Facebook for Lawyers - Legal OnRamp

The Bar Talk piece in the May 2008 edition of The American Lawyer is focused on Legal OnRamp. To toot my own horn, Brian Baxter, the author of the piece threw in a few quotes from me:

"Social networking costs are minimal-it's not like sponsoring a table at an awards dinner or printing brochures-so your return on investment is astronomic," says Douglas Cornelius, a senior real estate associate with Goodwin Procter in Boston. Cornelius says he favors Legal OnRamp over other business networking sites like LinkedIn and LawLink because it's interactive and offers access to potential clients through its in-house contacts. Cornelius's one gripe with the site so far is that it has too many Silicon Valley types.

The second half of my gripe (which did not make it into the story) was that there were few real estate and real estate investment management in-house contacts in Legal OnRamp. After all that is my client base.

As I have written about Metcalfe's Law before, the power of a social network tool or communications tool is increased as more people use the tool. If my client base and peers are not using the tool, it is a less effective tool.

But wearing my knowledge management/enterprise 2.0 hat, Legal OnRamp is a tremendous tool. Even if your clients are not the "Silicon Valley types."

Since the time of my interview by Brian Baxter, I have seen more and more real estate counsel come into Legal OnRamp. It is becoming more and more useful to me. I would bet that it will become more and more useful to my clients and potential clients.

Can Google Answer Your Question?

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.

Book Review

I just finished reading The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde. Mr. Fforde is a literary jokester, spoofing both nursery rhymes and mystery fiction protocol, including anagrams, secret twins, and the butler who did it. I first started reading some of Fforde's books a few years ago with The Eyre Affair, followed by the other Thursday Next books.

The Big Over Easy centers around the murder of Humpty Dumpty. At first it looks like the alcoholic Dumpty just fell off the wall. Then it looks like he might have been pushed or shot. Fforde moves through the world of nursery rhymes and mystery cliches.

This book was not as good as The Eyre Affair. Bur it did make for good reading on the train. I was a science major, so I probably miss many of the literary references in his stories.

Up next on my reading list is Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever.

CRM in Law Firms

Andrew K. Burger has a story in CRM Buyer: CRM in Law Firms: The Jury's Still Out. Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch pointed out this story in her post: Law Firms Still Not Relating to Client Relations Management Software.

The Firm uses Interaction as its CRM. I find Interaction to be much better in theory than practice. I think everyone agrees at a firm level that the sharing of contact information and relationships across the firm is a terrific goal and adds tremendous value to the firm. In my experience, attorneys are willing to share contact and relationship information with members of the firm. Yes, they are cautious how it is used and want some some credit for the relationship. But that position is true for all knowledge sharing.

As Carolyn points out:

[T]he larger barrier to integration of CRM is institutional: Most lawyers simply aren't willing to take the time (or sacrifice the billable hours) to input critical data. Then, when CRM fails due to lack of lawyer commitment, lawyers blame the software and subsequently grow even more resistant to CRM efforts.

Knowledge sharing is a marketplace. If I am going to take time to contribute something, I expect to get something back in return. Increasing the knowledge resources of the firm is not enough. I previously wrote about this in Personal Knowledge Management and the Knowledge Market. A lawyer is more likely to use a new tool if it provides more functionality to them then an existing tool. Why should I enter information into a clunky public space instead of a persona space where I can organize the information in the way that makes sense to me.

I want the CRM system to make it easier for me to do my job. Contributing contact and relationship information into a public repository creates little or no marginal value to me. All of that information is already sitting in my email contacts, in my head and other local places. The current CRM system does very little to help me manage that information. I would spend much more time using Interaction if it provided much more functionality to me as an individual. All of its extra function is derived from collecting information from others, not in providing function to the individual.

Unfortunately, CRM systems only provide a small margin of additional benefit to the individual lawyer. That margin is too small to motivate lawyers to change behaviors or to learn the new tool.

This scenario is true of lots of first generation knowledge management tools. They put the emphasis on the benefit of sharing knowledge across the firm. They did not focus on making it easier for the individual to manage their own knowledge or the knowledge of a small group.

Perhaps there is some future hope for Interaction and CRM for law firms. The article in CRM Buyer has this quote:

"The foundation for incorporating Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis, blogs and other social networking tools, into InterAction are likewise already in place, and LexisNexis is moving in that direction, according to [Tracey Blackburn, LexisNexis product marketing manager]."

For now, InterAction does not even have a field for linking to a person's LinkedIn profile. That is a place where people are updating information about themselves and who they know. If InterAction could combine external information about people, with our internal information and give me a better way to organize and manage my contacts, that would make it useful for me.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - The Obstacles

One of the obstacles to implementing Enterprise RSS is getting the firm to agree that enterprise RSS is a good investment.

RSS is still not a well known technology. People are more likely to keep going back the webpage instead of subscribing to the RSS feed. Relying on people to keep coming back to the blog or wiki to find changes will make the tools less effective and less likely to spread within the firm.

RSS producing tools are less effective without Enterprise RSS. If you have to rely on the people to sign up for RSS feeds themselves, they are less likely to do so.

Of course if you don't have many RSS producing tools inside the firm, then enterprise RSS would not seem to be a good investment for the firm.

So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Which comes first, the enterprise blog or the enterprise RSS?

The other challenge to enterprise RSS is the broad group of skills needed to chose a vendor and implement. You need desktop applications to test the integration with the email client or the standalone RSS feedreader. You need the network guys to integrate the enterprise RSS server. You need the web developers to integrate enterprise RSS with the RSS producing tools. You need the telecommunications people to integrate the RSS feedreaders on mobile devices. You need the librarian and researchers to help find, organize and disseminate external RSS feeds. You need people using internal RSS producing tools. Fortunately, the enterprise RSS platforms are relatively inexpensive. It is the allocation of firm resources that is a bigger investment.

Personally, I think enterprise RSS is a great investment.

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is drawing to a close here in Boston.

From Networking to Net Work

I watched/listened to a webinar by Patti Anklam as part of the Community 2.0 Conference. Patti is the author of Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World.

