Knowledge Connections

Is Yahoo! shutting down Del.icio.us?

2010-12-21T16:55:00.004Z

We use Del.icio.us for social bookmarking and have been fans for some time - but the rumours have been rife about whether Yahoo! will be shutting it down.

This excellent post from Alexia Tsotsis has an update from the Delicious blog, saying:

“No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.”

Good news.

Enterprise Search – panacea or pain?

2010-09-02T16:10:00.010+01:00

Search can be seen by many as the answer to all of our information retrieval problems, but I have always thought that it depends how it is applied – one of my favourite phrases is: “rubbish in, rubbish out”. Search is only any good if it is pointing at good content, and it intelligently utilises what is known about both the documents and the searcher.
An excellent post by Venkatesh Rao this week focused my mind on this issue once again.

There has been much discussion on search over the years, some good points can even be found in the posts advertising search software. Such as this; “The Business Value of Enterprise Search 2009 A review of cost effective solutions for managers” advocating Oracle, which has the line: “A common flaw in the use of information search technologies is overconfidence in the results”.

I have always been enticed by semantic searching, and again there is a lot on this topic out there. Pandia Search Central is a an interesting one to follow, and they review their chosen top 5 semantic search.

An interesting concept that turns traditional search on its head is that of document comparison - computational forensic linguistics. If document comparison was used to search a quality data set, the results are far more accurate and relevant than traditional search technologies.

CFL Software Ltd is one company exploiting this in many different contexts. One great application has been in a music site, Slicethepie. The latest innovation is “SoundOut Search” which enables users to search a music catalogue using what ever snippet of information they have.

Top KM books and guidance

2010-07-20T16:21:00.001+01:00

Reading around a topic is something that I always find helpful when getting to grips with that subject, and KM has no shortage of good books and articles to stimulate those thoughts and plans.
A recent discussion on LinkedIn asked for peoples thoughts on “must have” KM books, with some interesting results.

There are many blogs and websites with good recommendations, such as David Skyrme’s site and the Knoco site with many books, articles and white papers. David Gurteen also lists his top ten KM books and I am sure that there are many others.

The comments on that LinkedIn discussion brought some recommendations that I have not found so far, such as Nick Milton’s suggestion:

Nancy Dixon's "Common Knowledge"
Melissie Rumizen, "The Complete Idiot's guide to KM"

Together with a lot of the well thumbed texts that I have enjoyed so far, such as:

Learning to Fly by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell 2004, and Working Knowledge by Thomas H Davenport and Larry Prusak, 2000.

The only problem is making the time to read them all!

Complinet to be bought

2010-06-04T09:46:00.003+01:00

Another online publisher is going to become part of Thomson Reuters; Complinet mainly provides compliance data for financial institutions and the acquisition will add to the Thomson Reuters compliance offering.

Complinet was one of the few choices other than Thomson’s or Reed Elsevier as a possible resource to help with the inceasing need of compliance checks.

The Thomson Reuter press release describes the move as something that will “further Thomson Reuters vision to provide end-to-end financial service compliance solutions”.

Less choice in the market?

Digital copyright rumbles on

2010-05-28T08:27:00.003+01:00

At a time when News International are trying to extract as much commercial value as possible from their newspapers by removing them from aggregators, James Murdoch has criticised the British Library over the BL’s plans to digitise the national newspaper collection.

Murdoch’s argument is that public bodies should not decide how copyrighted material is exploited for commercial gain – his concern is presumably loss of revenue for News International, rather than access to information for the general public.

The British Library has announced that it is digitising a large chunk of the national newspaper collection archive. The partnership between the British Library and a company called “Brightsolid” will enable the digitisation of 4 million pages of newspapers over the first two years in a ten year agreement.

It is hoped that “in-copyright” content can be scanned in the future after negotiation with rightsholders. This archive would only be available online as a fee paying service, but it will be available online for the first time, increasing access to the material and helping to safeguard the content of this collection for the future.

Times and Sunday Times still available to Law Firms via LexisNexis

2010-05-27T08:51:00.000+01:00

Bob De Laney, Director, News & Business at LexisNexis has confirmed that LexisNexis have successfully negotiated continued access for law firms to News International content via their services:

“Further to our previous communication, I’m writing to let you know that we have finalised a contract with News International to maintain content from The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World on our services. Not only will this new agreement ensure your continued access to these key UK newspapers, but it will also deliver two improvements to your service:

• Content will start to be delivered earlier in the day, enabling you to pick up coverage at 9:00am rather than noon

• As News International begins to add more “website-only” content to its online offer, this content will also become available to Nexis customers, later in 2010."

KM reference material

2010-05-25T17:51:00.007+01:00

Some great guidance and introduction to KM techniques and tools have now been brought together within a KM reference section on the Knoco website, free of charge.

With helpful introductions to KM processes, KM roles and structures, KM technologies and KM governance, these are excellent guides created by Nick Milton and Knoco.

The Knoco website already provides some great Knoco white papers, guidance documents, newsletters and details of workshops. http://www.knoco.com/

Enterprise Search

2010-05-24T14:46:00.007+01:00

The recent Enterprise Search Summit 2010 in New York has spurred several reports from different commentators and I do believe that Enterprise Search can enable an organisation to tap into it’s combined knowledge so much more effectively.

With so many vendors vying to sell their own enterprise search solutions, there is even the idea of using Google for your search engine.There are many guides, sales pitches and definitions around;

Accenture believes that being able to easily access all available information, then use it to meet business challenges, explore opportunities and exceed the competition, is essential for achieving a higher level of performance. And that goal is increasingly within reach because Enterprise Search technologies are advancing rapidly.

IBM states that a certain size of organization often produce and accumulate textual data from a wide range of sources and in a variety of formats, and effective tools for searching over that data are central to the organizations' success.

Finally Freepint did a nice introduction to Enterprise search in 2005 that still makes interesting reading for this topic, listing 10 critical success factors worth bearing in mind.

Cost and ROI are an issue - as always.

How to write clearly

2010-05-10T12:29:00.005+01:00

Whether you are a lawyer or not, we can all write more clearly.

This guide from the European Commission is intended for all writers of English at the European Commission – but I think it is useful where ever you are.

The document is full of hints – not rules – that will help you to write clearly and make sure your message ends up: “in your readers’ brains, not in their bins”.

It is very easy to read and quite interesting!

Another useful resource provided by the EU Translation team is a page of online glossaries for each language of the EU, very helpful for technical terms.

OU Library available online

2010-05-05T09:43:00.009+01:00

Described as “the most advanced digital university library in the world” The Open University library website is an excellent resource. The OU have spent time developing a gateway to a wide range of online information resources, much of it available free, including the ability to search across a range of journals, books and websites.

It also provides information about the services and resources at the Open University Library building in Milton Keynes. Users have access to 400 online databases, 30,000 e-journals and hundreds of thousands of e-books.

The free search for “visitors and guests” is excellent, with an impressive range of materials searched quickly and easily. There are two options, to search "journals, books and websites" or to search "reference shelf".

Other valuable assets include the recommended links for other free resources on the web; well worth visiting.
I particularly like the “online collections and databases” links, but there are lists of everything from images and sounds, to libraries near you.

A gem of a resource.

Document sharing on Facebook

2010-04-26T10:40:00.002+01:00

Facebook and Microsoft have teamed up on an online document-sharing service, which is apparently similar to Google Docs.

The site allows Facebook users to log in using Facebook Connect and create, edit, and share Microsoft Office documents with their Facebook friends.

New documents will show up in a user's news feed, just like status updates or pictures.

Can social networks replace expensive in house systems?

2010-04-23T16:48:00.006+01:00

With professional social networks such as LinkedIn growing in popularity, is there a need for an expensive in-house CRM system? Do you need to build alumni sites or could you just utilise social networking to reach your alumni?

Although the use of systems such as LinkedIn has grown, not just as a way of contacting people but with the discussion groups that really seem to work, they are still not comprehensive.

