My article comparing wikis to a document management systems is published this month in two sister publications. KM Legal Magazine has it published as Which route? and Inside Knowledge Magazine has it published as EI Case Study: Wiki versus DMS at Goodwin Procter.
Rizwan Khan talked about change management, in particular in moving to matter centricity. Moving from DocsOpen to iManage was a change in the technology not a change in process. Matter Centricity is a dramatic change in process and user behavior. Attorneys are willing to share files but not as willing to share structure. People want to organize documents in a way that makes sense to them.
Simplicity is key. The change is going to be severe, so make it easier for the attorneys and legal staff. Only push out a few folders at first. One firm said that the have selection process at matter opening to pick the folder structure. Another firm said that they allowed the attorneys to create their own folder structure.
Communication and training is key. Communication up front is key to clarify the business need and convey those needs to the firm-wide audience. You need multiple trainings. People will remember some features and not others. They will have questions.
Rizwan showed an eLearning tool for the Interwoven products. Unfortunately, I could not find it on their website. (Hmm! Why not?)
Rizwan pointed out how the Universal Search can used to deal with centralization, or lack there of. The Universal Search can pull from the disparate systems. Centralization benefits the IT staff, but provides little benefit to the attorneys.
(Universal Search would be very useful tool for mergers. Just point the search at the two firms DMS systems. You can work on merging the systems later.)
One plan for Universal Search is to also incorporate external repositories.
The indexing and search results is much faster in 8.3. A repository of 9 million documents took 30 days in 8.2 and 5 days in 8.3. The search results are much faster in 8.3 (I found this to be very true in our testing.) There were some charts that the user experience for tolerating delays is about 5 seconds. Anything longer than that rapidly becomes unacceptable.
I was asked to speak about The Firm’s Worksite 8.3 implementation. Kevin Hicks from Interwoven was able to supply the technical side of information. My main focus of presentation was on the user interface and user experience.
Everyone asks us for Google. “Why can’t we just have Google search our documents?” Larry and Sergei are billionaires because they figured out the special sauce for searching and ranking webpages. What our people are asking for is a simple interface that returns documents in a meaningful way. Instead, with Interwoven we give a lot of fields to search in very database look with documents returned in a flat result list.
Before throwing Interwoven under the bus, there are four types of searches and Interwoven does two of them very well. The four types are fetch, recall, research and precedent. Interwoven excels at the fetch and recall search. These are by far the most common searches run at most firms.
It is the research and precedent that deliver the knowledge management value by allowing attorneys to find and reuse relevant content.
Until Worksite 8.3 and Express Search, they did poorly at research. Interwoven Express Search now delivers on research. Nobody does a precedent search. That is one of goals for enterprise search.
A deeper discussion of the four types of search.
With the fetch, you have exact identifying information. For instance, with a document in the document management system you have the document number, or you have a filename and path, or a URL. This is core document management activity.
With the recall search, you have some distinct information about the nature of the item. You remember a matter it was associated with, who created it, when it was created, etc. With this type of search you typically get back several or many items and you need to sort through the results to find the item you were looking for.
The research is the type of search that an enterprise search was built for. You want to find information on a topic and you may have no idea if the enterprise has any information on that topic. Information could be stored in a variety of sources/databases.
With a precedent, the information that makes the item relevant is generally not in the text of the document. For instance, if I were looking for a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida that is buyer favorable. The words “Florida” “retail shopping center” and “buyer favorable” may not appear in the document and if they do they may only appear once or twice. To enable this kind of search you need to harness the document collection to another database of information.
Four firms have Worksite 8.3 in production, four will be live in 30 days, 8 firms live within 90 days.
Interwoven presented areas of improvement:
Worksite 8.5 has some improvements to email management. It has a suggestive email filing, like the blackberry has, to help you pick the appropriate location for the email.
Worksite 8.5 will have greatly improved offline access. They have a new, ground-up offline mode. It will have background synchronization and on-demand synchronization.
Rafiq also talked up records management. (I am not familiar with the records management piece.)
