Recently, I had a discussion with Jill Hannemann, who is thedirector of advisory servicesfor PortalSolutions, inaddition to being a sought after speaker.Jill has had a busy fall schedule traveling to a number of industry conferences, and shesat down to catch me up on her experience at this year’s KMWorld in Washington, D.C. Hereisour conversation.
Jenny: What is KMWorld 2015?
Jill: Actually, KMWorld is a collection of conferences. There is the namesake KMWorld conference, put on by the publishers of KMWorld. Then there are three additional mini conferences: Enterprise Search and Discovery, SharePoint Symposium, and Taxonomy Boot Camp. I have been a speaker at the SharePoint Symposium for about five years now and enjoy this event each year.
Jenny: How is KMWorld different from other conferences you attend? What drives people to attend?
Jill: KMWorld is for records managers, knowledge managers, information managers – folks whose sole focus is knowledge creation, retention and management. Their goals aren’t about SharePoint, so this conference makesno assumption that they are using SharePoint to accomplish any of these tasks.
Instead, SharePoint’s role at this conference is supplementary. They are looking at how SharePoint can act as a resource to reach their business goals. They are interested in search solutions, community management and really creating the best intranet solution.
At KMWorld you can expect to hear a lot of case studies that show what is working for other companies. And how to make those solutions work for your business.
Jenny: I heard that you were on a panel called, “Stump the SharePoint Guru.” What was that like?
Jill: Well, there are three experts on the panel, and the audience is encouraged to bring their toughest SharePoint questions. And – to make it more interesting – they have us wear noise-cancelling headphones, so we can’t hear the advice given by the other panelists. This set-up is really great for the conversation. Unlike your averagepanel discussion, where all the answers tend to end up pretty much in agreement, you get a lot more disagreement because you don’t know what the other panelists have said. It’s a nerve-racking situation as a panelist, but it’s a lot more fun for the audience.
Jenny: So did any questions stump the gurus?
Jill: Usually the questions are strategy- and business-oriented at this conference. Not a lot of time is spent in the weeds on the technical aspects. One question they asked this time that was pretty tough and left all the panelists thinking was, “If you couldn’t use SharePoint, what would you use?”
We use SharePoint daily – we live and breathe it – so the question threw me. I gave a “best of breed” answer that suggested I would cobble together some of the better products out there. We all got a little humbled on that one since we can’t imagine our lives without SharePoint.
Jenny: You were also the speaker for a session. What was that about?
Jill: Yes, my topic was about Office 365 and how to increase productivity with this solution. With the introduction of NextGen Portals, and all of the features available for your business, it is important to understand how to best leverage the tools for your business.
I really feel that it is three-fold:
- What are you trying to solve? Identify what your business needs are.
- What can this technology do? Understand what you want it to do for your business.
- How can I manage this change? Develop a plan to get these components to work within your organization. Make sure everyone knows what the products do, what to use them for and when to use them.
All of these elements need to be in place before you implement a new technology solution.
Jenny: What’s one thing you learned at the conference this year?
Jill: I went through benchmarking your SharePoint maturity, and I took Portal Solutions through that process. It was encouraging to see that Portal Solutions did pretty well. You might say that we are cobblers’ children with pretty good shoes. Sure, there were some areas that we were not strong on, but those were not areas we should focus on improving or investing our efforts in. Those elements don’t fit our needs or make sense at our size, so it was good to walk away from that with satisfaction.
We worked with the Real Story Group to analyze this withtheSharePoint Maturity Assessment. This is a great resource for unbiased input to understand that landscape of document management.
Jenny: What are the noteworthy takeaways from this conference?
Jill: The struggle continues. We have all been trying to manage knowledge for decades. What changes at these conferences is the technological advancement in our solutions. Technology is making the landscape simpler. In another 10 years, we will still be talking about findability, content management and search. The heart of the conversation will be different, however, because the challenges and goals of companies will shift, and the technology being used to do that will be new.
At this conference, there are a lot of valuable insights from what has worked for other people and seeing what that looks like in practice. But, what has worked for other people might not work for you.
Jenny: Thanks for joining me, Jill. Do you have any final thoughts?
Jill: I always walk away with a renewed sense of optimism after hearing lots of success stories. People are out there getting it done. Listening to innovativeuse-cases, making things accessible for people with disabilities and making it mobile.
