Looking For The Intersection Of Knowledge Management And Enterprise 2.0

Back in early October a group of New York law firm knowledge management leaders and a group of Toronto law firm knowledge management leaders gathered to discuss current issues in knowledge management. One of our topics was: Does Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?

You can read some more notes on the gathering:

• NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston by Jack Vinson
• Culture and Technology by Mary Abraham
• Does Enterprise 2.0 = 2 Knowledge Management 2.0? by Ron Friedmann
  

One exercise was to have half of the attendees compile a list of words  and concepts related to knowledge management while the other half compiled a list of words and concepts related to Enterprise 2.0. I decided to reproduce the lists. Take what you will from the lists and the intersection of the lists.

Knowledge Management:
• Adult learning
• Best practice identification
• Best practices
• Blog searching
• Business activity monitoring/alerting
• Business intelligence – generation; dissemination
• Business processes for collecting, storing and retrieving information about people, key events and work product
• Capturing hidden information
• Capturing, organizing and leveraging institutional knowledge
• Client base
• Client stickiness
• Codify
• Collaboration
• Collaborative work
• Collective expertise and experience
• Collective knowledge
• Content – management, presentation, search, structure
• Creation of precedents so everyone has a starting point to work with
• Cultural acceptance of the need to store and collaborate and providing incentives to share
• Deal/matter tracking
• Decision management
• Delivering more value to clients
• Delivering right information to right person at right time
• Discipline that makes wise use of intellectual and business resources
• E-mail folders and inquiries
• Enterprise search engines
• Experience
• Experience management
• Expertise
• Expertise location
• Expertise location (internal and external)
• Findability
• Gathering, indexing and sharing information for the purpose of furthering the organization’s strategic business goals
• Harnessing the collective intelligence of the organization
• Having actionable information at your fingertips
• Improving the way people work; marking them work smarter
• Information flow
• Information management
• Innovation
• Integrating business processes
• Integration
• Knowledge base – searchable, sortable
• Leverage
• Leveraging corporate memory
• Lotus Notes
• Making information useful/useable
• Matter databases
• Matter info/management
• More than precedents
• Multi-disciplinary
• Multi-faceted
• Networking
• Not valued enough
• Organized information flow
• Organized retrieval
• Organizing work product to prevent reinvention of wheel
• People / processes / technology
• Personalized generally
• Portals
• Practice smarter
• Process of transforming: data > information > knowledge > wisdom
• Promoting and supporting collaboration and efficiency
• Right place – right time
• Sharing knowledge to further the aims of the enterprise
• Skills
• Social networking – knowing who has interests and expertise in your company and finding it quickly
• Standards
• Storing the collective wisdom of the organization
• Structured
• Synthesize
• Systematized
• Tacit information
• Thinking in public
• Using knowledge to find solutions for client problems
• Using social media tools and storytelling to enhance collaboration and exchange information
• Using social media tools and storytelling to permit in-the-flow exchange of information in context
• Using technology to improve process
• Value-added information
• We know more than me
• Who worked on what and what did they do
• Wikis/blogs
• Wind milling existing processes to collect and deploy knowledge
• Working smarter


Enterprise 2.0:
• Accessible
• An enterprise where everyone knows what everyone knows, and who they know and what they have done
• Collaboration
• Comprehensive management
• Confusing label
• Connectivity
• Content over format
• Contributing not just extracting
• Dynamic financial data
• Enabling end users to use computing more easily and effectively to manage and analyze information and to collaborate
• Enterprise search
• Framework for sharing
• Giving up control
• Globalization
• Holistic approach to an organization’s organization
• I never heard anyone say Enterprise 1.0
• Integrated organizational function
• Jargon
• Knowledge = KM, Marketing/Business Intelligence, Financial; mash-up
• Knowledge sharing
• Learn
• Leveraging Web 2.0 Technology
• Listening to the customer/client
• Manage
• “Merger” of technology with commerce and business making it more interactive and collaborative and participatory for the transaction; an “active” partnership
• Misunderstood
• Overwork
• Peers
• Personalization
• Profile knowledge
• Profitability
• Ramped-up customer service
• RSS
• Social networks
• Tag knowledge
• Technology enabling collaboration
• The successor to Enterprise 1.0?
• Value
• Virtual organization
• Web stuff plus something
• Where enterprise knowledge (+ not individual knowledge) rules
• Works across systems in organized way

