding and is increasingly unstructured. This presentation discusses the application of text analytics and visualizations across a number of these datasets and respective initiatives to provide an actionable view into the data. This involves demystifying techniques including predictive modeling and machine learning in this domain. We show how these techniques can be applied to research analytics, government spending, situational awareness, and assessing consumer financial complaints.

The terminologies that form taxonomies, thesauri, classification schemes, and name authorities aim to define all concepts unambiguously. These conceptual definitions are, however, primarily written for a human audience and are only partially meaningful to automated categorization processes. This talk explores how automated categorization rules can be synthetically generated by mining the terminology and semantic relationships found in traditional knowledge organization systems. We examine the pros, cons, and limitations of using categorization rules derived from KOS and discuss how they can then be refined and extended using human-curated categorization rules.

This talk presents an original approach to processing search results. Rather than showing the usual 10 blue links to webpages, the software creates a text summary of those webpages—a narrative on the topic of the user’s query. The narrative gives the user a quick way to understand the key information on his query. This approach is best applicable to queries that are informational in nature, i.e., those where the user wants to understand a particular subject and get a quick grasp of a concept, an event, a product, or a public figure. The talk focuses on the merits and drawbacks of the approach and comparison with other techniques of presenting the answer to the user’s query.

There is much talk about building triple stores from source content, but most of the models are just that without content to back them up. This session covers a case study of building a triple store to support search and other use cases from nearly 6 million documents. It also looks at the extraction or mining process for pulling 22 types of triple sets for full text and redeploying them for search queries. Lessons learned are also covered.

This session addresses the main principles of extracting entities and relationships from unstructured content against ontologies and semantic data sets. We give industry examples of business cases and key components of semantic technology architectures including text analytics and supporting data and metadata governance workflows. Finally, we demonstrate semantic annotation, talking about the challenges organizations face in this regard and some of the important lessons learned in more than 15 years of industry experience

Auto-categorization is “auto” only in part—there is much in the process that still requires old-fashioned human judgment. One critical step on the human side of the fence is to evaluate the quality of results so refinements can be developed and fed back into the process. But how do you measure quality when human indexers themselves apply topics inconsistently and often differ over applicability of topics? This case study explains how one publisher approached quality assessment in light of human variability and details how classic recall and precision measures were adjusted to provide a user-focused sense of auto-categorization quality.

In search, there is often a trade-off between recall and precision, and this impacts any evaluation of approaches: If one system achieves higher recall but lower precision, is it better? Traditionally, this situation has been addressed by using a measure that combines precision and recall into a single number, such as the F1 score. F1 makes strong assumptions about the amount of precision you can trade for a little more recall, and those assumptions are not always appropriate. In some contexts, recall and precision have very different significance. This talk presents a novel performance measure called the extrapolated precision, which avoids making such strong assumptions about allowed trade-offs between precision and recall.

Using case studies of real-world client projects, Smartlogic’s CEO presents, discusses, and demonstrates how post-relational databases, text analytics, AI, semantics, and linked data are delivering rapid returns on investment in data intensive industries. Cases range from predictive analytics and financial risk assessment to compliance, superior superior customer service, and unified enterprise intelligence within industries including banking, life sciences, media, and healthcare. The talk looks at the technology, the opportunity, lessons learned, and the keys to project success.

To improve the effectiveness of information findability and usability, we are developing a new mechanism to understand users’ interests and predict the information that will be most relevant to their needs. We analyze the technical documents published by members of the workforce and build models that can be used to match user’s requests with the best available content. We utilize an existing hierarchical taxonomy as part of the clustering effort in order to provide preliminary labels for the clusters. The information retrieval environment we are building will not only support retrieval of relevant corporate information upon request, it is designed to proactively notify targeted members of the workforce when relevant information becomes available.

In this talk, Patrick Lambe takes an unconventional look at how text analytics, taxonomies and search can be used in concert to probe areas of ignorance, not just uncover and organize what is already known, via three problem cases from the areas of public health and public transport. We demonstrate how elements of the search and discovery technology stack can be used to detect patterns in the environment to address or mitigate these types of problems.

A panel of four text analytics experts answer questions that have been gathered before the conference, during the conference, and some additional questions from the program chair and sponsors.

