Strategic Legal Technology

I am at a large law firm knowledge management conference. The morning session was Does Enterprise 2.0 = 2 Knowledge Management 2.0 and featured Dan Keldsen, Director of Market Intelligence and Carl Frappaolo, VP Market Intelligence, both associated with AIIM. This was one of the more interesting KM sessions I’ve attended in a while. 

Here are highlights of the session:
  Interesting group exercise to define themes  [conference organizers take note - this is a great approach]
        i. Split into 2 groups
        ii. Write terms on Post-It Notes - keep to 1 or 2 words - to describe E2.0 and KM2.0
        iii. Put all the Post-It Notes on a wall
        iv. Each group de-duplicates Post-It Notes and organizes by theme
  Enterprise 2.0 Themes
        i. Collaboration
        ii. Social networking
        iii. Knowledge sharing
        iv. Search
        v. Virtual organization
  KM 2.0 Themes
        i. Training and PD
        ii. Forms and precedents
        iii. People and processes
        iv. Taxonomy, content organization
        v. Sharing, gathering, and re-using
  Comments on excercise
        i. Paper exercise illustrates the wiki approach of group authorship
        ii. Exercise shows that tools do not help reconcile differences of views in groups
  Commonalities across the KM and Enterprise 2.0
        i. Search, collaboration
        ii. People
        iii. Technology
        iv. Sharing information
  What’s new if we accept premise that the basic tenets of KM don’t change because of Enterprise 2.0?
  Four elements of KM, irrespective tools and jargon
        i. Business strategy and purpose
        ii. Process
        iii. Technology
        iv. People (allegiances, incentives, inclinations, respect, trust) - this does not go away, irrespective of technology.   Open access to technology does not mean everyone has an equal voice.  
  Legacy technology and KM
        i. Intermediation - Groupware, profiling, e-mail  [sharing views and info]
        ii. Externalization - doc man, visualization, portals [to capture explicit know-how]
        iii. Internalization - search, taxonomies, agents [to help users find info]
        iv. Cognition - workflow, decision support [to help drive decision making]
  New tech and KM
        i. Intermediation - wikis, blogs, social network analysis [sharing views and info]
        ii. Externalization - wikis, blogs, podcasting [to capture explicit know-how]
        iii. Internalization - RSS, mashup, search, social tagging  [to help users find info]
        iv. Cognition - RSS mashup [to help drive decision making]
  New in technology (From Q1 2008 research available from AIIM).
        i. Low barrier and ease of implementation
        ii. Web and widely accessible
        iii. Lean
        iv. Low cost
        v. Agile
        vi. Emergent and heuristic [drastically reduced delivery time for new applications]
  Critical to understand if an organization is ready for a new technology.   You cannot use new technology to drive organizational change