Internal systems are carefully constructed with quality and accuracy in mind, on social networks the contacts create and maintain their own data, which can mean incomplete and missing information. Plus the fact that many people will not even be on the system.

Jason Plant has started a discussion on whether LinkedIn can replace InterAction, with some interesting comments.

With relation to Alumni systems, social media can play quite a helpful part in providing benefits to alumni, but again it does not allow the organisation to add information, only the individual.

Social networks may have valuable contributions to play, but internal systems still appear to be needed; to formalise the data and gain full business benefit.

Legal research tools – more relevant results when searching the web

2010-04-20T11:12:00.005+01:00

Searching the web for specific material can be frustrating purely because there is so much content on there and too many results are returned.

The Zonebee beta site is trying to help the effectiveness of a Google search, by aiding users to create a better search strategy.

It appears to work by using a tool bar that sits over the top of Google, a search term can be typed in, and Zonebee would generate a tag cloud or “buzz”of the most popular terms associated with the search term.

The user can then simply click to select which terms are the correct concepts, and what should not be included. Only once the relevant terms have been “explored” is a Google search run, hopefully bringing back more relevant material.
However, this is still in Beta form, so how effective it is remains to be seen.

Pending actions

2010-04-19T16:42:00.002+01:00

Lawtel have released some new functionality, available as part of your Lawtel subscription – “Pending Actions" tracks all documents submitted to the High Court before a hearing date is fixed.

The idea is that you can follow proceedings from start to finish, and make decisions based on actions submitted to the court. For example, you can flag up important cases at the earliest stage, or, see if an action has been settled out of court.

Google search tips

2010-04-12T15:13:00.004+01:00

Which ever search engine you prefer, you will probably use Google at some point – even if you do not get as far as Google Chrome.

With everything from defining specific words, to calculations and rates of exchange, many of us are only tapping into a fraction of the functionality of Google.

There are many tips and guides on the web, this one from Hubspot contains some quick advanced search techniques, others include the less known Google commands, some like the Bodelian Library produce a nice cheat sheet for ease of use.

What is a “knowledge worker”?

2010-04-08T18:15:00.006+01:00

This term can cover a multitude of sins, but does it really include every person that is working effectively within an organisation?

Jack Vinson blogged this week about the topic, saying that: “ Just about everyone within an organization has valuable knowledge about the ins and outs of the business and could contribute - assuming the organization is willing and interested in hearing the contribution.”

So all employees could be knowledge workers, but those that actually proactively facilitate the sharing of that knowledge are the ones that are more easily recognised.

The Havard Business Review looks at the “collaboration curve” and the concept that more value is added the more collaboration is undertaken – or the more nodes in a network are connected.

It uses the analogy of a fax machine. The First person to have a fax machine got little value from it, until more people had fax machines and it enabled the full value of transmitting images to be exploited.

So if we are all knowledge workers and we all collaborate, what effective organisations we would have!

When does new legislation come into force?

2010-04-07T18:15:00.005+01:00

BIS have just published the Forward Regulatory Programme which is trying to make it easier for businesses to prepare for when regulations change.

For example two common commencement dates have been introduced; 6th April and 1st October when the majority of regulatory changes will come into effect. The Government aims to provide clear and straightforward guidance explaining any changes at least 12 weeks in advance, and businesses can keep up to date with new requirements and changes through http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/.

Be warned however that the dates could all change after the general election - especially if there is a change in government.

Email – Love it, hate it, store it – find it?

2010-04-01T08:46:00.005+01:00

Email is such a contradiction – I for one am so reliant on it; I get updates, alerts, information, collaboration, communication and so much more from it. I also have an inbox that seems to fill up every time I am away from my desk, and I question how much of the time that I spend on emails is actually of business benefit?

The other problem is organisation – I get a lovely snippet of useful information by email, what do I do with that so that I can usefully find it again? Many of us drop the email into our email folders (some better organised than others), I might add it to our blog or reference it in our knowledge system. Those of us with a DMS that allows email filing have an advantage, can drop it into a folder that can be collaborative, contextual, inclusive of documents and material from elsewhere, flagged if it is already filed by someone else, and full text searchable – so reducing duplication.

A decent search engine and we are not limited to browsing a good – or a poor organisational structure to find it again.

However, in many organisations emails are filed by one person in their personal email folders, at the same time as many others in that organisation are storing that email in their own email folders; taking up space unnecessarily and often, being lost for future use.
The information may not be shared – for the fear that others may already have it, or that others might not value it, so some people will not have even seen that nugget of relevant information before it is filed away and lost.

A recent post from Jason Plant made me smile – “Email, hate the stuff” - I have to sympathise!

However, the death of the email has been talked of for some years, this post from 2008 talks of the last days of email and suggests alternatives – RSS feeds for information updates, speaking to colleagues face to face or picking up the phone, using collaborative calendars. Although these are all good tools – and I do believe that RSS has huge potential in the work place, even though it is not always exploited enough in innovative ways to fit in with people’s workflow – email still fills that gap.

What should have happened? Continuous learning

2010-03-31T07:48:00.003+01:00

After Action Reviews (AARs) are excellent tools – they may be painful to do, (someone who can fulfil the role of a facilitator is always well worthwhile), awkward to suggest, time consuming to pull out the most valuable lessons, and even more time consuming to change processes within the organisation in the light of that learning – but they are such good value!

If you are not familiar with After Action Review it is basically a case of getting together all of those involved in that particular project, and reviewing how it went. It could be a project or a transaction, and the aim is to find out:

What was supposed to happen?

What actually happened?

What is the difference between the two questions above?

What can we learn from this?

What would we do differently next time?

The benefit can be enormous; it can stop the wheel being reinvented in future work, it can improve the quality of the work carried out next time, it can save time and once a routine of carrying out AAR’s is established, the lessons learnt can be used right at the beginning of the project, adding in a “what do we already know” stage, before the project is undertaken.

Then you can move into “before, during and after” reviews, which is a very healthy state to be in.

I believe that some of the origins of this can be traced back to the US Army, but my favourite hand book is “Learning to Fly” by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell.

There is a lot of good material on their website, but there are lots of helpful experiences, templates and implementation advice around elsewhere as well. Kim Plowright shares a template that she uses for projects, and it has some useful prompts. Some of the language used may need to be changed to be relevant to your own organisation, but it can be a useful exercise.

Merger mania

2010-03-30T08:39:00.001+01:00

The mergers and acquisitions market appears to be warming up, with recent high profile mergers like Orange and T-Mobile, Cadbury and Kraft, there are bound to be more to follow.

BNET have put up some tips on “how to survive a mega-merger”, dealing with some of the issues around consolidation that mergers always bring.

Charging for the The Times online

2010-03-29T10:05:00.003+01:00

Karen Blakeman blogs about the latest move from News International.

The Financial Times did the same thing three years ago, making us all pay for additional licenses to be able to obtain FT data through the aggregators. The FT withdrew their content from Lexis, Westlaw and other aggregators, losing several customers in the process.

If The Times does the same thing, is the content unique enough to merit us taking out additional licences and extra cost? I doubt it.

What value does Knowledge Management add?

2010-03-26T08:30:00.001Z

Why "do" KM? Isn’t it just common sense? An intelligent way of working? The answer for me is yes it is indeed all of these, but KM facilitates and leverages all of those good ideas that might not come to anything otherwise, it supports innovation, enforces some of those good habits, more importantly it can reveal what measures would actually help an organisation to improve quality, save time and reduce risk.

A simple overview of the difference between conventional knowledge sharing and what is gained by using knowledge management is shown in a presentation from Óttar Erlingsson and Espen Grødem.

Sources disappearing?

2010-03-25T10:06:00.004Z

Many of the online database aggregators that we rely on remove sources – sometimes without letting subscribers know. This could be because they have not been able to agree distribution rights and licence fees with the source owners, or even because that source could be seen as a competitor to one of the aggregators own products.

