Doug Cornelius .com

I presented on knowledge management as part of the Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education program: The Paperless Practice Toolkit: Taming the Technology Tiger

I focused on search tools, wikis and cloud computing.  The audience was expecting the talk about search, but I think I really caught them off guard with my presentation on wikis and cloud computing. I fit those topics in by pointing out that if you are going paperless that means you are going digital. If you are going digital, there are new and better ways to create your documents and to store them.

The PowerPoint slide deck is below. After you play PowerPoint karaoke, you can view the slides with my notes over JD supra and see what I was talking about with the various images: The Paperless Practice Toolkit: Knowledge Management.

Bud Miyahara, Section Manager, Procter & Gamble shared his company’s take on enterprise search during the webinar: FROM VISION TO REALITY: ENTERPRISE SEARCH AT PROCTER & GAMBLE.

The user experience is guided by consumer websites and searches. Internally, the content does not have as wide a variety of information. You need to meet their expectations.

The companies internal search average was 1.58 words which is much less than the 2.7 word average on the internet. A huge number of queries were for acronyms. Over half of the queries were not in their search engine (the search did not return relevant results).

The user benefit they were looking for:

Find the documents you need, the people you should talk to, and the places to look more efficiently than before. Reduce the time spent searching for information, increase the time to make productive connections, and enable action.

The company chose Vivisimo. They liked the end-user experience. What came out of the box was close to what they wanted.  They also like the clustering of Vivisimo.  They also liked the flexibility of connectors and architecture. They ended up with rapid deployment, going from start to live in 8 weeks.

Bud struggled with the ROI on enterprise search. His advice:

• Throw hard numbers away 
• Possibility of increase in employee productivity
• Reduced rework around the globe
• Increased number of searches being performed
• Search as the “glue”

Matthew Brown, Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research presented on Enterprise Search strategies in a Webinar sponsored by KM World and Vivisimo.

User behavior is driven by consumer experiences

• Simple queries
• Illusion of comprehensiveness

Enterprise search technologies are very different

• Connectivity to specific repositories
• Business content lacks context, text, and links

And requirements are not the same

• Security really matters, often mandated by law
• Application, and worker context is king

This was just a snapshot of his more complete coverage in Matt’s foir purchase report: How To Be A Hero: Develop An Enterprise Search Strategy

At the ILTA conference, Lexis and Interwoven announced that they have teamed together to provide some integration. (This is the big announcement I mentioned earlier:  Interwoven – Big Announcement at ILTA.)

Lexis Search Advantage is a new product from Lexis Nexis. It links to case law, statutes and regulations, with real time Shepard’s indicators for cited cases.  It also works with transaction documents by creating a virtual table of contents, a search for reusable clauses and links to companies and people.

The key to Lexis Search Advantage is that in integrates into Interwoven Universal Search.  Lexis is adding value to firm’s existing content and not creating a separate silo of information.  This collapses searches of internal content, Lexis content and updating cases into one platform and one step.  Internal content is combined with Lexis sources.

According to Doug Stansfield of Lexis, they partnered with Interwoven Universal Search because they thought it was the best enterprise search product in the marketplace for law firms. 

In the search results, there is a “research preview” button. This brings up a HTML preview of the document with live links to the cases cited in the document and Shepard’s signals to the treatment of those cases. Clicking the Lexis content triggers the Lexis charges. The charges are based on your firm’s subscription model. You also have highlighting that shows the search terms in the document. The Shepard’s signals are updated when the document is opened and rendered. Not when the document is indexed.

Lexis also allows a search of web content to be another place that you search with Universal Search.  I noticed the search they used also included content on JD Supra and some blogs. (Yet another reason lawyers should be blogging and posting documents to JD Supra.

For transactional documents, the document has a link to information on people and companies. If the document has IBM as a party, you have a live link to the Lexis Dossier on IBM.  You can also pull up the SEC filings for public companies. The links are configurable, so you could link to Interaction information or other internal sources of information instead.

Search Advantage also offers some auto-profiling of documents.  It can be matched to a firm’s taxonomy or a Lexis taxonomy.

