Optimizing Organizational Knowledge With Project Cortex & The Microsoft Digital Workplace

Editor's Notes

• #2: Today, organizations can go beyond the intranet and connect people to interactive expertise within the organization and personalized insight through an integrated suite of Microsoft 365 applications. Based on significant improvements in artificial intelligence (AI), real behavior-based data based on the Microsoft Graph and Azure innovation such as improved language understanding, organizations today can provide contextual and dynamic topic cards, expertise mapping, pages, topic centers, and more. Powered by image tagging, form processing, document understanding, and machine teaching; organization content and documents are optimized for better compliance, processing, and discovery.   Join LiveTiles, along with Richard Harbridge, a Microsoft MVP and internationally recognized expert on Microsoft 365 and the Digital Workplace, who will share: Best practices on modern knowledge management How the continued innovation from Microsoft can be best reconciled with enterprise intranet and digital workplace needs
• #3: Richard Harbridge is the Chief Technology Officer and an owner at 2toLead. Richard works as a trusted advisor with hundreds of organizations, helping them understand their current needs, their Soon needs, and what actions they should take in order to grow and achieve their bold ambitions.   Richard remains hands on in his work and has led, architected, and implemented hundreds of business and technology solutions that have helped organizations transform both digitally and organizationally. Richard has a passion for helping organizations achieve more; whether it is helping an organization build beautiful websites to support great content and social strategy, or helping an organization leverage emerging cloud and mobile technology to better service their members or the communities that they serve.   Richard is an author and an internationally recognized expert in Microsoft technology, marketing and professional services. As a sought-after speaker, Richard has often had the opportunity to share his insights, experiences, and advice around branding, partner management, social networking, collaboration, ROI,  technology/process adoption, and business development at numerous industry events in around the globe. When not speaking at industry events, Richard works with Microsoft, partners, and customers as an advisor around business and technology, and serves on multiple committees, leads user groups, and is a Board Member of the Microsoft Community Leadership Board.
• #4: COVID Beard (missing a mask)
• #5: Our world is changing. Every day, all around us, we’re experiencing change in very real ways. Change is nothing new. We've always been impacted by cyclical market-driven changes, like new competitors, skills gaps, disruption in supply chains, and shrinking margins. But the changes we are seeing now, are different and more disruptive: climate change… demographics… pandemics. We’re also seeing changes driven by digital transformation, automation, AI, and other technologies. Change occurs more randomly and seemingly at higher frequencies, and with more severe impacts though. These changes drive volatility and uncertainty in our markets and our eco-systems. These changes are harder to predict, and harder to mitigate. So, we need to find ways to become more resilient.
• #6: To build that resilience we need to become more flexible and agile. That means empowering our people, to make more informed decisions, and act faster… to shift decision making towards the edges of our organizations. We do this by creating connections to knowledge and insights that surface in real time, in the apps people use daily to get work done and collaborate with each other. This enables people to rapidly remix and reuse ideas from others, building not only on expertise but also on experience. Knowledge unleashed is powerful. It helps us become agile and resilient. It helps organizations not only survive, but thrive, in this new era of volatility.  
• #7: There are three business initiatives that customers around the globe are using to harness knowledge and insights: 1. Drive culture and measure change 2. Connect people with actionable information 3. Capture and share knowledge and experience 1. Fostering a culture built on transparency where people are mission-aware and engaged; providing insights about how people spend their own time; and identifying work trends – successful patterns and practices that are worth replicating throughout the organization – are all fundamental aspects of not only defining the culture we want, but driving towards that culture, and being able to measure our progress as we go along. 2. Our second initiative, Connecting people with actionable information, is focused around breaking information silos, enabling instant access to relevant and actionable information and in doing so, shifting the decision making towards the edges of the organization; reducing inefficiencies caused by frequent context switching by surfacing knowledge in the flow of people’s work; and automating content services to optimize findability and reduce reliance on end-users to tag content. So now that we’ve talked about fostering a culture that supports our vision of the resilient organization, and how we can break the informational silos, let’s take a look at the third initiative: 3. Capturing and sharing knowledge and experience and how we can break the organizational silos and enable people to collaborate and quickly access the relevant information. Basically building knowledge networks that evolve over time; connecting people to people, based on their expertise but also based on experience; encouraging communities where people learn socially, collectively solve problems and crowd-source ideas to drive innovation.
