I’m a big fan of workshops for several reasons:

Value

They provide maximum impact at minimal cost to the client. I’m the first to recognize that not every organization needs, or can afford, a lengthy engagement where a team of consultants are embedded on a client site.

Impact

They provide a direct impact opportunity to point an organization in the right direction and align goals. Many of the organizations with whom we work possess the expert, conscientious, “doers” in house, and only need a limited engagement workshop to ensure they’re leveraging our experience and best practices.

Alignment

They ensure an aligned understanding and vision for goals, actions, and potential returns. The core act of getting the right people in the room is incredibly powerful. Having all voices heard and creating a shared roadmap to success powers the overall initiative and allows everyone to know each other more directly, which in turn leads to greater collaboration.

Regardless of the subject matter around which we’re running a workshop, from Agile Strategy, to Taxonomy Design, to Action Oriented Search, to KM Roadmapping we focus our workshops around providing the utmost value, impact, and alignment.

To that end, we focus our workshops to have the following characteristics:

Balanced Participation

As superhero facilitators, our mission is to ensure that all voices are heard, and that we respectfully inject our own experience and recommendations into the culture of the organization. Though we may be flying in to save the day, that doesn’t mean we’re talking more or louder than anyone else. Our role is to empower and guide the discussion.

Practical Best Practices

Our role is not to “vanquish the villain,” but to empower the organization with the approach and best practices to own that task. To that end, providing real world stories of success and failure from the hundreds of organizations with whom we’ve worked provides the practical context necessary to think workshop in real terms.

Actionable Results

One of the most critical keys to a successful workshop is ensuring that, at its conclusion, there are clear deliverables and next steps. There are many who can complete a workshop and leave people feeling good. That’s not enough. A truly impactful workshop will have clear actions, deadlines, and an accompanying view to the future (or roadmap) as a product.

Ownership

Along with those actions and deadlines, each workshop should help to identify the internal heroes and protagonists of the organization who can help to progress the roadmap.

Fun and Energy

At times I think our greatest superpower of all is infusing an organization with the excitement and energy to make real progress to address their challenges. This is possible because we truly believe in what we do and love helping organizations understand and internalize the value that could be realized if they align to address their challenges and goals.

Are you looking up in the sky for your Agile KM Superhero? Send a signal to info@enterprise-knowledge.com and we’ll answer the call.

Workshop Brochures

The post Making Workshops Work appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

EK assists government program and IT leaders in the strategy, design, and implementation of Knowledge and Information Management systems, leveraging Agile approaches to facilitate all aspects of our work. Staffed by a diverse group of senior consultants with decades of experience across the public and private sectors, EK’s mission is to form true partnerships with our clients, listening and collaborating to create tailored, practical, and results-oriented solutions that enable them to thrive and adapt to changing needs.  EK is already a longstanding and trusted partner to federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies.

Since being founded in 2013, EK has applied its expertise in strategy, design, and development of Knowledge and Information Management systems, with proven approaches for Taxonomy Design, Brand and Content Strategy, Change Management and Communication, and Agile Transformation and Facilitation for a range of federal agencies, nonprofits, and commercial organizations.  

The GSA contract allows Federal customers to easily and efficiently purchase the wide range of Agile Knowledge and Information Management IT services offered by EK. The GSA establishes long-term, government-wide contracts with vendors to streamline and standardize the process of procuring products and services for the entire Federal government. EK’s inclusion as a GSA Schedule 70 vendor enables all Federal government agencies to obtain Agile support, Knowledge Management consulting, and Information Technology services at approved pricing and with license terms from a trusted vetted consultancy.

“EK is pleased to make our Agile, Knowledge Management, and Information Management services available to government agencies through the GSA Schedule,” said Zach Wahl, President and CEO of EK. “This provides another avenue by which we will be able to support the Federal government with our unmatched experience and capabilities.”

In awarding EK a GSA Schedule 70 contract, the Federal government has determined that EK is recognized as a preferred vendor that is fully authorized to conduct business directly with Federal government agencies.