The Pirate's Dilemma

The delightful Connie Crosby of Crosby Group Consulting gave me this book on her recent trip to Boston. Matt Mason traces the current web 2.0 movement back to the 1970's punk rock culture. He starts with focus on a quote from punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue with a diagram showing three finger positions on the neck of a guitar with the caption:

"Here's one chord, here's two more, now form your own band."

In a 2.0 world, doing-it-yourself does not seem that radical anymore. Anyone can be published author on the web. You can jump onto Blogger and in a few minutes have a powerful web publishing platform up and running in a few minutes.

Mason looks to some early punk bands who played for themselves and your buddies. Then maybe a few friends come along. If other people come then great, but it does not matter that much because you are doing for yourself and few people close to you. Mason focuses mostly on music, but in the background I was thinking more about blogging and enterprise 2.0. It does not make much sense to put together and a print a book that only a few hundred people will read. That is a big deployment of capital with an improbable return on investment. With web 2.0 the capital for distribution and publishing is minimal. A blog with only a few hundred readers is successful.

It goes back to my post on Why Blog? It is about me capturing my ideas and sharing them with myself and sharing them with some friends and colleagues.

"Here's one post, here's two more, now form your own blog."

I also see the pirates taking over knowledge management. Knowledge management was about capturing the best documents and the best practice, vetting them and packaging them for distribution. There is a big hierarchy of command and control over what information gets published and who gets to see it.

Enterprise 2.0 breaks down that hierarchy. Essentially, anyone can publish information, comment on information and link pieces of information together. The 2.0 movement goes a long way to one of the challenges of knowledge management by making it easier to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Turn it over to the pirates. Let them find, collect and distribute information inside the enterprise in the way that works best for them.

The knowledge management 2.0 movement is about reducing the "management" and enlarging the knowledge base. KM professionals should look to ways to reduce the hierarchy and the barriers to contribution. Hand KM over to the pirates.

You can read more of my take on the book at DougCornelius.com - Book Review: The Pirate's Dilemma.

Knowledge Management in a 2.0 World

My latest article has been published in National, the magazine of the Canadian Bar Association: Knowledge Management in a 2.0 World.(.pdf)

It’s never been more important for lawyers and law firms to be able to organize and access all their knowledge. And thanks to the emergence of Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis, it’s also never been easier. Welcome to the next generation of KM.

I take no credit for the French translation of the article. My french is not that good.

Enterprise 2.0 Progress Report

We have continue to wiki-fy content at The Firm.  SharePoint treats wiki pages as documents and gives them high rankings in search results. They are quickly becoming the preferred way to capture information and knowledge in the firm.

The SharePoint wiki tool is simple, but that makes it easy to teach people how to use. Everyone who has actually used the wiki is stunned at how easy it is to edit.

Here is the latest count of wiki pages:

	June 6	July 7	Sept. 15
Wiki Page	205	313	667

I am staggered at the amount of content flowing into the wikis.

I am using the number of wiki pages as an indicator of adoption. Ideally, I would like to be able to pull the total number of versions of wiki pages. That could be a better indicator of usage because it would show the total number of edits to pages, not just the number of pages. So far I have not been able to find a way to get a report on this from SharePoint.

Does anyone know a way to find that information in SharePoint?

Why Social Computing Aids Knowledge Management

I stumbled across this CIO.com article by Michael Fitzgerald : Why Social Computing Aids Knowledge Management. (I missed it originally because it was not listed under the Knowledge Management articles on CIO.com.)

