Wikis in Knowledge Management at Law Firms – Part Two: Sharepoint Example

As mentioned in my last post, I recently attended an event on knowledge management and web 2.0 held at a major Boston law firm for people who work in knowledge management at legal firms. I served on a panel, Blogging as Knowledge Management. Here are my notes on the second part of the following session on wikis in knowledge management. It covers a Sharepoint example.

This firm already had Sharepoint which offers a wiki so they made use of this option. The wiki use cases include: meeting management, project management, knowledge discovery and sharing, as well as knowledge management. The Sharepoint wiki provides ease of use. The categories work well and provide good ability to create them for wiki pages. The categories work like tagging. They also use RSS on all the wikis for updates.

There are currently a couple of problems with the wiki. Notifications provide you the entire document and not simply the change area. This gives too much data in some cases, especially for large wiki pages. Also, the checkout allows two people to work on the same document at the same time. Then whoever saves first wins.

On the positive side it has greatly promoted content contribution. They have 800 wiki pages in four months. In comparison 500 pages were created on the intranet in 5 years. There are many boosters with some pockets of resistance. To be successful, you need the top person in a group to participate. This promotes real engagement.
The material is also easy to find since in Sharepoint search, the wiki and wiki pages tend to come up on top.

Several best practice suggestions were offered. Set a link to home page on each page. In addition place a “see also” at the bottom of each page. Show a change when a link goes to new type of resource such as a move to a Word document versus a wiki page. Place a RSS button on every home page.

Prior to our session Dan Keldsen, Director of Market Intelligence, AIIM, and Carl Frappaolo, VP Market Intelligence, AIIM, offered an excellent session: Does Enterprise 2.0 = 2 Knowledge Management 2.0. See Ron Friedmann’s post on the session. He said it was “one of the more interesting KM sessions I’ve attended in a while.“

I do not think Enterprise 2.0 and KM are the exactly the same thing and Carl and Dan did not seem to literally imply this. However, I think there is huge overlap. Enterprise 2.0 also provides a new opportunity to implement the principles of knowledge management broader within the enterprise. In addition, it offers knowledge managers an opportunity to play a larger role in their organizations providing a leadership role as they implement enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Jack Vinson also covers this session in his post, NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston. Carl Frappaolo offers access to the slides in his post, KM, E2.0 and The Law.