Some aggregators are great and tell you as soon as they know that it is going to disappear and why, but all too often we find out the hard way that a source is no longer included when we thought it was – a real quality issue.

Robin Neidorf from Freepint VIP has been carrying out a brief survey on sources: " What sources have you lost? What sources are you concerned you may lose? How have you adapted?"
Participants will receive a copy of the report, and a feature story on the results will also appear in an upcoming issue of VIP Magazine.

Hidden information

2010-03-24T16:31:00.004Z

A lot of useful and current information is hidden away within Power Point presentations, and although an advanced search on a mainstream search engine may find the odd one, many will remain undiscovered.

There are several good tools to find this sort of material – I have previously used Slideshare but have recently discovered Slidefinder. Both of these – and probably several other dedicated sites out there, provide access to presentation materials that contain all sorts of corporate information, insights into lessons from other industries, statistics, concepts, background etc.

Slidefinder has the advantage of taking you directly to the slide that contains your search term, rather than you having to search through a presentation to find out whether the item is relevant to you.

Legal Document Management using SharePoint?

2010-03-23T08:42:00.013Z

Several organisations have been looking looking towards a Microsoft solution for a document management system (DMS) in recent years. The Orange Rag (Legal Technology Insider) has a nice overview - if you are a subscriber.

Some are pushed in that direction because their organisation already has SharePoint and want to leverage and integrate with other Microsoft applications, collaborative platforms and Word, others are looking that way because it could be a cheaper alternative to some of the bigger systems like Interwoven and Opentext. Finding a good SharePoint solution out of the box is certainly exercising a few minds; version control, security, individual document numbers, metadata retention, lack of email management and integration have all been issues.

There is of course lots of information from Microsoft, such as on the Microsoft TechNet site and Sharepoint 2010 appears to be the answer. However, these do not necessarily highlight some of the issues, so there are many blogs and many Microsoft partners happy to be paid to develop Sharepoint DMS solutions – but at a cost, plus development time. Such as Kraft Kennedy, and documents such as SharePoint briefing .

One recent announcement has come from Sword Group, who plan to launch a Legal Document Management Solution based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Sword Group have entered into a collaborative agreement with Lewis Silkin to acquire the IP for their “Legal centric Document Management application”, which uses SharePoint. Their objective is to develop a commercial package (Excalibur) for launch Q3 2010, targeted at law firms and in-house corporate legal counsels, so more of an out of the box product.
I am sure that there are many others in the race to a flexible Sharepoint DMS solution off the shelf.

KM and innovation

2010-03-22T08:00:00.011Z

There has been lots of great discussion recently about knowledge management and how it affects innovation – it is so pertinent in the current economic environment where every advantage counts.

I have long subscribed to the theory that KM helps, supports, and nurtures innovation. The only "innovation" that might be stifled is when people waste time and effort re-inventing the wheel and do not build on experience.

Nick Milton of Knoco has a number of helpful posts around this issue, and about project-based learning:

http://www.nickmilton.com/2010/03/just-same-only-better.html

http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/11/create-vs-re-use-core-tension-in-km.html

If you have never encountered Nick Milton’s "bird island" to illustrate how constructive it is to capture and re-use knowledge – it is well worth a look!

Recent discussion on a LinkedIn Knowledge Management Experts * thread added that if KM is done properly it is no extra effort, it is just about getting business processes to an excellent level, standardised and shared across an organisation. If KM is not done so well and ignores the behavioural change needed to make projects succeed, then there is a disconnect between the Knowledge Management intiative and the employees, with people not understanding what the benefits could be, and a lower success rate as a result.

*(NB. You may have to be a member of this group to be able to follow this particular link, you will certainly need a LinkedIn account - but it was an interesting discussion so I wanted to give it a mention)

Plain English - legal writing and drafting

2010-03-19T08:50:00.004Z

Legal writing and drafting training can be very valuable in the legal world, as can careful proof reading! To support good english language habits there are various texts and sites, one that I particularly like is Ken Adams’ site, especially the blog.

Nishwa Ashraf from Melcrum has also written an interesting post; "Are you guilty of crimes against the English language?"

Nishwa explains that The Local Government Association (LGA) is tightening up on what it calls "impenetrable words", and has drafted a 250-word list outlawing meaningless and confusing terms including "trialogue", "clienting" and "goldfish bowl facilitated conversation".

Oh to be a "fly on the wall" for that meeting...

Business information service

2010-03-18T09:18:00.003Z

With the closure of the the FT Business Information (FT Research Centre) and London Business School fee paying information services, there are not so many business information services available for the more obscure historic enquiries that need specific sources to resolve.

Dermot McGrath was the senior researcher at the FT Business Information Service and when the Research Centre was closed in early 2008, he left to set up Markets Information and Research Ltd, to provide a service that the FT no longer operated in.

Markets Information and Research Ltd specialise in researching the World's stock exchanges and other financial markets, global public and private companies, economies and rich lists. They have a wide-ranging library including a significant collection of pre-1980 data, such as company rankings, UK economic statistics, and UK stock market records that may be impossible to locate elsewhere.

Dermot is always helpful and has found things that we cannot obtain elsewhere, well worth a try!

Open source software and how to do more with less

2010-03-17T09:57:00.003Z

James Mullan puts some excellent posts up on his “Running Librarian” blog, and like the “good blogger” he is, he has captured some useful resources and tips on providing information for less cost.

Based on his recent talk at the Ark conference; “Managing your law firm library and information service through challenging times” James includes several open source presentations and details.

Business Directories

2010-03-16T10:09:00.004Z

Two established company directories have re-vamped their online offerings – Kompass and Kellysearch.

Both have become less of an essential source for business information in recent years but will these changes make them useful tools?

Anne Jordan looks at their new offerings. Kellysearch is positioning itself as a B2B request-for-quotes site, and some of the Kompass site is still in beta form.

Looking for national court decisions on EU law?

2010-03-15T10:45:00.006Z

The European Court of Justice’s Research and Documentation Department database has been made available in both English and French.

It contains over 20,300 decisions of national courts concerning Community law from 1959 up to 20th June 2007.

Free map data?

2010-03-11T15:17:00.001Z

The "Making Public Data Public" project’s latest hope is to make Ordinance Survey map data freely available online from April 2010. It looks as though this is mainly to allow people to access and interpret public statistics by postcode, local authority or electoral boundary. One of the applications is the "ASBOrometer", a mobile application that measures levels of anti-social behaviour at your current location (within England and Wales) and gives you access to key local ASB statistics.

If you have not seen the beta site www.data.gov.uk it is worth visiting, the site aims to provide access to government data and is under constant development. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others are advising the government on this initiative.

Free Legal Web

2010-03-11T14:32:00.003Z

FreeLegalWeb is being pulled together by Nick Holmes, with the aim of delivering; "better, affordable, joined-up access to the law". Ideally this would link up all of the good free resources that already exist, such a BAILII, government information, primary law and secondary law, commentary and know how.

It sounds great, if ambitious, and could be an alternative to the expensive commercial resources that help us to obtain commentary and analysis, primary and secondary law.

"FreeLegalWeb is a collaborative project which will provide intuitive, joined-up, public access to the law and legal guidance via:

· A user-generated knowledge base of expert guidance on the law
· Underpinned by direct access to all publicly available primary law and related resources
· A content-analysis system automatically connecting articles to related primary law and other resources on the internet.

It will benefit all who require better, affordable access to the law, providing a wide-ranging public and community service via a Community Interest Company."

The beta site is due to kick off this spring, focussing on housing law only. The hope is that this first platform will help to attract potential sponsors and grow the project.

Are you mobile?

2010-03-11T10:00:00.001Z

This view of mobile working from BT looks at the four traditional barriers of mobile working; technology, culture, cost and security.

With some case studies around collaboration, security issues and ROI this is an interesting read even though it concentrates on BT products.

Financial Times images - will your licence cover it?

2010-03-09T11:00:00.003Z

The Financial Times is consulting on the way that they licence their digital images, consolidating their digital licensing.