In fact, social computing represents a third wave for KM: the set of tools and processes companies use to create, track and share intellectual assets, says Patti Anklam, an independent consultant who is focused on KM and social networking. Anklam says the first wave involved digitizing and tracking documents using tools like content management systems. When it became clear that it was too hard to share those documents, companies adopted collaboration tools. With social networks, companies are extending knowledge management to make it easier to connect employees and information.

"A framework for knowledge management consists of understanding what you need to have in place so that people can connect and share with each other, and then...connect to people outside of their own current, small personal networks," Anklam says.

The Benefits of Inefficiency

I listened to a profound presentation on the benefits of inefficiency and its implications on enterprise social networks and enterprise 2.0.

One of the many great things at The Firm is the Life Series. The Firm brings in interesting outside speakers to speak about interesting things. A few weeks ago, Devon Harris spoke about his experience as member of the 1988 Olympic Jamaican Bobsled Team and Captain of the 1992 and 1998 Jamaican Olympic teams.

This week Dr. John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University spoke about how we, as individuals in a complex, modern society, can resist the tendency to allow large institutions to get the better of our human natures.

About 15 minutes into the presentation, I realized the implications of his presentation on justifying knowledge management, enterprise 2.0 and enterprise social networks. I did not have my laptop or even a pad of paper, so I started taking notes of the blackberry. (I think everyone around me thought I was ignoring Dr. Lachs and sending emails.)

Dr. Lachs put forth a proposition about the impotence of large institutions. They break the unity of action. He defined the unity of action as having three parts: (1) intention, (2) execution and (3) the enjoyment or suffering from the action.

People lose interest inside large institutions because they lack control of the three nodes of the unity of action. They are going through the motions because someone else is making them. They are stuck with policies for which they had no input or comment.

The misery of the modern world comes from there being so many of us and our institutions are too big. People do not feel good about it. We can't go back to living in small communities. (Although there are a few left over hippies from the 60s.) But, there are great things about living in the modern world. (You can have grapes in the winter!)

Institutions need to make things more transparent. The CEO needs to spend time with front line workers. People inside institutions need to get to know what others are doing inside the institution.

What are the consequences?

1. Its okay to be a little less efficient if we can be more human. There is no need to keep secrets when making policies. Why are doing this? How could we do it better? How does it impact the enterprise as a whole? All of these questions can be better answered by exposing the policy-making process to a larger audience.

2. We have to lodge responsibility and accept responsibility. We should hold people at the top of ladder as responsible for bad acts of the institution as we do for those people who commit the bad acts.

Institutions, even if built on best intentions, can become inhumane. Sheer size causes institutions to become inhumane. There is a break down in communications. The larger the institution, the bigger the chain of command and the greater the problems.

Using new communication techniques, we may be able to break down some of the barriers and the breakdowns in communications. It is better to be less efficient in order to share information with a larger group.

How do you take the time in our time-sensitive culture? It takes less time then you think. Can you say hello to everyone? (On twitter or yammer you can!) Instead of creating a policy, say "what do you think?" It is actually more efficient because the opening up of the process allows for improvement of the policy. A larger audience will provide greater insight on the impacts of a policy and how it can be improved.

Dr. Lachs wrote the book "Intermediate Man" on this subject.

Free Copy of Andrew McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 Article

For those of you have not yet Andrew McAfee's seminal article: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, SocialText is sponsoring free copies of the article from their website. The blurb about downloading the article is on the right hand side of the SocialText home page, after you scroll half-way down the full page.

Need to Share Culture

Oscar Berg over at The Content Economy writes about Transforming from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture".

The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency are both moving to become more open and collaborative using enterprise 2.0 tools to gather information and communicate.

Is your firm more secretive than the State Department or the CIA? Why?

