KM World Trip Report

I just sent my trip report from KM World to my team at work, and thought I'd share. Enjoy...

We recently attended KM World and Intranets Conference in Santa Clara.

We presented in a session called "Grass Roots Intranets in a Corporate World."

We all took pages of notes, but rather than have you read all of that, we digested everything into the top things we learned (or already knew and agree with). Enjoy.

1. Executive sponsorship a must. For any project that spans several groups (especially divisions), having managers support efforts is critical. Many attendees commented that lack of executive support often led to failed projects.

2. Governance must be distributed to team members, and made part of review objectives. Those who are responsible for creating, updating, and maintaining information have to have some stake in the success of the shared resource. This is best achieved by giving ownership of the project to everyone at some level.

3. Search is key. By its nature, diverse content can’t exist everywhere someone would first think to look. Search has to be pervasive, easy, accurate, and powerful.

4. The shared vision of a successful Intranet model revolved around having multiple views (personal, group, functional, location, corp). SharePoint is one of many tools that create a “digital dashboard” for employees.

5. Intranets are all about information flows, not just posting content. Intranets shouldn’t be thought of as “web sites,” but rather as a part of a larger content management/knowledge-information management system.

6. A good Intranet will “give people answers, not documents.” It’s not about technology, that’s only a small part of it.

7. A good intranet content strategy revolves around three things: Business requirements, Information architecture, and Metadata.

8. Process mapping can help identify unmet needs. Most solutions start with looking at as-is processes, identifying knowledge needed at specific points and filling the gaps. Our team is focused on learning how information flow works, understanding the pain points of employees, and working to create tools to meet those needs.

9. The success of a portal can be measured by connecting people to content, connecting people to people, connecting people to experts. Scorecard should be aligned with key performance indicators. Tools should reduce operational costs, improve revenue, improve cycle times, reduce risk of litigation and improve compliance.

10. A good Knowledge Management strategy can be cost-effective and meets organization goals: It can:
• Drive Innovation through better collaboration
• Capture and retain Organization Memory
• Reduce duplication of effort
• Decrease time to market

11. What are typical management expectations of portal?
A. This is a one time investment
B. We would recover costs immediately
C. We would be able to attribute increased revenues
D. Customer sat would increase immediately
What is the reality?
A. Owning and maintaining a portal is an ongoing investment
B. Difficult to calculate ROI
C. Customers have to be retrained before satisfied

12. A good Intranet can be designed to enhance collaboration
• Shared vision and shared tools can lead to shared ways of working
• Flexible, targeted real-time communication helps: Top down, bottom up, horizontal, one-to-many, one to some.
• Effectiveness and productivity through appropriate standardization and centralization
• Consistent and transparent communication between management and employees can build trust
• In defining the user architecture and navigation, the key determiner is his/her perception of the corporation. Each person must see how they fit in and be able to relate what they do to the big picture. The portal can help that.
• “When you have the same look and feel, people are more open, more sharing, more innovating and that is tremendous.”

13. Lots of things need to be investigated, discussed, and decided when making International portal key decisions:
• Role of HQ vs subs
• How people and teams are defined (roles, responsibilities, rights)
• Scopes of different sites (country, biz, team, Communities of Practice)
• Standardization: tools, graphic guidelines, processes, content standards, language
• Virtual teams, meetings, and project spaces play and even stronger role internationally. Intranet plays key role in handling issues with language, structure, etc.
• Structure e-meetings to make them short, efficient, and participatory
• Facilitating participation for non-native speakers
• Balancing different meeting and communication behaviors
• Setting up project workspaces for teams, centralization vs. decentralization, languages/translation policies, common corp language