Federal, State, and local agencies can obtain information about EK GSA Schedule 70 contract services on the GSA Advantage web site at: www.gsaadvantage.gov (Contract Number: GS-35F-486DA) or by contacting EK directly at 571-403-1109.

About Enterprise Knowledge

Enterprise Knowledge (EK) is a services firm that integrates Knowledge Management, Information Management, Information Technology, and Agile Approaches to deliver comprehensive solutions.  Our mission is to form true partnerships with our clients, listening and collaborating to create tailored, practical, and results-oriented solutions that enable them to thrive and adapt to changing needs.

Our core services include strategy, design, and development of Knowledge and Information Management systems, with proven approaches for Taxonomy Design, Project Strategy and Road Mapping, Brand and Content Strategy, Change Management and Communication, and Agile Transformation and Facilitation.  At the heart of these services, we always focus on working alongside our clients to understand their needs, ensuring we can provide practical and achievable solutions on an iterative, ongoing basis.

The post EK Awarded Information Technology Schedule 70 Contract appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

While many IT businesses want to go agile, many of them do not know where to start. Others come to us after a failed agile transformation in which a development team was sent to a Certified ScrumMaster training and told they were agile without being armed with the practical tools to succeed. Indeed, many of our clients do not realize they may need to change their organization design, SDLC processes, or technology infrastructure to maximize success in their agile transformation.

In order to help our clients get started with agile quickly and understand underlying changes that may need to happen for them to support an agile environment, we created an Agile Design Workshop. The overarching goal of this workshop is to create a strategy and plan to maximize our clients’ investments in agile.

The advantages of a workshop methodology for agile implementations are threefold. First, the workshop is a low-risk, low-cost way for business leaders to understand what it takes to be agile and create an actionable set of next steps to continue on their agile journey in a smart, sustainable way. Each organization or team will need to take slightly different steps to build fertile ground for adopting agile.

Second, there are typically varying levels of understanding of agile throughout the technology industry, government and private sector, and the workshop includes one day of built-in agile training. Agile is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but often suffers from a lack of shared understanding. The benefit of this training is that it allows participants to end the workshop speaking the same language and expecting the same outcomes as they plan to go agile.

Third, the workshop can be scaled to include the actual future practitioners of agile. This means it serves as a powerful change management tool to get buy-in and solicit input from those who might otherwise resist the change. With a lack of change management as one of the major reasons agile transformations fail, this piece is critical to starting the effort on the right note.

In order to elicit useful information, we lead workshop participants through a number of activities that will serve as crucial inputs into the organization’s customized agile transformation roadmap. Here is a sampling of three activities our clients have found valuable during past workshops:

• Cultural factors play a major part in the success (or failure) of an agile transformation. In this exercise, we ask participants to identify a current state of tailored cultural factors that impact their organization the most. For example, past factors we have measured include risk vs. reward, individual accountability vs. team accountability, or urgency vs. deliberation in decision-making. In this example, perceptions may differ based on factors like seniority or geographic region, so it’s important to include a diverse array of participants.
• Identifying a common vision is an important step toward working together toward an agile transformation. In this activity, we lead participants through a visioning activity to define the desired future state. Many organizations that are large or long tenured have a good deal of organizational debt – which can range from outdated policies to a high degree of complexity in technology systems. Naturally, expecting this organization to function like a technology startup may not be realistic. However, adopting agile is still possible, especially in a grass-roots or incremental fashion. This activity helps participants define a clear, achievable target state that is unique to their organization.
• Developing and prioritizing the agile transformation backlog is a crucial step to investing resources wisely. The agile transformation backlog is a prioritized list of all the work that needs to be done for an organization to reach its transformation goals. Many teams and organizations may feel overwhelmed with the amount of change required for teams to adopt agile; clear priorities and limits for simultaneous work in progress will help show progress early and prevent burnout.

