Doug Cornelius .com

The Firm has taken its second step into Enterprise 2.0 with the launch of our first wikis in SharePoint 2007:

Our first wiki was an import of our existing knowledge management wiki into the SharePoint platform. I wrote about that wiki in a previous post on Making Wikis Work – Success Factors. That wiki had been very successful on the external platform and I expect it will continue to be successful on the SharePoint wiki platform. There have already been several edits.

The downside to moving the wiki was that all of the links in the wiki broke. The links to our intranet were already broken as a result of the upgrade of the intranet from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007. Now the internal wikis links are broken.

We had debated on whether to move the wiki. The winning argument for the move was that “we need to eat what we cook.” If we are going to pitch the use of wikis in SharePoint, we needed to be using them ourselves.

We also launched a second wiki for managing HotDocs and our HotDocs templates. The vision for this wiki was to create the manual for each of the HotDocs templates and to share information among the HotDocs developers. The wiki page becomes the item returned on a search for the HotDocs template.

We found one great feature of wikis in SharePoint is their ability to combine structured and unstructured information on the wiki page. At the bottom of the image above you see the words “Template In Production.” I had created a new column/field in the wiki page library called “Template.” In the Template column I allowed for the choices of “In Production”, “Under Development” and “N/A.” You can edit the field right from the wiki page.

By adding the structured content we can also create views of the wiki page library to expose content, rather than having to rely solely on links in the wiki pages. In the image below, the sections labeled “HotDocs Templates”, “HotDocs Templates Under Development” and “HotDocs Wiki Recent Edits” are all separate views of the wiki pages library.

The Firm has taken its first steps into Enterprise 2.0. Using SharePoint’s blog platform we launched our first blog today. Mark Puzella, David Hosp and Robert O’Connell started their Trademark, Copyright and Trade Secrets Blog.

They put up four posts the first day and a had handful of comments. (The comments were mostly the authors trying out the comments feature on the blog.)

In early April, we upgraded our intranet to SharePoint 2007. The blog feature works great in SharePoint. Certainly you can’t add on the numerous widgets and other tools that you could with WordPress or Blogger. You can add categories to the posts. At first we thought you were limited to one category per post, but quickly found the setting to allow multiple categories per post.

Most of our planned uses for blogs are targeted at hosting firm announcements. It was great to have lawyers dive in and want a real law blog. I hope the Trademark, Copyright and Trade Secrets Blog will be a beacon showing other lawyers the power of blogging inside the enterprise. This may also lead to some external blogs.

It was a great series of presentations at the Boston KM Forum Symposium: KM 2.0 – Real or Hype?.

All of presenters danced around the question of what is knowledge management 2.0 and the relationship between knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 . I expected that. There are so many different definitions for the two terms. (see Ray Sims collection of 57 Definitions of Knowledge Management). The relationship between the terms depends on how you define the terms.

As those of you have been reading my posts and publications know, I think Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management belong together. (See Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0; Tom Davenport also thinks so: Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?) Knowledge Management and Enterprise 2.0 share similar goals, similar issues and similar tools.

Knowledge Management 2.0 is more personal focused. The tools are focused on helping the individual capture, find and categorize knowledge as part of their daily work. Knowledge management should not be about some central repository for you to deposit stuff for others to use. Knowledge management should be about a repository for you. That repository just happens to be easily accessible by others in the firm.

It was great to have some face-to-face time with Jessica Lipnack, Ray Sims, KellyPuffs, Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait. I also had a chance to meet some new people and hopefully grow some new connections. (Since a common theme from the symposium was connecting people with people.)