Worksite 8.5 will offer some access through the browser so they can expand access through more mobile devices. Certainly some email management through the blackberry will be a plus. I have not seen much demand for documents through the blackberry.
First up on the demo was Worksite Mobility 8.3. It is a mini-browser based access to Interwoven WorkSite. One key thing that caught me attention is that you can access the email in Worksite and forward and deal with the email. This actually could be a big improvement over current functionality. Right now I have a hard time accessing email filed in my email folders. This will be a big plus for encouraging people to file into WorkSite. You can find the email from your blackberry. Good stuff!!
Worksite 8.5 will have server side filing of email instead of client side filing of email. Right now if you file a lot of emails, it can bog down Outlook and your computer while it processes the emails by moving them from Outlook into WorkSite and profiling them in WorkSite.
You will be able to link a mailbox sub-folder with a WorkSite folder. You can take an email folder, click a button to link it to a worksite folder and synch the two folders. After moving an email into the outlook folder, they will be filed into WorkSite. A copy stays in the folder as a convenience copy. It is not clear if the purge and filing works in these folders. It is an interesting direction, but will depend on execution.
Offsite 8.5 allows you take matter workspaces or individual folders with you. You can pick the container. The synchronization takes place in the background. I have a lot of questions about how the documents are affected if multiple people access the documents and edit them in different places. If I have it offline and edit the document and someone is online and edits the documents, what happens and which version wins first. In the current version of WorkSite, only one person can access a document at a time. This offline mode seems to indicate that multiple people can edit the document, not knowing that other people are also editing the document. The audience had many questions and concerns about this feature. The Interwoven folks did not have a clear message or understanding of some of the issues and concerns.
Worksite 8.5 will bring improvements to Express Search. In the result set for Express Search, a mouseover will reveal more profile information about the document. They added intelli-type and recently used terms in the search. F2 will pull up the pop-up field for particular fields.
Next up was exploring some of the features of Vivisimo’s Velocity 6.0 and how it may fit into WorkSite and Universal Search. This introduces things like ratings, tagging and annotations. [I previously expressed my excitement about this feature:Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration and The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo’s Social Search. No, I do not think lawyers will immediately jump on to these features. But from the knowledge management perspective, it will provide a great tool for highlighting the better content in the document management system. Even if only a few attorneys use these features it will have an enormous impact on the system and the return on documents. The ability to tag and annotate documents will be available in the underlying tools like MS Word. You also should be able to generate the usual 2.0 features like tag clouds. I am still excited about this feature and am looking forward to it coming out. You can also generate some reports with top tags and top taggers. These tags are one of the ways I see that we can get the document management system to be more effective on a precedent search.
Next up was the records management features. We do not use this and I do not particularly understand it. I admit that I am big ignorant on the needs of records management. I just want to be able find my stuff.
WorkSite 8.5 is scheduled for release in fourth quarter of 2008. Universal Search 6.0 with the social features is also scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2008. Hopefully, I will get them in my Christmas stocking.
Rafiq also mentioned Project Meritage which is the next generation of WorkSite. It would still be compatible with 8.5 clients. It will be compatible with Unicode, will improve compatibility, allow for consolidations and consolidate records, documents and images in a single server.
Rafiq Mohammadi the CTO of Interwoven was the presenter for this session.
Three drivers for professional service firms: risks, client expectations and battle for talent. Interwoven wants to position itself as a productivity tool.
The strategy is to provide a complete solution to organize, find and govern information. Rafiq acknowledged that find or search was a weakness of their product, but the 8.3 release now turns it into one of their strengths.
The want to meet the ease of use expectations of Google. They are moving to a simple user interface, available in many devices. They also want to embed access to the Interwoven product in many platforms instead of having to go to a free-standing, separate program.
They also realize they need to scale up to handle many more documents. If they are going to be a repository for email, they realize that the number of emails will greatly exceed the number of documents. [Law firms are not ready to tackle Luis Suarez's reduction in email.]
Interwoven wants to focus on opening the platform to integrate with other applications and be able to support new applications without difficult development.