Do you use the FT or FT.com and have an NLA licence / an FT.com licence / a press cutting agency agreement? If so this is what the FT are saying so far.

Copyright and social networking

2010-03-08T11:50:00.001Z

As social networking increases in popularity, are people breaking copyright with some of the items that they post? Photos or videos appear to be most at risk; with a large number of social networking site users completely unaware of the potential copyright issues associated with posting such original works.

Although looking at the situation in the U.S. this item in Law Technology News provides an interesting review and some good suggestions to bear in mind when posting on social networking sites.

Do you mind map?

2010-03-04T17:40:00.003Z

Some of us naturally think graphically and are happiest drawing diagrams to explain structures, concepts, make notes and to think things out. I have just been introduced to some lovely freeware called "Freemind".

You may have found this one already, but it is great tool, and I prefer it to a lot of the alternatives. I use it for planning out ideas, showing the relationship between issues – and it has a polished output that I can pass on to others without having to tidy up my scruffy hand drawn efforts!

I find it helpful to record discussions in meetings, and for sharing thoughts / strategy / objectives. Free to download it has not conflicted with anything on my pc so far…

Knowledge Audits

2010-02-25T09:43:00.003Z

I find knowledge audits an immensely practical tool, not just to kick off a knowledge strategy, but to re-focus activities regularly.

The areas that cause problems in any organisation will change, and the opportunities to add value, innovate and benefit the organisation are constantly evolving.The review audit may not need to be as detailed or as formal as the original audit, but the principal is to stay very close to the activities within your organisation.

With all such tools success depends on what is done with the findings, what actions are carried through after the audit, what changes are made, opportunities developed, behaviours changed, problems solved. “A pragmatic approach to conducting knowledge audits” is a paper from the British Nuclear Group, Sellafield and the author, Clive Bright, tries to address some of the more practical issues.

E-billing

2010-02-24T17:50:00.001Z

There is a lot of debate about E-billing, and how useful the LEDES standards and UTBMS code sets are, but E-billing continues to grow as a requirement for law firms dealing with corporate clients, not just in the US but in Europe as well.

The EU has now proposed an European Electronic Invoicing Framework (EEIF), as in the report below.

http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/consultations/docs/2009/e-invoicing/report_en.pdf

The end of competitive advantage for information services?

2010-01-20T18:16:00.003Z

The latest step in shared services for law firm libraries took place in December, when TLT and Beachcroft LLP joined Osborne Clarke by outsourcing their information services to Integreon.

To some minds, this could affect the competitive advantage gained in some areas of information services, and what does this mean for the provision of value added information services for clients? If law firms have to pay to provide this via their outsourcing partner, it becomes a more tangible cost - so will law firms still want to provide that for free?

Is Nexus working?

2010-01-18T18:05:00.002Z

A competitor to the iPhone? Google has entered the market with Nexus One, a challenge to the iPhone, but is it any good for serious commercial use?

BNET have brought together several reviews to make interesting reading: A review roundup

Working with Worksite

2010-01-05T18:01:00.009Z

Happy New Year!

I hope that you all had a good holiday – despite the snow.
Do you use Worksite?

Some know this DMS as “Worksite”, some know it as “Interwoven”, or “Imanage”, and since the purchase by Autonomy, another name is added to the collection. However you refer to it, there are various good tips on how to makeWorkSite even more helpful. This one by Jason Plant is about adding a folder shortcut in your file, to a folder in another file.

Legal Research Search Engines

2009-12-15T17:17:00.003Z

Cornell University has worked with Google to offer a legal research search engine.

Although this is very U.S. in coverage it does have some Foreign and International material. The Cornell Legal Research Search Engine carries out Google-powered searches of Legal Research Guides, the “Legal Internet” and Academic Blawgs.

Betsy McKenzie gives an overview of how well this works for students on: “Out of the Jungle”.

Who’s talking about you?

2009-12-15T16:23:00.007Z

An interesting article from Jon Bernstein on BNET – a frightening insight into how your reputation could be damaged by comments made online.

The recommendation is to keep track of what is being said about you – as simple as setting up alerts on something such as Google – as Google does cover so many sites: google.com/alerts It is also good to look at social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and identify blogs and discussion sites in your professional circle.

Jon’s article covers all of this and has a useful checklist – he finishes by suggesting that you check your biography on your organisation’s web site, to make sure it is correct and up to date.

Electoral Register - consultation on changes

2009-12-08T14:57:00.006Z

Do you use the Electoral Register at all? There is a consultation going on about how useful the edited Electoral Register really is:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/electoral-registers-consultation.htm (closes on the 23rd February 2010)

The Ministry of Justice are looking at how people might be affected by the abolition of the edited version, before deciding what form it might take in the future.

Head in the Clouds

2009-11-25T18:59:00.001Z

What is “cloud computing?” How does it work? Can I trust cloud computing for remote working – what about security? A short introduction to some of the issues from Richard Neale. http://digbig.com/5bapab

Measuring the ROI of Social Media

2009-11-06T10:39:00.000Z

Mashable has put together a really useful post on "How to measure the ROI of Social Media" in the post they refer to a presentation called "Basics of Social Media ROI" which we've embedded below.

This is a really interesting and funny way to look at ROI, which is well worth reviewing.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

Happy bonfire night!

2009-11-05T17:00:00.000Z

Happy bonfire night to all our readers, we hope you have a sparkling time.

Sowing the seeds of change

2009-11-04T10:06:00.000Z

Mary Abraham at the Above and Beyond KM blog has written an interesting post on change. Called "Are you ready for change" Mary looks at some of the obstacles and challenges for Knowledge Managers in Law Firms.

In her post Mary points readers towards another blog post called "9 tips for change agents" Mary argues quite rightly that one of the difficulties with managing change is where you don't have any experience of actually "working" in the business e.g. you're not a lawyer a paralegal or a banker.

There are some very good tips contained within these posts, which for anyone involved with projects or change management are well worth reading.

Who knows what?

2009-11-02T16:10:00.005Z

Who knows what is the title of an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal. In it the author describes how in "big companies" in-house experts who might have specialised skills and knowledge will exist but people in the same office might not know they exist!

The authors goes on to identify two problems with some of the systems that are designed to manage "expertise"...there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts. Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts' "softer" qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn't easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries"

The author goes on to describe how social-computing or social media tools might help with some of the gaps in the current approaches to managing this content. The two tools that the authors discuss in more details are Blogs and wikis, although they also mention Social networks and tagging as a source of expert information.

I believe blogs are an excellent way to identify experts, especially if someone is dedicating their own time to create and manage content on a blog. Wikis are also another excellent way to identify experts and potentially where there might be "holes" in a teams areas of expertise which require filling, either by developing/training an individual or asking another team member to provide the expertise.

Overall this is a really interesting article, which is well worth reading.

Is it about the culture or the technology?

2009-10-30T10:00:00.000Z

In their post "Culture makes the collaboration, not technology" the Knowledge Jolt blog looks at some of the factors associated with the successful implement of social media tools. The post makes reference to an article called "Corporate Culture, Not Technology, Drives Online Collaboration" so which is more important, culture or the technology?

We'll let you decide! but I'm sure we all know the answer.

Checking your premises

2009-10-28T10:00:00.002Z

Mary Abraham at the Above and Beyond KM blog has written an interestin post on her blog. Called "KM's worst enemy" the post ask whether KM's worst enemy is actually the people responsible for developing KM in the first place - namely Knowledge Managers.

From Mary's blog post "Knowledge managers should lead by example when it comes to finding creative solutions to practical problems. The first step along this path is to question our premises. When we fail to do this, we pursue outdated goals and methods, thereby relegating our KM programs to an increasingly irrelevant position within the firm"

In the post Mary highlights two areas which Knowledge Managers have traditionally considered important in terms of the development of Knowledge, "document collections" and "model documents" but are they?

Who know's what?

