Cisco Advances Collaboration; Law Departments Push Enterprise 2.0

I've had this post in edit mode for far too long. I apologize for its lack of topicality, but realized that it can be useful to publish something even for use as a reference for myself (and perhaps others). I'm returning to this particular post despite the potential embarrassment because I feel it addresses a significant advance in the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities of a few law departments and also highlights one law firm's strong client-focused KM effort.

I attended a session formally titled Legal Technology and the Law: Collaboration Strategies in the Legal Marketplace at LegalTech in New York February 2nd that highlighted some outstanding collaboration tools and efforts undertaken by a few legal departments. In my view and based on my knowledge of private surveys others have done, they exceed in features and apparent extent of adoption those undertaken at any law firm. This is surprising when you consider that many attorneys who move "in-house" are perplexed by the absence of what at law firms would be considered basic legal IT resources such as an effective document management system with version control and so forth. It is less surprising when you consider that large corporations are far out in front of any law firm in terms of development and adoption of "Enterprise 2.0" tools such as IBM's "Connections" and Lockheed Martin's "Unity."

Cisco OnRamp Exchange

I was particularly impressed with the OnRamp Exchange ("ORX") developed by Risa Schwartz, Head of Knowledge Management, at Cisco. It's a central know-how repository built by Paul Lippe and others at Legal OnRamp.

I previously covered Risa's 2007 presentation what was then called the Legal Exchange Collaborative at ILTA. At that point she was working on a culture that encouraged attorneys to ask questions and pose learned answers, in connection with sets of information on different topics of interest to Cisco lawyers. The system they had then did not allow attorneys to interact via email.

Cisco and Risa has since worked with the folks at Legal OnRamp to develop a collaborative tool that threads discussions in email, provides notice to content owners or other interested people of changes, and spans the firewall. It's in use for substantive knowledge management purposes, managing Cisco's repository of contract language and negotiating advice, like a "playbook."

Moderated wikis contain negotiation guidance, grouped by topic such as "open source." Discussion forums are integrated with wikis and with email. Recent changes are listed at the upper right, new conversation threads lower left.

Posting a conversation must be started within the application and directed at the outset at two moderators. Mark Chandler (Cisco GC) wants to value moderators. Moderating is part of the annual review process and it has become a way of recognizing people who have done well. After the conversation is approved you can also add in others, even people outside the firewall such as outside counsel. Content development is tied very tightly to email. Anyone who has access to an email application or browser can edit the wiki. Email notifications link to a redline and contain an approval button.

(The ability to interact with a social collaborative space through email may seem odd to web denizens. I've repeatedly heard this as a feature request from attorneys I work with, however, even ones who are very technically sophisticated. Their work often takes them out of the office, or traveling, and they want to be able to accomplish their work whether or not they are sitting in front of a PC.)

Cisco Deal Rooms

Cisco also developed extranets, in particular, a Mergers & Acquisitions site is using MOSS Sharepoint (WSS).

They require the other side in a deal to upload document to upuload the documents Cisco needs. The targets know the information better.

Outside counsel are analyzing documents quickly on these deal to identify dangerous issues. Now counsel do the analysis on the site linked to the document. This allows more efficient analysis and recommendations. They worked with Fenwick & West (Mark Drose) on some custom development to make these work.

These deal rooms have significantly speeded up deals.

What Business Needs Drive Collaboration?

Another presenter addressed collaboration strategy.

Less money, too many providers, new fee arrangements and "convergence" are reducing outside providers.

Law departments want to restructure incentives so both sides feel like they are winning. Much less work is being done on an hourly basis.

Law departments can cut costs by sharing information, inventing it once and sharing many times. Taking steps out of business processes or automating steps saves people time and the company money.

Corporations are looking for 20-60% savings from law departments. They won't attain that unless there is a different working relationship with law firms. It will require greater mutual sharing of information. More investment in working relationships is required. Shared risk and investment is not possible with hundreds of outside counsel.

One key for collaboration efforts is clearly identifying the business needs of the legal department. They need to increase collaboration across geographically dispersed areas, between department and internal business clients, and between department and outside counsel. Within law departments there is a continued lament of "I can't find what we already know." You can't expect people to go outside of workflow to capture information.

Marketing is really key. Having senior management market the tools is just the beginning. Have users tell people how they are using it. Other groups wanted to use it in similar ways.

Adoption is a real challenge. You have to focus on business process and what you are designing for. Involve the people who will use the tool in the design.