Patti started by thinking about whether there are sets of network properties. If so can we apply a taxonomy to them. All networks share certain properties. You can draw them and you can count the connections and map the connections. Patti pointed out that networks are not Facebook or LinkedIn. We have always had networks. Facebook and LinkedIn start exposing the network in a very visible way.

Every network has a purpose. Patti proposed five major group of purposes:

• mission - aid and support
  
• business - create economic gain
  
• idea - generate and collaborate in the developing ideas
  
• learning - communities of practice
  
• personal - nurture emotional relationships
  

Patti demonstrated a few different network structures. The visual representation of a social network can often show how the communication and therefore the decision-making in the enterprise do not follow the hierarchical organizational chart. It can also show that the departure or retirement of person who may not be a key person in the organizational chart, but is a central person in the network.

For leaders, your management can be re-thought if you think about the network you are leading. For the most, part law firms are networks.

• Network intentionally - create more connections, fill in gaps in the network, make it more collaborative and cooperative
• Practice network stewardship - you need to pay attention to change triggers, watch the network evolve
• Embrace and leverage technology - get the technology aligned with the network, enterprise 2.0 is aligned with a mesh network structure
  
• Create a capacity for net work - encourage outreach, encourage on-boarding and incorporation into the existing network within the firm
• Learn to use the network lens - map the idea network and see if there are artificial boundaries
  

Going from networking to net work, its not how many networks you participate in, its how many people you "connect" with. Think about quality and contribution. Don't think about quantity.

In the spirit of the social network analysis I created a visualization of my Facebook friends and their relationships to each other. On the right side in green are my Facebook friends from The Firm. At the bottom in the blue and purple are my friends in the legal knowledge management and legal technology area. (Most of the Canadians got the purple label. I am not sure how it figured that out). At the left in the pink are my Facebook friends in the knowledge management area, but not in the legal industry.
The chart was generated by the TouchGraph Photos application in Facebook.

Lawyers, Law Students and Facebook

With the summer associates coming soon, The Firm has been wondering what to do with Facebook. Last summer, the summer associates created their own Facebook group. The Firm's recruiting department was wondering whether to create the Facebook Group for the 2008 group ahead of time.

Of course, I was a big advocate of setting up the Facebook group. That way the summer associates could start connecting with each other before they arrived at The Firm. Also, it would send them the message, that their online personas and activities need to get cleaned-up (if necessary).

They also spent some time researching Facebook to see what other large law firm groups are in Facebook. Here are the results. It starts with the firm name, then lists the groups found with the firm name. Under each group is the target audience of the group, whether it is opened or closed and who created the group.

Arnold & Porter
Arnold & Porter - Summer Klass of Summer 2k7
07 SA Open Student

Baker Botts
Baker Botts (Washington)
STAFF Open STAFF
Baker Botts DC Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (DC) Closed Student

Bingham McCutchen
Bingham McCutchen
STAFF Open STAFF

Cravath
Cravath Summer Associate Class of 2007
07 SA Closed Students

Davis Polk
Davis Polk 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
Davis Polk & Wardwell
STAFF Open STAFF

Debevoise
Debevoise & Plimpton Summer 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
STAFF Open STAFF
Debevoise Summer '07
07 SA (NY) Open Student

Dechert
Dechert Philadelphia Summer Associates '07
07 SA (PA) Closed Students
Dechert LLP London Future Trainees
London Closed UNK
Dechert Trainees
08 London Closed UNK

Gibson Dunn
Gibson Dunn Summer 2008
08 SA (LA) Open UNK
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher (NYC) Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Goodwin Procter
Goodwin Procter
Staff Closed Staff
2007 Goodwin Procter Summer Associates
07 SA (all) Closed Student

Hogan & Hartson
Hogan & Hartson Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (DC) Open Student
Hogan & Hartson NY Summer 2008
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
Hogan & Hartson Summer Associates 2007 - DC
07 SA (DC) Open Student

Heller Ehrman
2007 Heller Ehrman Summer Associates
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Heller Ehrman LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Kirkland & Ellis
Kirkland & Ellis LA - Summer '08
08 SA (LA) Closed Students
Kirkland & Ellis Intake 2009
STAFF Open STAFF

Latham & Watkins
Latham & Watkins New York Summer Associates 2007
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Latham & Watkins Trainees-to-be
London Closed Student
Latham & Watkins LLP
STAFF Open STAFF
Latham & Watkins 2007
London Closed UNK

Paul Hastings
Paul Hastings Summer '08
08 SA Open Student
Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Paul Weiss
Paul Weiss 2007 NY Summer Associates
07 SA NY Open Student
Paul Weiss 2008 NY Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Open UNK
Paul, Weiss Summer Associates 2008*
08 SA (NY) Open Student

Proskauer
Proskauer Rose Summer 2008
08 SA Open UNK
Proskauer Produces Results: Summer '06
06 SA Open Student

Ropes & Gray
Ropes & Gray, Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (Boston) Open Student
Ropes & Gray NYC 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Ropes & Gray NYC Summers
07 SA (NY) Open Student

Sidley
Sidley Chicago 07
07 SA (Chicago) Closed Student
The Sidley Squad
Interns Closed Student

Simpson Thatcher
Simpson Thacher 2007 Summer Associates
07 SA (ALL) Open UNK
Simpson Thacher 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Open Student

Skadden
Skadden NY Summer '07
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Skadden Alumni STAFF
ALUMS Open STAFF
Skadden, LA - Summer Associates 2007
07 SA (LA) Closed Student
Skadden DC - Summer 2007
07 SA (DC) Open Student
Skadden Summer Students 07
07 SA (ALL) Open Student
Skadden HK Summer '07
07 SA (HK) Open Student
Skadden LA Summer 08
08 SA (LA) Open Student
Skadden Trainees 2008
STAFF Closed STAFF
Incoming Skadden LA Attorneys
STAFF Closed Student

Sullivan and Cromwell
Sullivan & Cromwell's 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA Open UNK
Sullivan & Cromwell
STAFF Open STAFF

Weil Gotshal
Weil Gotshal Summer 08
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
2007 Weil Gotshal Summer Associates
07 SA (NY) Open Student
2006 Weil Gotshal Summer Associates
06 SA (NY) Open Student
Weil, Gotshal & Manges
STAFF Closed STAFF

Wilmerhale
WilmerHale Boston Summers, 2007
07 SA (Boston) Closed Students

Thanks the Recruiting Department at The Firm for doing this research.

