Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management as Internet Strategy

Understand your firm's internal processes and data flows, and develop approaches to facilitate them.

By John Hokkanen

TWO HIP TOPICS -- knowledge management and the Internet -- have a lot of similarities. Law firms have a unique opportunity to work at, understand, and develop a knowledge management strategy and then leverage those efforts towards their Internet strategy.

Knowledge management experts seek to understand an organization's internal processes and information flows, and to develop approaches that facilitate them. Just a few years ago, KM theory held that the primary goal was to convert the intangible knowledge assets of attorneys and staff into recorded tangible assets that the firm could use by others. The stated goal was to retain some of these assets in the event a person left. This sounds like a great goal, but in practice it had problems.

By placing an emphasis on knowledge capture, often there was little discrimination on whether the captured knowledge had any leverage. Often large scale systems placed onerous burdens of profiling in an effort to generate the knowledge base. Information overload became as much of an issue as lack of information. In short, KM systems of the past involved over inclusion and under leverage.

Although KM is still in its infancy, models are maturing. Now, discussion focuses on creating collaboration or sharing environments. This goal is much less ambitious and, in fact, more realistic.

Firm cultures are slowly changing to online, electronic cultures, people are learning how to work and share in the virtual world. Geography is increasingly rendered irrelevant as people develop online relationships and personalities. If members of your firm doubt this proposition, just reflect on how the use of e-mail has evolved within your organization.

In the process of creating electronic workspaces, the capture and sharing of the knowledge exchanged becomes increasingly easy. As the electronic firm culture develops, implementing new online-only systems becomes not only accepted but the norm This creates a foundation from which true process evolution can occur.

To understand how all of this relates to an Internet strategy, one must consider key tenets that drive Internet innovation:

• The business is only about the customer, hence, one must innovate now

• Fast is not fast enough

• Become the market gorilla

• Offer a blended combination of both services and products.

The need for innovation, speed, and market dominance require that a company pursue a pursue tight business focus, outsourcing, partnering, and substantial money investment. In the Internet space, businesses tighten up what they do in order to do it as quick and as cheap as possible, and then bring as many players and as much resources to the table as they can stand in order to bulk up as fast as possible in order to squash competitors. These goals dominate other business considerations, yielding a results-oriented approach.

The legal KM world can (and should) overlap a lot with the new Internet models of business because the legal business model is knowledge-based. While the Internet model is concerned with innovation in the offerings to new clients and the creation of new value chains to external customers, the KM model is concerned with innovation in internal processes.

Adding value to the knowledge (read legal) product by understanding the value chain and eliminating inefficiencies is a KM objective that seems a lot like an Internet business. Such goals require job classification innovation (i.e., new age blurred jobs like Information Architects) of the same sort found in the dot.com world. The same drivers in broadcasting information on the web apply to the tasks in KM where one wants to push information as broadly as possible across the law firm.

This focus on mass customization and personalization are the same sort of blended service offerings presented by Internet portals. Finally, the kind of partnering dot.com businesses engage in to maximize speed (e.g., content syndication, marketing partnerships, technology development collaboration, and revenue sharing) sound similar to the knowledge sharing, collaboration, and depth of interconnection results that are supposed to occur from KM efforts.

Finally, at the most superficial level, KM technologies today typically are Web-based.

In fact, the focus on corporate portals in the KM world shows the close alignment of the KM and Internet worlds. For law firms, this means that developing a strong KM platform can inform the firm's future Internet strategy and vice-versa. When considering client-centric Extranets and legal e-business opportunities, it is clear that the two worlds actually converge.

The scary proposition is that the Internet start-ups are likely to enter the sphere of law-related (if not legal practice) services more quickly than law firms will enter the Internet space. Unfortunately, most law firms are not likely to be able to move with the speed and funding in the Internet space that the dot coms can accomplish. However, the field of knowledge management allows a firm to focus on its traditional legal services and to strengthen the internal workings of the firm. Because of the carry-over, firms that move aggressively into the field of knowledge management will be in a much better position to react to the challenges that the dot coms present in the next 10 years.

John Hokkanen is an Internet and knowledge management strategist at Good2CU.com. He also assists the Austin office of Baker Botts LLP.