Orrick's Global Corporate Secretarial Services

Clark Cordner, the "Director of Practice and Client Services" from Orrick presented on a system they developed with Cisco to help that multinational's business needs around global corporate work.

Cisco has hundreds of subsidiaries and is operating in more than a hundred countries. Challenges included operating in multiple countries with local regulatory changes, with local lawyers of varying levels of sophistication and unpredictable fees.

Technology Cisco had to address these challenges was not adequate. They did a traditional "gap analysis" (what do we have, what do we want, how can we get there) and ran a competitive bidding process, then customized the product of the winning vendor. Part of the program entailed an evaluation of Cisco's foreign counsel network in conjunction with Orrick's network (there was some merger between the two).

Orrick gets a flat fee for the costs of foreign local counsel and the technology. Cisco has seen a 25% savings over two years and it has worked well for Orrick. This kind of collaboration is only possible if client and law firm get really close and have a higher level of trust. The trust was developed partly through Orrick KM lawyers and others "shadowing" attorneys at Cisco who dealt with the corporate work.

Orrick is now providing this platform as a service and has about a dozen other clients.

GCSS addresses corporate, licensing, compliance tracking and assessment and covers entities, people, documents, tasks, and calendars. One function allows a view of corporate families.

A typical entry for a corporation includes information about:

• Profile
• Officers / Directors
• Minute Books
• Counsel
• Business Entities
• Tree Walker
• Jurisdictional Requirements

GCSS and the process for developing it are a model (in my view) for new opportunities that law firms could be uncovering.

Wikis at ILTA 2009 Part 2, SmartSpace Integrates Wikis Into Leading Document Management System Platform

SmartSpace

PBWorks is a tool squarely in the Enterprise 2.0 space. SmartSpace attempts to merge the traditional core document management system functionality of legal market leader iManage (Interwoven) with an enterprise wiki, or actually, thousands of wikis. To understand this tool you have to understand a little bit about how iManage's "matter centric collaboration" or MCC system works.

iManage Background

With MCC each legal matter or practice area is automatically assigned a "workspace" that contains iManage folders. These iManage folders function something like a Windows explorer folder, but are located essentially within the application (webparts allow folders or workspaces to be displayed in portals, however). To assign a matter number or other characteristic to a document or email, it is placed in a folder in a workspace. At the "workspace level" proper, however, no information is displayed and no documents can be located. Workspaces, like folders, can be associated with metadata like client / matter numbers, legal service codes, and practice areas.

Baker Robbins has leveraged the curious opportunity created by the "blank" workspace to create and display a workspace-specific wiki. As with any wiki, new pages can be linked and created on the workspace wiki. The home wiki page is currently somewhat "structured," such that documents in iManage can be added as part of a "briefing" at the top of the home wiki page.

Technically I understand that the SmartSpace wiki is hosted on a separate server and is displayed within iManage dynamically based on the workspace information (this suggests that it would not be challenging to show the SmartSpace alone on a portal, say in conjunction with one of the many Matter Pages intranet systems or in an extranet).

Document Management System Collaboration??


I think it is really interesting that a top consultant has figured out a way to add a matter-specific collaborative tool right into the main-line document management system. Providing attorneys and staff the ability to interact with and add context to the key set of documents they work with could very significantly enhance their ability to find and leverage work product, and also could provides an easy way for wiki knowledge-sharing and collaboration to be embedded in the normal attorney / staff workflow.

Suggestions For Improvement


The product was first discussed (released?) in June (2009) so, not surprisingly, I see a few ways that the current SmartSpace approach could be improved to make them more of a collaboration and communications platform.

1) Notifications (Signals)

Notification of changes is core wiki functionality, in my opinion, because it provides a signal of changes and allows the wiki to serve as a communications platform instead of simply an on-line database.


I did not see notifications built into SmartSpace. It should be easy to sign up for notifications of changes to the SmartSpace (and perhaps also the documents in the workspaces?). Notifications work best if the user can select the notification frequency, whether immediately, daily, or weekly digest formats.

In addition, the type of notifications provided can be really important. As noted by my former colleague in "Sharepoint Wiki Disaster," Sharepoint 2007 (a/k/a MOSS) provides the latest version of the page "entire," without a redline or indication of changes. This has limited (though not eliminated) the utility of those wikis.


Notifications are typically provided by email, or, in fully Enterprise-2.0-compatable organizations, through an RSS feed.

