Doug Cornelius .com

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

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

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.

This series on Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0 focused on the suite of technologies coming into place that will allow expansion and change in the way we approach knowledge management at law firms. (Although I think this is true for all companies, not just law firms.)

• 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

These are just technology tools. At its core knowledge management is about collaboration and sharing. Different people and different groups communicate and collaborate in different ways. As a knowledge management professional, I focus on bringing people together to communicate and collaborate. I want to give them tools to make it easier for them to communicate and collaborate.

In starting this tread about law firm knowledge management 2.0, I wanted to emphasize that the existing “1.0″ technology tools and the growing list of web 2.0 /enterprise 2.0 tools are just giving people better ways to communicate and collaborate. The list of tools will get longer and longer. We need to embrace them and find the best way to deploy them across the enterprise and make sure the content is findable.

Findability is a keystone of knowledge management and is a keystone of law firm knowledge management 2.0. The goal is get information out of inaccessible locations and into accessible locations and putting it into context.

If the information is in an accessible then it should be search-able. Is the reverse true? If I search for it, can I find it?

One goal of law firm knowledge management 2.0 is to reduce the number of places people need to search to find the information they need. Email has one search, the document management system has another search, the expertise system has another, the intranet has its own search, the CRM system has its own siloed search and the KM system stands by itself.

We need to unite the searches to make it easier to find stuff. Otherwise the first step of the search is searching for the right place to search.

Enterprise search will be a key tool in law firm knowledge management system. The search should unite the content in the various systems. So if I search, I find it.

Email is not going away. We need to find a way to better integrate email into law firm knowledge management 2.0. The issue is what to do with email. We get lots of it. It lies unshared in our inbox.

One of my goals of law firm knowledge management 2.0 is to reduce the amount of internal email traffic. Another is get that email into a shared and searchable repository.

Are there technology fixes and ways to match the process? One example is that I can publish a post to this blog through email.

The real step is to get lawyers to recognize that there are ways to communicate other than email. Ten years ago, many lawyers thought email was just a passing technology fad. It took a long time to get to this place where email is ubiquitous. It will take a long time to adopt other methods.

The first step is acknowledging the problem.

For a law firm, the document management system is their factory assembly line. Lawyers draft documents. We start with a form, precedent or blank sheet of paper. We add text, add more text, revise, and further revise the content. We use multiple versions to show to others and incorporate their comments. We share the documents with our secretaries to help us with the edits. The document management system is key to dealing with this production.

As a result the document management system is our of our biggest repositories of findable information. The deficiency with the document management system has always been an inadequate search tool in the document management system. Without a good search, the documents become less findable and less useful for future work. Since the vast majority of documents produced by the firm end up in the document management system, useful documents lie side-by-side with useless documents. Our form securities purchase agreement sits in there next to fax cover sheets.

One challenge with law firm knowledge management 2.0 will be identifying those items in the document management system that can be better handled in a wiki or a blog instead of a document.

Another challenge (or opportunity) will be using blogs and wikis to identify and highlight the better content in the document management system. Law firm knowledge management 2.0 can and should be used to better identify why someone should use one

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.

Right behind wikis in the toolbox for law firm knowledge management 2.0 is the use of RSS feeds. Without RSS, a wiki is a much less powerful tool.

RSS is simply a notification of a change or new content on website. The notification can be sent by email. Even better is through feedreader. Google Reader, Bloglines, Attensa, and Newsgator are examples. (Most of you reading this are getting it through a feedreader. There are few getting it by email and some keep coming back to the page to read the content.)

RSS disaggregates the content from its source. You do not need to go back to the website to find the change or discover the new content. The content is pushed to the subscribers of the RSS feed for the website. Wikis publish the changes to a wiki page or the addition of another wiki page to the subscribers of the wiki. Blogs push out new blog post with RSS.

The power of RSS is to showing the flow of information rather than just seeing static content. RSS turns a webpage from a repository of information into a broadcaster of information.