P2P

winter21

Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine

Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1439196

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85 I L T A N E T . O R G K nowledge is essential to any professional services organization, but it is the lifeblood of law firms and corporate legal departments. Leveraging the know-how, know-who, and know-what existing within organizations is critical to competitive advantage. While these Knowledge Management (KM) activities play an important role, it is just a starting point – an output. The ultimate goal for legal organizations should be a business outcome – whether that means the ability to work more efficiently, innovate faster, or get the most from their employees' expertise in order to better serve clients and secure a competitive advantage. Whether dealing with Analytical Knowledge, Curated Knowledge, or User-Encountered Knowledge, achieving business outcomes means leveraging these KM outputs and successfully delivering them to knowledge workers to activate knowledge within the organization – and ensure that the organization is 'Making Knowledge Work'. Welcome to the Knowledge Economy Today we're operating in a knowledge economy where there is scarcely anything more important than knowledge. Knowledge is essential to any professional services organization, but it is the lifeblood of law firms and corporate legal departments. Given this importance, knowledge management (KM) becomes absolutely critical to ensuring effective and high performing organizations. Leveraging the know-how, know-who, and know-what existing within organizations is essential to operations. While these KM activities play an important role in capturing collective wisdom and know-how for the creation of knowledge assets like templates or best practices documents, the most strategic legal organizations are looking at how to extend KM to drive business outcomes – whether that means the ability to work more efficiently, innovate faster, or get the most from their employees' expertise in order to better serve clients and secure a competitive advantage. What we see, then, is that KM and knowledge work are complementary. Achieving business outcomes means leveraging KM outputs to activate knowledge within the organization and ensure that the organization is 'Making Knowledge Work'. Getting to Know the Different Types of Knowledge Outputs If the goal is to ensure that KM is feeding into a process that 'makes knowledge work' and ultimately creates a business outcome, the first step organizations should take is to consider the major different buckets of knowledge that they will be dealing with. These can broadly be classified into three groupings: analytical knowledge, curated knowledge, and user- encountered knowledge. A N A L Y T I C A L K N O W L E D G E This first category – analytical knowledge – helps wrangle knowledge by analyzing existing documents in order to connect and surface information that aids in leveraging best practices or in identifying experts or expertise. There are several different ways this knowledge can be harvested: • Matter locator — the ability to discover similar matters and reuse relevant content such as contracts, billing profiles, or experts. • Expert locator — the ability to identify experts and make connections between their knowledge and

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