2009-10-27T10:00:00.000Z

"Who know's what" is the title of a very interesting blog post on the KM Space blog. In the blog post the author reports on "Who Knows What? Finding in-house experts isn’t easy. But most companies make it harder than it should be" this article explores the expertise location benefits of social media tools.

The blog post and the article are well worth a quick read.

Folksonomy folktales

2009-10-26T10:00:00.001Z

Folksonomy folktales is an interesting post from the KM world blog. From the introduction to the blog post "In reviewing articles about folksonomies and taxonomies, I found that while there were some interesting experiments in combining the two, most writings repeated the same myths, folktales and misconceptions."

The post goes on to outlines some of the myths associated with folksonomies and some of the benefits associated with using them. Some highlights from the blog post.

Folktale One: Folksonomies are examples of the wisdom of crowds.
Folktale Two: Folksonomies are building bottom-up classification systems.

The author then discusses some of the benefits of using folksonomies but highlighting the negative aspects of those benefits, for example on folksonomies being easier to use then taxonomies "there are a number of problems with *this*. First, picking from a simple taxonomy is at least as easy as thinking up a keyword. Second, there are ways to make it easier to select from a taxonomy, such as auto-categorization software, that automatically suggests terms from the taxonomy. In that case, the cognitive task of agreeing with the suggestion or not is much easier than trying to think up a term."

This is an interesting post, which I recommend you have a quick read of.

KM tools and techniques

2009-10-23T15:44:00.003+01:00

The Green Chameleon blog has just posted a useful looking list of KM tools and techniques in their blog posts More KM tools and techniques.

Some of these resources look really useful.

How to measure the impact of KM

2009-10-19T10:00:00.001+01:00

The KM Edge blog has published an interesting blog post called "How to measure the impact of KM..again" why again? because this subject seems to come up in conversation over and over again. The blog post explains the three primary approaches for measuring the effects of knowledge management. They are;

"...to tie participation to outcomes, which enables the KM team to know that their efforts are actually making a difference"
"...to quantify the value of success stories to the business. Sometimes it isn't feasible to measure all the intangible value that comes from KM--the connections between people, the sense of affiliation and belonging, loyalty and flexibility--but we can measure the value of business outcomes tied to specific uses of a KM approach"
"...to know where to invest more or less. Executives care about this. Which KM investments are leading to better outcomes? Which are just legacy or busywork?"

If Sharepoint is the solution...what's the problem?

2009-10-16T10:00:00.000+01:00

Neil Richards from teh Knowledge Thoughts blog has writtent two very interesting post on the use of Sharepoint with Law Firms. In the first post called If Sharepoint is the solution, what is the problem? Part I/II Neil looks at some of the "generic problems" that Law Firms that could be resolved through the use of a relevant tool.

Neil gives the example of a firm "Acme Partners LLP" not hiring law graduates at the right time, which means they don't have the opportunity to hire the top student from that year. Neil also lists the following as examples of problems that could be managed by using an application like Sharepoint.

Sharing documents
Researching legal questions
Tracking credentials / major deals
Managing relationship information about each client

In Neil's second post on this subject called If Sharepoint is the solution, what is the problem? Part II/II Neil outlines why he believes Sharepoint is a good choice for any law firm looking to solve some of these problems. As Neil explains the problem for IT departments is that they need to deploy something that is "simple to deploy, simple to use" and "can be used on the firm's hardware"

Sharepoint "out-of-the-box" certainly ticks all of these boxes, but it does have its drawbacks as Neil goes on to explain. "...it doesn’t do...wikis, relational data or deliver to your exact requirements" very well. Another problem "...is people’s expectations. If your requirements can mostly be met through the use of a generic tool, is it unacceptable to ask the business for a bit of compromise? Hardly. If the business case warrants it, Sharepoint is extremely customisable, you merely have to have the willingness and the developers to do so"

These are two really interesting blog post, which I'd encourage anyone who is thinking about using Sharepoint to read.

Can you really unplug KM?

2009-10-14T10:00:00.000+01:00

In the post "KM unplugged" which is from the Archestra blog the author looks at why well into the 21st century people are still looking for definitions of Knowledge Management. From the blog post:

"Let's approach the challenge like this. ask the question(s), "how do you know if you are managing knowledge?"Of course, that is really two questions: how do you know if you're managing, and how do you know that it is knowledge that you are managing?"

This is an interesting post, which should encourage organisations to look closely at Knowledge Management. As the author says when concluding "For an organization that presumes to compete and win based on advantages, understanding knowledge management is a no brainer"

A simple definition of Enterprise 2.0

2009-10-12T10:00:00.000+01:00

The FASTForward blog has published a simple yet very useful definition of Enterprise 2.0. They define Enterprise 2.0 as "Enterprise 2.0 is about applications where business value is determined through the contributions of participants"

I like this definition because it focuses on the value that participants by contributing content etc rather then looking simply at the technology.

Social networking for business

2009-09-21T10:00:00.001+01:00

Brad Hinton from his blog "Plain speaking" has written an interesting post called "Social networking for buisness" in it he looks at some of the reasons why social networking can have enormous benefits to companies.

He illustrates the points he makes in the blog by recommending the following Seth Godin video on Youtube.

Brad also summarises the video with the following "...social networking is good for business because it facilitates the establishing of effective relationships based on trust and reciprocity. According to Godin, you can’t count the worth of social networking by the numbers – it’s the quality of the relationships that give the greatest meaning to social networks and that’s where the value sits."

A Knowledge Solution to Drive Revenues and Competitive Advantage

2009-09-18T11:37:00.002+01:00

Using practical resources to drive revenues in a downturn economy is the title of a very interesting white paper published on the PLC US site. The article which has been written by Bruce MacEwen looks at how law firms are under greater pressure to protect and even increase revenue. But as the introduction to the article says "how can firms do more with less?"

According to the introduction the White paper then goes on to argue the following points:

"All firms face the same problem: how to deal with associates who lack the practical understanding to work at a level of competence clients will pay for.
US firms have largely ignored practical knowledge resources as a source of attorney support relative to other areas of investment.
Having resources in place to achieve this practical understanding will get associates up to speed quicker and increase their realization rates - key profit-drivers in a downturn"

Is Enterprise 2.0 going anywhere?

2009-09-13T13:47:00.000+01:00

An interesting post here from the Above and Beyond KM blog which asks "Enterprise 2.0: All Talk and No Action?"and whether Enterprise 2.0 is becoming a reality within the private sector?

It would seem not according to the results of a recent AIIM report, which is cited in the blog post. According to this report only 25% of corporations are actually doing anything with social media. That's a staggeringly small number or corporations given the number there must be in total.

Where I wonder does Enterprise 2.0 go from here?

How to Ruin a Knowledge Management Program

2009-09-11T13:36:00.002+01:00

Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond the Law has published a link to an interesting post called "How to ruin a brainstorming session" as Mary points out many of the "bad practices" in this post can be applied to Knowledge Management. They include the following;

You have no clear objectives.
The group involved is too homogeneous.
Your boss is autocratic and doesn’t trust the creativity of his or her team.
You allow early criticism to smother creativity.
You settle for just a few ideas.
Your process lacks closure or follow through.

The problem is then how do you deal with them?

Sharepoint in plain english

2009-08-21T14:18:00.004+01:00

The guys at Commoncraft have produced a very good video on how you can use Sharepoint withing a company. Although the focus of this video is on managing projects Sharepoint of course has much more potential and is used widely by firms for its blog and wiki functionality.

SharePoint in Plain English

This is all in all a pretty good video, although as the Knowledge Jolt blog says..."you can't forget that the implementation of any such solution has to overcome the usual fun of actually making it solve the problems without creating any new ones."

