24 hours at KM World 2008

I am writing this on the plane returning from KM World 2008.  I was at the very first KM World conference, which I’m pretty sure was in October 1998, back when you could go to a conference on Knowledge Management pretty much every month of the year if you wanted to, so it was pretty cool to see how strong this event has remained for the past 10 years.  I enjoyed re-connecting with colleagues I’ve known for a very long time.  One of the most interesting features of this year’s conference on Knowledge Management was the focus and interest in SharePoint.

There were enough presentations specifically on SharePoint that it was featured in the conference program.  In addition, on Friday, there was all-day SharePoint seminar, another indication of the incredible interest in this product.  I was given one of the worst possible time slots in which to deliver my talk, “Secrets of Successful Portal (SharePoint) Implementations” (which is posted on my web site, along with supplemental notes and examples), at the very end of a very long first day, just before the free beer.  One thing I’ve learned about conferences is that you don’t want to be the only thing keeping people from the beer!  Moreover, I flew to San Jose from Washington on a 6 am flight and by the time I gave my talk, it was actually 7:15 pm on my body clock and I was pretty exhausted.  I was shocked when close to 100 people showed up and when I challenged the group to ask me a lot of questions so that I’d stay awake and they would stay engaged, they exceeded my expectations and we had a lively dialogue, which was much more fun for me than “death by PowerPoint” (not that I would ever do that, of course).

The thing that makes KM World a special place to talk about SharePoint is that given the main subject of the event – knowledge management - everyone there “gets it.”  They know that successful portal solutions are less about technology and much more about people and organizations and culture and they know that the holy grail of successful portals is measureable business results.  They are also pre-disposed to share their best ideas so that they can get the best from not just the conference speakers, but also from the other attendees who often have even more relevant contributions to share.  “KM people” are consummate networkers who steal shamelessly (but with attribution, of course) so we spent our time sharing what worked and what didn’t in terms of engaging end users rather than talking about technical “how to’s.”  
It seemed like everyone shared many of the basic challenges (and suggested solutions), that I addressed in my talk, including (but definitely not limited to):

• Helping users understand the paradigm shift from folders to metadata (the “winning” audience member shared his tale of a 38-folder deep hierarchy that he found on a shared drive)
• Overcoming cultural resistance to sharing “my” content
• Engaging leaders to model information management best practices such as sending links to documents instead of attachments in e-mail
• Delivering user training in small “just in time” modules
• Targeting early adopters with broad reach in the organization, and most importantly,
• Understanding and documenting the business value proposition for collaboration.

I gave out a lot of business cards so I hope that some of the conference attendees, many of whom had great experiences to share, find their way to this blog so that they can add some of their insights to mine.  If they get me via e-mail, I’ll share their ideas here (assuming they give me permission, of course).