Knowledge Management and Portal Technologies

Knowledge management (KM) as a discipline is simultaneously relatively new and very old. We, as people, want to share ' or rather we acknowledge that it is vital; societies were built on the interchange of information and knowledge. Historically, apprenticeships and livery companies ensured the transfer of tacit expert knowledge. We still do this in our personal lives; we share happily with friends and strangers. Yet at work, and particularly in professions, the lack of sharing and capture of contextualized knowledge is so extreme that an entire industry has arisen to help us relearn and apply what should be natural to us.

The Emergence of KM and Portals

Although the term 'knowledge worker' was first coined some 50 years ago, the publishing of 'The Knowledge Creating Company' by Nonaka & Takeuchi in the mid-1990s marked for many, the beginning of KM as it is known today. Defining the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, and examining the role of people, process and culture in knowledge management, this book helped to frame the debate and the ensuing movement. The period from the late 90s has been termed the '2^nd generation' of KM (David Snowdon, 'Next Generation Knowledge Management,' ' ARK Group 2006). An exploration of the suggested 3^rd generation will follow in the next article in this series. It saw an explosion of vendors, conferences and consultants branding their product with the 'knowledge' label ' however, many of these products were not really knowledge tools, but rather information retrieval. While commentators may debate the difference between information management (IM) and KM, this article assumes that KM refers more to the evolution of a rich ecology of contextual knowledge transfer and sharing.

Contemporaneously with the start of the 2^nd generation, we saw the emergence of the portal, or dashboard. A reaction to the burgeoning number of desktop applications and data silos, portals sought to aggregate contextual and task-related information into an easily accessible form and to provide a springboard into the native systems. In this respect, portals provided, prima facie, useful information management as opposed to knowledge management.

Yet portals and KM grew to be spoken of together. It was not unusual for the answer to the question 'Do you have a KM initiative?' to be 'Yes, we are putting in a SharePoint portal.' In law firms, in particular, where cultural change is at best challenging, technology provides an all-too-easy answer for management. It is far easier to conceptualize and implement software than cultural change, and to see the beginning and completion of a technology project. It plays into the conceit of partnership that they want the newest, that they are innovators, and that they are embracing KM but not willing to embrace all the cultural change that would entail.

The Convergence of DMS and Portals

Whether led by the knowledge professionals or by the technology that existed to support it, the 2^nd generation focused heavily on explicit knowledge ' on documents, and on leveraging the data already captured through existing processes. Time has been spent on the identification of a set of precedents and standards and on the manual or automatic classification of these documents to aid in their retrieval as well as seeking to convert tacit knowledge to explicit so it could then be managed.

Here, the dominant document management system (DMS) vendors such as iManage and Hummingbird had a head start. Between them, they already 'owned' the document management in most law firms. The merger of Interwoven and iManage saw the integration of the DMS and TeamSite platforms. Hummingbird launched its own portal product. Both products evolved ' into today's Interwoven WorkPortal and Hummingbird's Enterprise Web-Top (since Oct. 2, OpenText's Livelink ECM). Yet neither saw (at least in the legal industry) large-scale acceptance when compared with the head start the incumbent DMS had.

In 2001, Microsoft stepped into the portal marketplace with SharePoint Portal Server, based around a soon-to-be-abandoned Exchange information store architecture. Despite being hard to work with, difficult to customize, and with very few third-party vendors producing components for it, for a number of firms it provided the first foray into do-it-yourself portals ' creating an independent layer over other document silos as opposed to an extension of one. This was also a paradigm shift from the generally accepted single-storage world of the DMS since SharePoint required that documents live in the portal and be located in as many places as they were to be shown, united by a 'hands-on' collaborative approach to document creation and lifecycles. Also during this time, SV Technology developed LawPort, a legal portal and KM tool that unlike Hummingbird and Interwoven, sat as a layer above all other silo applications, and integrated with law firms' various applications including their DMS, Practice Management Systems, HR systems and CRM.

Did any of these help with KM? In the early years, all systems, with perhaps the exception of LawPort's layered approach, were heavily document centric, and in this they helped buoy the perception that knowledge was about documents, true, but only partially. While one could argue that this may have resulted in too much focus on documents, the reality for many was to first understand and organize what they already had.

These systems all lacked an ability to categorize documents comprehensively without manual input. While one could use them to build tools, they lacked any innate understanding that there was a world outside their own. Technology, if nothing else, gave a focal point and project around which to motivate resources ' in this, those early portals could be said to be successful.

