Doug Cornelius .com

School Library Learning 2.0 put together their list of the 23 Things program to learn about Web 2.0.

We are in the beginning stages of upgrading our intranet platform from an older version of SharePoint to the new version with blogs, wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. I thought the 23 things program would be interesting to try out with our Knowledge Management team here at the firm. That way we could try out these technologies and in the process look for ways to utilize them on our intranet.

After looking at the list of 23 things, I thought it need to be revised to better focus on Enterprise 2.0 rather than Web 2.0.

My first step was to set up a wiki using an external vendor. I chose PBWiki. It was free and had a lot of features. Plus, I was familiar with PBWiki because I had already been using a PBWiki that a colleague set up to plan an event.

I also created a del.icio.us account for the KM Team.

On the frontpage of the wiki. I laid out a list of some our KM projects and a list naming each member of the KM Team.

I created a new wiki page with the steps below.

Wikis

1. Read the wiki’s introductory materials on the Help page and learn the basics on how to use a wiki.

2. Create your wiki page from the text on the FrontPage and add information to your wiki page.

3. Update one of the project pages on the wiki or add a new wiki page for a project not on the site.

4. Add a link to a document from our document management system on your wiki page and describe what the document is about.

RSS Feeds

5. Sign up for Google Reader (or another feedreader if you have a preference. I use bloglines on the web and Attensa in Outlook)

6. Add the RSS feed from this wiki as one of your feeds. (The feed is on the bottom right corner of the page.)

7. Subscribe to each of the blogs on the KM Learning page in your feed reader.

8. Check your feedreader for new items at least once a day.

9. Add an RSS feed from your online newsource of choice. (Boston.com and WSJ.com each have an extensive list of RSS feeds.)

Blogs

10. Setup a blog on blogger.com. You can keep it private (there is setting for that.) If it is private, add each member of the KM team as a reader.

11. Add a link to your blog on your wiki page.

12. Subscribe to the RSS feed from your blog.

13. Subscribe to the RSS feed from each of the KM team member’s blogs

14. Write a post on your blog.

15. Clip a news article using the “Send to Blogger” button on the Google toolbar.

16. Write at least one post or clip one article each day for five days.

17. Write at least one comment each of the KM team blogs.

Tagging

18. Set up an account on del.icio.us.

19. Install the del.icio.us toolbar buttons.

20. Tag some websites in del.icio.us.

21. Add the KM Team Account to your network

22. Share some tags with KM Team Account.

Social Software

23. Set up an account on LinkedIn.

24. Fill in as much profile information as you are comfortable with adding.

25. Add each of the KM Team Members as a connection.

26. Search for other contacts in LinkedIn and add connections.

27. If you use a web email system, check to see if any of those contacts are in LinkedIn.

The latest issue of Inside Counsel magazine contains a primer on knowledge management Article(pdf).

They interviewed the right people by including Jack Vinson, Dennis Kennedy, and Sally Gonzalez.

The article laid out a seven step guide to knowledge management:

1. Create an objective.
2. Sell it.
3. Appoint a leader.
4. Get buy-in
5. Leverage existing technology
6. Consider other stakeholders
7. Maintain it

One big difference between an in-house legal KM system and law firm’s KM system is the objective. In-house, the KM system should be designed to save the enterprise money. The in-house lawyers should be (a) more efficient, (b) able to provide better advice, (c) better able to leverage and manage outside counsel, and (d) able to reduce the liability and risk exposure to the enterprise.

Those same four objectives apply to a KM system for a law firm. But the cost savings get passed on to the client, not as more revenue to the law firm. That is what makes it hard to determine the value of knowledge management to a law firm and hard to determine what the return on investment may be. The goal is to convert those cost savings and better work product into more business and higher realization on the payment of the bills.

The one situation where it is possible to work knowledge management into the law firm financial equation is for fixed-fee representations. If knowledge management can help the attorneys produce better work product, quicker and more efficiently, then the law firm can increase the time value of the representation. If the client agrees pay $X for each matter which equate to Z hours of attorney time at their billing rate, then the goal is to complete the matter with less than Z hours worth of work.

That is where knowledge management (and legal technology) can help. I would propose using document automation to produce the documents more quickly. I would also institute a post-closing review of the comments to the documents to see which ones should be incorporated going forward to reduce negotiation time. You can see how layering in KM around the practice and the client would make a quantifiable difference.

One of my principles of knowledge management is transparency.

Knowledge workers should easily be able to find out information on a particular knowledge object (i.e piece of information or document) in a repository. They should know how it got there, who put it there, when it got put there, why it got put there, and where to find it in the repository.

The Applied Knowledge Group put together this list of terms used in the practice of knowledge management: http://www.akgroup.com/company/jargon.html.