Above and Beyond KM

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.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - Making Enterprise Communications More Effective

One of the enticing features of Enterprise RSS is the ability to make enterprise communication more effective. Ten years ago, enterprise communication happened face-to-face, by phone and paper memos. Now, email is the default way of communicating within the enterprise.

Take a look at your email inbox. If your inbox looks anything like my inbox, it is full of email from the administrative departments transmitting updated policies, events and information. Almost none of these emails are urgent or require me to take any action. So why are they clogging up my inbox, getting in the way of client communication and urgent communication? Are these internal communications reasonably findable anywhere except my inbox? If not, what happens to the person who joins the firm tomorrow?

It would be better if that information was posted to a website so that everyone in the firm could find that information. (And find it the same way and in the same place.) For that posting to be an effective communication to the firm or a subset of the firm, you still need a way to push that information out to the firm or at least make them aware the new information. You can't rely on each individual in the firm setting up their own RSS feedreader and subscribing to the feeds for this information.

That is where Enterprise RSS fits into the picture. Feedreaders are installed at the firm level, making RSS information feeds available to everyone in the firm through a variety of tools. You can view the RSS information feeds in your email program, a dedicated feedreader, the intranet or even your blackberry. With Enterprise RSS, you can also force subscriptions on people. So everyone gets the human resources updates, memos from the managing partner, etc.

Take some time to read about and learn about Enterprise RSS today, the Enterprise RSS Day of Action:

• Enterprise RSS Day of Action Website
• Attensa's Enterprise RSS Product
• NewsGator's Enteprise RSS Product
• Other Posts on The Enterprise RSS Day of Action
• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast - james dellow - enterprise rss action day
• NewsGator's collection of webinars on Enterprise RSS
  

A big thanks to James Dellow of Chieftech for organizing this information about Enterprise RSS and organizing the Enterprise RSS Day of Action.

Developing a Playbook for Your 2.0 Community

I watched a webinar on 2.0 communities. This was a preview of a presentation scheduled for the Community 2.0 Conference.

Speakers:
Sylvia Marino, Director of Community Operations
Edmunds.com Inc.

Kathleen Gilroy, CEO
Swift Media Networks

The speakers advocate the development and deployment of communities wrapped around user generated content.

Their pitch was to create a playbook for the community development. They set up a wiki on PBwiki to host the playbook: community20bootcamp.pbwiki.com (it was public).

Their first example was ravelry.com, a site for the knitting community. One interesting tactic of this site was to blend in other 2.0 sites. Instead having knitters post the pictures of their knitting on ravelry.com, they post them to flickr. Ravelry.com then uses the flickr API to pull the pictures into ravelry.com.

Their second example was the TheDailyPlate.com, a site for helping you to eat smarter. The site gives you functionality by tracking your eating and activity during the day. Users are contributing information on calories burned during exercise and the nutrition information for food. (I will have to check back to this site if I am ever going to lose by baby weight.)

They shared an interesting story about tags. Apparently one of the most popular tags in flickr is "me." That is the way we think about the pictures and relationships.

The target of the webinar was clearly on public websites. I was hoping to pick up some ideas for creating communities inside the enterprise. I am interested about integrating some internal websites into our intranet to enrich the content. Now, I do have a few more ideas.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - April 24

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is April 24.

I consider RSS to be the glue that holds together Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0. Blogs and wikis are great tools. But they are even more powerful when they are pushing content out through RSS feeds. It is much more efficient to have relevant content pushed to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

I previously posted on knowledge as an artifact and a flow. RSS is the flow. Enterprise RSS is the flow for the enterprise.

Of the 2.0 technologies, RSS is the least recognized. Most people recognize blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Tagging like del.icio.us tends to fall down on the list. But most studies I have read put RSS way down at the bottom for recognition and use. Enterprise RSS falls even father down the list.

Enterprise RSS is the key tool that would turn a collection of blogs and wikis into communication tools. To much internal communication happens by email. As a result, your email inbox becomes an information warehouse. That email does no good to the person who starts at the firm the next day. The knowledge is lost to that person.

Lots of internal communication could be better handled by using a blog, wiki or similar tool to host the information. As new information is added, the subscribers get the notification of the change and the content. The big plus is that the content is on a platform that should be easily indexed and retrievable by a search engine.

To really make this work well, you need to force subscriptions on people. That is the keystone to Enterprise RSS.

To learn more about Enterprise RSS:

• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast - james dellow - enterprise rss action day
• Enterprise Day of Action Wiki
• Attensa an Enterprise RSS vendor
• NewsGator an Enterprise RSS vendor
  

What Blogging Brings to Business

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I will be sitting on a panel with Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam and Cesar Brea.

What Blogging Brings to Business

Blogs are powerful communication platforms that allow you to capture information you find interesting and to share it with an "audience" who can talk back to you. This panel of five business bloggers with a combined blogging lifetime of 19 years has generated business, communicated the concerns of its customers, experimented, and broken new ground through their blogs. Topics we'll cover include: Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for "fame and fortune", Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam. Come join us to share your experiences and have the chance to speak at length with experienced bloggers.

Come join us at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Do today's new collaboration tools make it harder for IT to wrangle corporate information, or easier?

Mostly to toot my own horn, there is a piece by Andrew Conry-Murray in Information Week: Holy Web 2.0 Herding Nightmare. I am not a big fan of the title; it makes Web 2.0 sound scary. I am fond of the subtitle: Do today's new collaboration tools make it harder for IT to wrangle corporate information, or easier? YES.

"Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They're easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. . . . Departments and business units can provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds--and never make a single call to IT."