They gave a demo of email filing and management, in particular the send and file functions. Send and file really requires their matter centric environment to work. The presentation had two buttons with “send” and “send and file.” With send and file, a screen pops up and asks for the client matter designation. Unfortunately, the file screen that pops up is terrible. It does give you the option to pull down a list of recent matters, the ability to just put in client matter numbers or send only. One nice feature is that a reply email has a “luggage tag” that designates where the original message came from. When you file the email, that tagged matter comes up automatically.
The email integration also allows you to keep courtesy copies in their inbox with a flag designating that the email has been filed in WorkSite. There is a button that purges all of the filed emails out of your inbox. (It is not clear if the purge only works on the inbox, or also in other email folders in exchange.)
One problem that pops up is that if the recipient is also on email management client, there will be competing “luggage tags” for the emails and the email chain. (ouch!)
They moved on to Interwoven Express Search. It is a floating toolbar that pops up with a simple “Google-ish” search box. It also returns results based on relevancy. There is also a query builder that you can pop-up to do an more advanced search by limiting the search results to particular fields.
The problem with the query builder is that they introduce some new terminology. We are used to limiting based on particular document types, Adobe, Word, PowerPoint, etc. They lump Office documents into one category. They also introduce the concept of “my stuff” and I am not sure what the definition of my stuff is. One problem we are having with 8.3 is that it does not seem to work well for searching for a document when you have the document ID.
Lastly, is onto Universal Search, powered by Vivisimo. This a great move forward on Interwoven’s approach. I am a big fan of Vivisimo’s approach of semantic clustering of results, along with the more straight-forward clustering of results based on hard-coded taxonomy. I have found the semantic clustering to be somewhat hit or miss. If the documents are rich in words you can get some interesting clusters. Otherwise the clusters can look very odd.
I very excited to see some graphical representations of some of the taxonomy. So you can see that a particular person is the author of most of the documents in the results. That starts exposing expertise.
Joe Cowan, the CEO of Interwoven started off the Legal IT Leadership Summit talking of the state of the company.
The company is very strong financially. Joe presented great revenue numbers, great profits and other items of a solid financial position.
Seventy-one percent of the Global 100 firms are customers of Interwoven.
Interwoven’s strategic vision:
I spending Monday and Tuesday in Georgia at the seventh Legal IT Leadership Summit sponsored by Interwoven. We are staying at the wonderful Ritz Carlton Reynolds Plantation.
Today, I am presenting on a customer case study on “Deploying WorkSite 8.3.” Tuesday, I am on a panel with Andrew McAfee and Jason Lichter on “Serving Multiple Generations – The Role of Web 2.0 and Strategies for IT”.
I will trying blogging my notes for the other sessions.
I just finished reading The Toothpick: Technology and Culture by Henry Petroski. Here is the New York Times Book Review that caught my attention to the book: Consider the Toothpick.
It was a good read, not as good at Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World or Salt: A World History, but it was good. This was one of the author’s reasons for writing the book:
“For whatever reason, the usually forgotten toothpick came to my mind one day when I was searching for an engagingly simple device that would serve to illustrate some basic principles of engineering and design and that at the same time would help reveal the inevitable interrelationships between technology and culture.”
There was some fascinating history and information. According to the book, in the mid-1980′s toothpicks were in 97 percent of American homes and that Americans consumed over million toothpicks each day.
The June 2nd entry deadline for the 2008 InnovAction Awards for ingenuity in law practice management is coming up fast. There is still time to submit an entry. (But you will have to compete with The Firm’s entry.) Take a moment to review the InnovAction web site and submit an application for you ingenuity in law practice management.
For more information:
My presentation at the Spring Conference at the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians was An Attorney’s Perspective on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. The slide-deck is embedded below. (I warn you that it is mostly images)
A central theme was my C’s of 2.0:
I emphasized that we are still at the early adoption stage of most of these tools and ways of working. Do not panic. You are not being left behind. . . Yet.
© 2012 Doug Cornelius .com. All Rights Reserved.
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