The agenda and links to my notes from each presentation:

Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management - Mark Frydenberg, Senior Lecturer, Computer Information Systems Department, Bentley College

KM and Web 2.0 – A User’s Perspective – Ray Sims, formerly Director of Knowledge Management at Novell

Enterprise 2.0 = KM 2.0? – Dan Keldsen, Director, Market Intelligence, AIIM

Case Study: The Siemens BeFirst Portal – Jeff Cram, Co-Founder and Managing Director, and David Aponovich, Content Management Strategist, ISITE Design

Moving Beyond Web 2.0 Resistance – Jessica Lipnack, CEO and co-founder, NetAge Inc.

Wrap-up: KM 2.0 – Why We Should Care – Larry Chait, Chait & Associates

As we are working on deploying wikis and blogs inside The Firm, we have been working on ways to explain these tools. Most of the lawyers have heard the terms, but are not familiar with the tools.

One question that arises in the difference between a blog and a wiki. The distinction between the two becomes less clear inside the enterprise.

Mark Miller at endusersharepoint.com put it beautifully when he said:

Blogs are great when one person is trying to communicate to a team or group. Think of a blog as pushing out information from a single source to anyone who is willing to listen, “one-to-many”. The listener has the ability to participate in the communication through comments, but the main direction of the message is controlled by the person writing the blog posts. . .

By the very nature of wikis, many people will be adding content and that content can be consumed by any number of readers, “many-to-many”. At first, it seems like a free-for-all, but in an intranet situation, it is extremely useful for letting content experts participate by contributing in their area of expertise. In general, someone sets the basic beginning structure of the wiki by creating a table of contents and some starter pages. From there, user generated content drives the expansion of the wiki, based upon the needs of the participating audience.

Simple test: one or two people providing content, use a blog; many people providing content, use a wiki.

Lee Rosen, the president of Rosen Law Firm, took a few minutes to talk with me about his firm’s experience with wikis.

Rosen is replacing his Lotus Notes platform with an externally hosted wiki from PBWiki. You may have read about the cash prize contest he ran for his employees in a story on CNN.com: Boosting Teamwork with Wikis. He offered up the chance to win a cash prize for contributing to the wiki. The more you contributed, the better your chance of winning.

Lee was drawn to the concept of using a wiki because of its purported simplicity. He found it much easier to develop and add content. Setting up the wiki was quick. The firm started with the free version of PBWiki and had their wiki up and running in minutes. Some of his administrators worked with the wiki for a few months to see its functionality and how it might work within the firm. Then others in the firm started asking to join and it took off.

Over the last year, his firm has created three to four thousand pages in the wiki. Lee estimates that 60% of his employees make at least one change to the wiki each day.

Lee really likes the flexibility of the wiki platform. People can work in the wiki the way that they want to work. Of course, that has lead to some disagreements over the way to organize content. The upside to the disagreement is that people are working together to add content and organize it. They would not bothering disagreeing if they did not care about the content.

Lee sees a conflict between the need for rules and the freedom to contribute. There are places where the wiki is not organized in a way that works for him. But it does work for others.

There is a great deal of latitude on what people can do with the wiki at Rosen Law Firm. Many have created a personal page where they update information about themselves. This social component has been well-received and keeps people engaged in using the wiki.

Lee also likes that the wiki is externally hosted. He lets PBwiki worry about keeping the server up and all the “plumbing” headaches. He wants to be out of the IT business. That benefit was a little offset by the long term viability of wiki providers. It’s great the PBwiki does not charge much for their product. But what is their long term plan? His firm’s thousands of pages of content get dragged along with their long term plan.

One of his biggest issues is keeping the wiki in people’s minds as a way to communicate. It takes some time for people to realize that they can communicate through the wiki. Lee still sees lots of email communication that could be better handled in the wiki. They are also still transitioning some of the content from Lotus Notes into the wiki.

Lee also drives people to the wiki by only publishing some information in the wiki. For example, monthly reports like time billed are only published on the wiki. Lee uses the wiki to host his video training. The wiki replaces weird URLs and DVDs. With PBwiki, the video can display right in the wiki page.

It looks like the PBWiki has been a tremendous success for Lee Rosen and Rosen Law Firm. That is a lot of content and a lot communication happening inside the wiki.