If you read the story, you will pick up a few quotes from me. If you do not want to read the story, here are my quotes:

Doug Cornelius, a lawyer at [The Firm], relies on PBwiki, a popular provider of online collaboration tools, for a variety of projects. As a member of the law firm's knowledge management department, Cornelius uses the wiki to manage meetings and agendas and to plan conferences. "It's tremendous for capturing information," he says. "Instead of a string of e-mails, you just go in and edit the wiki."

While the firm also uses SharePoint as an intranet platform, Cornelius wanted to experiment with other options. "We didn't need anyone from IT to do anything. Training and setup took 30 seconds," he says. After a year of use, the wiki has more than 100 pages and gets several edits every day. Other departments in the firm are also using the PBwiki service.

"It's a classic story of enterprise 2.0," says [The Firm]'s Cornelius. "We're up and running with PBwiki in 30 seconds, and SharePoint is taking a year."

Twitter and Tweetclouds

I have been a sporadic user of Twitter. I was first drawn into using it when I noticed that Twitter is easily setup to change your status in Facebook.

Twitter continues to intrigue me. I have exchanged some great tweets over the past few weeks. The synchronous nature of Twitter often throws me off. I jump into a twitter and see that something interesting happened hours ago and the participants have since signed off. But I have had some Twitter Moments. (A phrase I attributed to Ray Sims.)

I like the lightweight and easily digestible aspect of Twitter. One new thing I heard about from Luis Suarez is the ability to create a TweetCloud. It creates a tag cloud based on the words you use in Twitter. This is my TweetCloud:

I am not sure if it is useful, but I find it very interesting. Sometimes "interesting" is enough.

If you sign up for Twitter, I am @dougcornelius

Happy Patriot's Day

One of the quirky Massachusetts holidays is Patriot's Day. It is a state-wide holiday to celebrate the Battles of Lexington and Concord. (For those of you who forget high school history, that was the "shot heard 'round the world" to start the American Revolutionary War.)

Patriot's Day is also the day of the Boston Marathon. For the past fifteen years I have lived in a few different places, but all within a mile of the marathon route. Today was a beautiful day and I was able to get a few photos:



UPDATE: Doug's Boston Marathon Photo Album on Picasa

The Zen Of Blogging

Darren Rowse pointed me to the Zen of Blogging by Hunter Nuttall.

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous

It starts: They say that when the student is ready, the master will appear. One day I felt ready, and I began the long climb to the top of Mount Blogmore. Was the legend true? Did the old man really exist? No one knew for sure, but we knew that every aspiring blogger had felt compelled to seek him out when their time had come. We also knew they were never seen again. And so I climbed Mount Blogmore, with a strange force pulling me to the summit even though my knees quivered with fear. It wasn't my choice, it was my destiny. I had to know if I had it in me. I had to know if my inner blogger was ready to be awakened. And ends: There is no blog! A blog has no inherent value; it's just a medium for conveying value from one person to others.

Wikis in SharePoint 2007

The Firm has taken its second step into Enterprise 2.0 with the launch of our first wikis in SharePoint 2007:


Our first wiki was an import of our existing knowledge management wiki into the SharePoint platform. I wrote about that wiki in a previous post on Making Wikis Work - Success Factors. That wiki had been very successful on the external platform and I expect it will continue to be successful on the SharePoint wiki platform. There have already been several edits.

The downside to moving the wiki was that all of the links in the wiki broke. The links to our intranet were already broken as a result of the upgrade of the intranet from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007. Now the internal wikis links are broken.

We had debated on whether to move the wiki. The winning argument for the move was that "we need to eat what we cook." If we are going to pitch the use of wikis in SharePoint, we needed to be using them ourselves.

We also launched a second wiki for managing HotDocs and our HotDocs templates. The vision for this wiki was to create the manual for each of the HotDocs templates and to share information among the HotDocs developers. The wiki page becomes the item returned on a search for the HotDocs template.


We found one great feature of wikis in SharePoint is their ability to combine structured and unstructured information on the wiki page. At the bottom of the image above you see the words "Template In Production." I had created a new column/field in the wiki page library called "Template." In the Template column I allowed for the choices of "In Production", "Under Development" and "N/A." You can edit the field right from the wiki page.

By adding the structured content we can also create views of the wiki page library to expose content, rather than having to rely solely on links in the wiki pages. In the image below, the sections labeled "HotDocs Templates", "HotDocs Templates Under Development" and "HotDocs Wiki Recent Edits" are all separate views of the wiki pages library.

Document Behaviors

With my use of wikis and the adoption of wikis at The Firm, I have been focusing a lot of attention on the behaviors towards documents. After all, a wiki page is just another type of document. When producing documents, I have noted five types of behaviors: collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial.

Collaborative
With collaborative behavior, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so.

Accretive
With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content. Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents. Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner. I have seen this in wikis as well where people will add content but not edit others content.

Iterative
With iterative behavior, existing content is copied to a new document. The document stands on its own as a separate instance of content. The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together. With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same document, effectively editing the document. With iterative behavior, the person creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

Competitive
With competitive document behavior, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content. However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters. The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior.

Adversarial
Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit. Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors. Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors. Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

I have an article coming out in KM Legal and Inside Knowledge magazine that further discusses these behaviors in more detail and in the larger context of wikis and document management systems.

Putting the Social into Social Media

Kevin O'Keefe hosted a group of Boston Bloggers at Emmitt's Pub last night. Kevin is in town for a presentation to the New England Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association on How to Work a Room in the Digital Age: Social Networking for Law Firms.

It was great to spend time with Kevin (Real Real Lawyers Have Blogs) Bob Ambrogi (Robert Ambrogi's LawSites, Media Law, and Lawyer 2 Lawyer), David Hobbie (Caselines), Joshua Paulin (Boston Immigration and Nationality Blog), Jessica Foley (Massachusetts Driving Laws), Leanna Hamill (Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law), Emmanuel Dokter (Family Law Solutions), Kysa Crusco (Her blog is coming soon from LexBlog) and Gerald May.

I had previously compiled a list of Massachusetts Blawgs (law blogs) over at my Real Estate Space blog on commercial real estate finance.