There are three big advantages to the mashup:

• Improves ‘Findability’ of content in Interwoven repositories by enriching documents with external meta-data at index time. During indexing, Search Advantage scans the contents of all documents and e-mail.  When it finds a citation to legal authority (court case, statute, etc.), it can add the court or the judge to the searchable metadata of the document. This allows you to find, for example, all documents that cite a particular case or that were filed in a particular court.
• It eliminates several manual steps previously required to assess current legal validity of precedents and previous firm documents via ‘real-time’ Shepard’s signals. When a user previews a document the document will be shepardized in real time.
• Makes it easier to navigate from a internal document to case-law on lexis.com. Citations to previous cases, statutes, etc. are automatically hyperlinked to the corresponding source document on lexis.com when previewed from Interwoven Universal Search.

Universal Search is already an impressive product. This integration makes it that much more powerful.

There is public demo of the product on Wednesday in Texas Ballroom 5.

Press Release: Interwoven and LexisNexis Team Up to Introduce Integrated Solution

Knowledge workers spend approximately a quarter of their time searching for information, but how successful are they at locating what they are looking for? Our panel members have had enterprise search engines implemented at their respective firms for over a year and discuss the changes they have encountered with enterprise search.

Speakers

• Robert Guilbert – Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen + Katz
• Jeff Rovner – O’Melveny + Meyers LLP
• Rachelle DeGregory – Sheppard, Mullin, Richter + Hampton LLP
• Chad Ergun – White + Case LLP

My Notes:


Recommind at O’Melveny + Meyers LLP

Jeff was heavily influenced by the Long Tail (as explained in the The Long Tail by Chris Anderson). Their analysis of enterprise search tools was based, in part, by what was coming out of the consumer internet. The firm chose Recommind. Their search solution imputes lots of of information about a document based on the client/matter designation assigned to the documents. They pull information form the financial system, the matter tracking system, etc. and add it to the metadata for the document.

They started the Recommind proof of concept in November 2006, finished this June 2007 and launched it in September of 2007. They started with Recommind as a stand alone application. They used flickr as model for the the visual landing page. They also modeled the search training on searching for products on internet shopping sites. If you could shop online at Macy’s, you could use Recommind.

Their second stage of Recommind was integrating it into the intranet. For example, the people search uses the Recommind people search tool. You can filter the search results or used an advanced search to find very specific skills.

Autonomy for White + Case

Chad’s experience was similar to Jeff’s experience. they put together a very long list of features and comparison of four vendors. They picked autonomy. A big issue for them is that they have 38 office with many different language.

They did a quiet roll out of the product. Their IT systems are very decentralized. Each office had their own document managment system. It would take hours for an attorney to hook into all of the different offices and conduct the search across all 38 systems.

They have Autonomy index each of the systems and create a united search. They get blazing speed. (Especially compared to the searching each of the separate document management systems.)

Autonomy also has a desktop application to go along with the web-based search. This was really fast. It also can be incorporated into MS Word. As you type in a document it show you other relevant information in the firm’s resources.

They will also have a search for voicemail.

. . . .

Tagging

The panel thought the tagging features in the next versions of Universal Search and Recommind will be very useful.


Other thoughts:

• You may want to check out the AIIM‘s Market IQ Report on Findability: The Art and Science of Making Content Easy to Find

My ILTA Schedule

UPDATE: slight revision to protect the innocent

It looks like Tom Baldwin and Lisa Kellar Gianakos are hitching their cart to Recommind as they are kicking off the knowledge management program at Reed Smith: Reed Smith Builds Knowledge Management Solution on Recommind Technology.

“Reed Smith’s knowledge management platform needs to accommodate our vast network of lawyers around the globe. We evaluated several solutions and quickly realized that the other products do not provide the usability, relevance and structure needed to effectively access the vast amount of knowledge we generate,” said Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer, Reed Smith. “Our new knowledge management solution, built on the MindServer platform, brings the right content – in context – to the people who need it, allowing us to focus on what we do best: giving our clients the best service available. Additionally, using Recommind’s unique Matters and Expertise locator, Reed Smith’s lawyers and staff now have a system that automatically leverages our broad knowledge base of experience across the entire firm by allowing us to instantly find the most experienced lawyer for any type of situation imaginable. With the rapid pace of our firm’s growth, giving our lawyers across the globe an understanding of everyone’s experience was paramount in our decision to purchase the MindServer platform.”

These are my notes from a panel on enterprise search. One panelist pointed out that enterprise search may be reaching too far. They will not be able to get every silo. You should just try to get most of the silos.

