Wikis and Document Management Systems

Versions of this article appeared as

Which Route?

KM Legal, Volume 2 Issue 4, June 2008
http://www.kmlegalmag.com/coverfeature

EI Case study: Wiki versus DMS at Goodwin Procter

Inside Knowledge, Volume 11 Issue 8
http://www.ikmagazine.com/

The document management system has long been the factory assembly line for most big law firms.  In turn, the document management system becomes the largest searchable repository of knowledge in a law firm.  With the rise of enterprise 2.0 technologies and their alignment with knowledge management, the question arises how these new technologies might affect the use of existing technologies, like the document management system.  One of the most promising enterprise 2.0 technologies for knowledge management is the wiki. 

Definition of a Wiki

At its core, a wiki is a collection of editable pages on the web.  Each time a wiki page is edited and saved, a new version is created.  Also, when the wiki page is saved, the wiki platform will send out a notification of the changes to subscribers to that wiki page.  A typical feature of the wiki platform is that it is easy to compare changes between any two versions of a wiki page.

Wikipedia is the most famous wiki.  Wikipedia.org is a web-based, free content encyclopedia project.  This site is based on a wiki platform, open for anyone to add content or edit existing content.  With over 9 million articles in more than 250 languages, and over 2.2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia is several times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.  One key step that Wikipedia took was to eliminate any requirement of registration to add or edit content.  Anyone can anonymously edit wiki pages in Wikipedia.  Rarely would a firm allow for anonymous editing of wiki used within the firm.  Most wiki platforms deployed inside a firm's firewall will allow a single sign-on so the editor is recognized from their initial sign-on to the network.

Wikis are attractive as a knowledge management tool because they it make very easy to contribute content and easy to find the content.  Most wikis offer an easy to use "What You See Is What You Get" page editor that resembles a simple word-processing program.  Since the wiki content is in the form of a web page most search engines can easily index and search the contents of the wiki.

Definition of a Document Management System

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents.  Those electronic documents can include word-processing documents, presentations, scanned documents, spreadsheets and a variety of document formats.

A typical DMS will automatically tag the document with a specific reference identification.  This identification allows for immediate retrieval of the document.  The DMS will allow (or require) you to add metadata about the document.  For law firms, that metadata will typically include a designation of the client and the particular matter for the client.  This allows you to search for a document based on specific criteria about the document in addition to the text of the document.

The DMS will also allow you to add security to the document, so it can be private to the individual, limited to the matter team, limited to the client or to exclude specific people (as may be required for ethical purposes).  The DMS allows you to store multiple versions of a particular document so that you can track the edits to the document.

A DMS succeeds because it offers more functionality than the user would have from saving the document to a standard drive.  The DMS offers greater searching and categorization of documents.  The unique identification marker on the document allows you to quickly identify the exact document in question.  This identification is much shorter than the long file folder designation you would get from a file located on a standard drive.  The DMS can also easily be tied into the word-processing software.  In the end it easy to contribute to the DMS and easy to find content in the DMS.

DMS and Wikis at Goodwin Procter

Almost a decade ago at the beginning of my firm's knowledge management group, one of the first action items was the selection of iManage (now Interwoven's Worksite product) as the firm's DMS.  We now have over 8 million documents in the DMS.  Nearly all of the documents produced by the lawyers and staff in the firm are stored in the DMS. 

Our existing intranet is built on Microsoft's SharePoint 2003 platform.  A great deal of the content on the intranet is merely links to documents in the DMS.  Users update content by opening and editing the content in the DMS.  That shields them from the clunkier web editing and process on the existing intranet. It also allows them to use the version control features of the DMS to trace the history of the document and its content.

Over the past year, we have been planning and implementing an upgrade of our intranet to Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 platform.  Wikis, blogs and some other enterprise 2.0 tools are included as part of SharePoint 2007 platform.  At the outset of planning for our upgrade, we decided to actively use some of these tools to see how they worked.  In particular, wikis caught our attention as a great tool for knowledge management within the firm.  I used the free test version of PBWiki for a variety of projects:  managing our knowledge management projects, co-authoring an article on social networking, planning a conference, managing transactions for a client, preparing and gathering the results of a survey of law firm knowledge management leaders, and gathering definitions of knowledge management. 

Comparison of Functionality

In comparing the features of a wiki and the features of a DMS, a wiki combines more of the features in the document production process into one package.  A wiki has a basic word processing program, with a simple editor for creating content.  The wiki has a flat list of wiki pages within the wiki platform.  (Although some wiki platforms do allow for greater organization.)  The wiki has the ability to compare changes between versions of a wiki page.  The wiki has a notification process that alerts subscribers to the wiki page when changes or additions occur.

The wiki combines features of a word-processing program, a DMS, a document comparison program and an email program into one package.  Of course, a wiki does not have all of the bells and whistles that these four programs do.

