Your choice of two half-day preconference workshops on Monday, November 4 is included when you register for the PLATINUM PASS with WORKSHOPS.
View the Office 365 Symposium 2019 Final Program PDF
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
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.
Stan Garfield, Author of six KM books & Founder, SIKM Leaders Community
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Text analytics is becoming essential in 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 these points:
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.
Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group and Author, Deep Text
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
The volume of human knowledge is growing. But machine knowledge is growing even faster. And the accelerated pace of both is taxing the limits of traditional KM. Machine learning platforms are valuable tools for discovering hidden patterns and trends. But they often provide little or no insight into how new knowledge is generated, or when a model or algorithm is no longer valid. All of this greatly increases risk. Consider how many of your business decisions are automated, how many business rules your organization has, and if they are current and still valid. You may need to start incorporating knowledge governance into your organization Join our popular speaker and get a road map for implementing a top-level governance model, including how to measure results and make adjustments along the way. Get the seven major facets of knowledge governance, how to align them with overall corporate governance, and most importantly, how to evaluate the range of possible social impacts, both positive and negative. Get a sneak preview of what’s coming, including the emerging technologies you’ll need to be closely watching, and how those technologies will place even greater demand on having a sound knowledge governance model in-place.
Art Murray, CEO, Applied Knowledge Sciences, Inc. and Director, Enterprise of the Future Program, International Institute for Knowledge and Innovation
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
You’ve perhaps heard it before: We implemented enterprise social networking but now how do we get people to really use it? Or: We’ve got such a talented workforce—why aren’t people sharing their knowledge more? Our longtime KM advocates answer these questions. They bring collaboration and knowledge tools and processes together in ways that empowers people’s digital fluencies and practice so they can collaborate and work more effectively in rapidly changing contexts and diverse global teams. They know that employees are more willing to collaborate when they have built relationships with the others and they have creative ways to make those relationships happen! Get lots of techniques, insights, and ideas from this workshop to immediately put into practice in your organization.
Catherine Shinners, Principal & Founder, Merced Group
Nancy Dixon, Principal & Founder, Common Knowledge Associates
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
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.
Holly C. Baxter, Chief Scientist & CEO, Strategic Knowledge Solutions and Cognitive Performance Group
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Humans connect through stories, find meaning in stories and remember stories far better than data. Steve Jobs once said: “The most powerful person in the world is the story teller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” And Steve Denning, in his book The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, provides a guide to different types of organizational storytelling, tying the ancient practice of sharing through stories to today’s business world. Although most KM professionals know about the power of stories in organizations, many KM programs don’t include teaching the art of telling a story or conduct storytelling workshops. This workshop highlights the ways that TechnipFMC is using storytelling in its KM program and walks participants through several fun storytelling activities. Get a heightened awareness of the power of stories and the ability to run storytelling activities in your organization! Enjoy “story-listening,” as other KM practitioners tell their own tales. Come tell us your story!
Kim Glover, Director, Internal Communications, TechnipFMC
Tamara Viles, Knowledge Management Program Manager, TechnipFMC
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
This workshop covers the entire enterprise search solution lifecycle including the most important concepts of enterprise search and priorities for successful solution implementations. How is data getting indexed in search in a secure away, honoring access control lists? On the UI side, the workshop looks at the fabric of modern search interfaces going far beyond the list of search results and a few filters; it considers deep integrations into intranet portals and business applications. Vogt also covers the search experience management, relevancy optimization, and how this continuous effort ensures success of your users and hence search solution adoption. He outlines how AI can, in practice, be leveraged to augment the search experience. Throughout the workshop, Vogt presents real-world scenarios and explains the underlying implementation and reasoning behind, uses live demos to illustrate the capabilities of both open source-based and commercial search engines, e.g., Google Cloud Search or Microsoft SharePoint and SharePoint Online. This interactive workshop focuses on the aspects which are most valuable for the specific audience and aims at diving deep discussions on how their use cases could be implemented.
Christian Vogt, Director Services, Raytion GmbH
Benjamin Braasch, Project Manager, Raytion GmbH
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
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.
