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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

With a little help from my friends

Posted in Collaboration, Culture, KM, Lawyering, Technology on 20 October 2008 | 3 Comments »

Knowledge management activities in UK law firms depend very heavily on people power — being more reliant on Professional Support Lawyers (PSLs) than their US and continental European counterparts. Despite this, the recent Knowledge Management in Law Firms conference had a noticeable technology focus. I’m afraid I set the tone in the first session with [...]

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Going with the flow

Posted in Culture, KM, Technology on 7 July 2008 | 4 Comments »

I had a number of discussions with people last week that brought to mind Michael Idinopulos’s description of the relationship between wikis and work.
Wikis can be used for many different activities, which fall into two broad categories:

In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual [...]

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Beyond the Golden Rule

Posted in Collaboration, Culture, Technology on 1 July 2008 | No Comments »

I am still catching up with unread blogs, but I want to add something to Mary Abrahams’ commendation of the Golden Rule as the key to collaboration. As the Wikipedia entry on the Rule suggests (at the moment), it can be the cause of problems when there are differences in values or interests:
Shaw’s comment about [...]

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Lowering the sharing threshold

Posted in Culture, KM, Management, Sharing, Technology, Web2.0 on 28 April 2008 | 2 Comments »

A common meme in knowledge management is that “people don’t share knowledge.” Here are a few examples:

http://www.designingforcivilsociety.org/2004/03/why_people_dont.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5362/is_200605/ai_n21391376
http://www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/articles/0504/0504covstory_share.asp
http://www.skyrme.com/updates/u64_f1.htm

The non-sharing statement is usually coupled with a set of purported justifications, and may also include a solution. However, I am not sure that the basic proposition is correct. In my experience, people are naturally willing to share what they [...]

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Web 2.0: life-enhancing technology

Posted in Collaboration, Technology on 25 April 2008 | No Comments »

A quick post to draw attention to Scott Berkun’s report from the Web 2.0 expo. Here’s the bit that deserves memorialisation: 
The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:
We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. [...]

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Critical thinking about KM

Posted in Culture, KM, Rationality, Technology on 12 March 2008 | 2 Comments »

Three thought-provoking KM-related articles have recently come to my attention, so I thought it might be useful to bring them together. Two of them embody a critical approach to the discipline, whilst the third is more mainstream (but can be read in a different way).
Those who participate in the actKM mailing list will know that Joe [...]

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Document management and collaboration

Posted in Collaboration, Culture, Knowledge, Lawyering, Projects, Technology on 28 February 2008 | 1 Comment »

James Dellow has neatly summarised a discussion about the relative merits of wikis and document management in law firms. Reading both reminded me that I owe an former co-conspirator my view on document management systems as a tool for collaboration. I hope what follows will suffice.Like most law firms, we have a document management system [...]

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Can’t Buy Me Culture

Posted in Culture, KM, Lawyering, Management, Technology on 14 February 2008 | 2 Comments »

According to Jordan Furlong, “Money Talks“. He describes the adoption of a wiki by a North Carolina law firm, which is rewarding contributions by its staff with the incentive of a $1000 prize for the best contribution. Jordan reasons thus:
Law firms ask a lot of their employees, mostly with regard to cramming a whole lot [...]

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