The strength of the DMS lies in it rich metadata collection, version control and security.  Within a law firm, it is important to be able to retrieve all of the documents for a particular client or for a particular matter for a client.  And perhaps even more important is the ability to apply security limitations to documents for a particular client or matter.   For example, a document for public company merger would have security applied to limit viewing to the matter team in an effort to avoid the disclosure of the transaction.

Document Behaviors

A wiki and DMS are both focused on producing, storing and sharing content.  A wiki page is just another type of document.  When producing content, I have noted five types of behaviors:  collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial.  In a collaborative scenario, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so.  With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content.  With iterative, there is single author controlling changes to the document.  The document may have originated from another source, but stands on its own as a separate instance of content.  With competitive content creation, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content.  However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters.  Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit.  Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors.  Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors.  Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

Typical Behaviors With a DMS

The principal behavior for use of content in he DMS is iterative.  Lawyers will search for and reuse existing content in a DMS.  But rarely will they change an existing document.  Generally, a document in the DMS was drafted for a particular issue for a particular client.  They reuse existing content, but create a new iteration of that content.  Lawyers will work collaboratively in drafting documents, but the process is iterative.  They draft the document with some collaboration with their assistant in finalizing and editing the draft.  The draft is circulated for comments.  Then the lawyer creates a new iteration of the document as a new version of the document in the DMS.  The lawyer then incorporates the changes they accept, finalize this new draft and circulate again.

The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior.  A junior person will generally want to hide interim drafts and issues from the senior person.  The junior person is looking to impress and move up in the firm.  The same behavior is typical with a client.  The client is expecting vetted, finished work for their review and comment.  With a lawyer-client relationship there is the additional and important issue of liability for mistakes resulting in possible malpractice and personal liability for the lawyer. 

Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents.  Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner.


Typical Behaviors with a Wiki

I have seen two principal behaviors in using wikis.  The first is accretive.  With this behavior, the person will add content to the wiki, but not update or edit existing content.  This is largely the learned behavior from email.  The second behavior is collaborative, where the person will add content, but also edit existing content. 

The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together.  With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same wiki page, effectively editing the document.  With iterative behavior, the lawyer creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

When to Use a Document in the DMS

The traditional DMS process is best used when the production of content is adversarial, rather than collaborative.  Generally all discussions between opposing counsel are adversarial, even in transactional law.  With collaborative behavior in a typical wiki, there is no control over the addition or editing of content, other than responding to edits or locking the wiki page from editing.  You give up the control of authoriship.  Most of the bad behavior stories from wikipedia come from an adversarial editing process.  A robust infrastructure has grown as part of wikipedia to deal with adversarial editing.

The DMS is the better repository for documents that enter a competitive or adversarial behavior.  The lawyer will want a record of what was contained in each version of the document as the content was changed by the author.

When to Use a Wiki

The question is what content in the law firm should you "wiki-fy"?

Of the document behaviors, a wiki is an exceptional platform for collaborative treatment of documents.  Ownership of the document is less important than the collection of the content into one synthesized place.

One great use of a wiki is to replace a practices and procedures manual.  One of the first questions I hear when a group creates a practices and procedures manual is how will they know when it changes.  The typical behavior is to draft the manual in a word processing program, save it into the DMS, then email the group when it is complete.  The recipient will then print it out or refer back to the email when using the manual.  With the manual in a wiki, the notification of changes happens as soon as the change is made.  The manual becomes an active flow of information rather than the republishing of a manual.

I had some success using a wiki to manage the internal closing agendas for a client with several transactions occurring in the office at any one time.  Instead of one person needing to control the edits, the entire client team can update any closing agenda at any time.  When viewing the wiki page, it will always be the most up-to date location of information.  As changes are made to an agenda, the wiki platforms sends out a notification of the change to the entire internal client team.  The DMS behavior would be to maintain the closing agenda in a word-processing document.  A single person would be responsible for keeping it up to date (usually the most junior person).  After an edit or a group of edits, the author would email the updated agenda to the client team, who would then have to discern changes or eschew a version full of the marked changes.  The wiki collapses the document process into a shorter series of steps and provides a richer flow of information.

Wiki While You Work

As law firms begin implementing wikis, they will need to identify the best way to use this new tool.  Wikis can simplify the production of content by reducing the number of programs and the steps needed to produce the content.  Although they are not appropriate for all types of content, they are an excellent tool to add to your knowledge management program.

DMS and Collaboration Suite: Friends not Foes

Michael Idinopulos published a great piece on his SocialText blog: DMS and Collaboration Suite: Friends not Foes.  (It reminded me that I never published my Wikis and Document Management Systems piece. I have it set to publish tommorrow.)

"When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials.