• #8: [LEFT hand side] As we have just seen, Microsoft 365 offers rich experiences that people use every day. To create content. To communicate with each other. And to perform their daily jobs – as individuals and as teams. That content, and that activity, is being captured by Microsoft Graph – which associates people, content, and activity, and creates relationships between those. Microsoft 365 reasons over that data with AI, and uses that intelligence, to improve your experiences. Making them more intelligent and more personalized. So, there's a virtuous cycle between the work you do and the experiences you use, to help you do your work even more effectively. [RIGHT hand side]But of course, you're not working alone. You're working with others on your team, and others in your organization. And as other people are contributing to the graph, you're creating organizational knowledge together. And that knowledge that others bring in, that expertise that others bring in, further enhances your experience. Bringing that collective knowledge to you, in the experiences where you work – every day. Again, a virtuous cycle of the work that each of us do, building on each other. And amplifying each other’s impact. [TO SUM IT UP] Microsoft Graph can in fact, be the most valuable asset your organization has, to power your digital transformation. Because it contains the corpus of the knowledge and expertise of the individuals and teams, that power your organization. Your organization can tap into that information to derive insights that allow you to see how people achieve their work. To look for patterns of success, that can be replicated, across the organization. To set objectives, and measure organizational progress, against those objectives.
• #9: The result? People become more agile, and the organization becomes more resilient.
• #15: We'll begin by looking at how Project Cortex delivers knowledge in the apps you use every day.   Here, in Teams, colleagues are chatting about topics I’m not familiar with. [CLICK]
• #16: Project Cortex has automatically flagged topics that I can learn more about. [CLICK]
• #17: I can hover over a topic and a topic card appears… [Advances automatically]
• #18: I can hover over a topic and a topic card appears, connecting me with knowledge about the topic: a definition, experts, resources and project details. OPTIONAL: This topic card can be configured to show resources from external systems, including content from your LXP.    All of us have had to get up to speed on new terms, new projects, new roles, right? And so this topic card is pretty magical. But the AI that creates this topic card is even more magical. So, let's dig a little bit deeper to see. I can click to open the topic page Construction Operations Reliability. [CLICK]
• #19: [Advances automatically]
• #20: I can click to open the topic page Construction Operations Reliability. This is a more comprehensive view of the topic. There’s an expanded definition of the topic, the people working on it, and related resources from across Microsoft 365 and connected external systems. [Advances automatically]
• #21: I can click to open the topic page Construction Operations Reliability. This is a more comprehensive view of the topic. There’s an expanded definition of the topic, the people working on it, and related resources from across Microsoft 365 and connected external systems. As you can see, this is like a “Wikipedia page for the enterprise”, but AI has done the hard work of building the page. AI identifies topics, finds resources, and creates pages, automatically.   But of course topics get better with experts. Experts can create and edit topics with Wiki-like simplicity. As experts contribute their knowledge and resources, AI learns so it does an even better job at keeping topics up to date. So Project Cortex gives you the best of AI and human intelligence. OPTIONAL: Today, an expert could add links to learning resources in the LXP. Our vision is that, in the future, connectors will surface LXP content automatically. [CLICK]
• #22: Of course, because Project Cortex is part of Microsoft 365, it maintains the privacy, security and compliance you'd expect. Administrators can control what is included in the knowledge network, and I am only able to see what I have access to. [CLICK]
• #23: Further down the page, we see a topic map.What this topic map illustrates is that Project Cortex is using crazy advanced AI to reason over content and expertise across my organization, automatically organizing it into shared topics that relate to each other. We call this your knowledge network. Topics can be projects, products, processes, customers, or any knowledge that's important to your organization. Now, I love this topic map because it helps me find related topics, even when they might be in another part of the organization. For example, I see Mark 8 here. That related work is now a click away. [CLICK]
• #24: The connections between the topic and the people and content already in the Graph means we’re able to organize knowledge across an organization in a way that’s different from just organizing around the people you work with and their relationships.
• #25: You can see how powerful this network becomes when you’re able to reach a person that is connected through topics. In this case, I discover the topic of Digital Surfaces because of my interest in Construction Operations Reliability, but more importantly, I’ve found the people and content that could impact the work that I’m doing.
