Doug Cornelius .com

My buddy Mary Abraham started a blog: Above and Beyond KM, a discussion of knowledge management that goes above and beyond technology. Mary has often been a rudder keeping our knowledge management groups focused on knowledge management and not on the technology.

Mary and I were recently sparring over whether lawyers are good at sharing knowledge. Being at a big law firm, I see lots of sharing. Senior lawyers must share with the junior lawyers on their team if they want the junior lawyers to get anything done. I see lots of requests for information in emails. (Unfortunately, I rarely see the responses. More on that below.)

Sharing happens in the law firm at several levels: between a junior lawyer and their mentor, among peers, within a matter team, within a client team, within a practice, and across the firm. I believe the most effective sharing is the sharing among smaller groups. So, I see much more sharing within the matter team than within a client team. It is just human nature and the nature of sharing.

But, I am firm believer that we are missing some technology tools to make sharing easier and more effective. We need better tools for the small groups to share their information within the group, but also allow the entire firm to access that sharing.

Unfortunately, the default way of sharing in a law firm is by email. I long lost count of the requests to better capture email to share the knowledge and information in the email. The problem is not sharing the email; the problem is the email itself. It is just not a good way to share.

That is why I am so excited about Enterprise 2.0 tools. They combine the communication power of email with the sharing and finding powers of the web. In particular, blogs and wikis make it very easy to share information and do so in a way that it seems very close and focused on what the smaller group is doing. But, all of that information in the blog or wiki is easily findable and useable by others in the firm who are not part of the smaller group.

Ray Sims of Sims Learning Connections put together a list of 43 Knowledge Management Definitions. Ray only stopped at 43 because he “ran out of energy.”

As Davenport and Prusak state in Working Knowledge: “People rarely give away valuable possessions, including knowledge, without expecting something in return.”

First generation knowledge systems expected people to contribute to them because it was for the collective good. Everyone had the benefit of this good work product, organized in the central taxonomy of the firm.

Many companies offered incentives, like gift cards, for contributing to the system. If you have to give away a prize to motivate people to contribute, then perhaps they do not seen enough value in contributing. What in it for me? Sure, you get the Starbucks giftcard. And you get some smug satisfaction for contributing into the central knowledge system vault.

The failure of these first generation knowledge management systems was that the central knowledge system does give the user a significantly better way to manage their personal knowledge. It is outside of their normal workflow and outside of the places they normally look for knowledge and advice. The contribution helps others find the contributor’s work product, but it does not make it easier for the contributor to find and manage their own work product.

Knowledge management solutions will work better if they are focused on improving the normal workflow and better capturing that information. The user is more likely to use a new tool if it is easy to use and provides more functionality than what they currently use. As Dion Hincliffe pointed out, the new tool needs to be many times more useful than the current tool for people to use the new tool.

A case in point is a document management system. The system needs to provide much more functionality than the user would get from saving the documents to their local computer. Our Interwoven document management system offers version control, better searching, automatic backup, and many other features you do not get on you desktop. In exchange, as part of the knowledge market the rest of the firm gets the ability to find and reuse those documents.

I put together this list of reading materials for knowledge management. Obviously, there are few books that are focused on law firm knowledge management.

Cluetrain Manifesto. Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knowledge Management. Melissie Clemmons

Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Etienne Wenger

Effective Knowledge Management for Law Firms. Matthew Parsons

Everything is Miscellaneous. David Weinberger

Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Peter Ferdinand Drucker, David Garvin, Dorothy Leonard, Susan Straus, John Seely Brown

If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice. Carla O’dell, C. Jackson Grayson

Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations. Thomas A. Stewart

The Knowledge-Creating Company. Ikujiro Nonaka in the Harvard Business Review (1991)

Knowledge Leadership: The Art and Science of the Knowledge-based Organization. Steven Cavaleri and Sharon Seivert

Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer. Gretta Rusanow, Esq.

Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations. Chris Collison, Geoff Parcell

The Long Tail. Chris Anderson

We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. Barry Libert

Wikipatterns: Stewart Mader

Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak

Let me know what else you think should be on this list.

Many knowledge management texts draw a distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge. With one being knowledge in someone’s head and the other being knowledge that is written down somewhere. Frankly, I find these terms so abstract that I have forgotten which term is which.