2) Ease of Editing

A wiki is supposed to be easy to edit. The edit button should be large, friendly, and inviting. That encourages people to start the editing process. Lowering the barriers to authorship enhances the opportunities for attorneys and staff to add value to the workspace wikis.

3) Structured vs. Unstructured Wiki Pages

Currently SmartSpaces allows users to right click on a document anywhere in iManage and add a document to a "briefing" section on the home page of a workspace wiki. I understand and applaud making it easy to add documents to these wikis.

I am concerned however that limiting where the documents go when they are added will dramatically reduce the opportunity for users to provide context to the documents through organizing and formating the page and set of pages to on which the document is linked. It is the ability of users to control and add to the context and organization of wikis that make them superior, from a knowledge management context, to traditional document databases.


One way to improve the flexibility would be to let users choose from a list which page on the wiki to add in the link. Another would be to have the right-click create the full link, complete with text, for addition into any place on the wiki. A third way would be to have the right-click simply identify and copy a unique URL for the document (this is clunkier).

4) Search

Another concern is search. An organization with enterprise search could readily search both the iManage system and any related wiki. Without federated search, however, the documents themselves and the context for the documents and the text provided by the SmartSpace wiki would need to be searched separately, which is problematic. And search within SmartSpace might be limited to that workspace wiki, or extended to all of the wikis.

5) Security

A separate system would need to map and abide by the same security settings found in the iManage workspaces. For instance, it should not be possible to even view the name of a workspace wiki if only certain people in the firm are allowed to access the matter (the names themselves can constitute information that needs to be kept from everyone except those on the matter team).

Conclusion

Despite these concerns, I am very intrigued by the concept of adding matter-specific wikis into the law firm environment. I have been looking for a wiki package that would allow automatic generation of wikis based on matter opening, and this system certainly fits that need. It remains to be seen if this system can meet enough other needs to rise to the level of a truly useful and adoptable tool.

Wikis at ILTA 2009, Part 1, Bracewell & Giuliani Litigation Knowledge Base

Wikis (a significant interest of mine) came up in three largely unrelated contexts at the ILTA conference this year.

One law firm, Bracewell and Giuliani, is using an externally-hosted wikis provided by PBWorks for "core" knowledge management and retrieval in the litigation group at one of their offices. I attended an Enterprise 2.0 session on this on Monday as part of the Enterprise 2.0 track (more details below).

Second, I had a preview of an iManage-reliant technology called "SmartSpace" in developement by Baker Robbins that integrates wikis with iManage's matter workspaces (details in the second part). Increasing people's ability to easily add context through a wiki or other interactive tool like tagging has great potential to change the way that people work with and relate to the document management system. (Disclaimer: my firm has employed Baker Robbins from time to time).

Third, at a knowledge-management track session on Creative Adoption Techniques, I learned that another law firm is using Sharepoint wikis to store practice-area related information. I did not obtain any significant details about this and so have little to add to this tidbit. Wikis are clearly beginning to make some inroads for limited purposes even at firms not noted for Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

Bracewell & Giuliani -- Wikis as Litigation Work Product Research and Knowledge Sharing Tool

Bracewell's project was an outstanding example of leveraging the power of Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 tools to enhance a group's sharing and alerting of valuable core knowledge, for one litigation practice.

Background

The New York office of this firm has less than 30 litigators, yet they had difficulty finding legal research that had been previously carried out at that office. They did not have a work-product retrieval tool like West KM(TM) or Lexis(TM) Search Advantage. They did have an enterprise search tool but it was providing them with "too much information."

They were using a set of centrally-located research binders, but they were hard to maintain and keep current.

One of their attorneys heard that the U.S. State Department is using wiki technology to share and collaborate across the globe (through Diplopedia), and they have since investigated and adopted wikis as the primary way of storing and retrieving valuable work product (in that office).

They commented that if you can’t share the research it’s not efficient and makes the next attorney reinvent the wheel.

Tool, Form, and Adoption Techniques

They chose PBWorks as an easy-to-use externally hosted platform into which they could load the documents and create a browseable view of resources (PBWorks is the first E20 vendor to really focus on the legal market with its PBWorks Legal).

The B & G wiki focused on what NY litigators wanted. Their wiki covers areas such as substantive law of New York (the example they showed was contract law); civil procedure; and information about judges and courts (for instance, filing practices in particular New York Supreme Court offices). Each topic page enhances browsing by linking to related procedures, areas of law, and court information. Search on the wiki also works quite well because of the targeted nature of the content.

