Bill Ives, who writes the excellent Portals and KM [1] blog, has an interesting post this week regarding how law firms handle knowledge management. Ives recently attended the NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008, which strangely enough was held in Boston. Regardless, there were some interesting discussions about how law firms are using blogs and wikis as knowledge management tools.
Ives describes one case where a law firm, which had been using an ad-hoc file system, switched to a Wiki and was able to organize its materials far better (a huge success). It's a great example of how businesses can use Wiki technology to organize large amounts of information, making it more useful and easier to locate and share information in true Enterprise 2.0 fashion.
There are plenty of lessons to be learned here, but it's important to analyze your business processes and find out if there are better ways to do things. A lot of companies could be making of use of wikis and blogs; they make a lot of sense in certain cases, especially any time users have to share information. A good way to get started might be to have your customer service people set up a Troubleshooting Wiki with customer issues and how they solved them.
For more information:
- read the full Portals and KM post here [2]
Links:
[1] http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/
[2] http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2008/10/wikis-in-knowle.html