In many cases, you will want to integrate the two. Law firms, for example, are absolutely dependent on their document management systems to manage their filings and other legal documents. But we're increasingly seeing them set up collaboration suites to capture all the discussion around the documents, how to use them, what they mean, and so on. The two systems are integrated with links from the collaboration suite into the corresponding DMS records."

Interwoven Express Search and Worksite 8.3 Update

The document management system is the assembly line of large law firms. We sell our knowledge to our clients. But we package and deliver a lot of that knowledge in documents. I keep a close eye on the document management system to make sure it is keeping pace and hoping that it will show some functional improvements in this 2.0 world.

Our document management system vendor, Interwoven, has been throwing out some good ideas on how they are going to improve their product. Back in February, we ran a quick test of Interwoven's new Express Search tool: Interwoven Express Search = WOW!! Last month I presented a Case Study on Worksite 8.3.

After a lot of load testing, checking configurations and hardware upgrade, we sat down to test them again.

The concept is still great. They stripped the cranky old search engine and plugged in a fancy new search engine from Vivisimo. They also combine several of the metadata fields into one search box, so you get a much more Google-like search. The search is still very fast.

In our current tests we ran into a lot of issues. We are still trying to figure out if is our problem or Interwoven's problem or some combination of both. These were the problems:

1. Multiple Versions. If there are multiple versions of the documents (which almost always the case for our important documents) each version comes back in the search result as a separate item. Our prior configuration was just a single entry for the multiple versions.
   
   
2. Document ID. One of the core functions of a document management system is the fetch search. You enter a single unique document identifier and that one document is returned. We operate with multiple document libraries, so our document identifier numbers are only unique in each library. The identifier will be in the system multiple times, but can be limited by library. With DeskSite product from Interwoven, the search results show the document library so you can easily distinguish the document you are fetching for. In Express Search, the search results merely show the document application symbol and document name. That means you can't distinguish the document from the list presented. This is especially problematic when you combine this the multiple version problem. Today we had a new problem. When we search by placing the document ID in the Express Search window, the search just fails to return results.
   
   
3. Exact Phrase. Putting quotes around a phrase is a powerful search technique. For some reason two word phrases worked fine, but three or more words in the phrase failed. "one two" works but "one two three" does not.
   
   
4. Three Letter Words. The search engine seems to ignore words with three letters or less. When the three (or two) letter word is put in quotes to search for a phrase, the search fails.
   
   
5. Wild cards with numbers. We configured the application to automatically put wildcards around searches in DeskSite. 1995 proxy fails.
   
   
6. Differences Between Data Miner and Express Search. A search for "1995 Proxy" worked in Express Search, but not in Data Miner.
   

Some of these problems may be easy to fix configuration issues. Or they may be a systematic problem with the new tools. Either way, we are probably pushing back the deployment date for Worksite 8.3. That also means we are pushing back the deployment date for the Matter Centricity tools as well.

Document Behaviors

With my use of wikis and the adoption of wikis at The Firm, I have been focusing a lot of attention on the behaviors towards documents. After all, a wiki page is just another type of document. When producing documents, I have noted five types of behaviors: collaborative, accretive, iterative, competitive and adversarial.

Collaborative
With collaborative behavior, there are multiple authors each with free reign to add content and edit existing content in a document, and they do so.

Accretive
With accretive behavior, authors add content, but rarely edit or update the existing content. Accretive behavior is seen more often in email than documents. Each response is added on top of the existing string of information with no one synthesizing the information in a coherent manner. I have seen this in wikis as well where people will add content but not edit others content.

Iterative
With iterative behavior, existing content is copied to a new document. The document stands on its own as a separate instance of content. The accretive behavior is distinguished from the iterative behavior by the grouping of similar content together. With accretive behavior the content is being added to the same document, effectively editing the document. With iterative behavior, the person creates a new document rather than adding to an existing document.

Competitive
With competitive document behavior, there is a single author who seeks comments and edits to the document as a way to improve the content. However, interim drafts and thoughts are kept from the commenters. The transmission of the content to a client or a more senior person inside the firm will result in a competitive behavior.

Adversarial
Adversarial behavior is where the authors are actually competing for changes to the content for their own benefit. Although there may be a common goal, the parties may be seeking different paths to that goal or even have different definitions of the goal.

Collaborative, accretive and iterative content production are largely internal behaviors. Competitive and adversarial are largely external document behaviors. Of course, a document may end up with any or all of these behaviors during its lifecycle.

I have an article coming out in KM Legal and Inside Knowledge magazine that further discusses these behaviors in more detail and in the larger context of wikis and document management systems.

Knowledge Management with Folksonomies and Tagging

Although tagging and the folksonomy the tags create have interested me, I have a hard time figuring out how they would work inside a law firm.