In 2003, Microsoft released Share-Point Portal Server 2003 and the buzz around portals, which had waned, began to increase. Now based on SQL Server as the common data storage system, SharePoint was re-architected on the new .NET application server and a suite of core services know as Windows SharePoint Services. Bundled with Windows Server 2003, those services provided core collaborative services to the MS Office product suite as well as establishing a free platform for building limited scope team and task-based portals. This time around, Microsoft built an accessible framework and standard for what it termed 'Web parts,' and allowed for integration with other application data. Third-party vendors, such as Handshake and XMLLAW, used the common Web part standard to build and deploy mini-applications that could be used to extend the platform and allow SharePoint to search over DMS content. While initially slow to gain acceptance, SharePoint Portal Server picked up speed as law firm technology core infrastructures were renewed with Microsoft technologies.

What did it bring in the way of Knowledge Management? In essence, aside from the overall gains given to any technology enabled initiative when integration, development and maintenance costs are lowered, not a great deal. It was still hampered by the 'document lives on a list, list lives on a site' paradigm that meant that sharing the same document across sites and practices was not easy. This paradigm was also completely at odds with that of the DMS. While a major step up for any organization previously using file servers, there was still the problem of how to leverage the SharePoint/Office collaboration model ' with documents being checked-in/out from SharePoint and worked on in workspaces ' in an organization where traditional DMS was still the technology focal point. The support for these ad hoc and automatically generated document and meeting workspaces went unheralded at the time (probably because of the difficulty of reconciling with the DMS), however, looking back, they were a fantastic opportunity to capture the tacit knowledge and context around such documents. Sadly, they were underused.

Microsoft's third iteration of the SharePoint platform, SharePoint 2007, is due for release shortly. With it, Microsoft has addressed many of the concerns and limitations in the 2003 version. Of particular relevance for its use as a KM tool are: document level security, distribution of documents, the native ability to import and use meaningfully external data via the business catalog, and native support for Wikis and blogging. Particularly intriguing is Microsoft's acknowledgement that KM goes beyond documents, backed up by features that enable basic expertise tracking and the mapping of social networks within organizations. As with all Office products, SharePoint benefits from extremely tight integration with its brethren. As we move more toward task- and episode-orientated knowledge capture and dissemination, this access to Word, Outlook and OneNote opens exciting possibilities.

The next part of this article will examine other technologies that have been used to support the KM initiatives. We will also look at what the possible '3^rd generation' of KM will demand of these products and whether Share-Point 2007 is up to the challenge.

Knowledge management (KM) as a discipline is simultaneously relatively new and very old. We, as people, want to share ' or rather we acknowledge that it is vital; societies were built on the interchange of information and knowledge. Historically, apprenticeships and livery companies ensured the transfer of tacit expert knowledge. We still do this in our personal lives; we share happily with friends and strangers. Yet at work, and particularly in professions, the lack of sharing and capture of contextualized knowledge is so extreme that an entire industry has arisen to help us relearn and apply what should be natural to us.

The Emergence of KM and Portals

Although the term 'knowledge worker' was first coined some 50 years ago, the publishing of 'The Knowledge Creating Company' by Nonaka & Takeuchi in the mid-1990s marked for many, the beginning of KM as it is known today. Defining the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, and examining the role of people, process and culture in knowledge management, this book helped to frame the debate and the ensuing movement. The period from the late 90s has been termed the '2^nd generation' of KM (David Snowdon, 'Next Generation Knowledge Management,' ' ARK Group 2006). An exploration of the suggested 3^rd generation will follow in the next article in this series. It saw an explosion of vendors, conferences and consultants branding their product with the 'knowledge' label ' however, many of these products were not really knowledge tools, but rather information retrieval. While commentators may debate the difference between information management (IM) and KM, this article assumes that KM refers more to the evolution of a rich ecology of contextual knowledge transfer and sharing.

Contemporaneously with the start of the 2^nd generation, we saw the emergence of the portal, or dashboard. A reaction to the burgeoning number of desktop applications and data silos, portals sought to aggregate contextual and task-related information into an easily accessible form and to provide a springboard into the native systems. In this respect, portals provided, prima facie, useful information management as opposed to knowledge management.

Yet portals and KM grew to be spoken of together. It was not unusual for the answer to the question 'Do you have a KM initiative?' to be 'Yes, we are putting in a SharePoint portal.' In law firms, in particular, where cultural change is at best challenging, technology provides an all-too-easy answer for management. It is far easier to conceptualize and implement software than cultural change, and to see the beginning and completion of a technology project. It plays into the conceit of partnership that they want the newest, that they are innovators, and that they are embracing KM but not willing to embrace all the cultural change that would entail.

