Be Part Of A Webinar Discussion On Enterprise Knowledge Management

I can discuss various strategic Enterprise Knowledge Management topics including risk management and long-term strategic planning for growth of knowledge resources at large companies.  The level of detail I can go into these topics just depends on the required length of the webinar.  I intend to include the following talking points in my webinar:

1. What is Enterprise Knowledge Management(EKM)?  (an IEEE-accepted definition)

2. Advantages of a successful EKM strategy and risk management notes for EKM shortfalls.

3. Computing the budget for development and implementation of an EKM strategy.

4. Fostering an EKM-friendly environment for sustained EKM budget ROI, including the politics of information management wtihin an organization.

I would propose two different topics:

Topic One: Knowledge management Q & A sounding board, hitting the top ten questions leading the knowledge management space. 

Such top questions:

1. What is knowledge management?
2. What silos within my company are affected?
3. What internal assets are affected by knowledge management?
4. What external communities are affected by knowledge management?
5. What are the different benefits between internal knowledge management and exposing my data to the marketplace?
6. What are reasonable budgets to allocate?
7. How do I prove an ROI model for executive stakeholders?
8. How do I identify points of "knowledge failure" within my company?
9. What policies do I need to have in place for knowledge management?
10. Where are can I find out more about the right tools and knowledge?

Topic Two: revolves around the use of knowledge management as a communication tool and how it can be leveraged as a promotion channel both internally and externally. This goes into the mindset of knowing how different points of information across an organization can be used to do things such as damage control, enhance competitive intelligence, and reduce project development timeframes.

1. What is knowledge management?
2. Why would I encourage knowledge management across silos?
3. Why does internal data need to be examined as an external promotion tool?
4. Has our group enabled employees to share information easily, effectively and without hurdles?
5. How can we identify internal and external supporters with technical understanding?
6. How does knowledge management affect our online brand and reputation?
7. How does knowledge management aid our business development?
8. How does knowledge management secure our stakeholders?

Currently IP (patents, trademarks, and copyright) have strayed so far from what the founding fathers intended that many people have become hostile to all forms of IP.

This is certainly understandable, especially since the abuses tend to be increasing rather than decreasing! You can see the result in the contempt some nations show for US IP law!

However, IP, when administered properly, can be extremely important. For most of us, finding the next "killer app" without IP protection would invite theft by better financed, larger competitors! We can see that in the many "patent trolls" now, where investors treat "ripping off" others as a business strategy!

I propose a webinar with an inventor-oriented IP professional (I am the only one I know of in the US, but there are many in other countries), a "standard" US IP professional (wh1at is often called "large entity" IP), and several business/technology people.

The purpose of the webinar would be to:

1. educate on the present system (which does have some advantages, though IMO has much more compelling disadvantages),

2. educate on IP as intended by the founding fathers (which the Obama administration may be tending toward), and

3. Examine the business/technical implications of each.

        There is a clear need to simplify Enterprise Knowledge Management to

- Encourage Expression of Ideas (Wiki/Blog/Twitter/Facebook culture)

- Nurture Creation Articles/Artifacts (importance creative commons, open source)

- Transform Tacit learning to Explicit Documentation (surveys, feedbacks and indexing)

- Enable Protection of Knowledge Assets (Access, Entitlements and Rights Management)

    I am Proposing a Webinar on a Practical Approach to build commodity Private Cloud Infrastructure to host rich set of Open source Knowledge Managment tools using Sun/Intel Platforms.

This type of Infrastructure helps the user to redefine the Role of Enterprise Knowledge Management.

The relavance of Enterprise Portals (SAP, BEA,Java, Oracle, MS-SharePoint) in the wake of dynamic dashboards, gadgets, widgets and API's .

Cloud Infrastructure software will help us scale well with KM tasks like

- Distributed indexing

- Faster distributed Search

- Federated/parameterized Data Minig/Business intelligence

with minimal additional efforts

We propose a webinar that will be jointly hosted by two presenters:

Guy Dickinson, owner and founder of Participo, developers of social software and consultants with a crack team of technical, design and education experts delivering knowledge management solutions for corporate clients; and

Eric Priezkalns, Director of Revenue Protect, a revenue management consultancy that often works hands-on with implementing knowledge management for small teams that are geographically distributed and highly mobile.