10 things Sharepoint can do for your Firm

2009-08-12T11:52:00.002+01:00

10 things Sharepoint can do you for your Firm is the title of a great little article on the Law.com website. The article, which is written by Mark Gerow looks at some of the ways Sharepoint could be used within a law firm to "improve...effectiveness, deliver better client service and reduce costs" So what are the suggestions, well they are in no particular order:

Replacing your document management system
Automating new business intake
Searching across ALL systems
Encouraging "communities of interest" using "my sites"
Creating a Firmwide Calendar
Creating Practice Group Wikis
Collaborating with clients using Extranets
Managing projects
Displaying "Key Performance Indicators"
Creating "Mashups"

There are some very good suggestions here for how Sharepoint could be used beyond Blogs and Wikis.

Can you have too much knowledge?

2009-08-10T10:34:00.002+01:00

"When it comes to knowledge management, too much knowledge can prove even more dangerous than a having just a little if you want to share ideas" this is the introduction to an interesting article on the Knowledge Board website.

The article looks at how difficult it can be for individuals to explain what they know to other people and suggests a way to "bridge the gap" between what you know and what you want to tell someone. "The solution is to create a metaphor that will make it easier for your listeners to make the journey from familiar territory (what they already know) to unfamiliar territory (what they don’t know). Thinking metaphorically forces us to take a step back from what we know and imagine seeing it from someone else’s point of view. This is because metaphors are created by answering the question, "what’s it like?"

The internal reputation of KM

2009-07-22T21:02:00.003+01:00

Neil Richards from the Knowledge Thoughts Blog has written an interesting blog post called "The internal reputation of KM" In it Neil discusses an interesting article in a recent edition of the McKinsey Quarterly called "Rebuilding corporate reputations"

The article looks at some of the "reputational challenges" that face businesses especially as a result of the financial crisis. As Neil suggests in his blog post "The article is to pitched companies looking to improve their external reputations, but I think many of the themes, tools and approaches the MQ advocates are relevant to those in the KM space."

The importance of knowledge development in a recession

2009-07-16T14:00:00.000+01:00

The Knowledge Board has published a timely piece on "The importance of Knowledge development in a recession" from the introduction to the article. "In today’s world where knowledge is power, it should come as no surprise that the most valuable asset for any business is the knowledge of its employees. And within our current knowledge-based economy, competent and confident employees are the foundation for a successful business"

But what does this actually mean in practice? well the author has identified several areas that business should be working in, they are:

knowledge training and development programmes
Identifying top employees (these are individuals who are already creating and developing knowledge and so are crucial to a business)

This is an interesting article, which highlights two areas businesses should be developing to ensure they're ready for the recession and the upturn.

Baking KM into everyday workflow

2009-07-13T16:35:00.000+01:00

How is KM doing in the economic crisis? Are law firms taking advantage of other law firm departments to support KM ("baking KM into processes") Ron Friedman at Prism Legal reports on these and more questions in Baking KM into Everyday Workflow: An Analysis of Knowledge Management Survey Data.

From Ron's blog post on the subject "The bad news is that law firms are not baking KM into processes as much as they could. The good news is that KM does not seem to be suffering unduly in these tough times" This is a really interesting article, which is well worth reading.

10 things every Lawyer (everyone) should know about Legal SaaS

2009-07-13T10:30:00.002+01:00

10 Things Every Lawyer Should Know About Legal SaaS looks like an interesting series of post on what Software as a Service is, how it could be used and some of the issues that are associated with using it.

Enterprise 2.0: Twitter Up, Facebook, MySpace Down

2009-07-12T10:00:00.000+01:00

Is Facebook about to whither and die? That would certainly seem to be the case if you read this article called Enterprise 2.0: Twitter Up, Facebook, MySpace Down from Information Week. The article is a report of a session called How Twitter Changes Everything from a recent Enterprise 2.0 conference.

It's interesting to see in how short a time period people move from one technology to another.

Knowledge Management Measurement

2009-07-10T14:00:00.000+01:00

A thought provoking post here from Brad Hinton on Brad Hinton - Plain Speaking, which looks at some of the issues around measuring Knowledge Management. Brad argues that hard data (facts and figures) often doesn't represent what activities are being undertaken by Knowledge Management teams.

He goes on to say "We therefore often have a problem conveying the full story of our work in knowledge management since we do not always have the facts and figures senior executives want. We often provide information that is easy to collect but does not provide real meaning. The classic example is in using hit rates for intranet pages and web sites. High hit rates can often indicate confusion just as well as indicating purposeful traffic"

Brad goes on to discuss some of the techniques he uses to "Measure Knowledge Management". This is a really interesting article, which is well worth reading for an introduction to this area.

Has IT killed KM?

2009-07-09T13:32:00.003+01:00

This is the title of an interesting post from Greg Lambert over at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. Greg argues that "...Knowledge Management (KM) has become so overwhelmed with technology products that the individuals in KM have become ‘tech support’ rather than knowledge managers"

Greg goes on to discuss how Knowledge Management isn't a software or database issue. So adding some contacts to a CRM System and some documents to a Know-How system doesn't magically mean you're doing Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management should mean more than this, especially in the Web 2.0/KM 2.0 world we live in.

The Leaving Employee: Knowledge Management for Surviving and Thriving

2009-06-25T21:22:00.003+01:00

This is the title of a really interesting article on the FUMSI website which looks an issue which affects most companies. The issue discussed is the thorny one of employees leaving and taking all the knowledge and experience they have built up over their time there with them.

So what is the magic answer? well the article doesn't offer the magic answer to capturing all the knowledge that employees have but it does offer some strategies for how organisations might approach this issue. These include the following;

"Expert database - Ensure the departing employee's background, skills, strengths and contacts are saved in a searchable database
Social network analysis - Map the relationships between the leaving individual and other employees, departments, and organisations
Document management systems - Ensure the leaving employee's documents are stored and retrievable in an effective system
Succession planning - Ensure processes are implemented for the replacement of key people"

These are just four of the many strategies outlined in what is a very interesting article which looks at a very tricky issue for many organisations.

Long term access to Government Information

2009-06-15T13:20:00.002+01:00

At our last meeting Jennie Grimshaw from the British Library talked at length about the initiatives that are taking place within the British Library and the National Archives to preserve for posterity UK Websites. This was a really interesting talk which highlighted both the initiatives that are taking place and some of the issues the British Library and the National Archives face.

During her talk Jennie mentioned two websites The National Archives UK Government Web Archive and the UK Web Archive. This was a really interesting talk and we hope to get a similar speaking for our next meeting.

It's the economy stupid!

2009-06-04T10:53:00.004+01:00

In an interesting article from Inside Knowledge Magazine the author looks back at developments in Knowledge Management since 1992 and looks at what law firms need to do to "survive" beyond 2009.

The author explains that there are three key things that Knowledge Management initiatives needs to demonstrate. These are that KM is;

Client driven (e-commerce products, training, value added services)
Adds Value (training fee-earners, strengthening links with other offices, implementing knowledge sharing initiatives)
Increasing efficicency (this is about ensuring clients receive the very best the firm has to offer)

This is a really interesting article, which if you have a subscrption to Inside Knowledge is well worth reading.

Knowledge Bubbles

2009-05-29T10:00:00.000+01:00

I love the idea of Knowlege being something that bubbles to "the surface" where it is easily found by people. This is the idea discussed in another insightful post from the Knowledge Thoughts Blog.

"Traditionally the databases or search engines were relied upon to provide this functionality, and they will continue to do so. However, these systems each have limitations which are important to consider. Knowledge databases suffer from scale with firms having more content to catalog than their KM staff can handle while enterprise search can be challenging in terms of finding relevant results despite advances in faceted search."

I couldn't agree more with this assertion and having already seen how Enterprise Search can not only work but also fail it's interesting that the Blog authors suggest there is another way to make knowledge "more visible" The suggestion by the author of the Blog and also of Lee Bryant of Headshift is to use another form of metadata called attention metadata. Essentially this looks for/finds content based on content you're reading, listening to or bookmarking. Not only is the content more relevant because you might have been reading something related recently but as the post describes...

"...taking this in aggregate and by mixing it with traditional metadata (user, practice, industry or client) can help content to bubble up in front of unsuspecting lawyers. Why is this useful? Well, it helps to raise awareness of what is going on, and what people are using. PSLs, Lawyers and Partners alike can get a sense for the resources being used without having to delve through complex usage reports.