Their adoption approach leveraged attorneys' competitive nature. They set up a substantial reward for the most (real) new entries over a certain period of time. In 3 months they went from a handful of entries to hundreds of entries, with an especially numerous clump of entries on the (near-holiday) night the contest closed. They are now able to find valuable precedent through searching, or, just as often, browsing the wiki.

Outcome

They believe that an average successful search saves around 2 hours in fruitless searching or reinvention of work product. Theor wiki has resulted in more efficient service and cheaper client bills (happier clients).

The three attorneys who led the effort suspected that if a critical mass of information is built up, the information pool would reach at a certain point reach “critical mass” and be self-sustaining. As it turns out, the wiki has succeeded in terms of the number of users. Partners now will say “check the wiki first" or “just go to the wiki.” Partners have to answer for high bills and so they are driving use.

An additional goal is also to eventually provide the information on-line to answer questions, say, about liquidated and consequential damages under New York law from other Bracewell & Giuliani offices.

They find it much easier to post small bits of information on the wiki than to draft a formal research memo on a given subject. Attorneys can easily cut and paste an email into the wiki.

One paralegal was able to find a form for accepting assignment of a case to a mostly retired New York state judge on 30 seconds on the wiki, where it had taken two hours on the internet.

Alerts

Users get redlined changes of updates to wiki. This provides a way to educate all of them to keep up on new developments in the law.

Other Uses

While the litigation group's wiki was solely for internal use, they believe that the external hosting makes sharing the project wiki with the client a potential use for transactional work.

Reaction and Conclusion

At my firm we use West KM to retrieve previous examples of substantive legal research, and that tool works quite well for that purpose. We also use a collection of Sharepoint and Interaction lists and systems to track information about judges and courts. I am working on a Sharepoint wiki focused on federal civil procedure but Sharepoint's notifications limitations make it an inappropriate tool to serve as a tool for updating my department about developments in the law. And my systems don't currently provide an easy way for attorneys to capture knowledge contained in email or to contribute small bits of higher-level knowledge, such as the procedures and practices of a particular judge.

Litigation knowledge managers, practice support lawyers, and people with similar responsibilities inside law firms should look at the benefits that a substantive litigation wiki can provide their groups, and draw from this firm's experience with selection, adoption, and success.

Article Published in KMPro Journal

My article "Enterprise 2.0 at Goodwin Procter" has been published by KMPro Journal, of the Knowledge Management Professional Society (no subscription required).

http://www.kmpro.org/journal/KMPro_Vol_6_No_1.pdf

In the article I contrast some traditional knowledge management practices and the greater degree of communication and engagement possible with Enterprise 2.0 tools; address some of the many uses to which wikis and blogs have been put at Goodwin Procter; and discuss some lessons learned.

It was a really enlightening experience to put down my thoughts about Enterprise 2.0 and the progress made in adoption of these tools at Goodwin. My thanks to Deb Wallace and Mary Lee Kennedy for their helpful edits and guidance, and to Doug Cornelius for starting me and the firm down the Enterprise 2.0 path.

Upcoming Conference on "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter"

The Boston KM Forum is putting on a longer, more involved set of discussions around the business advantages of Web and Enterprise 2.0 tools, a subject near and dear to my heart, at Bentley College next Tuesday, March 31st. I'll be there.

The speakers and talk titles are:

• Soaring with Virtual Teams: How Working At-A-Distance and Across Boundaries Can Outperform Face-to-Face, Jessica Lipnack - CEO of NetAge and co-author of Virtual Teams; see her free webinar on the same subject.
  
  (I've enjoyed Jessica's presentations at Enterprise 2.0 Boston and elsewhere, with her trademark of "stand up and tell us who you are!")
  
• IBM’s Grounds-Up Social Software Transformation, recently married Suzanne Minassian (twitter)- Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM
  
  (Lotus Connections is one of the leading Enterprise 2.0 products (or sets of products) and I look forward to hearing some more stories of its implementation.)
  
• Vital Catalyst: Social Media is Holding and Growing Audiences,
  Ken George, New Media Manager, and author of The Converstation, WBUR
  
  (I don't know Ken but WBUR has a quite sophisticated web presence and set of podcasts.)
  
• Give to Get: Real-World Dividends from Social Networking, Sadalit Van Buren, Knowledge Management Associates
  
  (Sadalit is the author of A Matter Of Degree and is a real expert in making the most of Sharepoint's Enterprise 2.0 features.)
  