And, I think this is the wrong distinction to make. The knowledge is either findable by your computer or it is not findable by your computer.

By finding the knowledge I mean finding the knowledge itself or finding the person who has the knowledge. Certainly all knowledge within a firm is not going to be transferred into a form that is findable by a computer. That is why it is important to identify subject matter experts and make them findable by a computer search.

Knowledge written down on a piece of paper and thrown in a file does not do anyone any good. I have first-hand experience at this. (I think everyone has first-hand experience at this). Last week, I was cleaning up a stack on my desk and found some hand-written notes from a conference I went to last year. It was good stuff, but it had been lost. (One of the reasons I now blog conferences.) I had some vague recollections of the conference, but the written notes brought back a whole waterfall of recollections, action items and information. The notes were written but had not done me any good until I accidentally stumbled on them. They certainly were not doing any good for the rest of my firm.

A file saved on your local computer does not make the knowledge in that file findable by anyone but you.

Sending out an email makes the knowledge potentially more findable. But, you as the sender and all of recipients are going to end up keeping that email in different places, in different folders with different meta-data. As the sender, the email ends up in your list of sent items. As the recipient, the email lands in my inbox. Then it may stay there, or I may transfer it to a different location. Or I may delete it. Most likely any two recipients are going to treat the email in completely different ways. Email makes it more findable, but the parties to the email end up having to find it in different ways.

If the knowledge is not findable by my computer, then I have to know it myself or have to send out a blast email asking if anyone knows about it. Of course the responses end-up in my email or voice mail, being findable only by me.

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.)

With credit to Dave Snowden, I have come to the conclusion that knowledge is both an artifact and a flow. As part of the learning process, you learn the state of knowledge as it exists at that time. You are taught and learn the knowledge artifact. Then, as time progresses, things change and you now need to know the changes to the artifact. You need to know the flow. Of course the new student starts with the now revised artifact.

As an example, I was taught and learned that there are nine planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Nine planets was my knowledge artifact. With the discovery of new objects in the solar system and the discovery of new information, astronomers have deemed Pluto to no longer be worthy of planet status. Now, there are eight planets in our solar system. The demotion of Pluto is the flow.

For my three-year old, the knowledge artifact is that there are eight planets in the solar system. There is some value to him in knowing that we used to think of Pluto as a planet. That is, the flow has some value to him. But he is going to be taught the revised knowledge artifact. He is going to be taught that there are eight planets.

Take this inside the firm. A practices and procedures policy is a great knowledge artifact. But once I learn the policy, I am concerned with the changes to the policy. I care about the flow. Republishing the policy in its entirety hides the flow and hides the knowledge.

One of the limitations of email is that it is mostly flow and little artifact. Email is not a good artifact because each party to the email will end up with the email in a different location. For the sender, the email will end up in their sent items list. For the recipient it will end up in their inbox and probably be transferred to a different location. It is a good flow for the recipient. But each recipient will probably treat the email in a different way. Of course, the email does no good for the person who comes into the firm the next day after the email is sent. They end up without the artifact and without the flow.

For effective knowledge find-ability and transfer in the firm, you need both the knowledge artifact and the flow.

Google is looking to move from the web search into the knowledge sharing area. According to the Official Google Blog they are inviting “people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it”: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge.

Google has decreed that a unit of knowledge should be called a “knol.” Google envisions that each “knol” will have its own webpage and that webpage will be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. This is the example they posted: Insomnia (double click to magnify).

Maybe I am missing something, but isn’t this already covered by Wikipedia? The wikipedia entry for most topic comes up first in the Google search results. Try a Google search for “knowledge management“. The wikipedia entry comes up first.

Google is not claiming editorial control or ownership of the content. Of course they are picking the first authors of each “knol” so they are controlling the process.

Patrick Lambe of the Green Chameleon published this great collection of archetypal characters to represent a a range of attitudes and behaviors that a knowledge management professional is likely to encounter: Getting Management Buy-in For KM.

Now if I can just figure out which group I fall into. Captain KM?

Law.com – Legal Technology has an a new article: KM Attorneys Seek Calm in the E-Mail Storm.

I like Michael Mills statement of what a knowledge management lawyer does: “Our job is meta-lawyering instead of lawyering. It’s taking one step back to think about advanced technology and organizing information based on the culture of the firm, and how we serve our clients.”