1. IKO 2016 Insights - Business Case
This short video captures the key takeaways from three of our expert panellists on the qualities of a good business case for KM/KO: Tom Reamy, Cor Beetsma and Barry Byrne.

2. IKO 2016 Insights - Governance
This video contains some key insights about Governance for knowledge organization, from Neo Kim Hai and Ahren Lehnert, following the Expert Panel on Governance that they participated in.

Here's a brief selection of the feedback from IKO 2016 - we also got lots of great suggestions for next year's event. Keep watching this space!

​- The chance to interact with the other people. Several new ways of looking at knowledge organisation.
- Having a panel energised such that conflicting views are put forward. Lets us think about our own views.
- Case study table discussions are most interesting. Able to share how others have implemented their KM.
- It was a good mix of Theory (Book Writers), Consultants (Sharing Best Practices) and Industry Professionals (sharing issues and successes). Went back with better understanding on the topic of KO & KM.
- Enjoyed the format and variety.
- Listening to new ideas and pain of many practitioners.
- Sharing of practical experience of practitioners during the cafe sessions.
- Valuable views and sharing from the speakers and participants. It really helps in triggering more insights and thoughts. Thank you!
- Where to start? =) Practical insights on deploying knowledge base, conducting knowledge audit, etc. Frank discussions on pros and cons of certain techs and new processes, etc.
- Key takeaway: the iterative nature of developing KO - governance, map/audit, strategic business plan.
- Case studies: what other enterprises do with KO. Ideas about text analytics and taxonomy governance. New mindset about search.
- We can make use of metadata that is produced during use/interaction to create adaptive organising systems --> e.g. better personalisation
- Thought provoking discussions with participants about their KO challenges and my own. Helpful updates on current vendor offerings.
- The collective knowledge all the speakers shared. 1+1 is definitely more than 2 this way.
- I love the format which encourages dialogue and debate. Without competing views, it's hard to discover methods that work in your own organsation.
- The case studies are real life examples - I treasure my learning from this area.
- The case studies provided a very diversified experience sharing from the various presenters. One of the key takeaways is the process of choosing the right text analytics tool.
- Learning about taxonomy and how we can implement it. Hearing from others’ challenges.
- It was great that it was run on a "knowledge cafe" like style where participants were able to share and discuss in small groups. Gained insights into some technologies and expanded my thoughts on how technology can be exploited.
- Networking and intensive communication among the presenters and attendees.
- Insights on taxonomy creation, management and governance.
- Insights on new tools/methodologies.
- Case studies breakout sessions are enjoyable as they are more engaging. Networking with fellow practitioners.
- Case studies cafe has the most content and is very engaging.
- Please keep this track and style! Love it!!! Thanks Patrick and team. Good luck!!

This short video captures the key takeaways from three of our expert panellists on the qualities of a good business case for KM/KO: Tom Reamy, Cor Beetsma and Barry Byrne.

This video contains some key insights about Governance for knowledge organization, from Neo Kim Hai and Ahren Lehnert, following the Expert Panel on Governance that they participated in.

The 2016 IKO conference featured a number of great presentations, a number of interesting fishbowl expert panels, and two afternoons of fascinating case study cafes showcasing 16 case studies.  It also featured two workshops, one on search and the other on text analytics. 
 
The two workshop areas are intimately connected.  Search is one of the most common and powerful applications of text analytics and text analytics is the best way to make search smarter. 
 
Even though social media and sentiment analysis have been getting more press for the last couple of years, using text analytics to improve search actually delivers more business value to organizations by saving time for users across the entire organization, cleaning up chaotic collections of unorganized documents including multiple duplicate and near duplicate documents, and finally by enhancing business decisions by delivering the right information at the right time.
 
The payoff for improving search is so huge that the biggest problem is believing the numbers – but multiple studies keep demonstrating that those numbers are indeed true.  Saving $6,750,000 dollars a year per 1,000 employees  is huge and it is probably somewhat understated as the amount of unstructured text continues to grow (see note below).
 
But this raises the question – how do search and text analytics work together?  We spent considerable time on this in the workshop I conducted at the IKO 2016 conference, but the basic idea for those of you who could not attend the workshop can be summarized as follows:

1. Faceted search or navigation is the best way to improve search (way better than just trying to improve those relevancy ranked lists).
2. Facets require a large amount of metadata – content types, people, organizations, locations, products, processes, and more.
3. Adding metadata has a number of well-known and largely unsolvable issues – getting people to tag documents at all much less getting them to do a consistent, high-quality job of it.
4. Text analytics can be used to generate more and more metadata that is consistent and high-quality (if done correctly).