• #26: [Advances automatically]
• #27: I can tap into the knowledge and expertise to get up to speed faster, and to find the resources I need for my projects. [CLICK]
• #28: Topic pages roll up into knowledge centers. [Note likely will be called “topic centers”] [Advances automatically]
• #29: A knowledge center showcases knowledge from across the organization that’s personalized and relevant for you, including trending topics and open questions. [Advances automatically]
• #30: A knowledge center showcases knowledge from across the organization that’s personalized and relevant for you, including trending topics and open questions. [Advances automatically]
• #31: Project Cortex builds your knowledge center automatically, but you can use the same building blocks to create custom knowledge centers and knowledge experiences that integrate seamlessly with your intelligent intranet in Microsoft 365. Now remember that Project Cortex is bringing all this knowledge to you, in the apps you use every day. [CLICK]
• #32: Earlier we saw topic cards in Microsoft Teams. Topic cards will also come to Outlook. [CLICK]
• #33: And topics will become part of user profiles, making it easier to find experts across the organization. [CLICK]
• #34: And topics will become part of user profiles, making it easier to find experts across the organization. [CLICK]
• #35: Project Cortex allows you to tap into your organization’s knowledge in Word. [CLICK]
• #36: Project Cortex allows you to tap into your organization’s knowledge in Word. [CLICK]
• #37: Topic cards will also come to SharePoint. And when a users searches for a topic using Microsoft Search, the topic card will appear as the first result. [CLICK]
• #38: Back in Microsoft Teams, I can add a valuable conversation to the knowledge network with a simple @mention. Experiences like this show how seamlessly Project Cortex not only empowers people with knowledge in the apps they use every day, but also empowers people to contribute, and seamlessly harnesses the collective knowledge of your organization. Experiences like this show how seamlessly Project Cortex empowers people to connect with and contribute knowledge—turning every worker into a knowledge worker; and how Project Cortex harnesses the collective knowledge of your organization, creating a knowledge worker that powers the learning platform that is your organization.
• #39: And we’ll bring topic highlighting to SharePoint
• #41: Action: Click Nestor to simulate hover-over Click to simulate Windows Zoom In
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• #51: Note: The four items in the grey bar are ZOOM NAVIGATIONS to the corresponding sections. You can deliver in any order. Note also that you can click the left (blank) area of the grey bar to navigate back to the main session overview/navigation slide. If you do not wish to use zoom navigations, you can keep clicking. The sections will be presented in the order shown.
• #82: Over the past few years, we have seen a shift in how people work. People work more collaboratively, across more devices and apps, spinning up new teams, and working anywhere and anytime. If we look at just the past few months, facilitating remote work has become critical for many organizations. Microsoft 365 supports this new culture of work by enabling people to be more productive so they can drive impact wherever they are working. This change in how people work is also having many organizations think about how they can get the most from their Microsoft 365 investment. Many organizations tell us that they need insights to help them understand this and that their previous proxy of usage is not ideal. Microsoft 365 provides you visibility, insights and actions to help with this. Visibility is the first step so you can understand how your organization works. Microsoft 365 provides a productivity score to help you get a high-level view into this. Once you have the visibility you need, you can leverage insights that can help you identify where you can enable improved experiences across areas like content collaboration and network connectivity. Based on these insights you can then take action to help update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work and get the most from the Microsoft 365 investments you have made.
• #84: We know that customers want to maximize the value of their Microsoft 365 investments. Which means those conversations between IT and the business about ways to help the organization work more productively is crucial. The Productivity Score can help facilitate this conversation by providing visibility, insights, and recommended actions that enable the organization reach its goals faster.
• #85: By enabling a better employee experience across areas like content collaboration and communications… <<CLICK>>
• #86: and understanding how devices, connectivity, and other technology impacts the employee experience, you can empower the organization to do their best work and foster high-functioning teams.
• #87: With an unprecedented increase in virtual meetings and communications, we could all use some assistance to balance the need to stay connected with the need to unplug and recharge. To help enhance their wellbeing, individual employees get personal and private insights into their own work patterns based on how they spend their time in emails, meetings, calls and chats in Microsoft 365. For instance, with their personalized “Month in review: Wellbeing” digest email, employees can reflect on how well they are disconnecting from work after hours and identify opportunities to get more quiet days to recharge.  Employees also get intelligent and actionable insights in the flow of their work so they can be more effective. For instance, with inline suggestions that appear as employees read or compose emails and invitations in Outlook, employees can remember to follow best practices such as scheduling the email delivery to align with the working hours of the recipients. To help reduce the stress employees can face when planning for their upcoming time away from work, we’ve introduced the ”Plan your time away” checklist in the Insights Outlook add-in. This helps employees seamlessly set their out of office notification, inform top collaborators of their time away, resolve meetings they’ll miss, and schedule catch-up time with colleagues when they’re back. All of these insights are personal and private for every employee and the data is stored in their mailbox and protected in the same way as their email and calendar information.