Enterprise Knowledge Management may be implemented in very static environments, staffed by permanent people working from a small number of fixed locations. However, there are very many other small-to-medium businesses in the service sector that need good EKM to support staff as they work at customer locations or whilst on the road.  Furthermore, these smaller businesses often find themselves running teams and projects which involve a blend of permanent employees, temporary contractors, outsourced staff and client representatives.  Where skill and knowledge is at a premium, EKM can be hardest to deliver, but if delivered successfully, it adds the greatest benefits.

The biggest issue with knowledge management is the the very term ‘management’. It is better to think in terms of knowledge ‘enablement’. It is a significant distinction; it changes perspectives of how tools can positively (and negatively) shape people’s behavior. We will explore our vision of how to enable distributed teams to share knowledge and be empowered by it.

Knowledge is key in the professional service sector; the greatest differentiator is the expertise and knowledge of its people. How do you effectively utilize technology to manage knowledge amongst these teams? How do you share and work with people who sit outside of the business? This webinar will discuss the practical challenges from both a technological and social perspective.

The webinar will draw upon our real-world experiences. Guy has used, deployed, customized and built a multitude of software tools for use within large and small teams in globally dispersed companies. Eric has built new teams and turned around failing teams, and the tools to utilize information often plays a vital part in both processes. We have enjoyed wild success and the occasional failure, which has helped us build a pragmatic perspective on the approaches and tools that result in effective knowledge sharing. We also have a good handle on how to avoid common EKM mistakes.

The webinar would be ordered as follows:

1. Introductions
2. Defining distributed teams 1 – Distribution by geography and teams that have members which cut across organizations
3. Defining distributed teams 2 – The need for Enterprise Knowledge Enablement for distributed teams
4. Defining distributed teams 3 – Real-life examples of distributed teams and the problems they face
5. The Friction Factor 1 – Why traditional KM software never gets used
6. The Friction Factor 2 – Why real-life KM often fails to meet the needs of distributed teams (organizational barriers, administration and access rights, educational and cultural overheads, supporting mobility)
7. Project Communication 1 – Co-ordination vs. Collaboration; why projects succeed (and why they fail)
8. Project Communication 2 – Tools you can use; hosted project management software (case study)
9. Project communication 3 – Ambient awareness; simple ways to keep distant teams subtly but effectively connected
10. Getting Traction 1 – Demonstrating and measuring the benefits generated by tools, even on short projects
11. Getting Traction 2 – The 9x as good problem; why email still dominates team communication
12. Getting Traction 3 – Motivating people from different backgrounds to make the most of tools, and overcoming resistance to their use
13. Knowledge Enablement 1 – Turning the team’s EKM into one of the deliverables received by customers
14. Knowledge Enablement 2 – Pages and People – capturing and retrieving ‘organizational memory’ using wikis
15. Knowledge Enablement 3 – Wiki software (leading apps, strategies for implementation)
16. Knowledge Enablement 4 – Software for open conversations (case study)
17. Lessons Learnt: Why you don’t need FaceBook – avoiding IT fashion trends
18. Summary

Webinar Description:

Corporate employees hold large amounts of important and interesting data in their heads, but most knowledge management tools fail to extract that knowledge.  From remote workers to marketing technology to customer service touchpoints, the need for a company to communicate has never been greater, and the opportunity to leverage internal expertise has never been easier.

New user-friendly technologies and an increasingly digitial backbone has made it easier for divisions, especially recruiting, marketing, and customer service, to implement large solutions without key Information Technology support.  Outside services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be accessed outside of the firewall or from mobile devices, and these factors are diminishing the cutting edge importance of the IT division.  How do you recapture the mojo?

Training.  The rigor of IT training applied to new marketing and social media tools gives information systems departments the ability to reconnect and reconfigure conversations towards business goals.  This includes connecting siloed departments, tracking internal conversations, and providing key contacts with proper security training.  The use of social networks in and outside the corporation has to be harnessed for sales, marketing, public relations, and only the information technology department has the ability to connect those different divisions.

From making use of API's and RSS feeds to providing user-based training on setting up approved social media profiles, IT is the logical place to run and manage the communication infrastructure.  Broadcasting the correct data to the outside world using search engine marketing and poroper url infrastructure is a job for IT, and the impact can significantly boost profiles for salespeople, marketers, and executives.  Additionally, high tech internal systems only work when they are used properly.  Without training and proper support, end-users reach outside the company to public social networks for information.  This can yield benefits, but it also has dangers, and IT doesn't have resources to monitor all internal and external sites. 