Interested in booking an Agile Design Workshop for your team or organization? Contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Agile Activation Workshop appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

This approach leverages both top-down engagement (generally more human factors such as interviews, workshops, and focus groups) as well as bottom-up analyses (typically data driven aspects) in order to develop a taxonomy design that is intuitive and will be embraced by the average user, but is also representative of the organization and its contents, and flexible enough to adjust as the organization changes. Nearly two decades ago I coined the term “Business Taxonomy” to reflect that concept of a user-facing taxonomy. I find the term no less appropriate now as it was in 1998.

All taxonomists, as well as many consultants in the broader Knowledge and Information Management consulting arena, should be familiar with the data driven aspects of taxonomy design. Key inputs for analysis include:

• Existing Taxonomies – Most organizations possess existing taxonomies, whether they call them that or not. Even the structure of “organically grown” file shares can provide meaningful inputs on potential taxonomy terms and key metadata fields.
• Usage Analytics – A host of user analytics can be extremely valuable to the taxonomy design process, including most popular search terms, most popular content, and common navigation paths. Referral terms from public websites may provide another important input.
• Competitive or Collegial Taxonomy Designs – Given that many taxonomy designs are surfaced as navigation or facets for public findability, a myriad of existing taxonomies are readily available for those who know how to look for them, even if they aren’t published as such. Though these can be valuable, I generally offer the same warning I do with “off-the-shelf taxonomies.” There is a place for them to expedite industry standard taxonomy designs, however, this is not generally the starting point I recommend to an organization attempting to design a new Business Taxonomy, as it can lead to unnecessary entrenchment. In other words, organizations can get stuck attempting to adjust an existing taxonomy to their needs when it would’ve been more efficient and more effective to design their own starting from a white board.
• Content Analysis – A review of the actual content/information/products/people for which an organization is seeking to develop a taxonomy is another key aspect for analysis. The specific user needs and business cases will determine how deep such an analysis needs to go and how exhaustive it should be. We generally begin with a semi-random sampling of content and assess it based on existing tags, placement, usage, and a characterization of topic, type, and other TO-BE attributes.

Managing these data and analysis driven aspects of taxonomy design is only part of the puzzle. What many taxonomy design efforts lack is the human side of the design. This piece of the puzzle is just as important, if not more so.

At its core, what we’re discussing here is usability and findability. Taxonomies today are no longer just for librarians and information specialists. Based on the maturation of content and document management technology as well as an improved awareness in the industry as a whole, organizations are more often leveraging taxonomy to drive user-focused findability. In many cases, taxonomy is now driving the complete navigation of a site or system. Beyond faceted navigation or enhanced search results, an effective taxonomy can drive the design of an enterprise system, as it has done with the National Park Service’s Common Learning Portal.

That is where the art of taxonomy design comes into play. In order to design a usable and intuitive taxonomy that may be leveraged to drive the overall structure and findability of a site, we must engage with the actual end users.

Engaging directly with the end user can help to:

• Identify key attributes (metadata fields) and potential starter terms that reflect the natural language of the organization;
• Work through organizational misalignments to obtain consensus on attributes definitions and terms;
• Find terms that are critical to inclusion as well as those that need to be avoided;
• Pave the way for adoption of the new taxonomy by communicating it, helping everyone to understand its value, and giving stakeholders an opportunity to influence its design;
• Identify additional starting places for more bottom-up analyses;

I’ve written about our standard workshop practice, but that is just one of the many ways to engage with end users in a top-down approach:

• One-on-one Interviews – Typically most effective with stakeholders and senior leadership within an organization to identify critical inclusions/exclusions and understand overall project goals and user needs;
• Focus Groups – Centered around a particular function, geography, or product category in order to elaborate on an existing design; and
• Enterprise Workshops – Focused on breaking down organizational barriers to define and prioritize a broad set of Primary Attributes.
• User Workshops – Driving a cross-section of actual system contributors and/or end users to define attributes and terms natural to them.