  

Wikis In Law Firms

In early October 2008, with another legal KM practitioner, I gave a presentation on wikis to an experienced group of legal knowledge managers. Although about a third of the audience had wikis internally, there were still some people without significant practical experience with wikis.

The talk was organized in three parts. I started with an introduction to wikis, starting from the beginning, and highlighting their key features. My colleague then presented on her firm’s innovative use of Thoughtfarmer wikis. Then I discussed how my firm is leveraging Sharepoint wikis.

An Introduction to Wikis

I began with the definitive origin of the word "wiki" as I am often asked where the word came from. Wikipedia has the answer--the Wiki Wiki bus at Honolulu Airport was Ward Cunningham's alliterative inspiration for his WikiWikiWeb application, the first wiki created. Ward wanted "the simplest online database that could possibly work," and it appears he succeeded!

(I did not report that, unlike most wikis I've encountered, apparently the Wiki Wiki buses are being retired soon as "not only...somewhat inconvenient and uncomfortable" but also "a huge strain on the building structure due to their weight and level of activity.")

The word "wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian. On a wiki, you can quickly edit, save, link, and restore.

Edit -- Wikis always have a large friendly Edit button somewhere, and the whole point is that wikis are available to an entire group (or anyone who sees it).

Save -- There is normally no moderation before the edit takes place. On Wikipedia articles that have an established history of unproductive editing or great controversy are “locked down,” but that is not the norm.

Link -- There are two kinds of links in a wiki.

As in any HTML-based platform, adding a link to a web site or other URL-related resource is a matter of selecting a word and hitting a button or a keyboard command such as “Ctrl.-K” (Hopefully this shortcut is becoming this decade’s version of Ctrl.-C “copy” Ctrl.-X “cut” and Ctrl.-V “paste.”)

Additionally, one can create a new web page by creating a link to it (the exact procedure varies from wiki to wiki). Easy page creation is a key feature because it enables editors to add structure to the wiki and to limit the amount of content displayed on a given page. (Usability concerns mandate avoidance of “walls of text,” even in a content-rich context like an encyclopedic wiki.) Once one creates a page it is easy to create another link to it, either from a drop down or by some use of the page name. Easy interlinking greatly enhances the ability to relate different topics within a single wiki.

Restore -- A wiki captures each page version and allows reversion to a previous version (the reversion becomes the latest version).

Modern wikis also serve not just as living documents, but also as communication platforms because they have built-in notification of changes of one kind or another (ideally RSS, but often email as well).

The communications aspect of wikis leads to wiki happiness, contrasted with the email sadness from wasted time sending documents as email attachments, editing, saving them, sending them again, rinsing, and repeating.

Another way that "wikis" is a wonderful word, as I have previously blogged, is that it forms a KM acronym (knacronym?):

What

I

Know

I

Share

(Thanks to Attensa and Patrick Slesinger of Wallem Group for that one!)

Thoughtfarmer—Wikis as Intranet and DMS

My colleague then presented on her firm's innovative use of Thoughtfarmer wikis. Thoughtfarmer comes complete with cutting-edge (for a law firm) Enterprise 2.0 features like tagging and commenting, Her firm did not have either a formal DMS or an intranet, so they used practice-specific wiki pages as a means of organizing documents as well as other substantive and practice-related content. Hers was the kind of presentation that makes me wonder how a large organization would organize its information if it could start from the ground up with cutting-edge technology instead of having to address the innumerable complexities of legacy systems.

Sharepoint Wikis at Goodwin Procter

I then turned to what we have been doing with Sharepoint wikis at my firm. Sharepoint “native” wikis and blogs are actually part of the reason why I became interested in blogs and Enterprise 2.0 in the first place. They come built-in to Sharepoint, and my firm rolled Sharepoint / MOSS 2007 in late spring 2008.

Unfortunately, due no doubt in part to the necessarily long development cycle (they may have been state-of-the art in 2004), Sharepoint wikis have their weaknesses. The alerts of changes are horrible (see “Sharepoint wiki disaster”). Sharepoint email alerts send the whole page, worse than a simple notice of the fact of a change and much worse than a display of the change to the page as we had been accustomed to from another wiki platform. Furthermore, a surprising “simultaneous editing” flaw allows multiple users to edit the same page, but gives priority to the person who saves first.

