Do you have a project on your plate that you think is really cool, yet is so poorly defined you don’t even know where to start to make it happen? Bring your idea to this workshop and, using the research-based, experience-proven START method, you'll walk out with a draft project description which clearly defines what the idea is and why the project has business value (or why it doesn't!).You'll experience an innovation process you can use over and over again to win over key decision makers and set each project up for success from the start (or kill bad ideas before wasting time on them).

The volume of human and machine knowledge continues to grow exponentially. And as generative AI tools such as Chat GPT and Bard continue working their way into the mainstream, this growth will only accelerate, taxing the limits of traditional KM. As a result, leaders and decision makers will have far less visibility into how and even where their organization’s knowledge is generated, along with its validity. How many of your business decisions are automated? How many business rules does your organization have? How secure are they? What social amplification and other risks are inherent in your organization’s decision processes? If you can’t answer these questions, it’s a sign you need to start incorporating knowledge governance into your organization. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to build a top-level governance model, along with a plan for implementation, including how to measure results and make adjustments along the way. Learn the seven major facets of organizational knowledge governance, how to align them with overall corporate governance, and most importantly, how to evaluate the range of possible ESG impacts, both positive and negative. Don’t let the volume of knowledge overwhelm you. Rather, create more KM joy by putting a governance model in place, reducing the risk and uncertainty along your KM journey, and gaining greater value from your organization’s ever-expanding collection of knowledge assets.

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.

Microsoft 365 is packed with powerful tools and features for building an effective intranet. But with so many options, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. This presentation takes a deep dive into the “out-of-the-box” features of SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 and shows how to leverage them to build an intranet that meets your organization's unique needs. From creating and organizing content with SharePoint to enhancing communication with Teams and Viva Engage, it covers everything you need to get started. By the end of the session, you'll have a solid understanding of the key features of Microsoft 365 and how to use them to build an intranet that helps your organization communicate, collaborate, and succeed. You will also understand what is possible “in the box” and where you may want to invest in third-party solutions or custom development.

Successfully activating enterprise capabilities, such as knowledge management, sales enablement, marketing, ecommerce, and personalization, among others, requires a robust information strategy. Defining an information model which reflects your strategic business goals, addresses your current technology stack, and aligns with the needs of your internal and external users improves information connectivity and also encourages development of new organizational capabilities. This hands-on workshop provides practical tactics for designing, building, and maintaining the taxonomies, metadata, and ontologies that are at the foundation of your information infrastructure. Based on hard-won lessons learned from our work with Fortune 50 enterprises and leading ecommerce sites, this workshop provides a comprehensive overview of information modeling for enterprises. We explore the foundation for creating a consistent vocabulary that uniquely addresses your large enterprise, the framework for shifting to a model that meets both the needs of your enterprise and also your business units, systems, user profiles, and interfaces and the impacts of a project on technology, governance, workflows, marketing, analytics, search, compliance, and master data management.

Humans have always been storytelling animals. From sci-fi to fairytales and anecdotes shared around watercoolers, stories provide opportunities to learn, share, and take action on our hopes, dreams, and fears for the future. Narrative provides a collaborative and meaningful way for KM practitioners to explore the intractable issues of our time, a critical edge in embedding social and human capital into the world of work. Join the Cynefin team for one of their most popular workshop methods, Future Backwards. F-B is an alternative to scenario planning and a side-casting technique designed by Dave Snowden. The method brings groups together through storytelling to increase the number of perspectives that an organization can take both on understanding its past and a range of possible futures. It is a fun, connecting method used for lessons learned, historical analysis, and context setting among other purposes. Learn how to expose the number of perspectives that a group can take both on an understanding of its past and of the range of possible futures, discover what entrained patterns of past perception in an organization are determining its future, compare and contrast different aspirations as to the present and the future, and generate multiple turning points or decision points for use in the social construction of the Cynefin framework. This interactive and engaging workshop gives a practical approach to engaging employees in storytelling to explore the future of organizations, a means of conditions for novel discovery, cross-pollination of ideas and transformation, and lessons learning in workshops and beyond.