Central to these top-down design approaches that engage directly with stakeholders and end users is the need for a strong facilitator.   The mission of the taxonomy design facilitator is to give voice to all contributors while helping to drive toward meaningful consensus and buy-in.

Effective taxonomy design facilitation and workshopping will provide you a truly usable design that reflects the needs of your users and your organization. It will also provide a constituency that is bought in to the new design and the value it can hold.

Like many KM initiatives, buy-in and communications are just as important as the actual design (of the taxonomy, or the system as a whole). Change management is critical to success, and developing a design/system that users actually want to use and feel as though they had a hand in creating is an important aspect of this change management.

As you begin your next taxonomy design effort, make sure the people leading it are experts in facilitation and communication as well as data analysis and taxonomy design. If you’re looking for a complete solution to your taxonomy design effort that covers both the art and science of taxonomy design, contact Enterprise Knowledge.   We will work with you from start to finish to give you the design that works for your organization and your users.

The post The Art of Taxonomy Design appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

• Meet Someone New – As KM concepts have matured, we’ve gone from simply capturing, managing, and sharing knowledge and have added the additional facet of human expertise and interaction into the equation.  Well-designed knowledge and information management systems allow people to quickly and intuitively share and find the information they need; they can also allow people to discover and connect with experts.  For instance, in 2014 for a global manufacturing firm we designed a knowledge base that housed a range of content as well as profiles of identified experts within the organization.  Users of the system are able to employ faceted navigation to find both the content as well experts within the organization based on topics, types, regions, and functional area.  Moreover, users are able to “traverse” content in order to find the owners/creators of the content they found the most valuable.  As a result, connections are being made and this global organization is making better use of their collective expertise around the world.
• Get Organized – At EK, one of our areas of focus is taxonomy design.  Taxonomy design is all about organizing and categorizing information in order that it is easier to find and manage.  In 2014 alone we helped over two dozen organizations through our Taxonomy Design Workshops and proven methodology.  A well-designed and well-implemented taxonomy will help organizations better use and reuse their information, and will also help users discover information they didn’t know existed that will be able to benefit them and save time.  As a result, organizations and their users are more efficient, more successful, and more connected.
• Lose Weight – As KIM technologies have proliferated, it is unfortunately common, especially in larger organizations, for multiple overlapping systems and technologies to weigh down the organization with administrative burden, license costs, and confused or distracted end users.  SharePoint is a common example in many organizations, where lack of system and content governance has resulted in runaway sites that duplicate effort and compete for users.  We also see completely separate systems that effectively do the same thing competing within a single enterprise.  For instance, in 2014, EK worked with a large Federal agency to conduct an enterprise analysis of their content and document management processes and technologies.  We found that different parts of the organization were running eight distinct but similar document management technologies.  We developed the business case to justify the consolidation of design, content, processes, and technology into a single system.  The return on investment (ROI) for this effort is in the millions of dollars.
• Learn Something New – Any successful KIM initiative will help you and your end users learn something new.  We’ve already established the myriad ways KIM projects and systems can support the improved findability, use, and reuse of information, the sharing and capture of knowledge, and the identification and connection to experts.  In our experience though, the journey itself is part of the learning process.  Well-run KIM initiatives will not only yield the desired end product, they will yield an improved understanding of the organization as a whole, and a view towards additional ways the organization can improve their knowledge and information management practices and standards.  Our discovery and design workshop methodologies are all about helping organizations better understand their processes, their people, and their technologies.
• Clear the Clutter – One of the common challenges many organizations face within their knowledge systems is information bloat.  When we perform content reviews and analyses on existing information systems, we find a mass of information that is out-of-date, inaccurate, duplicate, or just plain useless.  For instance, for one recent services organization we were asked to help them clean up and migrate their content from their legacy systems to the new system we’d helped them design.  We leveraged both manual and semi-automated means of analyzing the content.  Of the roughly 650,000 documents held within their legacy systems, we found that 20% was duplicative, 20% was outdated, and 30% hadn’t been accessed by anyone over the last two years.  We focused on migrating the remaining 200,000 or so documents and ensuring they were properly tagged and managed over the long-term.  This “cleansing” alone vastly improved user satisfaction and trust within the system.  It also vastly improved the overall findability of the information within the system.