That after-work "meeting" was preceded by a great lunch with Dal Keldsen of AIIM International.

All of these real-life meetings were derived from on-line social networking. It is always better to hang out with people face-to-face. But the limits of space and time prevent me from being able to have face-to-face conversations with everyone I want to, as frequently as I want to. This blog, Twitter, Facebook, Legal OnRamp, and other social networking sites allow me to keep that conversation going and to to keep the connections fresh.

Blogging in SharePoint 2007

The Firm has taken its first steps into Enterprise 2.0. Using SharePoint's blog platform we launched our first blog today. Mark Puzella, David Hosp and Robert O'Connell started their Trademark, Copyright and Trade Secrets Blog.


They put up four posts the first day and a had handful of comments. (The comments were mostly the authors trying out the comments feature on the blog.)

In early April, we upgraded our intranet to SharePoint 2007. The blog feature works great in SharePoint. Certainly you can't add on the numerous widgets and other tools that you could with WordPress or Blogger. You can add categories to the posts. At first we thought you were limited to one category per post, but quickly found the setting to allow multiple categories per post.

Most of our planned uses for blogs are targeted at hosting firm announcements. It was great to have lawyers dive in and want a real law blog. I hope the Trademark, Copyright and Trade Secrets Blog will be a beacon showing other lawyers the power of blogging inside the enterprise. This may also lead to some external blogs.

Using Wikis for Project Management

I am sitting in on a webinar from PBwiki on using wikis for project management. Chris Yeh ran the presentation. (Of course it was focused on using the features of PBwiki for project management.)

One feature that I like about PBwiki is that it is easy to create a template. Just tag any wiki page as a "template." When you create a new wiki page, the splash page allows you to pick a template. Any page that you tagged as a "template" shows up on that list.

Chris showed us a Projects Tracker page with a summary of the few projects and their status. From this Tracker page, there are links to each individual project.

Each individual project page, started with an overview of the project, the objectives of the project, the team members, the timeline and the tasks and milestones.

Obviously using a wiki means the information is not in a structured format. So you cannot create dependencies and all the fancy stuff that something like Microsoft Project does. (Of course I have been trying to use Project for years but it is frustratingly hard to learn and use. I have found a wiki page to be so easy to use, that it is easy to get people trained [2 minutes] and using the wiki page.)

It sounds like PBwiki is looking for ways to structure some data to allow it to roll-up into other places in the wiki. (SharePoint 2007 has some interesting abilities to deal with this. I will post on this later.) In the wiki, you need to double enter information on the project page and on the master page. If you design which data goes where, you can minimize the double entry.

With a wiki, you give a common space for the project team to keep information and share information on the project. As items on the project are updated, the subscribers to the wikis get the notification of the change. (We have been using PBwiki to manage our knowledge management projects for almost year. A wiki is a great way to centralize information and publicize information at the same time.)

The webinar large ran through the features of PBwiki and lots of requests for functionality in the wiki. Since I have several active PBwikis and am familiar with many of the features so I got a little bored.

One challenge with a wiki is the lack of structured content. I have found that the more structured content you have, you more complicated you make the tool. My IT development manager and I always butt heads over whether to use a structured data or unstructured. Since I am an attorney, I am used to the unstructured content of document contents. He is from IT and is used to databases.

The key to using a wiki for project management is making sure everyone on the project team has an RSS feedreader. (Even better get an enterprise RSS feedreader and push out a subscription.) The wiki compresses the updating of information and the distribution of the updated information into one step. You edit the wiki page and the wiki page sends out a notification.

I have been using a wiki to run a client team for a few months. Each matter has a separate wiki page. On that page is a list of the needed diligence information and list of the closing documents and their status. I keep my notes on the page as does my junior associate and paralegal. I can go to the wiki page and see the current status. I would have gotten RSS notification of changes to the items. The old method was keeping the list of diligence information and closing documents in a word document in the document management system. The responsible person would edit the word document and then email it around to the working group. I would have to open the email and open the word document to see the changes. If the document was redlined to show changes, then I need to decipher the mess of edits to see the current status. If the document was not redlined, I would have to try to distinguish the changes.

Readings on “Knowledge Management 2.0 - Reality or Hype?”

As part of the Boston KM Forum Symposium on Knowledge Management 2.0, Lynda Moulton put together a list of additional resources for reading on the subject:

Half-Baked or Mashed: Is Mixing Enterprise IT And The Internet A Recipe For Disaster?
Andy Dornan.
Information Week 09/10/2007
“

Enterprise mashup tools are the long tail of SOA, letting ordinary employees build applications that aren’t on IT’s radar screen. But what about the risks?” A good summary of Mashups and issues related to the technologies involved.

World 2.0.
David Gurteen
The Gurteen Knowledge Website
03/21/2008.

“Most of us understand what Web 2.0 is all about as we move from a read-only web to a read-write or participatory web. And we are starting to come to grips with so called Enterprise 2.0 where the concept and technologies and social tools of Web 2.0 are moving from the open web into organizations.”

Academics butt heads over enterprise 2.0.
Chris Kanaracus.
InfoWorld (IDG News Service)
01/11/2008.

“Scholars from Harvard and Babson business schools spar over question of use of social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies in business environment.” Debate between Andrew McAfee of HBS and Tom Davenport of Babson on the spill-over and influence of Web 2.0 social tools into the enterprise to form a new paradigm, Enterprise 2.0.

Consumer Technology Poll: CIOs Still Fear Web 2.0 for the Enterprise
C. G. Lynch
CIO Magazine
03/14/2008.

“From blogs to wikis to hosted e-mail from Google, CIOs, on the whole, value command and control over user empowerment.” “The majority of CIOs didn’t seem enamored with Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS and social networks, either. Only 30 percent of IT decision makers said they offered wikis as a corporate application. A mere 23 percent offered blogs, while18 percent utilized RSS. Only 10 percent of respondents brought social networks into the enterprise.”

The Hype is Real; Social Media Invades the Inc. 500.
Eric Mattson, Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research conducted a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list for 2006 under the direction of blog researchers Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes. All interviews took place in November and December of 2006.

