Here are the available breakout sessions for the 2018 Knowledge Management Conference. The breakout sessions are categorized according to four tracks denoting general topic areas. Attendees are not required to follow any single track and can move between tracks to choose the ideal combination of sessions to suit their needs. Sessions are also blocked by the times offered. You may only attend one session per block, but follow-up materials for all sessions will be provided to conference attendees.
Is Collaboration Without Chaos Possible?
BLOCK 1: Thursday, April 19 10:05–11:05 a.m.
If you’re launching a new community program or want to increase participation in an existing one, then this session is for you. The session will kick off with highlights from APQC’s latest communities research, focusing on tips to draw in members and keep them engaged. APQC Research Lead Lauren Trees will cover common community models, knowing when to approve or retire a community, how to select and empower community leaders, the latest low- and high-tech solutions to enable interaction, and ways to market communities and recognize meaningful contributions. Next, community expert Stan Garfield will discuss common community archetypes and ways to build a positive, productive community culture that fits the target audience and the goals the community wants to achieve. He will also draw on his 20+ years of experience leading communities to share examples of successful community management and sustainment.
Bechtel's knowledge management (KM) program has dramatically accelerated how employees capture, share, and access business-critical information across its global portfolio. In two years, the program went from an initial pilot to an enterprise-wide program that is now integrating KM into the "flow of work." Key to this rapid progress has been an approach that focuses on Bechtel’s greatest asset—it’s people. Since its launch, Bechtel's KM strategy has relied heavily on industry best practices, internal lessons learned, and organizational behavior change theory to implement a model that manages the “people side of change” to normalize KM across the organization. This session outlines the key challenges Bechtel faced and the lessons learned along this journey. The session will cover 20+ tactics that Bechtel used that attendees can immediately apply in their own work.
providing a foundational baseline of knowledge each site has to have to successfully operate in a serialized state.
While these were great wins, the company still needed a measurement that would ensure the knowledge was absorbed and full embraced by each site. But how do you measure behavior and "ownership" of knowledge when you don't have all the automated tools? See the tool (inspired by a combination of the DuPont Bradley Safety Curve and APQC's KM Maturity assessment) that was created to both motivate and enable the KM team to tackle those obstacles to keep moving forward.
Find out how other KM leaders are planning and using advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive computing and chatbots, digital assistants, big data and knowledge analytics, natural language processing, machine learning, and robotic process automation. Learn from their challenges and journeys, and come ready to ask your own questions.
Block 2: Thursday, April 19 1:30–2:30 p.m.
An integral part of the knowledge management program at MSA is its engineering communities of practice. To foster collaboration and innovative thinking across the engineering design centers globally, a historic event was created: a global design summit. The call to action was, "It takes just one idea to save a life, what's yours?" Learn how MSA tapped into its associates' need to fulfill its mission statement, which in turn created a plethora of innovative ideas for potential new products. You will also learn how the company bridged the communication gap between four different cultures to present top ideas to its global leadership council. Join this discussion and learn more about what drives people to take action.
Design thinking has recently gained great popularity, partly because of proselytizing by top design firms such as IDEO. An important element in such thinking is empathy with the client. IDEO and its imitators uncover the unarticulated needs of clients through an ethnographic process of observation and interviews. Professor Dorothy Leonard has written extensively about that process. However, in recent research, she has identified additional ways of getting inside the clients’ minds. In this session she will first briefly outline those methods and then invite participants to share their own experiences and discuss how we could all create better user experiences by adopting one or more of the methods.
As the volume of content inside organizations grows, it has become increasingly challenging to organize, find, and extract value from enterprise data and information. Search engines have improved, but even the best ones cannot fully understand context or pick out additional topics that would be most relevant. Auto-classification capabilities provide a practical solution to some of these problems—and one that is within reach for most organizations. These tools help extend traditional KM taxonomy into deeper content enrichment and concept relationship modeling in order to provide more accurate search results and help people find and explore related material. When implemented effectively, auto-classification also enables an organization to scale the size and scope of its content repositories in a resource-efficient manner.