As The Firm is adopting enterprise 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs, I will get a request for a private wiki or a private blog. My first reaction is to ask them "Why?" The information they are putting up will be useful for the firm. People are already overloaded with the flow of information. They are not going to spend time reading your blog or wiki unless it is relevant to what they are doing day-to-day. They may find information in it occasionally in a search for information they need to know. Those two situations are exactly the reasons that you want to collect information and communicate using open platform tools like wikis and blogs.

Of course there are areas that do need to be walled off in law firms. Human resources has lots of limitations on what they can make publicly available. Client work needs to walled off to implement ethical walls.

If you are willing to send an internal email to more than one other person, maybe that information should have been put in a blog or wiki instead. You can always send a link to the information in the email, instead of trapping that information in an email.

Moving away From the Command and Control Approach to Knowledge Management

I remember listening to David Jabbari, Global Head of Knowledge Management, Allen + Overy LLP at LegalTech 2008. He spoke on a panel entitled: Technology Integration – The New Face of Knowledge Management. Part of presentation focused on the growing use of wikis and blogs at his firm.

Mr. Jabbari has now gone on to embrace Knowledge Management 2.0 in an article in the ABA's Law Practice Today: The End of 'Command Control' Approaches to Knowledge Management?

"If you see knowledge as an inert ‘thing’ that can be captured, edited and distributed, there is a danger that your KM effort will gravitate to the rather boring, back-office work preoccupied with indexes and IT systems. This will be accompanied by a ritualized nagging of senior lawyers to contribute more knowledge to online systems. If, however, you see knowledge as a creative and collaborative activity, your interest will be the way in which distinctive insights can be created and deployed to deepen client relationships. You will tend to be more interested in connecting people than in building perfect knowledge repositories"

As he writes in the article, Mr. Jabbari first caught onto this idea after seeing a seminar on Wikipedia a few years ago. He now sees knowledge management as a three prong approach: Collaboration, Location and Navigation.

I like the focus on these three areas so this is my take on them:

Collaboration. We must encourage the unregulated proliferation of content online (internally and externally). At law firms, this is already this occurring in our document management systems. Moving it online is just changing the forum. Even though enterprise 2.0 is more open, it surprisingly easier to monitor the content. As wikis are growing at The Firm, our KM team is taking on the role of wiki gardeners, as well as wiki champions.

Location. Google has raised the expectation of people when looking for information. The junior associates coming into a law firm are used to finding whatever they want at the snap of their fingers. Law firms need to have that same capability internally. This can work by just pointing the search engine at your document collections. But then you lose the inter-relationship between the content. The use of wikis and enterprise 2.0 tools allows you link to relevant content found elsewhere.

Navigation. Search is great, but you also need to guide people to the good content. Search is important when you are not sure what you are looking for and navigation is important when you do know what you are looking for.

Also see:

• Mary Abraham's view: So You Think You Should "Command and Control"?
• Mohamed Amine Chatti's view: The End of 'Command Control' Approaches to Knowledge Management?
  

Unlearn What You Have Learned

In making the case for enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0, there is usually the argument about showing the return on investment from the CIO and CMO. I ran across the Afterthought column in E Content magazine by David Meerman Scott: Unlearn What You Have Learned.

"I suggest that when people are faced with the inevitable push back from executives about "the ROI thing" to ask the executives a few questions: 1) Have you answered a direct mail ad or visited a tradeshow as an attendee? (Nearly all answer "No.") 2) Have you used Google or another search engine? (Nearly all answer "Yes.") OK, I then ask, why are we putting all our marketing resources into the old stuff such as tradeshow booths and direct mail instead of the things that people are using today?"

Web 2.0 - What is Means to Law Firms

Join the G100 CIO Advisory Board as they provide a recap of the G100 CIO event held on Monday, August 25 in conjunction with ILTA '08.  The focus is “Web 2.0 - What It Means to Law Firms,” including a summary of what Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps shared with the group around the phenomenon of Web 2.0 in general.

