Knowledge Management in the United States

By Gwendolyn Mariano

It’s not clear where the term originated. Of course, the concept of sharing information existed long before the term even became popular some 20 years ago in corporate America. Some observers say the term was coined by business consultant Karl Wiig, or Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak, authors of Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Harvard Business School Press). Its elusiveness, however, has not kept it from making money for its proponents. The research firm IDC says it expects that the KM services market will grow from $2.8 billion in 2002 to more than $6 billion by 2007, growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 16.8 percent. There are countless websites, books (including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knowledge Management), conferences, university classes, as well as hundreds of vendors pushing knowledge management products and services. The leading companies in the field include Tacit Knowledge Systems, KM Technologies, iManage, Hyperwave, FileNet Corporation, Hummingbird, LexisNexis, West, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, according to KMWorld magazine, which recently published its annual list of the top 100 knowledge management companies.

Knowledge management is a blueprint for a system that enables people to share and organize valuable information. For smaller firms and boutiques, knowledge management is less cumbersome. But for growing, sprawling, and merging law firms, knowledge management is a means of survival. Though some information technology directors seek to process knowledge management through the Holy Grail of technology, many argue that technology is only a tool, not an end in itself. Some even argue that knowledge management has nothing to do with sophisticated technology because a firm could use a file cabinet or a set of folders on the firm’s computer system. Similarly, some IT directors look suspiciously on the KM products that have swamped the market. Associate Oz Benamram, in Morrison & Foerster’s New York office, for example, tested a software program that purports to identify experts in a firm. The program identified an attorney in its Washington, D.C., office as an expert in Pennsylvania law-actually the lawyer only worked on Pennsylvania Ave.

To avoid such problems and to fine-tune your firm’s knowledge management system, consider using these tips from the experts:

1. Identify your goals. Start by defining knowledge management for your own firm. Determine who the knowledge management system is for-attorneys, secretaries, clients, or other staff members? Who will manage it? Chicago consultant Kingsley Martin says knowledge management is more established in England and firms there have a special staff of support lawyers dedicated to the KM task. A survey conducted last year by U.K.-based Managing Partner magazine and the consulting group Perceptive Technology found that 74 percent of U.K. firms with a KM program called it a success. After setting your firm’s goals, figure out a strategy. What’s the scope? Is it going to be limited to one or two practice groups or open to the entire firm? Martin advises settling on methods to measure those goals.

2. Know your lawyers. The KM team should have a detailed account of each attorney’s practice area, including the research issues that arise, documents produced, and clients served. “The firm should also know the interrelationship between lawyers of different practice groups who rely on others to get the work done,” says Jeffrey S. Rovner, director of knowledge management for the Americas region at Clifford Chance.

3. Identify the experts. Knowing who knows what and how much shouldn’t be a problem, unless you belong to one of today’s massive law firms. The experts in each practice area are the filters the KM team will rely on.

4. Create a KM system. Once the experts are identified, decide how content will be organized. Is it going to be organized by client matter or practice groups? By document type or area of law? You can start by creating a filing system that mimics that expertise. It could be as simple as creating public folders in Microsoft Outlook. “The fancy technology makes it better,” says Warren Jones, director of information technology at Pillsbury Winthrop. “But creating a file or a place where the knowledge can be stored and then devising the process for getting it in gets you halfway there. The other half is creating a process for sharing it.”

Search engines allow firms to sift through a myriad of information, but it still has to be organized. Sherry Lalonde, chief information officer for Cooley Godward, says KM products and services are changing-and failing-on a weekly basis. “Knowledge management is not something you buy as an application,” Lalonde says. “It is something that you do, and you use the application and technology to support the knowledge management process.” Create a plan that is aligned with your business plan and portal strategy, then spend the initial stages of your KM project focused on identifying the best source of organization and cleaning, securing, and making the data consistent.

5. Create a KM culture. One of the hot-button issues of knowledge management is getting everyone involved. That has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with creating a culture conducive to information sharing. Without the face-to-face interaction, says Pillsbury’s Jones, it’s impossible for knowledge management to be successful. A good KM culture would have clearly defined responsibilities for everyone in a practice group about how they’ll contribute knowledge and information and how they’ll share it on a regular basis. As Cooley’s Lalonde says, “It takes a village.”

Here are common definitions and descriptions of knowledge management given by information technology directors, consultants, and businesses.

Knowledge management is …
-How organizations extract value from their intellectual assets.

-The art of creating value from intangible assets.

-A process through which organizations generate value through leveraging their intellectual assets.

-Getting the right information to the right people at the right time for them to make better decisions.

-A formal process by which knowledge is captured.

-The glue that binds everything together.

-A process to share information in a fine way and to organize that particular information that is important to the firm’s practice.

-A tool kit in which you have a bunch of different applications for different situations.

-Leveraging intellectual capital.

-An attitude, not an application.