Gordon Vala-Webb, CEO, Vala-Webb Consulting Inc.
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
This engaging workshop by one of the leading practitioners of complexity theory and solutions discusses practical techniques to create conditions to enable novel emergent solutions to wicked and intractable problems. It introduces a complex approach to design thinking, a non-linear approach, a next generation approach design thinking. Get new ways to support innovation in your organization and generate ideas with a focus on solutions to unarticulated problems. Snowden shares the latest version of Cynefin, a sense-making framework used globally to create a contextual approach to decision support. Better decision in shorter time frames making full use of our resources and networks.
Dave Snowden, Founder & Chief Scientist, The Cynefin Company
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Search is being shipped more frequently with more advanced tools that enable “start search.” Our experienced practitioner looks at the vendor market and capabilities. He also examines what the advanced technologies such as machine learning (ML) and AI can offer and how to go about integrating them with your current search platform—or how to know whether your search technology has the smarts to work in conjunction with the more advanced ML/AI platforms. Building platforms for continuing evolving markets and organizations is a challenge, but our popular speaker sheds some light for future planning and implementation.
Monday, November 4: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
With Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and more in the Microsoft Office suite, you have a tremendous technology ecosystem to help automate many aspects of your knowledge management strategy. Learn how to take advantage of the many features and benefits in Office 365, including design options, workflows, designing taxonomies users actually want to use and the latest tips and tricks, to propel your knowledge management program forward to ensure your success! Get lots of tips and good practices from our experienced experts!
Daniel Lee, Director, Enterprise Information Solutions, ARC Business Solutions Inc.
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
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 rethink 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!
Dave Snowden, Founder & Chief Scientist, The Cynefin Company
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Office 365 is the only show in town when it comes to depth and breadth of enterprise functionality, however, the challenge is to ensure that its rollout leads to meaningful adoption and has sustained commitment to delivering concrete business benefits, which is no mean feat. Too often, businesses take a technology-first approach to Office 365, which can fail to fully engage with staff needs and strategic priorities. Organizations need to take a business-first approach to Office 365, working out the why and how before getting stuck into the what. With the whole organization on the journey from the C-Suite down to frontline, success is much more likely. Using Step Two’s new methodology for taking a business-first approach to Office 365, learn how to design 365 to turn ideas into reality, find out the best techniques to use in different situations, and participate in many hands-on activities in this interactive workshop.
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
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 this question remains: “How do I design, build, and maintain a body of knowledge that’s easily accessible to me 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.
Art Murray, CEO, Applied Knowledge Sciences, Inc. and Director, Enterprise of the Future Program, International Institute for Knowledge and Innovation
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Microsoft Office 365 offers a rich portfolio for building intranet and department sites, employee and team communication, and social collaboration. A centerpiece of Office 365 is the Microsoft Graph and SharePoint Online search. Both allow for not only finding documents but also for easily building rich business applications—applications that actually facilitate collaboration by bringing the most relevant context-dependent content to knowledge workers. This workshop develops the most important search use cases in collaborative environments, describes how they can be implemented with the search provided by Microsoft, and looks at how you can solve your business requirements within Office 365 by combining search with, e.g., Microsoft Flow. Options are presented to integrate search into a cloud-intranet portal or service support desk bot, allowing the most out of your investment. This workshop is use-case-driven and looks at the larger context of the Office 365 collaboration landscape and, of course, its technical architecture.
Christian Vogt, Director Services, Raytion GmbH
Christian Gross, Search Manager, Raytion GmbH
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
In the minds of many people, KM is about the past—best practices, lessons learned, organizational memory, etc.—while innovation is about the future—brainstorming new ideas, new product development, prototyping, etc. But one doesn’t do KM for the sake of KM! KM is done with strategic intent, and among many options that could lead to (better/more effective) innovation, of course. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum: Incremental innovation is building on (knowledge of) existing products and services, and even radical innovation needs (knowledge of) current business models and markets to define itself. Innovators may hail the mantra “Fail fast, fail often,” but failing without learning the lessons is useless! Innovation and KM hardly ever collaborate in large organizations, as they typically belong to different departments: KM is often somewhere under HR or support services, while innovation is most often under strategy or operations. This means that leaders most probably report to different VPs. Still, both innovation and KM are all about breaking the organizational silos and have functionally diverse teams collaborating. This workshop explores the relationship between innovation and KM from both our consulting and management point of views. It covers the following:
Be ready to gain lots of insights and ideas!