Speakers:

• Peter Lesser - Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher + Flom, LLP
• David Rigali - Husch Blackwell Sanders LLP
• Karen Levy - Debevoise + Plimpton LLP
• Peter Attwood - Simmons + Simmons
• Jeff Brandt - Crowell and Moring
  

My Notes:


G100 is a forum for the CIOs from the 100 biggest law firms in the world. This year, the topic was Web 2.0.  Some of the things they heard were speakers from an Australian law firm, Microsoft and Google.

The panel started off with a definition of Web 2.0, then moved on to Enterprise 2.0. They wonder if there will really be an impact on corporate information systems.

One panelist noted that it changes their way of looking at information and whether it needs to be as structured as it currently is structured inside their firms.

They were surprised to find out that more of the content being added is coming form partners and not junior associates.  (We have the same experience. We are getting much more contribution from partners than associates.)

Two big factors they noticed. One is that the content gets in very quickly. Second, you need very little IT control or input after the initial set up.

It is very cheap to fail with these tools.  There is very little incremental cost for each additional wiki page.

The panel although impressed with web 2.0 are not sold on them. Most of panel was not ready to start adoption of wikis. 

They had the same view on blogs.  One panelist stated that they have a ban on external blogs. But just the same, they had one internal blog that is highly viewed.

The panel moved on to Google apps. They were very impressed with a presentation from Google on Google apps.  They were very impressed with cloud computing and the ability to quickly push out updates to the programs. (I hate to rain on their parade, and Google does not use the term, but Google Docs is a wiki system.) They are intrigued with moving from an integrated desktop to a virtual desktop.

My view. I think the CIOs need to get out more often. They are missing the change that is coming.

My ILTA Schedule

Enterprise 2.0 Discussion with Stewart Mader, Matt Moore and Doug Cornelius

Last week I had a great time talking with Matt Moore of Innotecture and Engineers Without Fears & Stewart Mader, the author of Wikipatterns about all things Enterprise 2.0. Matt recorded the conversation and turned it into a podcast to share:

podcast - enterprise 2.0 - doug cornelius and stewart mader

00:00 - Doug visits the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston
02:45 - Many many vendors - they love E2.0!
04:00 - The CIA & Intellipedia
04:30 - Wachovia Bank
06:15 - Stewart goes Web Content 2008, Enterprise 2.0 in Italy, and 2008 WikiSym
07:45 - Social Network Analysis of Wikipatterns
08:15 - iPhone location-based social networking service and Stewart's dog's bladder
09:15 - Wikis cease to be a novelty - beyond Wikipedia
10:30 - CIA again
11:45 - My favourite Clay Shirky quote - are we boring yet?
12:30 - Training as a barrier to adoption - wikis are simple
13:20 - Email is not the zenith
14:45 - Wikis get out of the way
15:15 - Wikis as the iPod box
17:00 - What will happen in 2009?
19:00 - The steady curve rather than the tidal wave
21:00 - Wikis as a natural solution for unstructured information
22:10 - Writing the "wikipatterns" book on a wiki
23:30 - It's not about shocking people
24:30 - Awe instead
25:00 - The Bush reference I can't censor
25:15 - Giving and taking
27:45 - Wiki adoption happens at the lunch table
30:45 - The future of traditional blogs inside the enterprise
33:00 - The melting pot of tools
34:00 - The globalisation of everything

If you only have 2 minutes, we started off our discussion of enterprise 2.0 with a discussion about swearing and the social bonding of profanity. Matt posted this discussion as a separate podcast: podcast preview - salty language.

Enterprise 2.0 Progress Report

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 9
wiki pages: 313, which is a 50% increase over the past month's 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we deal with some issues. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

We are still suffering from the wiki's failure to show the changes to the wiki page as part of the notification. [See Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.]

Connections in Context Replay

On June 20,  I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster.

A replay of that webinar is now available on the ILTA website: Connections in Context - Who Mentioned CRM?