This session will use case examples to show the promise of auto-classification approaches, the practical challenges to be faced, and critical success factors in fully realizing the benefits. The presenters will also provide attendees with an approach for diagnosing their current state, developing a business case for auto-classification, and developing an implementation roadmap.
Anticipatory knowledge delivery is about providing digital assistance to knowledge workers to anticipate staff's information and process needs and actually help them by delivering targeted guidance, process prompts, role onboarding aids, and content recommendations based on key event triggers and user profiles. The MITRE Corporation will discuss the multi-year initiative launched to provide these capabilities to its workforce. . Based on experiences from multiple use cases, the MITRE team will share the maturity of the various underlying technologies and approaches, the amount of effort to implement, the components to consider in anticipatory knowledge delivery campaigns, and the user feedback and use metrics collected. They will share steps on how to get started to better knowledge provision for your user base.
Block 3: Thursday, April 19 2:50–3:50 p.m.
Can you have collaboration without chaos? That was the question that kept the leadership and the KM champions at IFC's FIG (Financial Institutions Group) awake at night. As one of IFC's largest business and revenue-generating units, FIG has a wealth of experience, best practices and expertise - and high numbers of staff who are hungry for it. But how do you keep key knowledge flowing across time zones and boundaries? When collaboration first came to IFC in 2011, FIG was overjoyed. Yet four years later the team realized that after the initial surge of enthusiasm, the usage remained low and the system simply failed to do the job. Fast forward some years and the FIG KM embarked on a collaboration project with IT and an external vendor to design a platform that could make life easier and deliver what staff needed. Taking their learnings from the first go around, they knew the staff had to feel confident that all content reflected best practice and was endorsed by the product or regional leads, there was governance and accountability, and there was proper tagging and metadata to allow for accurate and relevant search. This has helped them achieve measurable results that will be shared during this session.
How does your KM program compare with others? Are you curious about how other KM initiatives are staffed, how much they spend, and what kind of services they provide to their organizations? Join us to learn the results of APQC’s KM benchmarks and metrics research. You’ll find out how your KM program measures up and the decisions and investments most likely to set you up for future success. We’ll also discuss how these metrics align with APQC’s KM Levels of Maturity. You’ll learn why organizations are benchmarking their KM maturity and performance, what they are doing with the data, and how the data is helping them advance KM in their organizations.
Areas within Merck Manufacturing have been on a well-documented KM journey for several years. This session will focus on the more recent after action review (AAR) capability developed by Merck’s Manufacturing KM Center of Excellence. This successful AAR program has certified over 30 AAR practitioners who have generated more than 1,000 lessons to date, and has been applied to scenarios with Board of Director visibility. This presentation will highlight the program goals and accomplishments over its three year history. Thought models, such as the 'life of a lesson'; the process for AAR Practitioner Certification; the tactics to create a 'safe to speak up' environment; and the roadmap for the AAR journey undertaken at Merck will be shared. Key metrics and outcomes will be summarized, followed by learnings and recommendations from the journey.
The potential value of data, information, and knowledge is only realized when it gets used. With the ever increasing volume and complexity of data and information, the means of easily discovering, analyzing, and applying all three is becoming even more critical. With the recent advancements that have been made in speech recognition, automated translation, natural language processing, machine learning, and conversational intelligence. Combine that with a low barrier to entry and the use of bots and machine intelligence, and this becomes a very attractive opportunity. During the session we will share some examples of how people are using bots, show how to unlock the potential of data using machine intelligence, and demonstrate how easy it is to build your own bot.
Block 4: Friday, April 20 9:35–10:20 a.m.
lessons learned regarding the overall evaluation process.
