A professional services company, such as a law firm, is just such an entity.
Managing new work product, multiple versions of work product, metadata associated with work product, and near simultaneous collaboration on work product are actually well known problems.
The clearest solutions, in my opinion, come from the software and technology industries. Version control, build control, multiple targets, sophisticated management of groups of changes that can be applied or rolled back, these are the issues faced daily by programmers and engineers.
The key to having a sustainable vision to KM is developing and deploying KM solutions that "evolve". That is, you must design from day one a KM system that suits your present and near future needs, while always understanding that you will grow past your present solution and require a new one.
Avoid vendor lock in, don't get mired in proprietary systems, focus on data liberation and data portability, don't take shortcuts or bury your head in the sand. Also, don't trust what a vendor advertises or tells you, do the homework and actually try getting your data out! If it's not in a easy and open computer usable format, it's worthless.
The KM system we deploy at Innovate LLP was designed from the ground up to account for these issues. Using our experience with managing build flows for multiple target platforms with multiple target operating systems does help in the design process. The reality is that your solution doesn't have to be complicated and it doesn't have to require specialized software.
Presently, we deploy Google Apps for email and calender; Xero for accounting; and Dropbox for document management. The KM aspect is handled in the way we organize our client matters and internal documents. Dropbox takes care of the automatic synchronization with basic version control of all our documents across all our computers in near realtime, limited only by bandwidth. This eliminates error prone processes of emailing documents back and forth, etc.
Discipline and usage is enforced by the relevance and simpleness of the system, and of course by a KM administrator. The KM administrator is responsible for leading by example and always focusing on "evolving" the solution to ensure the team wants to use the KM system because they are constantly reaping the rewards of the KM system and processes.
Currently, we had the great opportunity to add a new partner. Since all our processes and systems were designed to handle, more than one user, it was very simple to add him to our organizational infrastructure.
You may argue that we have a limited problem domain due to the number of users. However, we are also dealing with a modest budget, as are all KM and IT departments in all organizations. We are already researching new tools and learning to understand what the specialized legal and IP management systems have to offer. With growth comes the potential for pain, evolving the KM infrastructure just ahead of the growth allows your organization to focus on developing, selling and delivering.
If you have any comments or opinions, I would be happy to hear them.
Enjoy,
Felix