Using the strength of the training skills inside most IT departments, this webinar discusses best practices on how to implement and leverage internal resources for external gain, as well as laying a groundwork for once again making information technology an internal center for innovation.   

Objectives:

• Learn what employees are currently doing to share information
• Gain a hands-on understanding of the most popular social media tools (as used by employees)
• Learn how to implement results-based communication projects inside the corporation.
• Learn  internal content strategies to improve SEO and conversion of website visitors.
• Learn internal networking strategies to improve overall skill level.
• Learn cost-effective tools for creating screenshot and video training.

Webinar Examples:

1. Video training clips of sales strategies boosted sales 34% for a retail store, creating a $10 million impact on bottom line from just six products.
2. Instant mobile communication between corporate offices, training and distributors in the field crushed the launch of a competitor's multi-million dollar marketing campaign within hours. 
3.  A namechange left a company struggling to be found online. Use of internal links on company website boosted online profiles for sales agents, making it easier for customers to find their contacts. 

This webinar may sound like its social media, but it's internal communication.  The goal is to show how skills learned from social media sites can be applied to processes within the corporation.

EKM has undergone a tectonic shift in the past ten years. No more are the days of a single, monolithic EKM system into which all communication and collaboration needs must be wrangled.  We're now in an era in which EKM consists of a patchwork of smaller, situation-specific systems that serve the individualized needs of teams in the enterprise.  So if effective EKM can be considered the toolset required by teams to amplify their efforts and ensure effective collaboration, what does that ideal toolset look like?  

The applications used now are wikis, blogs, project management applications, discussion forums, issue tracking and real-time twitter-like collaboration systems. Open Source provides a fertile body of applications from which to draw however it's been notoriously difficult to work with and typically requires a significant time investment from IT in order to install and maintain.  What if it were possible to have access to the diverse toolset afforded by Open Source without all the associated headaches?

In this webinar Sean will give both a strategic overview as well as a tactical demonstration of how virtual appliances have changed the equation and are bridging the gap and making a sea of valuable Open Source applications accessible to new, non-technical audiences. And with the advent of virtualization and cloud computing technologies users at the edge (the folks in departmental teams in the enterprise) now have the ability to solve their own infrastructure needs without requiring IT intervention. Between on-site virtualized deployments and private, remotely-hosted cloud deployments, virtual appliances push control to the edge and give teams on-demand, affordable & ready-to-use tools they need to address their EKM infrastructure needs.

Disclosure: Sean is co-founder of JumpBox, Inc and will be using JumpBox virtual appliances in his demonstration. 

Social media technology is rewriting the rules of knowledge management, and corporate information professionals hold the pen. But for any KM professional or information manager charged with understanding how these new technologies integrate with content and knowledge management initiatives, the challenge remains the same. Where do we begin? How do we execute? How do we achieve ROI?

With social technologies becoming more prevalent, traditional approaches used to manage content are no longer sufficient. This webinar session will explain how social knowledge networks combine traditional knowledge management with collective information and why its implementation will be important for all businesses moving into the next generation of documentation.

In the webinar, you'll gain insight into the biggest challenges on information managers minds, and learn solutions for handling them, including:

• The evolution of enterprise KM and Web 2.0
• How to kick-off your enterprise’s social strategy
• The do's and don'ts of implementing a social knowledge network
• Hidden pitfalls and unrealized benefits of going social
• Crafting a success plan with ROI

Phil Green

CTO, Inmagic

http://inmagicinc.blogspot.com/

The Challenge: There are a number of knowledge challenges for mid-market organizations: data, information and knowledge are elements on a continuum – but they are not the same; paradoxically, knowledge is inherently personal and social at the same time; technology enables organizations to manage information and knowledge in ways not previously available – similar to how advanced telescopes have transformed astronomy. Mid-market companies have opportunities to leverage their knowledge in many ways – inside and outside of their organizations. They face unique challenges not shared by larger enterprises.

A working definition: Knowledge Management (KM) is achieved through an organization’s management of its knowledge strategies, knowledge processes, and the organizational context in which knowledge exists and thrives. EKM practices lead to the optimal use of an organization’s knowledge assets.

Proposed Webinars: We have material to produce any or all of the following number of webinars on knowledge management topics – all specifically aimed at mid-market companies.