Andrew McAfee/Tom Davenport Discussion [on Enterprise 2.0]
Jim McGee
FastForward/KMworld
01/11/2008.

Commentary on the Webinar debate between McAfee and Davenport,

Knowledge Management Revitalized; KM in a Web 2.0 World
Mike Murphy

There are several factors contributing to the revitalized interest in KM, or KM 2.0. It is important to remember that Internet, HTML or audio/video content weren’t part of the equation when KM first entered the discussion - people were just getting comfortable with a relational database management system (RDBMS) and records-oriented content. It therefore wasn't obvious why you needed another content storage system. With the arrival of the Internet and its evolution leading up to today, unstructured data exists easily in so many forms that cannot be accommodated in an RDBMS.

Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web; Applications and How to
Avoid Them, Part II.
Joshua Porter
User Interface Engineering
07/31/2007

Web 2.0 pressures IT, shows benefits.
Robert Smallwood
KMWorld
11/01/2007

“Business today relies heavily on e-mail. Maybe too much so...So why haven.t KM and
collaboration tools that can organize and leverage this content caught on like wildfire?”
“A new report by Forrester, “Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up for Business,” supports the contention that although corporate IT departments have seen the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies, the vast majority have made limited investments in a formal implementation of them.” “The combination of the volume of e-mail and lack of user friendliness of collaboration tools has created an opportunity for a new wave of smaller, lighter and less expensive tools that leverage Web 2.0 technologies but are less obtrusive and demanding of users.”

Open-Door Policy, a Special Report.
Jimmy Wales.
Forbes
05/05/2007.
“

But the great lesson of the Web 2.0 era is that to control quality, you don’t lock things down; you open them up....Leave your doors unlocked and your windows open’ and creeps will sometimes come in. But the way to chase them out before they cause harm is to have plenty of friendly neighbors who are looking after your interests, which turn out to be remarkably similar to theirs.

”The 2.0 agenda: Get ready for transparency and collaboration.
Steve Wylie
Information Week
05/28/2007.

Describes Andrew McAfee’s six key attributes of Enterprise 2.0, which he shortens to SLATES: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals.

Are Blogs Marketing Tools?

If your answer to this question is no, perhaps you should take a look at the website for Hill| Holiday. For those of you outside of Boston, Hill | Holliday is a PR/marketing firm with clients that include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Chili's, AOL, Anheuser Busch, and Dunkin' Donuts.

The home page of the Hill| Holiday website is a blog. You can even scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the "proudly powered by WordPress" designation. They even have comments activated.

Is your marketing group still unsure about whether blogs are useful? The biggest marketing firm in Boston thinks a blog is a useful marketing tools for themselves. Does you marketing group know something that Hill| Holiday does not know?


Thanks to Stewart Mader at WikiPatterns for pointing this out in his Random Things he reading this weekend post.

Martindale-Hubble, LinkedIn and Legal OnRamp

Over at the The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell, John Lipsey; VP Corporate Counsel Services, comments on Larry Bodine’s Crowded but Silent piece in Law Technology News: Corporate counsel and Online professional networking.

Larry is right to point out that the power of any social network site is derived from the number of people using it. That power to you is relative to the number of people you know that are using that social network site. That is Metcalfe's law.

In the last few months, I have seen lawyers poring into LinkedIn (Doug's profile in LinkedIn). As lawyers see more and more of their fellow attorneys joining LinkedIn, it becomes a more useful tool.

Lipsey misses the point of social networking sites. I do not expect anyone to contact me just because I have a listing on the site. That is not networking. That is just advertising. (Just like a listing in Martindale-Hubble.) The power of social networking sites is your ability to create a flow of information about yourself. Networking is about contributing useful information to the people you know and keeping your name in front of them.

I assume that Lipsey's post was to try to proclaim the value of Martindale-Hubble, but in the end his description of what corporate counsel are looking for sounds a lot like Legal OnRamp:

[Corporate counsel would] be willing to use a professional networking site to make it easier to get to those referrals. But that network must be trusted, limited to other legal professionals, and protected from relationship “spammers” who litter strangers with relationship requests. . . . . What they would find valuable is a trusted professional community of lawyers, and a “safe place” that enables corporate counsel to find each other, and outside counsel. They want the tools develop their own communities within these sites to exchange information and collaborate – away from the watchful eye of would be vendors, competitors or hostile counsel.

And sounds like LinkedIn:

"If a professional network can allow a corporate counsel to get the lawyer information as well as connections linking him or her to that lawyer – voila."

But does not sound like Martindale-Hubble.

Are Social Networking Sites Knowledge Management?

Last week I presented to a gathering of law firm knowledge management leaders on social network sites. As I have been exploring various social network sites over the last year, I have also wondered if this was knowledge management? And if social network sites are not part of knowledge management what lessons can the knowledge management community learn from social network sites?

I explained my use of six social network sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Upcoming, Legal OnRamp and LawLink. There were a few common themes I tried to draw out.

The first theme was the power of the network and Metcalfe's law. Any communications tool and any of these social network sites are only as powerful as the number of of people that use them. That first person with a fax machine was very bored until lots of other people also bought fax machines. I also pulled the lever on the way-back machine and made everyone think back ten years ago when email was just coming into law firms. Ten years ago, I clearly remember asking people if they had email and if I could send something to them by email instead of FedEx. My theory is that email has become ubiquitous, because it is ubiquitous. A social network site is popular because it is popular. The more people that use the medium, the more useful that medium becomes.

I was intrigued by Upcoming, a social network site focused on events. It became many times more useful as I connected with more people in Upcoming. Then I got the benefit of seeing the events that they were publicizing.

The second theme was connectivity. There is an incredible ability to connect with people and to jump into their stream of information. This ability on these external sites far exceeds anything that our law firms have inside our firewalls.

The next theme was the ability to communicate. On these sites, you are able to put more context around the communication. You can also communicate in a variety of different ways. Again, looking at our internal communication systems made our internal systems pale by comparison.