Sure it would be great to allow users to add tags to pages on our intranet or other web-based applications. It would also be valuable to compile tags for external websites that would be useful to the practice.

But the vast majority of our knowledge artifacts are documents in our Interwoven Worksite document management system. Interwoven does not have a way to tag. If I can't tag my documents, then I might as well not have enterprise tags at all.

Sure, you can add comments and profile fields to the document in Interwoven. But that is not the same thing. Since you can only have one profile, you can only have one tag set per document. You also do not get the attribution. If I do not know who made the tag, I am less likely to rely on it. The tag has much more value when you know who made it.

Collecting and displaying tags by person then turns the tags into a person's expertise and areas of interest. If you look at my Del.icio.us tags you can see what I found interesting. My tags are in the lower right corner of the website.

One of the interesting tools that Vivisimo has apparently packaged with the new release of its Velocity search tool is the ability to tag documents in Worksite. Actually, it should give you the ability to tag any knowledge artifact in any system you connect to the Vivisimo enterprise search tool.

The tagging in Vivisimo gives you ability to enhance the findability of the knowledge artifacts inside the law firm and find out more about the people inside the law firm.

Personal Knowledge Management and the Knowledge Market

As Davenport and Prusak state in Working Knowledge: "People rarely give away valuable possessions, including knowledge, without expecting something in return."

First generation knowledge systems expected people to contribute to them because it was for the collective good. Everyone had the benefit of this good work product, organized in the central taxonomy of the firm.

Many companies offered incentives, like gift cards, for contributing to the system. If you have to give away a prize to motivate people to contribute, then perhaps they do not seen enough value in contributing. What in it for me? Sure, you get the Starbucks giftcard. And you get some smug satisfaction for contributing into the central knowledge system vault.

The failure of these first generation knowledge management systems was that the central knowledge system does give the user a significantly better way to manage their personal knowledge. It is outside of their normal workflow and outside of the places they normally look for knowledge and advice. The contribution helps others find the contributor's work product, but it does not make it easier for the contributor to find and manage their own work product.

Knowledge management solutions will work better if they are focused on improving the normal workflow and better capturing that information. The user is more likely to use a new tool if it is easy to use and provides more functionality than what they currently use. As Dion Hincliffe pointed out, the new tool needs to be many times more useful than the current tool for people to use the new tool.

A case in point is a document management system. The system needs to provide much more functionality than the user would get from saving the documents to their local computer. Our Interwoven document management system offers version control, better searching, automatic backup, and many other features you do not get on you desktop. In exchange, as part of the knowledge market the rest of the firm gets the ability to find and reuse those documents.

Interwoven Express Search = WOW!!

I have been a basher of Interwoven for years, ever since we deployed it (when it was called iManage) almost a decade ago. It has always been good at managing documents and retrieving your documents. It shortcomings was in finding other people's documents. Especially when you were not sure if the document existed. Interwoven is taking a big step to curing that problem.

We are pretty far down the path of deploying version 8.3 of their Worksite product. The big change is the new Vivisimo Velocity search engine. So far it is giving us blazingly fast search results.

They have also delivered a new way to search: Express Search.






Interwoven is giving us "The Google" for documents. It is one simple box that combines several of the metadata fields into one cohesive fast search. It combines the full text search with the document name and other metadata fields to one unified fast search. The results come back fast and based on relevancy rather than a grid sorting on a field.

Did I mention fast?

I can run a simple search. Add other terms one at a time to narrow results and delete terms to back out the search. All with results coming back at the snap of my fingers.

Having the results come back based on relevancy is fantastic. Getting two hundred documents back based on the last edit date is not giving you a meaningful search result.

The Express Search is especially compelling when you compare it side by side with the traditional Interwoven search.

We are still running some testing and deciding on some global settings. But we hope to have it deployed by the end of the month.

Document Management Systems and Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0

For a law firm, the document management system is their factory assembly line. Lawyers draft documents. We start with a form, precedent or blank sheet of paper. We add text, add more text, revise, and further revise the content. We use multiple versions to show to others and incorporate their comments. We share the documents with our secretaries to help us with the edits. The document management system is key to dealing with this production.

As a result the document management system is our of our biggest repositories of findable information. The deficiency with the document management system has always been an inadequate search tool in the document management system. Without a good search, the documents become less findable and less useful for future work. Since the vast majority of documents produced by the firm end up in the document management system, useful documents lie side-by-side with useless documents. Our form securities purchase agreement sits in there next to fax cover sheets.

One challenge with law firm knowledge management 2.0 will be identifying those items in the document management system that can be better handled in a wiki or a blog instead of a document.

Another challenge (or opportunity) will be using blogs and wikis to identify and highlight the better content in the document management system. Law firm knowledge management 2.0 can and should be used to better identify why someone should use one