 
What is the “correct” way to use text analytics to improve search?  The answer is, of course, that there is no “one size fits all” solution. The most successful basic model is what I called the hybrid model.  The hybrid model does not try to use text analytics to automatically tag documents (except in some cases) nor does it rely on an army of human taggers.  The way it works is to semi-automate the job of adding metadata tags as seen in this summary:

1. An author creates a document and publishes the document in a content management or SharePoint system.
2. Text analytics software (that has been integrated with SharePoint, etc.) analyzes the document and discovers and suggests multiple metadata values – the primary subjects of the document and significant mentions of facet values – the people, organizations, locations, content type, and more.
3. These suggestions are presented to the author who reviews the suggestions and either accepts them or offers alternative values. 
4. The “auto-tagged” and human-curated documents are then published into the appropriate repository – ready to be found quickly and intelligently in the search application.
5. Finally, the metadata values can be incorporated into relevancy scores that are much more accurate and useful than simply counting the number of times a search term appears in a document.

 
This model combines the best of human and machine providing the consistency and scalability of the machine and the depth and intelligence of the human. It also overcomes the issues of author-generated tags by presenting the author with a value that they can react to rather than ask them to generate all that metadata. Reacting to suggested values is a much more cognitively easy task than asking someone to think up the best keywords. Also, it turns out that authors are much more likely to actually provide this review. And if a number of authors simply say “yes” to whatever the software suggests, then you at least have the benefits of an “automatic” tagging – not as good as a true hybrid solution, but better than no metadata at all.
 
There are, of course, variations on this model and there are situations where this model does not apply as well, for example, in large collections of legacy documents or external documents. In that case, the solution would normally be more heavily weighted on the “automatic” side, but even there, a partial hybrid solution is still best. The human input in these cases comes about in at least two ways. First, as the “automatic” solutions runs, tagging hundreds of thousands or millions of documents, subject-matter-experts (SMEs) and/or a team of librarians or information analysts can periodically review the text analytics-suggested tags for quality. How many documents to review and how often will vary by organization and document collection and anticipated applications.
 
The second avenue for human input is provided by the feedback that SMEs, authors, and librarians/info analysts generate as they publish or review the text analytics results. This feedback can then be incorporated into the text analytics auto-categorization and entity extraction rules and models to refine and improve those rules and models. Having a sample document where a categorization or extraction rule was wrong enables the text analyst to not only get clues as to what went wrong, but also can be used to test a new, refined rule.
 
These refined, improved rules can then be used to not only enhance the hybrid CM-text analytics-search model of tagging with facet metadata values, but can also enhance the quality of tagging in those large volume cases that are more automatic.
 
There are a number of text analytics and search software vendors that like to claim that their solution is fully automatic. Just plug it in, and out comes quality metadata. My experience has been that these claims are almost always grossly overstated – both in terms of the effort needed to get them to work and the accuracy of the “automatic” solutions. 
 
It does take a significant amount of work to develop highly accurate categorization, sentiment, and extraction capabilities, but that work is becoming less as we learn to build on early efforts with templates, better knowledge organization schemas, and shared best practices. In addition, developing these capabilities also creates a platform that can be used for other applications besides search – business and customer intelligence, voice of the customer and voice of the employee, fraud detection, knowledge management applications like expertise location and community collaboration, and dozens more applications that utilize that most under-utilized resource, unstructured text. 
 
But let’s postpone that discussion for another post.
 
 
NOTE on dollar savings per year per thousand employees:
 
This calculation in USD is based on a 30% improvement of search through the application of text analytics as reported in the workshop I conducted for the IKO conference, and the figures on the cost of bad search as reported in an IDC study by Sue Feldman.  A good summary of search studies, including the IDC study can be found on Search Technologies website: http://www.searchtechnologies.com/enterprise-search-surveys
​

Governance. Lots of it. Lack of it. What is it? Where do you need it? Do you need it? The session Fishbowl (Expert Panel) 2 - Governance for Knowledge Organization: Challenges and Opportunities at the 2016 IKO Conference in Singapore addressed these and other questions about governance. Dave Clarke, a participant on the panel and a conference organizer, captured the following questions for consideration on the first day of the conference:

• What principles to determine what needs to be controlled and what can be “free for all”?
• Should governance be top-down or based on consultation with stakeholders?
• Organising? Does it always work? There are cases where no organisation is better.
• What can we do step by step to make the new technology support our business and bring value?