Enterprise Knowledge Management – The Basics
• EKM Fundamentals and definitions
• The four schools of thought driving knowledge management
• Understanding knowledge assets – intellectual capital; human capital; structural capital; and relationship/social capital
• A Broader EKM Framework
• The link between EKM initiatives and innovation (technology, process and service innovation)
• Developing knowledge strategies for mid-market organizations and aligning knowledge strategies with business strategies; i.e. making 'knowledge' a key element of your business strategy
• Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

A Retrospective Look at EKM Initiatives Across Mid-Market Organizations
• Technologies and tools used to support EKM (with an emphasis on tools from Sun and Intel)
• Intranets, Extranets and Portals – a myriad of opportunities?
• Knowledge-based business models
• Gaps in mid-market implementations

EKM Issues that all entrepreneurs and senior managers need to deal with
• Knowledge leadership and governance
• Knowledge (KM) strategies
• Systems to support knowledge management
• Knowledge continuity / retention
• Metrics for mesuring EKM initiatives - driving ROI

The EKM tool kit – tools for understanding, sharing and building knowledge in your organization
• Knowledge mapping
• Knowledge audits
• Knowledge engineering
• Story telling
• Specific hardware and software tools offered by Sun and Intel and how they contribute to EKM in mid-market organizations

Knowledge Organization Frameworks (KoF)
• Understanding issues in organizing knowledge artefacts
• Understanding Knowledge Organization Frameworks (classification schemes, subject headings, taxonomies, ontologies, controlled vocabularies, folksonomies, etc.)
• Social tagging strategies
• KoF and Search

Enterprise Search tools for mid-market organizations
• Defining "findability"
• Some case studies from mid-market companies
• Taking enterprise search out of the box (i.e. how can search really help KM?)

Getting Collaboration Right
• From content and collection to context and collaboration
• Web 2.0 and its impact on long-standing EKM problems
• An ever expanding toolkit for collaboration
• Creating a culture of collaboration

Social Networks, Knowledge Networks and Expertise Networks (inside and outside the organization)
• Social networks and networking
• Social media
• Knowledge networks
• Expertise networks and expertise networking

Knowledge and Organizational Learning
• Organizational learning
• Learning organizations
• Supporting learning in mid-market companies

EKM – future / advanced topics
• Web services
• Knowledge media / social media
• Semantic web technologies
• Knowledge markets
• Knowledge pattern recognition
• Knowledge optimization
• Knowledge fitness
• Knowledge mastery

The Seminar Leader: As Chief Knowledge Officer for a large law firm, Joel Alleyne developed and implemented a number of knowledge strategies – technical, organizational and process. As an invited speaker and conference chairperson / organizer, Joel has spoken about EKM in San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Orlando and Toronto. Last October (2008), Joel ran a one-day master class in EKM in Chicago.

The following outline is a revised and updated version of a presentation I have delivered to select private CXO, IT and storage admin audiences since 2007. Technology is an important piece of the KM puzzle, but ultimately personnel and political issues can undermine or derail even the best KM initiative. Learn how to overcome the challenges and exploit the opportunities of KM by eliminating the gaps and overlaps in your KM strategy. Leave with a few practical considerations for your next KM project.  A 45-60 minute, high-impact, easy-to-follow, memorable presentation with or without Q&A.

I. Knowledge is Power

II. Those Who Have the Knowledge Have the Power

III. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

IV. Who should be responsible? Who should be in control?

• It is IT or IM/KM? It depends on who you ask.
• Operation Chaos
• Two groups, one goal. Square peg, round hole.

V. The gap and the overlap: Aligning IT and Business

• The Overlap: find and eliminate redundancies
  • Personnel
  • Policymaking
  • Applications
  • Workflows/Collaboration
  • Investments
• The Gap: seek and demand cooperation
  
  • Expertise
  • Communication
  • Policy-sharing
  • Access Control
  • Resource-sharing

VI. Other strategic and tactical considerations

• Technogical (perhaps briefly discuss how Intel and Sun address some of these)
  
  • Interoperability
  • Storability
  • Findability
  • Usability
  • Manageability
  • Adapta bility
  • Affordability
• Personnel
  • Turf politics
  • Core competencies
  • Roles and Responsibilities
  • Communication
  • Buy-In

VII.  Solve the "people problem" before it undermines your IT and KM investments