Kim Glover, Director, Internal Communications, TechnipFMC
Christian De Neef, Founder & Co-Owner, FastTrack
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Every organization needs knowledge transfer (KT) to be sustainable and stay competitive. Most organizations find achieving smooth and continuous KT elusive, primarily owing to human rather than technological factors. This workshop provides attendees with action steps to overcome the human relationship barriers and accomplish cross-generational collaboration. It is highly interactive and includes small, multi-generational group practice exercises to jump-start the essential relationship building; identification of non-tech obstacles to KT; practical and achievable solutions; steps to establish regular person-to-person and team-to-team transfer of both new and institutional knowledge; and more. Understand the intergenerational and other resistance factors; learn tools to remove frustration and negative energy that often arise out of working with people of difference (generations/ages, functions, education/training, and other diversity factors); get strategies and techniques to accomplish common goals; and have fun doing it!
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
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.
Agnes Molnar, Managing Consultant, Search Explained
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
If your users can’t find what they need on your intranet, your information architecture (IA) probably needs some work! Join our experienced practitioner and learn tips and best practices to improve findability, information organization, and the basic concepts of information architecture. Hanley covers the critical aspects of intranet IA: navigation/site architecture, page design architecture, and metadata architecture. Get approaches for planning navigation across the entire intranet and on individual sites, along with tips and best practices for using mega-menus and organizing hub sites. Grab lessons about the best place to focus your IA energy so that you can build an intranet that is an essential part of your digital workplace today and as your organization evolves over time.
Rebecca Rodgers, Principal Consultant Digital Workplace & Community Manager, Step Two
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
The International Standards Organization (ISO) has just published a new set of Knowledge Management Standards. Are you ready? The new standards contain requirements and guidelines for all aspects of the KM program, e.g., establishing, implementing, maintaining, reviewing, and improving an effective management system for knowledge management in organizations. As is the case for all ISO standards, this set of standards can be applied to any organization seeking ISO certification, regardless of its type or size, or the products and services it provides. This workshop covers understanding the ISO standards and how to translate the standards into requirements for your organization; examining how an auditor evaluates a program against a standard; identifying ways to prepare for an ISO KM audit; and looking at examples of KM initiatives or tactics that should satisfy an ISO KM audit. This practical, hands-on, half-day workshop focuses on what participants are already doing in their organizations to meet the standard and how to present these efforts to an auditor. Get a laminated handout of the standards by category and explore in small groups how your organization can meet the standard and the ROI expected for achieving the standards. Get ahead of the crowd by learning about the ISO KM standards and how they relate to your program.
Michael Prevou, Deputy CKO, U.S. Army Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC)
Patricia Eng, Certified ISO 30401 KM Auditor, Trainer, Speaker, Author, KMHR Systems Auditors
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Data visualization tools are helpful for those who either a) think visually, b) want to present data to people in more innovative ways, or c) think more creatively. Mind maps have been used for decades in corporate America as well as by writers, attorneys, and educators. Mind maps and other related tools are especially helpful in laying out and organizing unstructured data. This hands-on workshop provides a short look at data visualization theory, concepts, and terminology; a discussion differentiating the tools; and working with three different data visualization tools that are absolutely free. The three different tools provide a myriad of ways to lay out unstructured data in innovative ways. Despite the fact that these tools are free, they are surprisingly powerful and flexible. Bring your device so the group can participate in solving problems using these tools.
Ron Arons, President, LegalDataViz and Author, Mind Mapping for Genealogy
Monday, November 4: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Creating value from KM initiatives depends entirely on user adoption by changing behaviors and beliefs. Learning and knowledge initiatives benefit from 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 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.
Gordon Vala-Webb, CEO, Vala-Webb Consulting Inc.