For modern digital enterprises, the key to survival is held by real-time predictive analytics done with heterogeneous data gathered from multiple sources—layered with contextual intelligence. The data is a mix of structured and unstructured data. Establishing contextual relevance requires systems imbued with deep reasoning capabilities that can link relevant pieces of information from within and outside the organization. This talk presents the outlines of a framework that can gather news events in real time, classify them, reason with them, and finally link them to an enterprise information repository and thereby generate alerts or early warnings for subscribed users. The framework is presented through a number of case studies.

The globally increasing tendency for political populism and media criticism has raised the sensitivity of brands to avoid misplacement of their own campaigns in negative and compromising contexts (bad ads). However, ad targeting is predominantly based on behavioral targeting techniques that heavily rely on (cookie-based) user profiling. The talk showcases a solution for real-time contextual targeting that is exploiting the full power of cognitive computing to match campaigns to online users’ real interests. The approach abandons tracking of any kind of user data and at the same time increases the precision of ad targeting on a real semantic level—beyond what can be achieved with keyword-based methods.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is the main source of multilateral financing for Latin-America and the Caribbean, and in addition to finance also provides knowledge responses to the Region’s development challenges. In this context, the IDB is constantly working to leverage new technology to improve knowledge management at the IDB in order to support efficiency in its operations and disseminate valuable knowledge and insights for the Region. For this reason, and in order to make all this information more accessible and also to solidify this information’s value to the Bank’s business, we developed a series of proofs of concepts (POCs) that use NLP and ML technologies. The purpose of this presentation is to share reflections gathered during the development of these POCs and the application of these types of approaches within the organization.

In the last 10 years, most of the academic research on entity extraction and content classification has focused on machine learning and complete automation. The latest tools are very precise, but in academic publishing, the use of automatic classification tools is still controversial. Publishers and information managers want the best of both worlds: a clear list of defined, managed keywords for their content and a cost-effective way of implementing the subject tagging. This presentation reviews the current use of machine-learning tools in publishing, both with and without the use of manually curated taxonomies.

Organizations are always looking for better ways to integrate their structured (databases and reports) and unstructured (documents and webpages) information. This concept is not new; in fact, it has been the primary information management goal for many years. The difference is that today, the technology to make this happen has matured to the point that this is real. This talk shares real-life examples of how this is done in large repositories using text analytics and ontologies. Session attendees will understand what an ontology is and how it can be merged with text analytics tools to provide better analytics for their data scientists.

This presentation discusses two recent projects where enterprise projects have benefited from direct interactions between taxonomies/ ontologies and text analytics. While these are often seen as competing work streams, our recent work continues to build on the idea that complex information-rich projects require both, and that pursuing one while abandoning the other often leads to poor results or project failure.

To address the complexity of language ambiguity requires a technology that can read and understand text the way people do. This session explains the concepts behind linguistic analysis, word disambiguation, and semantic reasoning to read and understand content the way people do. It explains the concepts that support a semantic platform, demonstrates a semantic engine, explains how one mobile phone carrier deployed a self-help solution that automatically answered 24,000,000 customer questions annually with 94% precision, and shows a knowledge platform that automatically organizes hundreds of data sources and millions of unstructured documents around multiple corporate taxonomies and entity clusters using dynamically generated metadata in a precise and complete way.

The next phase of how we communicate has already started. Popularized by Siri, Alexa, and the like, natural language interaction (NLI) has achieved commercial Q&A success. For organizations looking to adopt new experiences with their customers, NLI holds promise. But there is a big difference between AI applications—the distinction is the degree to which they are intelligent. This talk examines the considerations for enterprise application of NLI and how to avoid applications that just drive more white noise.

In the world of scholarly publishing (as well as many other industries— such as KM/information conferences!), meeting organizers are inundated with submissions for inclusions in conference programs. Given a large set of submissions, how can we develop tools to cluster submitted manuscripts into tracks based on topical similarity? This talk describes a project that used a subject taxonomy, NLP, and other text analytics tools as well as a large corpus of documents to construct an application to cluster submitted manuscripts based on topical similarity, including a GUI interface to interact with and analyze the results. This is not intended as a detailed technical talk (no slides of code!), nor is it intended as a product spotlight; the focus is on using known/existing text analytics tools to construct purpose-built applications to solve specific document-centric problems.