Employees are complaining about the amount of information they have to wade through—too much content, much of it duplicated, information and communication is irrelevant—and missing what they really need. Sound familiar? Delivering relevant, contextual experiences to employees is a priority, but where do you begin? Let our experienced speaker share tips and techniques for reaching different levels of personalization and targeting in many forms; plans for how to get started; and different types of personalization and where they are best applied.

Humans connect through stories, and KM is all about connecting people. Even so, many KM programs don’t utilize storytelling to drive adoption or teach the art of storytelling. This interactive workshop builds on a 2019 KMWorld storytelling workshop and adds the winning storyteller from that session, an attendee from the European Patent Office. Participants learn about storytelling through several fun activities, get a heightened awareness of the power of stories, and learn how to run storytelling workshops in their own organizations. A special focus is on the “KM Origin Story,” in which attendees learn about telling a story that makes the case for the magic of KM. Come and learn and enjoy “story-listening,” as other KM practitioners tell their own tales.

KM is all about collaboration, and as our organizations struggle with digital transformation and encompassing a global workforce, platforms matter. In addition to traditional platforms that we are now quite used to, there are 3D platforms that are stretching our capabilities. Learn more from our expert. Bring your questions and curiosity and be prepared to play and use your imagination about how new tools might fit into your enterprise.

This high-demand workshop, given by a KM pioneer and popular KMWorld speaker, focuses on how to build a successful KM strategy and revitalize knowledge sharing within your organization. Snowden, our workshop leader, engages participants, taking them 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!

Knowledge doesn’t manage itself. No matter how far AI/ML evolves, knowledge, whether human or digital, will always need human curation. And as the growth in edge computing and hyper-automation continues to accelerate, having a reliable, consistent curation framework in place 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 stay on top of the explosive growth in human and machine knowledge in my organization?” This workshop helps you do this by gaining an understanding of the three main pillars of knowledge curation: 1) knowledge capture and transfer; 2) governance; and 3) architecture, including the tools, platforms, and processes for putting it all together. Key elements include how to determine what knowledge is worth capturing and in what form; reconcile different world views, mental models, and learning modalities across various human and machine knowledge sources and recipients; 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 creating more KM joy in your organization by setting up and implementing a world-class knowledge curation program.

In this practical, hands-on workshop, Rodgers covers the difference between navigation and site structure (think experience vs. build); understanding user needs and pain points; the value of user groups and label information through a live card sorting session; using tree testing to see if you have your navigation right and where it might need help; and best practice approaches to designing intranet navigation that works. Using real-world examples, this workshop provides lots of tips and techniques to enhance digital workplace navigation experience.

During the last 3 decades, many organizations have built communities of practice (CoPs), and they play many roles: hosting forums for members to draw on the knowledge of more senior staff, collectively developing technical procedures and innovations, managing mentoring relationships, sponsoring discussions for collectively thinking through particularly difficult technical issues, and building relationships between their members. People are the center of CoPs, and technology is a background enabler. In today’s virtual and remote working world, technology platforms are being honed to adapt to the world in which we currently live and connect. These platforms thrive on thoughtful exchange in a practice becoming known as “working out loud.” Sharing ideas and perspectives in new ways allows us to work things out together or cast our nets wider for support. Our experienced community leader discusses community fundamentals and foundations; 10 key principles for successful CoPs; types of communities and examples of their use; community culture; community management, including creation; and preventing redundant communities as well as roles, goals, and measurements. Get new insights for your communities, share your experiences with your colleagues, and take your CoPs to the next level.

What is smarter than the new GPT/LLM-based AI? The combination of GPT-AI and text analytics. For all the success that GPT has accomplished in the public sphere, it has some limitations in the enterprise that text analytics can overcome—if done correctly. GPT/LLM’s weaknesses include tendency to hallucinate, that is, make up false facts; GPT/LLMs were trained on public information, but as we’ve seen many times, the content and vocabularies behind the enterprise firewalls are quite different; transparency, understanding why it says what it does. This workshop focuses on creating a text analytics foundation (autocategorization, data extraction, and more) as well as advanced applications that utilize text analytics to enhance and correct GPT-generated content. The text analytics foundation consists of orthogonal taxonomies with associated autocategorization and data extraction rules, sentiment analysis, and more. Learn how to set up a good text analytics environment starting with selecting the right tools, including text analytics software that creates a starting point for GPT and refines and corrects the GPT answers.