Knowledge management strategies in any organization are exceptionally complex. In pharmaceutical R&D, KM can be a monster. Consider unique business needs, the cross-functional nature of R&D, a multi-discipline, multi-generational workforce with up to half ready to retire in five years. All factors align to create an urgent need for a multi-faceted, integrated, hands-on approach to capturing, managing, sharing, and leveraging valuable knowledge. This session will describe the strategy, approach, successes, lessons learned, and future plans for KM methods, and best practices at AbbVie. One specific highlight will be how they helped established, "old-school" professionals realize the business value of "millennial" social collaboration tools, transforming a culture to be more connected and share knowledge more effectively. Participants will learn the business value of implementing social collaboration strategies, key tools to facilitate this process, and how a core team of committed - almost evangelical - change agents can drive culture and engagement as part of the KM roadmap.
HondaWiki was launched mid-2017 to create collaboration by not only associates who work in the same building or perform the same function, but rather encourage collaboration at a global level within the organization. Ultimately, this would reduce time spent searching for information and references, improve best practice development and adoption in various companies, and improve networking across divisions. Their key strength for early adoption was the incorporation of the wiki into a SharePoint platform where associates were already used to navigating as part of their daily jobs. This platform also allowed Honda to reduce expenses and use an already existing single-sign on approach. To date, they have already seen great strides in reducing the learning curves for new and transferring associates. This session will detail how this wiki was established, the results achieved to date, and the pros and cons of using SharePoint for a company wiki.
As we consider all the changes the future will bring, we often put people into two camps: (naïve) optimists vs. (doomsday) pessimists. But the implications are much more nuanced, aren’t they? The same advance can seem like a blessing or a nightmare, depending on your point of view. And some innovations may truly excite us while, at the same time, creating justifiable fear. Join futurist Nancy Giordano to explore the future in four dimensions, map how you’re feeling about what is happening, and then use this understanding to see what you are uniquely motivated to learn, do, and/or create as a result. This session and the framework it introduces may also give you a new lens to think about Nancy’s closing keynote later in the day.
Block 5: Friday, April 20 10:40–11:40 a.m.
A community of practice is like a home for a company or organization. Some are under construction, some are well built but need an upgrade, some are being remodeled, and some are well put together with beautiful fixtures and decorations. We are generally only inclined to invite outsiders into our homes when they are presentable. Similarly with communities of practice, there are times when our house should remain private, and times when we open the doors for outsiders to come in. World Vision has been walking this journey for the past several years, moving some of its CoPs from purely internal, company-only CoPs, to include external peers. World Vision will provide an interactive session using dialogic methods to share about its CoP journey and how external community membership became a leadership priority and a technical necessity. The team will share about the tools used, the challenges faced, and the lessons learned – and what they would do differently if we could start again. Session participants will work together to outline criteria to evaluate community readiness, as well as approaches for external community engagement.
Deloitte is currently in the process of implementing a new people-to-people tool in the Nordics - across five geographies and five service lines. As this is a challenge which requires advanced change management skills, this session will share the dos and the don'ts, specifically around clarifying the purpose, the importance of leadership commitment and involvement, having a clear and structured process, knowing the functionality of the technical tool, training and identifying super users, communicating and promoting the value, and following up and managing the tool. This session will also show how to deal with the cultural differences between the Nordic countries, because the cultural gap is bigger than you think.
As the oldest continuously running architecture firm in the country, Shepley Bullfinch is no stranger to knowledge transfer, however, many of our practices were undocumented, and didn't take advantage of modern technology to multiply the effect. In 2016, Shepley Bulfinch began to experiment with how to identify some simple and effective processes for identifying, collecting, and transferring tacit knowledge between our architects. As a result, they were able to streamline and systematize the process used to transfer tacit knowledge from experts to nextperts and novices. They learned a lot about what worked, what didn't, and developed new techniques to drastically reduce the time and effort required to identify and transfer knowledge, and how to achieve group knowledge transfer with minimal prior preparation. This session will be telling the story of their learning journey, our pivot toward smaller interactions, and the strategies and tactics we found to be most successful.