The first question was “make it like Google.” The first response was to have a simple interface that delivered relevant results. Relevancy is the hardest part. We do not have the magic special sauce that makes PageRank work so well for Google. One panelist also said that people are looking for Amazon.com. They want an ability to manipulate the search results to filter down to useful content. Another panelist showed the importance of putting the filters on the left-hand side. People are so use to Google putting advertisements on the right-hand side that they ignored the filters if they were on the right.

One issue is how to deliver relevancy or whether to include relevancy. What are the keys to relevancy.

What about the relationship between the document management system and the enterprise search? Most of the knowledge lives in the document management system and email. One panelist pointed out that those two sources are largely limited to work product.

What a bout taxonomy? Knowledge management has been focused on taxonomy. Does enterprise search reduce the need for a taxonomy? The panel all felt that taxonomy was very important to make enterprise search work. [I disagree. You want metadata to filter results. You do not necessarily need a rigid taxonomy.]

There was a lot of discussion about enterprise search inadvertently revealing documents that should not be public. One firm mentioned that they shut the enterprise search down after the a few weeks to give a cooling down period. During the cooling down period, people could put security on documents. Previously they had “security by obscurity.” One firm had a policy to report information that is available through the search that should be secure. Another firm did not include administrative documents as part of the initial roll-out of the enterprise search.

The panel thought that any enterprise search is better than no enterprise search. They do produce different results and have some different capabilities. But they all seem to produce much better results than not having one. Some notes are focusing on multi-threading. You do not want people to have to wait in line for their search to run. Another point to focus on the index size. Some indexes are almost as big as the underlying content repositories.

What to include in the enterprise search? The panel responded:

• Lotus Notes, resume collections, CRM, intranet, KM methodology system
• Lotus Notes, Elite billing information, CRM, records, DMS, website

Each of the panelists each had the results tabbed out and not intermingling the results in a federated list. People mostly deferred to the default tab of the search results.

There was some challenge to the request for “The Google.” Several audience members think the results need more bells and whistles to work. [I struggle with the question of whether the search tool needs to be more complicated or whether we need to store the information in a better way that simplifies the search.]

How do you prove value of enterprise search? One answer is that is an infrastructure thing, more than an ROI thing.

The panel offered their top advice on choosing and implementing and enterprise search tool:

• Define the sources to search
• Focus on security recognition
• Understand who is searching for what, in what business context
• Tune-ability of the tool
• Focus on crafting the user interface
• Put it into the toolbar of other applications; bring the ability to search to them

Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge started a new column in KM World magazine. Borrowing from Dave Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, he calls it Everything is Fragmented.

“I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the “chunked” material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems.”

Since I started following the Enterprise 2.0 movement, I have shifted my philosophy of knowledge management. I fall pretty close to Dave’s position.

“It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.”

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are still useful. But, as Dave Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, everyone has a different view on what the structure should be. Whatever taxonomy I create or a group decides upon, it will only be meaningful to some of the people some of the time. As the taxonomy gets more and more complex, the less useful it will be.

On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.

The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.

If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.

We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.

That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo’s social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.

One of the challenges of knowledge management is comparing the ability to find information inside the firm, against the ability to find information outside the firm.

Google, in its quest to organize all of our knowledge, has set the bar very high for us trying to organize all of our knowledge inside the firm.

One of the most common requests I get is: “Make it a Google-like search.” Obviously the information inside the firm is not organized in the highly linked and interconnected way of webpages that makes Google so successful.

But one of the keys in producing content and publishing content is how it comes back in a search for information. It is key in knowledge management to sit down like a regular person at the firm and try to the find the content you just produced. People are not willing to sit down and create a complex query or fill in a lot of fields to get an answer. They want to fill a few words into a simple search box and get results.

One of the new features of SharePoint is the ability of individual list items to be returned in search results. The SharePoint list function allows you to organize information in a structured way. For example, collecting a list of precedent acquisition agreements and noting specific characteristics. You can go into the list and filter for a particular set of results. Or, if the list is structured properly, you can just use the simple SharePoint search to return the individual items on the list.

There are questions that cannot be answered by Google and there are answers that cannot be answered by your intra-firm search. But we need to make sure that more and more questions can be answered.

Photo by snakeplisken.