Another theme was the ability to share information across systems. For example, Twitter updates my Facebook status. The posts from this blog feed into my Facebook feed. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Upcoming all push out updates by RSS so they are pushed into my feedreader. I can also repackage the feeds into my friendfeed or lifestream.

One thing that jumps out at me is the ability identify and find expertise. Certainly one of the challenges of knowledge management is the ability to find and identify subject matter experts. These social network sites are chock full of ways to find expertise.

The final theme was cost. That is, these social network sites are free. So it is cheap and easy to experiment. You can see what things are useful to you and where the people you know are connecting.

Several people pointed out that they had resisted using these sites. But lately they have started joining and trying to figure out how to use them. I pointed back to Metcalfe's law. These sites were becoming more interesting to them because more and more people that they know are using them. I also used Metcalfe's law to explain my difference in interest between LawLink and Legal OnRamp. Both are social network sites targeted at lawyers. There are many more lawyers in LawLink. But more people I know are in Legal OnRamp. Therefore, Legal OnRamp is more useful to me.

I never reached an answer to the initial question. Because, of course, the answer depends on your definition of knowledge management. Since the group seemed to be interested in these social network sites, that is probably enough to indicate that at least some element of social network sites are associated with knowledge management.

My slides: (I am big believer in using slides to show what I mean, rather that what I am saying. So the slides are just pictures.)

| View | Upload your own

Wrap-Up of Knowledge Management 2.0 Symposium

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

Wrap-up: KM 2.0 - Why We Should Care

Summary of Presentation
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Larry Chait, Chait & Associates

He thinks Web 2.0 is a catchall for a set of user-driven applications and the philosophy behind them. He hates the 1.0 , 2.0 and 3.0 labels, but since everyone is using the terms he does also.

Larry has seen KM move from technology-centric (capture store and access) to people-centric (after action reviews and peer assists) to social computing.

He thinks "2.0" is a cliche, but there really is a big change happening in the way people are communicating and there are big changes happening in the tools.

The issue he sees is trying to reconcile official taxonomies and user-generated folksonomies.

Larry points out that the use of collaboration tools is driven more by culture than technology. The tools will not do anything by themselves. He also points out that different tools do different things well. You need a suite of tools to get things done.

Larry raises five caveats: delivering business value, ensuring privacy, governing behavior, managing personal time, and overcoming cultural barriers. (I had to call Larry out on this. This caveats apply to all new technologies. He pointed out that the bad things are all now easy to find. I countered that the good stuff is also much easier to find.)

Moving Beyond Web 2.0 Resistance

Summary of Presentation
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Jessica Lipnack, CEO and co-founder, NetAge Inc.

Twenty years ago, an aspiring social network analyst asked us for the names of everyone in our database. He had a program that could link them up, he said, help them find one another, spark new connections. How intrusive, I thought. Who’d want that? Years later, he would go on to design one of the major social networking sites. I resisted and resisted – and then something happened: someone I trusted explained blogging to me, someone else invited me onto Facebook…and the rest is what brings me to Boston KM Forum. This talk will be about resistance to Web 2.0, even among people like myself who’ve been online forever, and what happens when that resistance gives way to powerful experiences.

Jessica got a round of applause for not using any PowerPoint slides.

People have lots of fear of the unknown. That resistance is hard to overcome. It is hard to have people confront their fears. Change is happening fast and people need to adapt to change. But people are generally reluctant to change.

Jessica went on to share some of the changes that are being instigated by General Caldwell. He thinks the army's mission is changing and the soldiers tools need to change. General Caldwell is an advocate of soldiers using Web 2.0 tools. This flies in the face of other people in the armed forces who are looking to block soldiers access to blog sites and Web 2.0 sites.

Jessica got intrigued by blogging when Bill Ives explained to her that his blog had become his personal knowledge tool.

Surprisingly, for a person focusing on networks, Jessica was reluctant to join sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. The comment she heard that there are ways to stay connected without picking up the phone.

She asks that we be very sympathetic to those who are resistant to change and resistant to web 2.0. Bring them friends and ways to get connected.

Case Study: The Siemens BeFirst Portal

Summary of Presentation at
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge.
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Jeff Cram, Co-Founder and Managing Director, and David Aponovich, Content Management Strategist, ISITE Design

The Siemens BeFirst Portal provides solid lessons in Enterprise 2.0/KM 2.0. Recognized as one of the best examples of how a large enterprise uses Web 2.0 principles in a business context, the portal connects 2,000 sales and marketing staff to collaborate, create, search and find corporate “approved” information assets and previously untapped “tribal knowledge.” The project was recognized by AIIM for its 2008 Carl B. Nelson Best Practice Awards; it was one of only three large-company projects nominated for recognition.

Jeff and David put on a show and tell for the enterprise 2.0 deployment that ISITE Design created for Siemens Communications Systems. They also plan to point out the mistakes as well as the successes in the project.

The company had thousands of sales and marketing people and their knowledge spread across the world and seven different languages. They need a way to share and a way to find the best knowledge and assets.

In planning the deployment they gave a lot of thought to the participants in the company. IN particular they found Forrester's ladder of participation by Charlene Li on social media to be a useful model. Rather than a business-to-employee model, they envisioned an employee-to-employee model. The vision was to capture the tribal knowledge, allowing employees to easily contribute and organize information.

They based the technology on Sitecore web content management, plus a Google search appliance and microsoft.net custom programming.

The platform has some high level taxonomy, largely focused on product lines. At the document level, there is an ability to rate and comment on the document. They also allow tagging of documents and other content. They found the need to identify content as HQ authorized content to separate it from user generated content.

They did some custom programming on top of the Google search to provide for faceting search. (Apparently the company had already purchased the Google search appliance.)

They found these cultural barriers to Enterprise 2.0

• How can I maintain control of the content
• How to convince stakeholders to give up control
• How to deal with different countries and languages
• How to ensure quality

The multiple country and language site posed some big challenges. They decide to have local country sites within the global site.

The other challenge (and big challenge for Enterprise 2.0) is reconciling a taxonomy with the folksonomy of user-generated content.