The universe of text analytics is largely constrained to the output of the entire human race. This can and does result in huge, petabyte- scale problems. Technologies for this scalability, computational distribution, deep learning, resolution, and semantic expression are all new within the last 10 years, and their combination is revolutionary. Key to putting all of this together is that the text analytics are performed in the native language of the original text, prior to the inevitable loss of fidelity in machine or human translation. This talk covers a number of use cases including counterterrorism, knowing your customer, border security, disease tracking and detection, and countering fake news and conspiracy theories.

In recent years, document-centric search over information has been extended with the use of graph-based content and data models. The implementation of semantic knowledge graphs in enterprises is not only improving search in a traditional sense, but opens up a path of integrating all types of data sources in a most agile way. Linked data technologies have matured in recent years and can now be used as the basis for numerous critical tasks in enterprise information management. Hilger discusses how standards-based graph databases can be used for information integration, document classification, data analytics, and information visualization tasks. He shares how a semantic knowledge graph can be used to develop analytics applications on top of enterprise data lakes and illustrates how a large pharmaceutical company makes use of graph-based technologies to gain new insights into its research work from unified views and semantic search over heterogeneous data sources.

At the cross-section of innovation, open data, and education, our speaker, a former government KM practitioner, shares her thoughts about the challenges and opportunities for organizations and communities in the coming years. She discusses empowering members of our communities and improving services using new tech like AI, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, Internet of Things, predictive analytics, gamification, and more. Are we moving toward anticipatory knowledge delivery (just enough, just in time, just for me), being in the flow of work at the teachable moment, establishing trust in a virtual environment, and learning from peer-to-peer marketplaces like Airbnb and Uber? Our longtime KM practitioner shares her insights about the evolving digital transformation of every part of our world and hints at the magic sauce we need for a successful future!

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.

Led by experienced KM practitioners, this workshop focuses on KM fundamentals, principles and concepts, specifically how to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of planning, problem solving, decision making, collaboration, continuity, innovation, and learning in any organization. They discuss using knowledge repositories/forums on SharePoint to maximize learning, innovation, and to support the decision-making cycle, mission, and vision; using online meetings and chat to enhance KM activities; KM tools to use as enablers such as SharePoint, online meetings, chat, OneNote, lessons learned/AARs, etc.; transforming knowledge-intensive activities into a knowledge process with related goals and objectives to support decision making; new knowledge creation (innovation), learning, and elearning tips; strategic knowledge gap analysis and knowledge audits; KM failures; applying KM as part of your daily business processes; and more. Gain insights, techniques, and best practices for making your daily business process more innovative, effective, and efficient using KM.

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 coworkers 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 is especially difficult with experts in niche specialties, when parties are geographically dispersed, and when the people who need the knowledge work in different organizations. The knowledge in each of these situations can be easily lost, yet it is knowledge essential to the success of the mission, especially in emergency situations such as responses to natural disaster events that are time-critical. Based on case studies of more than 200 top-level executives, engineers, and scientists at Fortune 500 companies; the military; and multiple government agencies, this workshop begins by offering a background of knowledge transfer and flow strategies and then offers effective processes for enhancing knowledge flow at all levels of organizations—both internally and externally. It covers the impact of internal vs. 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. The workshop provides an open forum for addressing individual challenges that participants are facing.

A good deal of knowledge use in organizations is not directly observable: It happens in interactions between people and is embedded in processes, tools, and artifacts. People are not necessarily good witnesses to their own knowledge needs. This workshop addresses the question of what counts for evidence in KM planning and measurement and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for gathering insight into KM gaps, needs and opportunities, to use in planning interventions and evaluating outcomes. It looks at examples, input from a global survey of knowledge managers on KM assessment methods, and ways you can create KM plans for the future.

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.

Effective collaboration is the key for any organization that seeks to be highly functioning. Leading effective collaboration is a critical 21st-century skill. Yet collaboration is much misunderstood. Too often, senior management believes collaboration to be primarily about people being able to “play nicely with each other.” But effective collaboration requires much more than good social skills. It requires good design. Learn how to design an effective collaboration effort and how to lead it to success. The workshop covers the structural components and people processes of good collaboration, as well as the facilitation techniques that help collaborators work more effectively with each other. Get lots of tips and insights from our experienced practitioner!