It gets me excited for the up-coming launch of our wiki platform. I am acting like a nine-year old on the day before Christmas waiting for the launch.

David Bicknell wrote a piece for ComputerWeekly.com: Make Web 2.0 deliver business benefits.

“The risks involved in embracing Web 2.0 are outweighed by the benefits experts say, and CIOs are already adopting Web 2.0 thinking to deliver a new approach to information creation, publishing, aggregation, discovery and validation.”

These lightweight, easy to deploy, easy to use applications make it easier to communicate and collaborate inside the enterprise and outside the enterprise.

For years technology advancements and especially legal technology was advanced based on computer speed and more features piled onto existing software. Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 are the new paradigm that it is the power of the network that is advancing technology. Your ability to connect with other people inside the firm and outside the firm and capturing the effect of connection is a powerful tool for knowledge management.

Tom Davenport seems to have found some middle ground with Andy McAfee in their battle over Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?

“But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of
greater responsiveness, better “knowledge capture and sharing,” and more
effective “collective intelligence,” there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked
about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I
remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM. . . . Sure, there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one.”

I touched on this in my Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0 post and the ensuing series of Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0 posts:

• Summary
• Wikis will be a great way to synthesize knowledge
• Blogs will be a great way to make announcements and summarize meetings
• Email needs to be incorporated
• Document management systems can host
• RSS is there to spread the word
• Search to find all of the good stuff

Blogs, along with wikis and RSS feeds form the big three new technologies from web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 that will impact law firm knowledge management 2.0.

A blog (like this one) is just a webpage that allows you to easily publish new information, doing so in a chronological manner, with notifications of new information being added.

A blog can give a lawyer or other employees the ability to quickly capture knowledge and publish it. As a result it is available for others to find. Since the blog post is html, even a simple search engine should be able to index it and produce good results.

Blogs may be a natural migration for lawyers. Lawyers (like me) are used to writing letters and sending them out. Essentially, that is the same process as a blog.

Personally, I find this blog to be great personal knowledge management tool. I write for me. These are thoughts I want to capture for my own later use. You reading it and finding this content is just a by product. I publish a new blog post when I feel like it and categorize it in the way that makes sense to me.

I think the big use for a blog inside a law firm will be the administrators trying to make the law firm community aware of new information, policies and happenings. I have already threatened many of my firm’s practice area managers with blogs. They seem to be willing guinea pigs for blogging. (Six more weeks until our enterprise 2.0 platform is released.)

The other feature of a blog that makes it a more powerful communication device is the ability of others to participate in the blog by allowing comments. The post and comment become captured elements of the collaboration and communication.

Back in June, I had the good fortune of going to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. (Thanks to Luis Suarez.) Those of you have been reading this blog know that I have been talking about and experimenting with blogs, wikis, tagging, social media sites, enterprise search and other enterprise 2.0 tools.

One of the questions that I had coming out of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was the relationship between knowledge management and enterprise 2.0. Which was correct: (a) enterprise 2.0 is a subset of knowledge management (b) knowledge management is a subset of enterprise 2.0 (c) knowledge management is the same thing as enterprise 2.0 (d) knowledge management has nothing to do with enterprise 2.0?

I have come to the conclusion that enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management are two disciplines that need to join together.

Several of the sessions were run by Jessica Lipnack. Her focus was on the need to focus on the people and process side of the problem and not on the technology. Enterprise 2.0 was 90% people and 10% technology. That is a common theme in knowledge management.

Early knowledge management was about developing a “knowledge management system.” One big database to hold the knowledge of the company. It was a top down approach, trying to force people into the process and the technology. The theme was to contribute to the common good. But the “knowledge management system” did not really give the individual user much in return. It lacked personal knowledge management. People have a hard enough time managing their own stream of information and knowledge. The “knowledge management system” was outside the typical workflow. You had to implement a different process and a roundabout way of collecting the information. Information that was already collected some other way. The “knowledge management system” would rarely give the individual a way to organize information in a way that makes sense to them.