The Convergence of DMS and Portals

Whether led by the knowledge professionals or by the technology that existed to support it, the 2^nd generation focused heavily on explicit knowledge ' on documents, and on leveraging the data already captured through existing processes. Time has been spent on the identification of a set of precedents and standards and on the manual or automatic classification of these documents to aid in their retrieval as well as seeking to convert tacit knowledge to explicit so it could then be managed.

Here, the dominant document management system (DMS) vendors such as iManage and Hummingbird had a head start. Between them, they already 'owned' the document management in most law firms. The merger of Interwoven and iManage saw the integration of the DMS and TeamSite platforms. Hummingbird launched its own portal product. Both products evolved ' into today's Interwoven WorkPortal and Hummingbird's Enterprise Web-Top (since Oct. 2, OpenText's Livelink ECM). Yet neither saw (at least in the legal industry) large-scale acceptance when compared with the head start the incumbent DMS had.

In 2001, Microsoft stepped into the portal marketplace with SharePoint Portal Server, based around a soon-to-be-abandoned Exchange information store architecture. Despite being hard to work with, difficult to customize, and with very few third-party vendors producing components for it, for a number of firms it provided the first foray into do-it-yourself portals ' creating an independent layer over other document silos as opposed to an extension of one. This was also a paradigm shift from the generally accepted single-storage world of the DMS since SharePoint required that documents live in the portal and be located in as many places as they were to be shown, united by a 'hands-on' collaborative approach to document creation and lifecycles. Also during this time, SV Technology developed LawPort, a legal portal and KM tool that unlike Hummingbird and Interwoven, sat as a layer above all other silo applications, and integrated with law firms' various applications including their DMS, Practice Management Systems, HR systems and CRM.

Did any of these help with KM? In the early years, all systems, with perhaps the exception of LawPort's layered approach, were heavily document centric, and in this they helped buoy the perception that knowledge was about documents, true, but only partially. While one could argue that this may have resulted in too much focus on documents, the reality for many was to first understand and organize what they already had.

These systems all lacked an ability to categorize documents comprehensively without manual input. While one could use them to build tools, they lacked any innate understanding that there was a world outside their own. Technology, if nothing else, gave a focal point and project around which to motivate resources ' in this, those early portals could be said to be successful.

In 2003, Microsoft released Share-Point Portal Server 2003 and the buzz around portals, which had waned, began to increase. Now based on SQL Server as the common data storage system, SharePoint was re-architected on the new .NET application server and a suite of core services know as Windows SharePoint Services. Bundled with Windows Server 2003, those services provided core collaborative services to the MS Office product suite as well as establishing a free platform for building limited scope team and task-based portals. This time around, Microsoft built an accessible framework and standard for what it termed 'Web parts,' and allowed for integration with other application data. Third-party vendors, such as Handshake and XMLLAW, used the common Web part standard to build and deploy mini-applications that could be used to extend the platform and allow SharePoint to search over DMS content. While initially slow to gain acceptance, SharePoint Portal Server picked up speed as law firm technology core infrastructures were renewed with Microsoft technologies.

What did it bring in the way of Knowledge Management? In essence, aside from the overall gains given to any technology enabled initiative when integration, development and maintenance costs are lowered, not a great deal. It was still hampered by the 'document lives on a list, list lives on a site' paradigm that meant that sharing the same document across sites and practices was not easy. This paradigm was also completely at odds with that of the DMS. While a major step up for any organization previously using file servers, there was still the problem of how to leverage the SharePoint/Office collaboration model ' with documents being checked-in/out from SharePoint and worked on in workspaces ' in an organization where traditional DMS was still the technology focal point. The support for these ad hoc and automatically generated document and meeting workspaces went unheralded at the time (probably because of the difficulty of reconciling with the DMS), however, looking back, they were a fantastic opportunity to capture the tacit knowledge and context around such documents. Sadly, they were underused.

Microsoft's third iteration of the SharePoint platform, SharePoint 2007, is due for release shortly. With it, Microsoft has addressed many of the concerns and limitations in the 2003 version. Of particular relevance for its use as a KM tool are: document level security, distribution of documents, the native ability to import and use meaningfully external data via the business catalog, and native support for Wikis and blogging. Particularly intriguing is Microsoft's acknowledgement that KM goes beyond documents, backed up by features that enable basic expertise tracking and the mapping of social networks within organizations. As with all Office products, SharePoint benefits from extremely tight integration with its brethren. As we move more toward task- and episode-orientated knowledge capture and dissemination, this access to Word, Outlook and OneNote opens exciting possibilities.

The next part of this article will examine other technologies that have been used to support the KM initiatives. We will also look at what the possible '3^rd generation' of KM will demand of these products and whether Share-Point 2007 is up to the challenge.