The Knowledge Management Office of The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. has developed fun and interactive games to promote and educate large groups of employees about KM concepts. These interactive games are shared with employees at annual events called Learning Labs. After the games are developed and deployed at the Learning Lab events, they are reused by incorporating them into smaller KM introductory courses provided for new employees on a quarterly basis. The objective of this workshop is to describe and explain the development of KM Learning Lab games, and then to have the workshop participants actually experience one of the games called, KM Saves Time—The Case of the Perpetual Motion Tire, a game inspired by the classic board game, Clue. After the game is played by all workshop participants, an opportunity for questions and comments is provided.

Modern intranets are no longer restricted to just corporate communications and content. They play a much stronger role in meeting staff and business needs. While intranets are evolving at a rapid pace, they remain hidden away behind the firewall. It’s therefore hard for intranet and digital workplace teams to see what other leading organizations are doing. This workshop shares worldwide examples across five fundamental purposes: content, communications, culture, collaboration, and social activity. Register for this exclusive behind- the-firewall look at leading-edge intranets, and bring your hardest intranet questions to our experienced workshop leader!

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 definitely for you! Take a look at how Office 365 can help enable your knowledge management objectives by looking at the key capabilities and how they support business outcomes. Find out about the key tools available in Office 365 and explore deployment and adoption strategies so that you can ensure that you are successful—from planning to rollout to governance and adoption and everything in between. Get a good understanding of how you can plan your Office 365 deployment to maximize your KM objectives and a framework that you can apply when you get back to the office.

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. You’ve seen no shortage of tools and techniques for building knowledge bases 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 to do just that. Gain an understanding of the four main pillars of knowledge curation: 1) the source of the knowledge (you and other subject matter experts); 2) the knowledge itself; 3) the people receiving the knowledge; and 4) the platform and process 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 knowledge curation program for your organization.

Most organizations that practice knowledge management (KM) make some effort to measure the health of their programs by using activity measures to assess how many employees use KM approaches and tools, how often they use them, and how satisfied they are. Organizations with more mature KM programs, however, go beyond simply tracking activity. A more sophisticated approach, called value path measurement, involves evaluating how KM activities influence business processes and outcomes. In other words, is participation translating into results? Tracing links between knowledge sharing and key cost, quality, and efficiency metrics goes a long way toward proving that KM is a value-added business process that yields a positive ROI. This interactive workshop gives participants tools and techniques to define the value path for their KM programs and approaches. It begins with a brief overview of the importance of measuring the impact of KM—why it matters—then moves through a series of activities to

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.

Innovation communities are a KM technique focused on the development of strategy and the implementation of business model innovation. This workshop illustrates how these communities can be used to accelerate innovation, derisk change, and greatly improve employee engagement. Learn: why strategy development and business model innovation are knowledge challenges, why networked approaches are so well-suited to KM practice in today’s VUCA environment (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.), and explore case studies on how organizations that have used innovation communities to create effective conversations between senior management and staff focused on business model improvement. Develop an innovation community blueprint for your own organization and learn how to sell it to decision makers. From our experienced practitioner, gain theory, case studies, and practical tools for using and explaining the impact of innovation communities. If you’ve always felt that KM should be used to spark and sustain business model innovation, this workshop is for you.

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

We are well into the long-anticipated wave of retirements and accompanying efforts to transfer critical knowledge before it goes out the door. A fair amount of knowledge, in the form of lessons learned stories, checklists, rules, and formulas, has already been transferred. While useful, these approaches work primarily at the surface level, addressing what to do only in specific situations. Such methods have proven to be ineffective in complex, rapidly changing environments. This workshop draws upon a growing body of research in cognitive neuroscience, backed by more than a decade of field experience in transferring knowledge at a deep structure level. It focuses on identifying and operating on the underlying thought and decision processes that went into building the knowledge in the first place. Experience the six steps of deep learning: thinking, observing, enumerating, expressing, assessing, and adjusting. Increase your powers of observation by viewing situations from multiple perspectives. Connect the dots and see the big picture. Break detrimental learning habits that are holding you and your team back. Build and grow your personal body of knowledge and improve your ability to communicate what you’ve learned so others may benefit. In addition to the worksheets and handouts, receive a complimentary copy of the book: Deep Learning Manual: The Knowledge Explorer’s Guide to Self-Discovery in Education, Work, and Life.