Sharepoint wikis also have two strengths compared to some other wiki applications. It is really easy to get started with a Sharepoint wiki; the page linking in particular is simple, intuitive and effective (just put [[double brackets]] around words to link or create other pages). And because, under the hood, Sharepoint wikis are built on the powerful if complex Sharepoint “lists,” there is a huge variety of categories and metadata that can be applied to a page.

Wikis For Project Management

This last feature gives Sharepoint wikis strength in one of their most prominent roles inside my firm—project management. In my KM team’s wiki, many pages embody KM projects; these pages are tagged with the names of project participants, and also with a status tag like “Active” “Completed” “Subsidiary” and so forth. My boss or I can quickly see my active projects at any time by looking at a view of the pages in the KM team wiki, showing only “Active” pages tagged to me and sorted by most recently edited. I learned this week that is even possible to display the content of a wiki page in a view of pages like this.

On a given wiki page devoted to a project, it is easy to record and share the latest project status, with project goals, business plans, and links to related projects, people, and resources.

At my firm, project management-style wikis have spread to a number of administrative groups including professional development, recruiting, and legal department management.

Meeting Management

The KM Team also uses wikis to manage its meetings. An agenda on a wiki does not just list what team members wish to discuss; it can link to the project or discussion page and thereby avoid the necessity for giving background information about a new item at the meeting. Wikis are also used on occasion to take notes at a meeting.

Discovery Sharing

One litigation-specific use was sharing and developing a nucleus of facts arising out of discovery in related cases. An early adopter used a wiki to share information among many people on different matter teams. The cases had different procedural aspects and parties, but shared a common set of underlying facts about the technology and related patents that were developed through discovery. Not surprisingly, this wiki had a very steep uptick in use as it got started, and then, as the discovery period wrapped up, use slowed down again.

Success?

As a project management tool I think Sharepoint wikis have been a qualified success. Despite a complete absence of any sort of internal marketing of this tool, there are now over 900 wiki pages (compared to ~500 pages on our long-developed intranet), and I am getting requests for specific targeted uses of wikis. The jury is still out on the other uses, which are still arising as use spreads.

Lessons Learned

The relatively primitive nature of Sharepoint wikis means you have to manually add in some features that are automatically generated in other platforms. One of these is simply a link [[Home]] to the wiki’s home page. Similarly, in wikis with what are substantively subsidiary or tiered groups of pages the navigation to and among those pages needs to be manually generated.
There is a built-in “help” page that is automatically generated for every new wiki; we’ve replaced it with a link to set of help pages in a central location.

As with other wikis, we’ve learned not to let a wiki page be a dead end. Find and link to other related wiki content.

Finally, show users what will happen when they click on a link beforehand. If the content is not another intranet, internet, or wiki page, you need to prepare users by indicating the document type (.doc .pdf). Where linking to a document in our DMS, we indicate the document number as that insures against link breakage and misspelling.

A two-headed violinist; Attensa and What I Share I Know

I couldn't resist this post from enterprise RSS vendor Attensa discussing how internal collaboration started at one an anonymous firm.

One reason I couldn't resist was the cute--but not too cute--acronym / motto "Wiki - What I Know I Share" that said firm developed through an internal competition. If it's an acronym, though, shouldn't it be "WIKIS"? Or perhaps without the all caps, "Wikis"?.

The other reason I couldn't resist was the charming picture of the two men playing the violin, one bowing, one holding and fingering (if you've never tried this, take it from a violin performance expert, it's quite difficult to carry off). I'm so used to bowing and "fingering" at the same time that only doing one is quite an odd feeling. By contrast, the collaborative software I've been exposed to thus far does not really create a feeling of novelty, at least for a person used to shopping on the web and writing email.

The primary thrust of the article seemed to be that for knowledge sharing to truly add value to an enterprise, parallel efforts to A) establish technological sharing and dissemination channels and B) encourage a culture of sharing are necessary. Certainly that's a key realization and "lesson learned" of early knowledge management efforts, although it comes close to a truism as it leaves somewhat undefined what a culture of sharing would look like. Here's the key quote:

"[U]sing technology to channel information is only part of the solution. The greater challenge is creating a collegial culture that better serves the real world information needs of the enterprise. While their technology integration is focused on developing a collaborative environment where people can easily share their expertise, their cultural initiative is focused on encouraging people to do so."

Branding and slogans like What I Know I Share are the kind of rallying points that people need to develop a common set of goals and beliefs.