Knowledge Management (KM) can enable an enterprise if it is central to the “place” employees go to work everyday. The place is no longer the physical location, but the e-workplace – where employees go to work on the Internet. E-workplaces provide a personalized user interface to integrated collaboration tools. KM and collaboration tools are integrated with business applications. From one “place”, employees can locate the subject matter experts within their enterprises and instantly communicate with them via real-time collaboration tools. With a KM solutions integrated into the e-workplace, employees can better locate and manage the information they need to do their jobs.

A Stated Approach to Intranets

In an intranet, your goal is to harness the power of distributed intranet development while avoiding the peril of disorganization. One way to do this is to stage the development of your intranet from a current disorganized collection of sites to a single focused site. To begin, you must create guidelines that allow the people who contribute to your intranet to work efficiently. Next, you must incentives movement toward the guidelines. Finally, you must continue to allow unofficial nets to breed the innovation you need to drive your official site forward.

The Migration of Intranets and Portals to Knowledge Communities

With few exceptions, today’s intranets represent a 21st century “Wild Wild West” a dumping ground for vast amounts of information that cannot be easily retrieved or relied upon for making informed business decisions. At the same time, portal-mania is in full swing, promising to deliver us from content mayhem.

The Role of Communities of Practice

Many companies are working increasingly across geographic and organizational boundaries, producing products and services through alliances in which different organizations contribute to a single supply change. Straightforward, transactional, relationships are typically not enough to make these virtual alliances work. Trust, relationship, and personal obligation make up the glue that holds these disaggregated virtual enterprises together. Allow us to describe how communities of practice weave people inside and outside an organization together into virtual communities that can provide the underlying glue of successful extended enterprise. Drawing on recent research, case examples, as well as personal experience, this talk provides practical advice on what it takes to make boundary-crossing communities work.

Increasing KM’s ROI

We all recognize that KM is not an end it itself, but rather that KM processes and technology can help achieve business objectives. Using real-world examples, our demo reviews what ROI means and how to calculate it, providing some fresh ideas about how to achieve business objectives using new KM frameworks, models, and technology.

Content & KM: Partners in E-Business Mainstreaming

Content is a fundamental driver for KM, and the successful manipulation of information gives business a competitive edge: 3 C’s – construct, connect, and communicate.

Content Management Tools & Techniques

This track discusses tools, techniques, and solutions used to provide access to critical content within knowledge initiatives. It looks at strategies and solutions for taxonomies, classifications, and categorization as well as case studies that illustrate the tools and techniques in action.

Taxonomies, Lexicons, & Organizing Knowledge

We have processes and can utilize an abundance of tools necessary for taxonomy creation –from defining meaningful categories to using automatic document clustering techniques. We know how to build a carefully crafted content map to enhance the users search experience and to uncover hidden themes in existing corporate data. We can provide real time taxonomy examples from our experience in the software industry.

Social Network Analysis for KM

Social network analysis (SNA) is a multidisciplinary field of study that is being applied in many areas, from studying the emergence of banking communities in Renaissance Florence to mapping the relationships in terrorist networks. In today’s business world, “social capital” is becoming a key indicator of a company’s success, and diagrams produced by social networks analysis tools consistently spark.

Portals

This track is focused on 3 critical phases of successful intranet portal deployment: 1) Developing a strategy that addresses business value and incorporates measurable goals and objectives; 2) Implementing best practices and lessons learned; 3) Long-term strategy planning to keep the portal valuable by enhancing content and adding new services and personalization.

COIN (Community of Interest Network)

For any COIN to transfer knowledge successfully, it must first have well-defined denominations (roles and responsibilities), with specific objectives for each. Longtime knowledge sharing organizations know that of the four main requirements of a KM system-people, process, content, technology-it’s the people component that is most difficult to develop, while simultaneously being the most critical to KM success.

Content Management & KM Track

Managing content is a critical piece of any knowledge initiative, making the strategies relating to content management (CM) vital. This tracks looks at key CM challenges and strategies, best practices, models, techniques, and solutions.

Communities & Collaboration Track

Bringing people and teams together across the globe is more important than ever these days. This track focuses on KM and collaboration strategies for building and supporting communities – communities of practice (COPs), communities of interest (CIOs), and more.

The Strategic Context for Communities of Practice

Communities of practice have to be an integral part of a knowledge strategy. A knowledge strategy without communities lacks the exchange dimension that enables the flow of knowledge across the enterprise. Weaving communities of practice across the organization complements the formal accountability hierarchy and enhances the long-term performance of an organization. This inserts a built-in capability within the organization the generate capability through collaborating and learning.

Design & Usability

Ensuring that information and knowledge can be accessed and used is critical within organizations. This track focuses on intranet design and provides practical examples, frameworks, and strategies. It also looks at how to make intranets usable and accessible to all.

Defining & Enacting Business Processes

In a consulting organization, the capture and reuse of knowledge is often indistinguishable from the issue of defining and documenting business processes. A collection of documents on an intranet is of limited use if the consultants are not provided with a process to follow. Traditional process documents are incomplete because the documents do not encompass the qualities of a reusable process definition: clear assignment of roles and responsibilities, multiple levels of detail (process hierarchy), linkage to the documents that should be used when applying the process, and access to a collaborative work space that “enacts” the rules defined in the process.

Digital Asset Assessment: Process, Strategy, & ROI

We have case studies that chronicle the challenges that the major KM teams encountered while publishing content to the corporate intranet. Most teams begins by defining the process for performing a digital content assessment and content audit as a critical part of the process in order to work toward defining a corporate content architecture to support the executive vision. Next, it is demonstrated how consensus is built around the business goals and objectives for successful intranet content publishing goals and objectives for successful intranet content publishing when different business units are involved. We outline the cultural and technological challenges the KM groups traditionally encounter and concludes with a review of the post-publishing process to measure its effectiveness against the business goals and objectives and to measure the ROI for these digital assessment initiatives against overall employee and company satisfaction.

The Economics of Web Services

Web services promise to forever change the way business applications are brought, and sold, and could completely alter the landscape for IT professionals and solutions providers alike. Part of this profound change will be the emergence of an entirely new set of methods and metrics that govern the economics of business automation.