Whatever your organization’s New Year’s resolutions might be, we wish you the best in the year to come.  And, of course, if you need a little help achieving those resolutions, we look forward to hearing from you.

The post New Year’s Resolutions – The Knowledge Management Edition appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Rationale

Who Should Attend?

Ideal for anyone tasked to lead or refresh a taxonomy, or anyone who will be managing a content management effort where taxonomy will play a part.

Taxonomy Master participants range from business user to IT experts, and from newcomers to seasoned practitioners, project managers to CKOs, public/private sectors, and just about everyone in-between.

The class will be held in Reston, VA on June 25 and 26.  For more information, click here.

The post EK Teaching Upcoming Taxonomy Master Class for KMI appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Enterprise Knowledge’s Zach Wahl will be speaking at the upcoming KM Solutions Showcase in Arlington, VA.  Wahl will serve as a featured speaker on the Knowledge Management Track, discussing best practices for taxonomy design and development.  Wahl will leverage his experience from nearly 20 years of taxonomy design consulting to share case studies and success stories.  The Showcase will take place at the Westin Arlington Gateway on March 27th.  To register and for more information, click here.

In addition to presenting, Enterprise Knowledge will be hosting an information booth at the event.

The post Enterprise Knowledge Speaking at KM Solutions Showcase appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Enterprise Knowledge’s Zach Wahl, today was named as the newest addition to the KM Institute’s faculty.  The International Knowledge Management Institute (KM Institute) is the leading educational institution in Knowledge Management formed in 2004 and incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA, in 2005. With KM training/society roots dating back to 1999, the prototype for today’s KM Certification program was formulated and delivered by future KM Institute personnel.

Wahl already conducts a popular 2-day course: “The Taxonomy Master Class” for KMI and mentors clients for in-house workshops and taxonomy design services.  In development is the new Certified Knowledge Specialist – Taxonomy, a 4-day + e-learning Certification program, combining the core of KMI’s CKM program with a “deep dive” into Taxonomy solutions. First class: Feb 3-6, 2014, in Reston, VA.

To read the full press release from KMI, click here.

The post KM Institute Partners with Zach Wahl and Enterprise Knowledge appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The “KM Solutions Showcase” is the new mini-conference designed by KM Institute; “Master Classes” of three hours each covering the hottest topics in KM today. It will be held September 11-12 at the Sheraton Reston Hotel. For more information, click here.

The post Enterprise Knowledge Serving as Featured Presenter at KM Solutions Showcase appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

As I discussed in a previous entry, business taxonomies can address a number of challenges regarding information capture, management, and findability.  A well-designed and implemented business taxonomy can improve the “findability” of information, improving search and browse within a variety of sites and systems.  A business taxonomy can also help users discover content, vastly cutting down on time wasted re-creating content that already existed.

Though many organizations have gained maturity in their awareness of business taxonomies, their importance, and their strong potential for return on investment, these organizations often still struggle with how to make a business taxonomy project successful.  Indeed, the struggle is understandable.  An effective business taxonomy is one that will span the enterprise of information, users, and potential needs.  This vast scope is often daunting to organizations, especially those that are global in nature and varied in offerings or activities.

In order to help address this challenge, I developed the Business Taxonomy Workshop methodology.  Often imitated but never replicated, my workshop methodology involves the actual business users in the initial design phases of a taxonomy design effort.  As a result, the methodology has several unique benefits.  First, with actual business stakeholders in the room there is no need to “translate” or infer requirements.  The direct involvement also creates a force of potential change managers.  By including a functionally, geographically, and hierarchically diverse group in the workshop, we create a group that will potentially help their colleagues and cohorts in their own functional areas, locations, and management levels to understand the taxonomy project and prepare to adopt it.  For instance, by involving a member of your Human Resources department in the design of a new taxonomy for your intranet, you not only get the insights and requirements to appropriately tag and categorize H.R. content, you also get a member of the H.R. department grounded in your efforts and prepared to go back to their colleagues and help spread the message.