The more radical part of the project was the creation of the communities area. Anyone could create a community, make it open or closed and pull users in. These small communities and they information stored in them lived inside the larger portal. Therefore, the community content was also indexed as part of the larger portal.

Enterprise 2.0 = KM 2.0?

My Summary of the Presentation
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Dan Keldsen, Director, Market Intelligence, AIIM (also of BizTechTalk)

AIIM’s first-quarter 2008 “Market IQ” on Enterprise 2.0 has just been completed, and a survey of 441 people revealed a subset who are having more success with Enterprise 2.0 than the general survey population. Does Enterprise 2.0 signify the birth of KM 2.0? We’ll examine some of the findings, and discuss the implications for new and old KM implementations.

Dan has threatened us with dozens of PowerPoint slides. (Dan plans to post his slides on SlideShare.) He also pitched his Enterprise 2.0 report from AIIM.

Dan used this definition of knowledge management: Leveraging the collective wisdom and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness. From Carl Frappalo, Executive Express Knowledge Management.

He notes that early knowledge management focused on technology and less on the culture and rewards. In some circles knowledge management has become a dirty word. But we are not quite dead yet. He also focused on the overuse of email and misuse of other technologies (and the money spent on them). Although knowledge management is not about technology. But knowledge management needs some technology to work well.

Dan proposes that we capture knowledge work as part of daily work, rather than capturing knowledge separately.

Dan shared some of the points from their Enterprise 2.0 Report. They found that knowledge management inclined group see the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 as more important to the success of the organization. The KM inclined are also early in the adoption and understanding of Enterprise 2.0.

Dan stopped short of stating whether he thought Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0. (I think it is! See Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0) (Tom Davenport thinks so also:
Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?)

UPDATE: Dan posted about his presentation and published his slide deck: Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?

KM and Web 2.0 - A User’s Perspective

Presentation Summary From
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Ray Sims, formerly Director of Knowledge Management at Novell (now of Deloitte)

This presentation begins by summarizing what Web 2.0 means from a behavioral (not tools) perspective and what that implies for the future of knowledge management. It then connects these ideas via an exploration of the business-driven use cases related to KM that most benefit from Web 2.0 behaviors and software application approaches. The presentation concludes with some general observations of where we are collectively in this journey and provides some prescriptive guidance for those on the path to knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0.

Ray started with a timeline of his adoption of Web 2.0 technology. He moved onto his definition of knowledge management and his post on 43 knowledge management definitions. (Now up to 57 definitions). He also pointed out the analysis of these knowledge management definitions by Stephen Bounds.

One of the trains of thoughts are that knowledge management exists at different levels. One level is the personal level; organizing knowledge for your own use. Another is at a team level; organizing for a small group. Then there is the enterprise level of knowledge management.

Ray also talked about the differences between knowledge as a flow and as artifact. (I posted about this a few weeks ago: Knowledge is an Artifact and a Flow and Wikis as a Knowledge Artifact and a Knowledge Flow.)

Ray concludes that Web 2.0 is "ideally situated to personal knowledge management and a personal learning environment." He sees the benefits of personal knowledge management as increasing knowledge in a chosen field. Writing and thinking about field should increase your knowledge and expertise. Using Web 2.0 helps you build your external network. (For enterprise 2.0 is should help you build your internal network.)

Ray believes wikis should be the THE tool as a default text and management tool. He thinks blogs are a great way to manage projects and provide status reports. For the projects he manages, Ray intends to ban project email. (Also see Luis Suarez's journey on not using email).

Ray sees the four greatest opportunities for Web 2.0 / E 2.0 through the knowledge management lens:

• Increased social capital
• Increased innovation
• Improved decision making
• Improved efficiency

Why improved efficiency? The increased transparency and openness makes things more findable. You can also leverage the power of the network, getting input from more people. There is also the raw speed. It is much faster to edit a wiki and share changes than editing a document and emailing it around.

Ray also peppered his presentation with the virtues of Twitter (Twitter@dougcornelius) (Twitter@rsims). Twitter is "his girlfriend of the moment."

UPDATE: Ray posted about his presentation and published his slidedeck: KM2.0 Presentation - Boston KM Forum.

Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management

Presentation summary from
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Mark Frydenberg, Senior Lecturer, Computer Information Systems Department, Bentley College

Recent years have seen a shift in how people have used the World Wide Web as it evolved from a tool for disseminating information and conducting business to a platform facilitating new ways of information sharing, collaboration, and communication in a digital age. A new vocabulary has emerged, as mashups, flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, twitter, and WikiPedia have come to characterize the genre of interactive applications collectively known as Web 2.0. This session will provide an overview of Web 2.0 tools and concepts, and describe how they may be used to create, share, and manage knowledge.

Mark started off by showing a video, The Machine Is Using Us. Mark sees difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that Web 1.0 is about linking documents and Web 2.0 is about linking people. Web 2.0 is more about applications than webpages.

Most of his presentation was an introduction of Web 2.0 technologies and websites.

It was interesting to see what he was making his students do as part of his classes. One thing I notices was that his students did not take full advantage of the tools. For example, he made his students collaborate using Google Docs to write a research paper. In one example it was clear that the student wrote the paper somewhere else and just pasted into the Google Doc. In another example, one student did all of the writing. I think we may be overestimating how proficient college students are with Web 2.0.

Mark was very interested in Mashups. One of the features of Web 2.0 is the ability to easily pull information from different sources. My personal mashup is my transactions map. This turns a list of the real estate transactions I have closed and converts it into a visual map display. (I have not updated it in a while.) There is also the lifestream I created in Yahoo Pipes.

One of the things that strikes me is the ability to view and find information in different ways. In looking at the list of subscribers to this blog, Feedburner shows over 40 different ways the subscribers grab and view the content. I see one of the keys of KM 2.0 is giving people the way to find information in a variety of different ways and view the information in a variety of ways.

UPDATE: Mark has posted his slides. Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management

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Boston KM Forum Symposium: KM 2.0 – Real or Hype?

I am spending Wednesday at Bentley College for Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge.

What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype? How does it relate to Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0? And – the bottom line – how does KM 2.0 help us to leverage knowledge?

The Agenda:

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