Incorporating enterprise 2.0 technologies into the knowledge management toolbox, gives people easy to use – easy to learn tools. It allows them to capture and organize their information is a way that works for them. The focus of knowledge management should be on the individual, by giving them tools for personal use, the content of which can leveraged by the rest of the enterprise. Knowledge management is trying to get people who do similar things communicating with each other and collaborating. Then capture that collaboration for their own re-use and re-use across the enterprise. That sounds like what the enterprise 2.0 movement is about.

One aspect of enterprise 2.0 at a law firm is that there is less of a hierarchy at a law firm. It is more of a caste system. The newer, younger attorneys are at the bottom and the senior partners are at the top. The bottom of the caste produces lots of the substantive knowledge. It is those junior lawyers that are doing the research and analysis that gets consumed by the higher levels of the caste. The lawyers move across cases and work for different players in the senior levels of the caste. (My family asks if I have good boss. I have dozens of bosses.)

Law firm knowledge management 2.0 is about incorporating Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 technologies and processes into the law firm knowledge management toolkit. I am going to have few follow-up posts on the use of the technologies as part of a law firm knowledge management strategy.

Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport squared off today on a debate on Enterprise 2.0. This was rematch from their debate back in June at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

I was disappointed that the webinar was less of a webinar and just a conference call. However, that lack of visuals allowed me to jump into a twitter and have a discussion with Luis Suarez, Dennis Howlett, Ami Chitwood, kellypuffs, Steve Matthews and others. At the time I was sitting in a conference room with others from my knowledge management department. It was interesting to hear the take of Tom Davenport about how enterprise 2.0 tools are interesting, as I was listening to the debate, discussing it among my team and twittering across the globe at the same time.

As for the debate, I think Davenport was getting hung up on the term “Enterprise 2.0.” His take was that Enterprise 2.0 is an over the top terminology. My take has always been that enterprise 2.0 is short for “web 2.0 applications brought inside the enterprise.” I do not think the tools themselves are going to change the way business operates. The way business operates is already changing. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have an excellent presentation on this in Wikinomics. The Web 2.0 suite of tools has created a new way to communicate. One that can be outside the traditional boundaries of business. As the tools do a better job of memorializing the communication, this non-hierarchical communication is on display for everyone to see.

Frankly, I thought Davenport was spending most of his time quibbling over language. For a lawyer like me to think that someone is quibbling over language, it must have been really bad.

McAfee broke Enterprise 2.0 down into three parts. First are the tools. Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, linking, tagging and robust search do make it much easier to organize, find and disseminate knowledge. Second are the change management issues. The organization needs to embrace a more open method of communication. The firm needs to realize that communication does not happen through a hierarchy. Third are the signals from management. Management must not only permit a more open dialog, they need to encourage it and participate in it themselves.

Everyone on Twitter was focused on the change management and management signals. I think we all agreed that if there was no culture for sharing, then the tools are not going to work. McAfee and Davenport also agreed on this point. Davenport just thought the tools are not all that different than the tools that have been previously been available.

I disagree with Davenport on this point. I think the suite of Enterprise 2.0 tools are much easier to learn and use than existing tools. If they are easier to learn and use then more people are going to use them. Also, I think the Enterprise 2.0 tools are more powerful and offer the individual user much more benefit than existing tools. I use my wikis, because I capture the information in them better for myself than any other tool. The wikis work as a better communication tool within the group because the message is made, synthesized and preserved in the wiki. Emails and word documents cannot do that.

Although I found the debate interesting, I found the reactions and discussion on Twitter to be more interesting and really enhance the experience of the webinar. I have never been a big user of Twitter. But this was great use for it. (An interesting note about Twitter is that it was set up by the same person who originally created blogger: Evan Williams.)