I like to think of it like a lava lamp. Attention metadata will heat up your knowledge goo rise to the surface, cooling down over time and then sinking back down until the next time it heats up."

Knowledge Management - creating barriers

2009-05-27T10:00:00.000+01:00

If I was to sum up this post on the Knowledge Thoughts blog it would be that "Barriers are bad"this is essentially the message they're conveying within this blog post. But what these barriers...

"...as service delivery types, we should know that our clients have a low threshold for things that get in the way, they just want the good stuff. That means we need to make it as easy as possible for them to use the tools we give them, especially if they’ve yet to adopt a new concept / way of working. Examples of barriers to consider:

Lack of interest from senior leaders
Difficult systems / poor user interface
Poor comms materials (too wordy, not wordy enough, confused messages)
Poor data
Slow systems performance
etc. "

A useful insight into some of the barriers that can affect the adoption/update of Knowledge Management tools and initiatives.

Finding an expert

2009-05-25T09:30:00.002+01:00

An interesting post here on the Knowledge Jolt blog which looks at the age old problem of "Finding an Expert"

"Assuming your company is large enough that people don't sit with each other, there often comes the painful realization that Sue has just spent two months on a project, only to discover that Pedro has a deep interest in the topic and could have helped Sue shave off a couple weeks' effort. Expert location services come out of stories like this. And they have been considered a staple of knowledge management for quite a while."

The post goes on to describe the attempts by companies to make information experts more widely available. These range from manual systems, where information on expertise is entered by hand usually by the expert and is then made available. Automated systems attempt to identify experts by looking at documents and web-browsing history. Both as discussed in the post can return experts but both are also flawed.

This post is well worth reading if you're thinking about building an expert search in your organisation.

What are the most critical roles in KM?

2009-05-22T16:00:00.000+01:00

A short but interesting post on the KM Edge Blog, which asks what are the most critical roles in KM? From the introduction to the Blog post:

"If you are really going to take knowledge management seriously--invest time and resources, engage with senior leadership, and expect to see results--then you need to consider the roles and resources required to support your organization's KM activities"

The post then identifies four roles crucial for the development of KM withing any organisation, they are:

"knowledge management leader--focuses on strategy, leadership, and facilitation;
knowledge management specialist--focuses on knowledge/content, flow and the impact of knowledge on processes and business/knowledge domains;
communication director--focuses on communications and change management; and
information technology/business analyst--focuses on IT tools, infrastructure, applications, and content management"

How to approach a KM Strategy exercise

2009-05-13T17:10:00.002+01:00

Another interesting video recording here from the Green Chameleon blog, which looks at how to approach a KM Strategy exercise. The video looks at how to move ideas around KM Strategy from a "consultants page" into reality.

It's not about the Tools...It's about the strategy

2009-05-07T08:10:00.002+01:00

An interesting post here from the Web Worker Daily which discusses how because of the huge number of tools available for working online and managing/creating content online individuals can become obsessed with the tools, rather then looking at why they want to use the tools.

This is like doing Web 2.0 just because it is cool. So what does the blog post suggest? Well there are five areas that it suggests you need to focus on. These are:

Finding your audience. Who do you want to reach or help with these tools?
Keep it simple. You shouldn't pick a tool based on the number of features.
Stay authentic. This is about ensuring that the content you create using these tools is consistent and authentic.
Know when to stop. If something isn't work, then don't keep doing it. Stop and look to use something else instead.

Vital behaviours for Knowledge Sharing

2009-04-30T13:09:00.003+01:00

The Anecdote Blog has published a short post on some of the "behaviours" that are vital for Knowledge Sharing within an organisation. In the post two of these behaviours are described as:

Active introductions - Where an individual is introduced to Knowledge Sharing initiatives
Beacons - These are the people who are really into Knowledge Sharing

What other behaviours are vital for Knowledge Sharing?

Conducting a Knowledge Audit

2009-04-28T14:01:00.003+01:00

The Green Chameleon Blog has posted a series of really interesting training videos on how to conduct a "Knowledge Audit"

There are three parts to the series:

Part 1 - Different types of Knowledge
Part 2 - Different strategies for different Knowledge types
Part 3 - Conducting a Knowledge Audit and building Knowledge Maps

The videos are relatively short and are well worth watching for an introduction to this subject area.

Can Web 2.0 really help Knowledge Management?

2009-04-21T15:40:00.003+01:00

An interesting post here on the KM Edge Blog which starts by looking at what organisations are hoping to achieve when they rollout out Knowledge Management initiatives. From the blog post:

"We want organic growth of information, but we also want an "official version."
We want to promote innovation and open usage, but we cannot risk exposing proprietary intellectual property.
We want fast, intranet-based tools, but we don't want to spend money.
We want everything in beta, but the tools still need to be stable.
We want free-flowing information, but without negatively impacting legal, e-discovery, or litigation.
We want integration with large legacy systems, but we also want low implementation costs.
We want grassroots adoption, but with executive sponsorship.
We want to increase KM effectiveness, but with little or no additional funding"

So the question is can Web 2.0 help deal with some of these issues? The answer if you read this article is Yes, but there are many questions that remain unanswered "Will people use the new tools? Will they really achieve the value we are promoting?" The post author also talks about how using Web 2.0 technologies is a massive shift from "...hierarchical order and paper to higher levels of comfort with user contribution, less inherent order, and a "please, no paper" attitude"

This is a really interesting article which is well worth reading.

Knowledge Management 101

2009-04-15T17:23:00.002+01:00

The LawyerKM blog is running in conjunction with Lexis Nexis a series of Webinars on Knowledge Management. The full schedule is as follows:

What Do We Know? Document Management and Retrieval Systems - Wed, April 22 - 3:00 PM

Who Do We Know? Contacts, Connections, and Social Networking for Lawyers and the Legal Profession - Wed, May 6 - 3:00 PM

Intranets, Portals, Web 2.0 & Enterprise 2.0 - Wed, May 20 - 3:00 PM

The Webinars look like they could be useful for anyone knew to Knowledge Management.

The hidden cost of downsizing?

2009-04-08T09:30:00.000+01:00

Is a lack of Knowledge retention the hidden cost of downsizing? This is the subject of this post on the The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) Website. From the introduction to the Blog post "While much of the business press is focused on significant reductions in force to improve profitability, there is a hidden cost affecting corporations of all sizes, according to a recent study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp). The study found that 30% of responding companies retain knowledge poorly or not at all when workers leave, while half (49%) think they're doing only "okay" at preserving institutional know-how. Just two in 10 think they are doing well or very well in knowledge retention"

Unfortunately the website doesn't contain the full report but this is useful reading.

Why do people share?

2009-04-06T10:00:00.000+01:00

A great post from the Knowledge Jolt blog on Why do people share? in which the author summarises this post from the Conversations Matters blog Jack Vinson has an interesting take on this post. From his post "...if they aren't using the system, then the system doesn't fit with the way that people share knowledge. And how does the knowledge sharing happen? It happens between people. And that is the focus of Nancy's article. We don't need incentives to share with one another. We need relationships"

Is this what other people think?

KM is useful...but it has to be strategic

2009-04-02T16:47:00.001+01:00

From the KM Edge Blog an interesting post here on how "sharing" is great but "but strategic knowledge management (SKM) makes sure we invest in doing the right things for the right reasons"

So what does this really mean? As the author explains the problem with tradtional Knowledge Managment is that you either do it or you don't. "You either believe in the effectiveness and importance of KM or you are an unbeliever, and resistance leads to the traditional complaints of, "When will they get it?"

A short but interesting post.