Have you been working with complex challenges and methods for a long time and wish to add something new to your toolkit? Or are you new to complexity and looking for a place to start? Join this workshop to learn about a complexity-informed approach to navigating the seas of organizational needs within the bigger-picture global tides. Estuarine mapping was presented for the first time at last year’s conference by Dave Snowden and is gaining traction worldwide in industry and government as a conflict-free approach to strategy. In this hands-on, interactive session, learn how to assess the constraints at play in the organization and networks, to make the energy cost of doing “bad” things harder and “good” things easier, while allowing for emergence along the way. Explore how this framework links into radical new means of distributed decision making at the intersections of technology and human sense-making, using the power of narrative and human connection, to find novel possibilities along the path. The workshop covers what we can change and manage in a complex environment, what we do when simple goals don’t work, how we plan for uncertainty, how we combine the grand vision with the day-to-day to build collaborative organizations, and how we do sense-making at scale with human sensor networks. Get a practical compass to start working with different ways to create conditions for novel discovery, cross-pollination of ideas, transformation, and more.

This workshop focuses on the lifecycles and workflow processes that knowledge engineers require to effectively manage complex and large volumes of knowledge. Knowledge assets represent diverse types of information, such as terminologies, information models, data elements, quality metrics, protocols, decision support rules, policies, etc. Content vendors provide collections of knowledge assets for different domains, but companies have to ensure that all active knowledge assets are integrated with delivery workflows. Systematic processes for asset review and curation are necessary, including consistently updating and tracking changes. Speakers provide an introduction to the most important knowledge management activities, including the need to catalog and index knowledge assets, author and track asset metadata, manage relationships and dependencies among assets, import and export assets to/from various information systems, validate structural and semantic integrity when assets change, and implement a comprehensive asset lifecycle process. Get KM best practices, in combination with examples, challenges, and lessons learned from the extensive practical experience of speakers. Simple examples from the healthcare domain are used to illustrate the lifecycle and process management aspects.

With steady fluctuations in workforces and more seniors retiring in the next years, KM stays one of the biggest challenges for many organizations. Which tools are capable of managing knowledge easily? How can one drive adoption? Which processes need to be established to maintain high quality while not introducing a threshold for submitting new knowledge? How can one access this knowledge easily? This workshop discusses how to successfully implement well-working KM portals in Microsoft 365; describes the project flows and involved persons; deep dives into aspects such as workflows, content management, and how enterprise search and new AI technologies support efficient knowledge retrieval. Get lots of tips and strategies for engaging staff and supporting your KM program.

Mainstream knowledge management approaches tend to be very mechanistic, using the metaphor of knowledge as an asset, or as a thing to be captured, moved around, and stored. This metaphor especially supports the management of explicit knowledge in artefacts, documents, and data, but it doesn’t provide much guidance for how to work with knowledge at play in and between people. Futures Thinking and Foresight techniques can help us to reframe the way we work with knowledge in organizations and reimagine new, more diverse, and more productive ways of working with knowledge. In this interactive workshop, Susann Roth and Patrick Lambe take participants through a series of futures thinking activities to reframe and reimagine new KM possibilities in their organizations.

The old saying, “This ain’t my first rodeo” carries the connotation that the speaker has experience and is ready for a situation. But like any learning, mistakes would have been made along the way, and the lessons that were learned form the basis of the knowledge. This workshop is a partnership between three KMers from Texas with a combined 52 years of experience in knowledge management who have gained wisdom by learning from failures while also seizing serendipities. They work with participants, whether it’s their first rodeo or not, to crowdsource the biggest barriers being faced by their KM programs today and facilitate the co-creation of solutions to remove those barriers, focusing not only on what works, but what doesn’t. Have fun as you gain insights into other participants’ programs and immediately implementable ideas to stay on that bucking bronco.

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 drinks and light bites. Open to all conference attendees, speakers, and sponsors.