• #88: Cultivate an engaged, productive, & happy workforce Today’s work environment can easily create a sense of imbalance, fragmentation, and stress. It’s more important than ever to ensure employees are empowered to do their best work, have the opportunity to learn and grow, and maintain a sense community and connectedness. Prioritize customer relationships & align revenue related functions As companies across the globe navigate economic shocks, it’s never been more important to prioritize customer relationships. Organizational level insights provide visibility into how collaboration patterns with customers, partners, and vendors have changed, and ensure revenue-related functions are aligned across the business. Understand what drives success & make better decisions faster Organization agility is key to building a resilient business. Workplace Analytics helps organizations understand quantitatively what drives success, empowering leaders to make better decision for the business and the confidence to act quickly for maximum impact.
• #89: We’ve unlocked the power of the Microsoft graph to help companies quantify the impact of change on teams and individuals, understand how ways of working are evolving in response, and measure the cultural aspects of work that impact personal wellbeing and effectiveness.  
• #90: Today’s work environment can easily create a sense of imbalance, fragmentation, and stress. Insights from the business continuity dashboard help organizations understand how collaboration patterns have changed… <<CLICK>>
• #91: Such as the dramatic uptick in Teams usage we see here for the HR team , as well as their overall increase in collaboration hours
• #92: It helps leaders quantify the impact of work-life integration… <<CLICK>>
• #93: by comparing after-hours collaboration activity against baseline norms,
• #94: And it helps leaders understand if employees remain engaged or risk feeling isolated.
• #95: It also provides visibility into how work patterns are evolving and what might warrant further investigation. For instance: An uptick in collaboration hours could represent a transition from ad hoc hallway conversations to a more formal meeting cadence. I also see that both workweek span and after-hours collaboration have increased. This may reflect a comingling of work and personal commitments, but it could indicate an overburdened workforce that doesn’t have enough time to get their work done. I’m also concerned about the number of employees who no longer have regular 1:1s with their manager, which I know is critical to employee engagement.
• #96: I also get actionable guidance for making work better and setting up people for success.   For example, a 4-plus hour increase in weekly collaboration AND workweek span for 28% of employees strongly suggests people are stretched over capacity. I’m presented with research, articles, and best practices that can help inform a top-down strategy and ways to address this challenge,
• #97: But as importantly, each employee is empowered with personal and private insights into their own work patterns – visible only to them - and intelligent, actionable suggestions to help them gain uninterrupted time to focus, disconnect and recharge, and network and collaborate more effectively. These private insights are available through a personal dashboard… <<CLICK>>
• #98: And also through monthly email digests. For example, with their personalized “Month in review: Wellbeing” digest email, which looks at meeting, email, call and chat activity, <<CLICK>> employees can reflect on how well they are disconnecting from work after hours and identify opportunities to get more quiet days to recharge. 
• #99: Employees also get intelligent and actionable insights in the flow of their work. <<CLICK>> For instance, inline suggestions that appear as employees read or compose emails and invitations encourage them to follow best practices, such as scheduling delivery to align with the recipient’s working hours.
• #100: The ”Plan your time away” checklist <<CLICK>>
• #101: helps employees seamlessly set their out of office notification, inform top collaborators of their time away, resolve meetings they’ll miss, and schedule catch-up time with colleagues when they’re back. All of these insights are personal and private for every employee. The data is stored in their mailbox and protected in the same way as their email and calendar information.
• #102: Cultivate an engaged, productive, & happy workforce Today’s work environment can easily create a sense of imbalance, fragmentation, and stress. It’s more important than ever to ensure employees are empowered to do their best work, have the opportunity to learn and grow, and maintain a sense community and connectedness. Prioritize customer relationships & align revenue related functions As companies across the globe navigate economic shocks, it’s never been more important to prioritize customer relationships. Organizational level insights provide visibility into how collaboration patterns with customers, partners, and vendors have changed, and ensure revenue-related functions are aligned across the business. Understand what drives success & make better decisions faster Organization agility is key to building a resilient business. Workplace Analytics helps organizations understand quantitatively what drives success, empowering leaders to make better decision for the business and the confidence to act quickly for maximum impact.
• #103: Cultivate an engaged, productive, & happy workforce Today’s work environment can easily create a sense of imbalance, fragmentation, and stress. It’s more important than ever to ensure employees are empowered to do their best work, have the opportunity to learn and grow, and maintain a sense community and connectedness. Prioritize customer relationships & align revenue related functions As companies across the globe navigate economic shocks, it’s never been more important to prioritize customer relationships. Organizational level insights provide visibility into how collaboration patterns with customers, partners, and vendors have changed, and ensure revenue-related functions are aligned across the business. Understand what drives success & make better decisions faster Organization agility is key to building a resilient business. Workplace Analytics helps organizations understand quantitatively what drives success, empowering leaders to make better decision for the business and the confidence to act quickly for maximum impact.