As one of the panel participants, I’d like to address each of the questions from the perspective of an in-house organizational practitioner.

What principles to determine what needs to be controlled and what can be “free for all”?

If we are talking about the governance of content, then it all comes down to purpose.
                 
What is the purpose of the information? Is it lessons learned, training, or records? What is the intent? Is the information meant to be discussed in an open forum, used by a team collaboratively, or used as research? Is the information retained for compliance and subject to records management policies?

Most organizations have many different types of content with a designated purpose. Good governance should cover all of these variables and have a spectrum of control. Discussions, blogs, and other social communication are governed as part of the company’s intellectual property, but the governance is low and has more room for variance across the organization as this content should be easily accessed, shared, and discussed among employees. Contracts, company financials, and other corporate operational documents should be highly governed with little access and no sharing as there is likely good reason to have one official copy in a designated location. Again, all of the organizational information is governed, but the level of control within the governance framework is dictated by the nature and purpose of the content.

Should governance be top-down or based on consultation with stakeholders?
                  See the last question. Within a greater governance framework, the nature of the content will dictate the type of governance policies which apply. Corporate-level, proprietary information should be subject to strict top-down governance and control. Compliance is a legal issue and is not open for negotiation. While stakeholders should be able to make their case for access, there is not a lot of leeway for alternate treatments of the information. An organization with good information governance will set the appropriate legal and financial policies so corporate information is protected, secured, and complies with all applicable local, regional, and national laws. There is no reason that information of this type should be subject to alternative methods of governance at department or regional levels other than to account for regional legal differences.
Information on the rest of the governance spectrum should have stakeholder input because it is the information directly related to their work. All employees should have the appropriate level of access and should have a stake in good information governance policies, particularly in how and when information is accessed. Without their input, existing inefficient information processes are never brought to light, addressed, and improved to make the organization more efficient.

Organising? Does it always work? There are cases where no organisation is better.
                  No information organization is still subject to governance because it is no organization by design. For example, if a company decides to leave knowledge in an unstructured location such as a file share and offers only navigational access or access through a search interface with no other intervention or attempts at organizing the information, it is done so by deliberate design. Whatever the motivations—perceived lack of value, lack of resources, reliance on search functionality, etc.—the information is still part of a greater governance scheme dictating some information is highly governed and other information has very little governance. The governance spectrum spans the various types of information a company may possess and unorganized pockets of knowledge exist within this framework.
                  Of course, in a perfect world, all information is governed from its creation until its disposition, but we all know we don’t live in a perfect world. The amount of time, resources, and money it takes an organization to retroactively organize information usually has very little return on investment. Making the deliberate decision to only manage and govern content based on its value, creation date, or some other factor important to the company makes governance a more palatable proposition for subsets of the greater information framework. Sometimes organization is just not worth the effort.

What can we do step by step to make the new technology support our business and bring value?
                  The final question is aimed directly at technology governance, but technology is always part of the three pillars of governance including people and processes. You can’t have any one of these pillars in absence of the others. I would argue it is possible to create and adhere to governance processes even in the absence of technology. Of course, in the modern world, this is rarely the case. However, if you treat governance from a “neutral” perspective—in other words, from the point of view that governance must work regardless of the specific technology—then you can start the work of establishing the right processes and people to support good governance at any stage in a technology implementation. Establishing technology governance policies when the technology is new and before go-live is preferred, but not often a luxury most companies have. In addition to the essential change management necessary to get users to adopt a new technology, governance put in place in the beginning brings several things to the new system: trust and operational longevity.

Trust may be one of the single most important factors in getting users to adopt a new technology. When the system has the right level of governance and processes supporting everything from change requests to support, from flexibility to strict control where needed, from access to understanding how and why to use the system, then users feel comfortable and trust the system.
​
Likewise, good technology governance brings policies to avoid garbage in, garbage out, adding to the operational longevity of the system. When a system quickly becomes cluttered with poor information and information retrieval becomes more difficult over time, the chances the system will continue to be used and offer value to the organization diminishes. A clear governance framework for the new system will be essential to realizing the full value of the technology.
 
In sum, governance is important, and whether a company does a lot or a little depends only on purpose and the nature of the content. It’s not whether you have governance or not, it’s whether you have the appropriate level of governance fit to purpose.