"Knowledge Management 2.0"

Among the numerous obstacles to an effective and comprehensive Knowledge Management program are (a) lawyers' reluctance—actually, make that absolute refusal—to spend 10 seconds in the active "care and feeding" of the KM system; and (b) the daunting information technology challenges typically associated with ambitious, top-down-driven and firm-wide installations of complex, sophisticated systems.

Nevertheless, achieving excellence in KM can actually be a competitive differentiator, and as bad a name as KM has periodically had, firms continue to come back to the trough to see if they can, at long last, get it right.

The confluence of two stories, one the cover story of last week's New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the other from the current issue of CIO magazine, compel me to share with you a proposal I made to an AmLaw 30 firm eighteen months ago designed to overcome the two barriers to KM cited above.  (Nothing immediate came of the proposal, although the firm and I are still best of friends.)

The Times piece, titled "Open Source Spying," highlights some of the fundamental reasons our national intelligence agencies famously failed to "connect the dots" prior to 9/11—and, one has the stomach-wrenching suspicion, still can't or don't.   In a nutshell, the reason is they're using "1995 technology," and the solution is bringing them into Web 2.0 as of 2006:

"Indeed, throughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind — and talk among themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country’s most senior intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly, many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world’s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’ s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?"

So frustrated was the CIA with its inability to connect "subject matter experts" in real-time that it sponsored a competition called the Galileo Awards: Any employee at any agency could submit an essay describing a way to improve intelligence sharing, and the best would receive prizes. "The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “TheWiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?"

"The Wiki and the Blog" has now been published on SSRN, where you can read the whole thing, but this is the key predicate:  "US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own."   And wikis and blogs, he proposes, are the answer.

But isn't this all a little airy-fairy?  When you're talking about national security—forget that RFP for the new client that you thought was a big deal—you're really going to trust a "blog" or a "wiki"?!  Well, we have a case study:

"[Andrus] was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the "reader-authored" encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors — some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details — began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. “You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,” Andrus told me."

Need I add that some of the best coverage of challenging events, from Kosovo to Baghdad, has come from local bloggers-on-the-ground? 

Blogs and wikis have another stunning advantage, one nicely captured by a Sun Microsystems Senior VP who commented from a deep reservoir of chagrin and skepticism that they didn't depend on massive enterprise-wide system upgrades and extensive user training:  "They're like pencils and paper;  people just know what to do with them."

From the perspective of eliminating the daunting IT challenges of installing a Google-like search that hooks into the dozens and dozens of incompatible databases your firm doubtless has, or even rolling out "Lotus Notes" for 1,000 people, blogs and wikis are also unbeatable.  As a friend of mine counseling a severely technophobic head of a small firm said, when asked how someone as Luddite as he could possibly set one up, said, "If you've got half an hour and a credit card, you're there."

We all recall the FBI's massive effort to overhaul its case management software, finally culminating in 2005, after $170-million spent on the project, in its decisive abandonment because it had proven simply too complex and bug-ridden to salvage. 

Which brings us to the CIO article, called "Knowledge Management 2.0." 

It starts from the premise (which I resoundingly endorse) that conventional "big iron" approaches to KM have been remarkably unsatisfying:

"So why haven't enterprisewide knowledge management tools caught on like wildfire? There's one main problem, says Gartner VP of Research Jeffrey Mann: Users and IT administrators hate them. Sophisticated KM products like EMC Software's Documentum put the burden of management on the users, who must take additional steps to access documents and register them with the system. And some IT departments dread the arrival of Microsoft's more user-friendly SharePoint because of its hunger for in-house server and support resources."

Northwestern Mutual, not normally thought of as an "early adopter" in any sense of the term, decided that a blogging platform provided by iUpload (which archives content in a particularly friendly manner, necessary for regulatory purposes)

would be worth rolling out on a trial basis. Within a few months, it had already began "changing the corporate culture." As one executive put it:   "This is the first time we've had a grassroots application that allowed employees to share what they're working on directly."

Or consider this case study from P&G, which emulates the experience of Dresdner Kleinwort Benson (which uses wikis to coordinate its globally-spread bankers' work on pricing deals, with a 90% reduction in email traffic):

"One of the driving forces behind Web 2.0 is the virtual office—teams of far-flung experts collaborating online to create a whole greater than the sum of its contributors. When Denise Senter-Loyola, a principal with business consultancy Milestone Group, needed to get her virtual marketing and sales team members to collaborate on creating some key documents, she first used a Web-based intranet for document management. That failed as content grew and folder hierarchies became cumbersome. Soon, team members stopped contributing content. "People gave up because they had to log on and make all of the decisions about categorizing," Senter-Loyola says.

"Finding the most recent version of a document required extra work as well—resulting in productivity losses and missed deadlines when team members mistakenly worked from the wrong version of a document. She found a better take on Web-hosted document management in Koral, a newly released Web-based tool that lets users share and collaborate on documents from any location. Koral is notable because it does much of the heavy KM lifting for you, categorizing documents and notifying collaborators of new versions automatically.

"When you upload files to your team's private Koral workspace, the service searches them and suggests tags—categories you'll use later to find documents relating to a particular subject. And borrowing from another Web 2.0 buzz technology, Really Simple Syndication, Koral doesn't wait for you to come looking for documents it knows you're interested in. Subscribe to a particular document, and Koral notifies you when it is updated. Subscribe to a team member (or a person with expertise similar to yours), and it notifies you when that person publishes new documents to the workspace.

"Because of the nature of our work, it caught on virally."

And guess what?  Just as the days of top-heavy, intricate, heavy-maintenance IT "solutions" to KM may be in danger, so is the need to exhaustively present binder upon binder of ROI analyses to senior management to get buy-in. 

Rather than have to promise benefits two years (or more) down the road after exorbitant expenditures, just show people actually sharing their work through blogs and wikis. Trust me, they'll be excited, and their excitement will be infectious.