Digital White Papers

43 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Transforming Tacit Knowledge: Making the Most of What You Know While many lament that email has reduced interpersonal contact within offices, email arguably has boosted tacit knowledge capture. Through email, people are more inclined to open their questions to a broader group of people who might not be located in the same office or country. Aer all, it is just as easy to email a dozen people or an entire practice group as one or two. In addition, recipients oen spontaneously draw into the email others who might have greater expertise. New angles and spin-off conversations could erupt, allowing for both deeper and broader knowledge sharing in a tangible form that can be further shared. Grasping the potential, KM professionals have tried to build methods into work processes to stream these conversations into their knowledge databases. Methods have included: » Being added to all practice group email distribution groups » Looking for firmwide requests for information and asking the author to share the responses with KM » Training others to contribute these exchanges as they would precedents and research Although data mining soware can help firms trawl users' email for specified topics or paerns of sharing and connections between people and topics, many firms have been reluctant to do so because of privacy, ethical walls and other concerns. Email's biggest and most obvious deficiency related to harnessing tacit knowledge is that it happens in a closed forum. People expect their inboxes to be somewhat private, and most would balk at the notion of KM having free reign to pan their inboxes for golden nuggets. KM needs to rely on lawyers' willingness (and memory) to contribute these threads or add KM as a recipient to them. A second and more frustrating problem is that threads become broken when people forget or decide not to reply to everyone or start side conversations disconnected from the original thread. Posting Blogs and Wikis: Either on their own or with KM's cajoling, some lawyers have goen into internal blogging on the firm's intranet. They post updates, commentary and musings on an area of expertise or interest. Creating a wiki about an area of expertise, emerging issue or model document under construction is a similar way to share knowledge and stimulate conversation through posted questions, answers and commentary combined with explicit knowledge, such as documents, videos and links. Likewise, including a discussion thread or note board feature on practice group and topical pages on the intranet can induce people to share what they know in a more public and permanent forum. If others both read and contribute, these methods can expose and build a wealth of tacit knowledge. Unfortunately for many firms, these are two big ifs. While many blogs and wikis are well-maintained with fresh and timely content, others taper off when the owners become busy with billable work. Worse still, even active blogs and wikis garner few –– if any –– comments to posts, making the potential conversation more of a monologue. Uptake of discussion threads and note boards has been equally unimpressive, with many gathering dust or being used by only a few true believers. Because tacit knowledge is subjective and often based on core beliefs and values, people are more nervous about sharing it than easily proven, objective information.

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