Comments on: Little Knowledge Management is the Next Big Thing

By: Doug Cornelius

Doug Cornelius — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:14:22 +0000

The solution to having too much information is, surprisingly, more information.

For law firms, that means a better document management system. One that incorporates some of the great lessons we have learned in Web 2.0. Too much of the DMS is an undifferentiated mass of documents. Folders are no solution if the folder is not incorporated back into the retrieval and information about the document.

By: David Hobbie

David Hobbie — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:24:11 +0000

I like how you’ve linked the ideas of social tagging and social networking here–both of these could help the KM goal of pointing people towards the “good stuff,” the Big KM.

I also completely agree with you that tagging must be doable in the work flow and feeds off a user’s self-interest in making it easier to refind stuff.

An effective tagging system needs to be able to uncover not just what tags have been applied, but who applied them. Then tags become one more way of identifying interest and expertise.

On the corporate side, Velocity 6.0 and its former law firm equivalent, Interwoven Universal Search, had social tagging designed to be applied at the search screen result, with full pivoting on user tags possible.

I’ve blogged about social tagging a fair amount. The link to that group of posts is:
http://caselines.blogspot.com/search/label/social%20tagging

We don’t have social tagging at my firm. With the exception of one Candadian firm that uses wikis as their DMS, I haven’t heard of any firm actually rolling out social tagging (through IUS) although I know another Canadian firm that has the capability to do so right now.

By: Sean Brady

Sean Brady — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:20:23 +0000

Great article. It is something I am pushing for a lot here…although I am calling it PKM. I agree that the ability to see the personal value of KM activities is the key to success.

By: Mike Mintz

Mike Mintz — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:00:05 +0000

Fantastic post Lawyer KM. This is what the next generation web is all about: relevance and remembrance. By tagging, rating, and commenting under a single profile (user identity), I want the web to remember what I mean when I search for a term – it should learn who I am and what I want to see. Google does this so-so right now with the “move result to front” feature on their search engine. Features like this help the web remember what I want to see and produce more relevant results next time. For the attorney who has precious little time to filter through the same bad results over and over again, relying on colleague tagging and rating can be a real time saver.