These initial workshop participants play another important role as well.  As we know, no taxonomy is ever finished or perfected.  Taxonomy design efforts can span a significant length of time as well.  This initial group of workshop participants easily translates into a Business Taxonomy Working Group that will help see a taxonomy design effort to roll out and then continue to iteratively improve it.

Over the last decade I’ve personally run well over 200 of these workshops on six continents.  Throughout that time I’ve honed the specific exercises but the core concepts remain the same.  Though there are any number of potential variations, the best outcomes are derived from a workshop that runs for one or two days and includes 12-18 participants of a wide variety as I’ve described above.  We facilitate these participants through a series of five core exercises, each of which has a specific product that feeds into the next.  First, we ask participants to define the “what” and “why” of the business taxonomy.  In short, this is the abbreviated business case for the effort.  Though this may seem elementary, it is common to find participants and stakeholders who have highly varied opinions as to why they are there and what they’re being asked to accomplish.

Next, we have participants discuss the intended audience for the business taxonomy.  This helps to define scope and highlights the challenge of a business taxonomy to serve multiple different types of users with a single vocabulary.  From this exercise we also derive personas, which we reference back to throughout the remaining effort.

For the third exercise, we ask participants to identify the verbs related to the system for which taxonomy is being designed as well as the verbs associated with the activities of the organization itself.  The interesting thing about this exercise is that it is largely industry and organization independent.  Participants will offer verbs such as “research,” “search,” “browse,” and “learn” for the system verbs, and slightly more contextualized words for the organizational firms such as “manufacture,” “sell,” or “educate.”  The point of this exercise, and the value it offers, is to serve as a guide for the workshop participants to get to what actually has the greatest value for business taxonomies, and that is the topics, or nouns, that contextualize the verbs.

Topics represent the core of a good business taxonomy design.  They are the way we naturally relate and categorize most everything in our daily lives and therefore they are natural and intuitive to virtually all users.  For the fourth exercise, we ask each of the participants to provide the core topics that comprise their business.  One of the ways this is done is by asking for them to “fill in the blank” behind the verbs they already provided, again, providing the context to what the organization does.  More importantly, however, we’re seeking to derive the subjects of the organization and the systems for which the business taxonomy is being designed.

We collect each of these words from the users, including repeated words, and display them all together.  What this yields, typically, is a clear view of the commonalities between the different workshop participants and the subject themes of the organization.  Put simply, the product of the workshop provides a map of topics or subjects that people individually derived but naturally agree on.  This is the start of the business taxonomy.  From there, we can map the words that are most common and use the outliers to facilitate a discussion around what might be missing.  This process is not supposed to be easy and has often proven to be a challenge, but after hundreds of successful outcomes, the results can’t be argued with.

The fifth exercise addresses the potential metadata fields and taxonomies beyond the core topics.  As an outcome of the topic mapping, many participants will have suggested words that aren’t pure topics, but could more easily be characterized as a function, location, document type, or some other less contextualized type of word.  As we did with the topical mapping, we identify these words, their potential value, and we use them to derive a list of additional metadata fields and values that could be of value as part of the overall taxonomy design.  This is particularly important as it nods to more traditional taxonomies and eases the change management challenge with which the less flexible individuals might otherwise struggle.

Depending on the time allowed and progress made, the fourth and fifth exercises can be repeated at additional levels of detail, effectively creating a top-down business taxonomy design.  In other cases, the initial products of the workshop can be leveraged by smaller groups, our own experts, or additional workshop participants to continue and refine the design efforts.  In all cases, however, the workshop provides a direct and actionable starting point that reflects the needs of the users and the perspectives of the business.  In a matter of hours or days, an organization can get their arms around what might otherwise have stymied them and risked or delayed an information management project.

The post The Business Taxonomy Workshop appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.