Analytics to Overcome Information Overload, Get Real Value From Social Media, and Add Big(ger) Text to Big Data Text analytics (text mining, noun phrase extraction, auto-categorization, auto-summarization, and social media or sentiment analysis) is becoming essential to any field that utilizes or tries to understand unstructured text. To develop both practical applications and deeper research results requires the development of a text analytics platform that incorporates the integration of all of these techniques. This workshop, based on a recent book, takes attendees through the entire process of creating a text analytics platform including basic analytics techniques from deep learning/machine learning, rule building and how to integrate them using a modular approach, making the business case and the people and content resources needed, 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. It uses case studies to illustrate these processes and shares the range of applications that can be built with text analytics, from advanced expertise applications to new uses of social media.

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.

Change management is a critical people process for any organization that seeks to excel. Unfortunately, good change management is hard to find. Most of us have been on the receiving end of at least one unnecessarily painful change management process. Yet it does not need to be this way! In this workshop, basically a field guide for agents of change, learn ways of leading a change effort that take less of a toll on the people and processes involved. Filled with tips and practical techniques, participants learn how to be more effective agents of change in the field.

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. 

Creating value from learning and knowledge initiatives depends entirely on user adoption by changing behaviors and beliefs. As complex social systems, human organizations cannot be programmed—they can only be hacked. KM initiatives can benefit from coordinated 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 deeper 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. This 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 look ahead to 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.

This workshop is for those who want to improve user experience, enhance services, expand brand loyalty, and grow revenue. It teaches the audience how to change organizational problems into innovative solutions through a human-centered design approach called design thinking. It covers transitioning through the phases of inspiration, ideation, and implementation; establishing an agile approach to fail fast to succeed sooner; and the importance of customer journey map design that shows your client where they are today to where they need to be in the future. Get insights to inspire innovation, learn to produce high-quality products and services through a human-centered approach, and understand how focusing on the user establishes an enviable competitive advantage.

The speed that information and idea flows into and through an organization is critical to its survival in our volatile and digitally-transforming world. In this interactive workshop, learn how to bring a slow-moving, zombie-like organization back to life. The workshop leader is an innovative KM practitioner and thought leader who has literally written the book on building smarter organizations. Practical takeaways include how to tell if your organization is in trouble, what to do to accelerate the speed of communication, the value of visual management, and how to make large-scale changes by starting small. Full of tips and techniques, come get lots of tricks to try in your organization!

Communication is the only way anything gets done. How come we are not better at it? In a post-Trump, post-truth world, being cautious is the least-safe option. Robust engagement with stakeholders, staff, and the public and getting your story out there confidently, early, and appropriately is the best way to be safe and protect your reputation. But in most cases the outside is going faster than the inside, and this needs to change. To do so requires being increasingly agile and effective at communicating with each other. The barriers to this are partly technological but primarily cultural and behavioral. It is therefore those cultural and behavioral aspects of communicating in a connected world on which Semple focuses. Join the former BBC CKO and author as he shares tools and techniques for improving communication in your organization. He illustrates these with real-world examples of how organizations are improving their communication and excelling at sharing knowledge within their enterprise.

The Forge is a Belgian consulting firm that supports teams in increasing their innovative capacity. We talk of an innovative culture if the team succeeds in offering an environment that stimulates its members to ideate and design new processes and products as answers to new and old problems. For the past 3 decades, lots of scientific research has been done on these issues. How can we build that culture—this stimulating environment? The Forge has translated this knowledge in handy tools and techniques that you can use in your team, but the key finding is that it is the quality of team and corporate communication that is the engine of innovation. This workshop is based on an award-winning work practice for knowledge workers, called adaptive or collaborative case management, which fundamentally changes how virtual teams work with information—creating a context in which they “extremely work out loud.” This process combined with principles for the increase of team innovation capacity, prompted joint experiments focusing on the innovation capacity of virtual teams using the collaborative case practice. Get the findings of this research and apply it in your own team.