Legal KM

The Small Stuff. By little KM, I mean meta data; but not the hierarchical, taxonomic stuff of older KM approaches.  It’s not about asking your lawyers to profile, or select prescribed meta data, for their documents when saving them in a document management system.  Rather, little KM is about on-the-fly, user-generated tagging, commenting, and rating.  Little KM is also about self interest; and that’s important.

Little KM is not substantive.  It points or directs people to the substantive stuff (the big KM).

Self Interest. Altruism may be alive and well, but for the most part, we do things to help ourselves, personally.  The good thing is that with little KM, the side effect is that it also helps others.  When someone tags, comments on, or rates a piece of content (presumably to help themselves find, or make sense of, it later) others get the benefit of that person’s efforts.

Since a lot of people live in their inbox, we should be looking at ways to interact with a company's wiki, blogs, forums, social network and even microblogging engine using an email client. I specifically say 'email client', by which I mean not the 'email inbox'. The inbox should be for private information only. All other content (e.g. updates from blogs, wikis, newsletters, RSS feeds) should be received in different folders within the email client.

There have been some interesting developments, but I would expect to see more in the near future:

All these examples are related to email in one way or another. However, transition strategies go well beyond email. In general, it is important to keep in mind:

For example, a very common argument is that people are unwilling to share what they know. Well, they may not be necessarily unwilling to do so, but it does take low priority when people try to meet their goals and deadlines. That was the fallacy of the early KM era, in which employees were asked to step outside their work and 'contribute' to a fancy KM tool (aka database).

People need to realize that in most cases, knowledge-sharing is not an activity but in fact a by-product of people's work. That's why it is so important to implement these kind of tools into people's workflow.

This leaves us with the last three barriers (applications not part of user's workflow, time effort > personal value, complex applications).

The general theme is that in the near future we will see more companies starting Enterprise 2.0 projects to increase productivity, reduce cost, improve client relations. While we have seen some early success stories, companies will need to think hard about ways to attract second-wave adopters.

The post is divided as follows:1) Overview of barriers to introducing Enterprise 2.0 and user adoption2) Scrutinizing barriers to user adoption3) Thoughts on how to attract second-wave adopters

However, with the current economic climate, change is not optional anymore. Organizations need to address inefficiencies caused by outdated management ideas and inadequate technology to increase productivity, save costs and offer better service to existing and prospect clients. This is one of the reasons why I expect to see more and more social software projects starting over the next months.

"Knowledge differentiates a law firm from its competitors," according to Gretta Rusanow of Curve Consulting, an attorney and knowledge management expert.

Knowledge Management specialists within firms work hard to set up and maintain KM technology, but without grassroots adoption, many KM initiatives languish from lack of use.  Placing the emphasis on technology, rather than user behavior, tends to distract from the real barrier to adoption: Attorneys and staff simply don't see enough individual value to take time away from urgent (and billable) day-to-day activities to complete additional tasks required by a separate knowledge management tool.

"Too often KM becomes a conversation about technology . . . if you want to converse with lawyers about value, talk about value instead of technology," said Toby Brown of Fulbright & Jaworski. "This focuses the dialogue on the benefits to the lawyers and not on the cost of any technology involved. Solve the problem, instead of offering technology."