Next on the KM Horizon: Simplicity (We're Serious!)

CIO Insight often is a good read because, for my money, they provide the clearest and most convincing links between "hey, that's cool!" technology and the delivery of hardheaded on-the-ground value to management.  Well, they've done it again, with an article entitled "The Rise of the Blog."  Oh, no, you're thinking, yet another bloviating article about blogs.  (If that's what it were, would I point you to it?  I hope by now we've established some reasonable expectations of "trusted content" here at ASEsq.) 

Rather, this looks at blogs—and the collaboratively-maintained databases known as "wikis"—as tools to enable coordination and project management among professionals.  Blogs and wikis share several attractive characteristics:

• they're dirt-cheap, even free ;
• magically intuitive to non-tech people (perhaps the strongest extant analogy was the ease of adoption of email) ;
• changes and updates are instantly available to anyone with online access (and, if appropriate, a username and password);
• since both have built-in RSS/subscription functionality, users can receive updates automatically without having to remember to go back and check (possibly to come away empty-handed); and
• with their search and categorization tools, they can grow up into powerful knowledge-bases over time.

Human nature gravitates to things with "no instructions required," and so it should come as no surprise that corporations from Lucent to Sun Microsystems have seen employees migrating away from massive and kinky project-management and collaboration tools dutifully installed and maintained behind the firewall to blogs and wikis started spontaneously by individuals and small groups.  As a technology director at Sun says, more than somewhat ruefully:  "Collaborative design groups are using wikis on their own, because they get lots of function with low complexity.  It's like pens and paper—you don't have to tell people what they can do with it."

Back to law-firm land:  How about wiki's on key clients?  On judges that seem to keep showing up?  On practice sub-specialties (§1031 exchanges, say)? 

Too flaky for your firm?  If that's your reaction, are "pens and paper" flaky?  Email?  Blogs and wikis are among the new tools in the technological arms race.  Are you going to let your competitors steal a march?