Enterprise search has become the standard for helping to make organizations’ information retrieval processes more efficient. Improving user access to data across the enterprise is key.  But effective search can do so much more than just improve existing business processes, it can transform your business network by exposing otherwise hidden expertise, customer relationships and cross-selling opportunities. In this session, Oz Benamram demonstrates how to transform your business development process with enterprise search by automatically sharing relationship connections and context throughout the enterprise and provide the benefits of a contextual, searchable network to your stakeholders to achieve maximum adoption and effectiveness.

Connections in Context

I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster. The presentation was a retake of the presentation he gave at the Enterprise Search Summit.

Oz has done some great work on finding documents. So I was enthusiastic to see his take on finding people.

My Notes:

The goal of CRM has been to help you find someone and to deliver information about that someone to help you decide if that someone is the "one." We need to make it easy to find people, whether internal or external, and see our shared experience with this person.

Oz set forth Amazon.com, with all of the related content related to the product. With Facebook, he pointed out the flow of information from Facebook.

There are three keys around people: who, why and what. Who are the People and Contacts. The Why is the client, matter or project. The What are emails and documents. It also important to coordinate those with when and where.

The goal is to make the information findable in a Google-like manner. That is one simple search box that integrates all systems. It also important to filter the results like you do in Amazon or Clusty (powered by Vivisimo).

Oz moved onto a presentation of the contacts module of his AnswerBase system. AnswerBase is powered by Recommind. The tool uses a relationship analysis tool from Contact Networks (in a proof of concept). This tool looks at the email traffic between internal and external people to show the strength of relationship. They also add info from the CRM system, HR databases, document management system, billing system, matter management system and marketing systems.

They had a privacy issue related to harvesting email. They limited it to emails that were put into their email filing system. This allows you to expose the email and alleviated privacy concerns.

Oz moved onto finding contacts in context. This involved some entity extraction. They use West KM to find courts, judges and parties mentioned in the document. (This is very litigation focused.)

Oz moved on to finding internal expertise. They mash together information from the HR system, the documents the attorney has drafted, the information on the attorney's matters and the attorney's time entries.

Enterprise 2.0 Progress Report

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 8
wiki pages: 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we debated the wiki structure and security models. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

Above and Beyond KM

My buddy Mary Abraham started a blog: Above and Beyond KM, a discussion of knowledge management that goes above and beyond technology. Mary has often been a rudder keeping our knowledge management groups focused on knowledge management and not on the technology.

Mary and I were recently sparring over whether lawyers are good at sharing knowledge. Being at a big law firm, I see lots of sharing. Senior lawyers must share with the junior lawyers on their team if they want the junior lawyers to get anything done. I see lots of requests for information in emails. (Unfortunately, I rarely see the responses. More on that below.)

Sharing happens in the law firm at several levels: between a junior lawyer and their mentor, among peers, within a matter team, within a client team, within a practice, and across the firm. I believe the most effective sharing is the sharing among smaller groups. So, I see much more sharing within the matter team than within a client team. It is just human nature and the nature of sharing.

But, I am firm believer that we are missing some technology tools to make sharing easier and more effective. We need better tools for the small groups to share their information within the group, but also allow the entire firm to access that sharing.

Unfortunately, the default way of sharing in a law firm is by email. I long lost count of the requests to better capture email to share the knowledge and information in the email. The problem is not sharing the email; the problem is the email itself. It is just not a good way to share.

That is why I am so excited about Enterprise 2.0 tools. They combine the communication power of email with the sharing and finding powers of the web. In particular, blogs and wikis make it very easy to share information and do so in a way that it seems very close and focused on what the smaller group is doing. But, all of that information in the blog or wiki is easily findable and useable by others in the firm who are not part of the smaller group.

Developing a Playbook for Your 2.0 Community

I watched a webinar on 2.0 communities. This was a preview of a presentation scheduled for the Community 2.0 Conference.

Speakers:
Sylvia Marino, Director of Community Operations
Edmunds.com Inc.