Finding the people you need

2009-03-20T13:37:00.000Z

A great post here on the Headshift Blog authored by Jon Mell. The introduction does a great job summarising the post "Rich profiles can be a powerful cornerstone of an Enterprise 2.0 / next generation intranet / social business software solution. Finding people rather than documents can be highly beneficial in terms of productivity, using information rather than looking for it, and simply getting things done and making things happen"

Jon illustrates these points by demonstrating how rich profiles are used within an application called Jive Clearspace. The following are some of the ways rich profiles can be used, all are discussed in more detail in the blog post;

You want to find someone who can help you in a particular subject area
You want to see what topics, blog posts and other content someone has contributed or commented on
You want to see what external content people have tagged/are looking at (Websites, Blog Posts)

A really interesting post, which I recommend anyone interested in finding information on people reads.

KM World's Top 100 KM Companies List

2009-03-18T10:00:00.000Z

The Accidental Aussise has posted a link on her blog to the KM World's Top 100 KM Companies List from the KM World Website:

"...we believe that each of the companies listed below embodies as part of its culture the agility and limber execution of its mission, in whatever subject areas upon which they focus. Both small and large, they embrace a spirit of innovation and adaptability. They each embody the resiliency and wisdom to identify and act upon their own areas requiring improvement and, more importantly, those of their customers"

Have a look and see what you think

Knowledge Discovery Resources 2009

2009-03-16T09:00:00.000Z

Looking for a great set of resource on "Knowledge Discovery" then look no further then this list on the LLRX.com website.

Sites listed include;

The 7 principles of Knowledge Management

2009-03-09T10:00:00.000Z

As reported on the David Gurteen Blog Dave Snowden has expanded his 3 Rules of Knowledge Management to 7 Principles of Knowledge Management

The 7 Principles of Knowledge Management are available in full on the Cognitive Edge Blog.

Surving a Zombie Intranet

2009-03-06T10:00:00.000Z

First of all you're probably thinking what on earth is a Zombie Intranet? Have I been spending too much time on Facebook...fraid not.

Have a look at this Google Search for some results on "Zombie Intranet" and then read the following from the StepTwo Blog. In it the authors describe an all too familiar scenario:

"Collaboration spaces, such as wikis or SharePoint team areas, have multiplied across the organisation. Now numbering in the thousands, some are hugely successful but many are not. Confusion and pain has oustripped the value offered by the collaboration spaces, and things may be getting worse not better.

How to untangle such a huge mess? What approach can be taken that will address thousands of spaces?"

So what is the solution and is there even one? Well the author outlines one which you may or may not agree with. You'll have to read the full post to find out what it is though!

[Hat Tip - Green Chameleon Blog]

Twitter is twensational!

2009-03-04T15:22:00.003Z

Following my post last month called Twitter for Beginners I thought it was only fair that I posted some more links to Twitter on the Blog.

If you haven't noticed already Twitter seems to be everywhere at the moment. Helped in no small part by the number of celebrities that have signed up to use the service. So it's no surprise that the number of articles that have been written about Twitter recently has increased substantially.

The following are a few that I and other bloggers have seen which may be of interest:

Twitter brings interaction to events
How to present while people are Twittering (a really great piece on the benefits although you might not think it of people Twittering whilst you're presenting)
Using Twitter in the Enterprise

[Hat Tip - The Elusa Blog]

Better Knowledge Management = Better customer service?

2009-02-19T11:00:00.000Z

An interesting article here from Fumsi which describes how a Government Call Centre based in Whitehall used Knowledge Management to improve customer service. From the article:

"Information advisers in the call centre or in other teams could access very little of the information held by their drafting colleagues, and information exchange tended to be informal and on a need-to-know basis. Much of the information held centrally was written in a style suitable for briefing but not for answering a telephone call."

"A first step was to pull together all the information we held into a searchable database - the Lines database. This database became the key knowledge resource for the Customer Service Centre"

What's interesting about the article is how the team then looked at Social Tools as a means to collaborate with each other:

"As our project to improve Lines took off, the department introduced two collaborative tools - Sametime (enabling informal ‘chat') and Quickplace (designed to improve collaborative working on policy papers and other documents). My knowledge team (of two) spotted the potential in these features for knowledge sharing across the Customer Service Centre."

One of the other benefits of rolling out this system was the impact it had on staff morale and retention of staff.

"Being able to find the information is a cornerstone in providing a good answer. It boosted morale and made the work seem more achievable. The rest of the changes related to the people aspect of the job"

A really interesting article well worth reading.

Share and share alike!

2009-02-17T10:00:00.000Z

Another day, another article from KM Legal this time from the pen of Rupert Scheiblauer, Head of Knowledge Management at Wolf Theiss. In the article Rupert looks at his firms use of Sharepoint which include the use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS Feeds.

One of the most interesting points Rupert makes is around the use of Social Networking type functionality within the site..."The ability to create your own profile is a bit step towards getting everyone involved with the firm's KM efforts...furthermore profiling makes it easier to find things or people because they have contributed their own content"

Now I'm not going to say this is crucial to the success of any project involving Sharepoint but enabling your users to edit their own profiles so that other people can see not only who they are, but what they are working on, what Know How they might have submitted, what websites they have bookmarked and who they are "connected" to truly makes Sharepoint a Web 2.0 experience.

Doom and gloom or time to prosper?

2009-02-13T09:50:00.004Z

Toby Brown of Fulbright & Jaworski has written an interesting article in the latest edition of KM Legal on some of the possibilities that could be exploited by Knowledge Managers during the global economic crisis.

On how Knowledge Management professionals can demonstrate the business value of their work:

"We know that lawyers and firms that embrace KM will be those that best serve clients needs, so we should be taking this opportunity to demonstrate its benefits"

On the benefits of having a fully resources KM team:

"The KM team can help our lawyers to achieve this and enhance our business development efforts, thus creating efficiencies and lowering cost over time"

On how KM Teams can "work smarter"

"...if you want to converse with lawyers about value, talk about value instead of technology. This focuses the dialogue on the benefits to the lawyers and not on the cost of any technology involved"

This is an interesting example of how KM Teams can use Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management tools to exlpoit the current global economic crisis.

Is Knowledge Management just a really expensive overhead?

2009-02-05T16:02:00.003Z

I for one hope not because Knowledge Management is a considerable part of my work in one form or another. But like most people I cant help but have noticed that 2009 is looking like it is going to be a particularly difficult year for Law Firms.

So "where does Knowledge Management fit into this" is the question asked by Doug Cornelius on the KM Space Blog

As reported by Doug two articles published in the most recent edition of Inside Knowledge Magazine try to answer this question. The articles are:

As Doug says in his blog post, both articles look to some of the challenges and opportunities for developing and improving Knowledge Management in what are difficult time.

Unfortunately you will need a subscription to Inside Knowledge Magazine in order to read these articles.

Twitter for beginners

2009-02-02T10:00:00.001Z

I recently wrote an article for a professsional association I belong to and thought it might be republish here, albeit condensed slightly.

First of all you're probably thinking, what on earth is Twitter?

Well Twitter began life in 2006 as a research and development project and has now become the most popular microblogging site on the Web. Twitter is part Social Networking site part publishing platform, with the idea behind it that it offers a way for individuals to provide more detailed “status” updates to their friends, family and other contacts.

Think text messages or Facebook status updates and you’re almost there in terms of the concept although with Twitter users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through applications like Tweetie, TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook.

A number of other services exist with a similar concept or which combine the micro-blogging functionality with other services, of these Jaiku, Plurk and Tumblr are the best-known microblogging sites. Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows individuals to post brief text updates (usually no more than 140 characters) or other media such as photos, audio clips and websites. Followers, individuals who have chosen to follow these updates, a bit like blog subscribers, then view them.

These updates could be about anything, from what you had for lunch to a new website you’ve seen to something you have just blogged about or are thinking of talking about, your only limit is 140 characters.

Still interested in taking a look at Twitter? then you'll want to have a look some of the excellent guides that have been written on how to use Twitter and why!

And if you're really keen to start using Twitter and are looking for some people to follow then look no further then the following:

http://twitter.com/jimmy1712 that's me!
http://twitter.com/banklawblog