Kathleen Gilroy, CEO
Swift Media Networks

The speakers advocate the development and deployment of communities wrapped around user generated content.

Their pitch was to create a playbook for the community development. They set up a wiki on PBwiki to host the playbook: community20bootcamp.pbwiki.com (it was public).

Their first example was ravelry.com, a site for the knitting community. One interesting tactic of this site was to blend in other 2.0 sites. Instead having knitters post the pictures of their knitting on ravelry.com, they post them to flickr. Ravelry.com then uses the flickr API to pull the pictures into ravelry.com.

Their second example was the TheDailyPlate.com, a site for helping you to eat smarter. The site gives you functionality by tracking your eating and activity during the day. Users are contributing information on calories burned during exercise and the nutrition information for food. (I will have to check back to this site if I am ever going to lose by baby weight.)

They shared an interesting story about tags. Apparently one of the most popular tags in flickr is "me." That is the way we think about the pictures and relationships.

The target of the webinar was clearly on public websites. I was hoping to pick up some ideas for creating communities inside the enterprise. I am interested about integrating some internal websites into our intranet to enrich the content. Now, I do have a few more ideas.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - April 24

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is April 24.

I consider RSS to be the glue that holds together Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0. Blogs and wikis are great tools. But they are even more powerful when they are pushing content out through RSS feeds. It is much more efficient to have relevant content pushed to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

I previously posted on knowledge as an artifact and a flow. RSS is the flow. Enterprise RSS is the flow for the enterprise.

Of the 2.0 technologies, RSS is the least recognized. Most people recognize blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Tagging like del.icio.us tends to fall down on the list. But most studies I have read put RSS way down at the bottom for recognition and use. Enterprise RSS falls even father down the list.

Enterprise RSS is the key tool that would turn a collection of blogs and wikis into communication tools. To much internal communication happens by email. As a result, your email inbox becomes an information warehouse. That email does no good to the person who starts at the firm the next day. The knowledge is lost to that person.

Lots of internal communication could be better handled by using a blog, wiki or similar tool to host the information. As new information is added, the subscribers get the notification of the change and the content. The big plus is that the content is on a platform that should be easily indexed and retrievable by a search engine.

To really make this work well, you need to force subscriptions on people. That is the keystone to Enterprise RSS.

To learn more about Enterprise RSS:

• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast - james dellow - enterprise rss action day
• Enterprise Day of Action Wiki
• Attensa an Enterprise RSS vendor
• NewsGator an Enterprise RSS vendor
  

Do today's new collaboration tools make it harder for IT to wrangle corporate information, or easier?

Mostly to toot my own horn, there is a piece by Andrew Conry-Murray in Information Week: Holy Web 2.0 Herding Nightmare. I am not a big fan of the title; it makes Web 2.0 sound scary. I am fond of the subtitle: Do today's new collaboration tools make it harder for IT to wrangle corporate information, or easier? YES.

"Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They're easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. . . . Departments and business units can provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds--and never make a single call to IT."

If you read the story, you will pick up a few quotes from me. If you do not want to read the story, here are my quotes:

Doug Cornelius, a lawyer at [The Firm], relies on PBwiki, a popular provider of online collaboration tools, for a variety of projects. As a member of the law firm's knowledge management department, Cornelius uses the wiki to manage meetings and agendas and to plan conferences. "It's tremendous for capturing information," he says. "Instead of a string of e-mails, you just go in and edit the wiki."

While the firm also uses SharePoint as an intranet platform, Cornelius wanted to experiment with other options. "We didn't need anyone from IT to do anything. Training and setup took 30 seconds," he says. After a year of use, the wiki has more than 100 pages and gets several edits every day. Other departments in the firm are also using the PBwiki service.

"It's a classic story of enterprise 2.0," says [The Firm]'s Cornelius. "We're up and running with PBwiki in 30 seconds, and SharePoint is taking a year."