Use Your Words
Nostalgia title for this post – I can’t tell you the number of times I said to the now grown, employed and, after this evening, all moved out on their own, Mireau Giggles, “Use your words”. Actually, it wasn’t too often come to think of it, but as you read the phrase you may hear your mother or fathers voice. Use your words is a more recent theme as well. Yesterday, I was delighted to share some tips for deploying knowledge management initiatives in mid-sized law firms with a group of engaged participants from the BCLMA KM Subsection. My presentation was about deployment – pushing projects over the finish line and KM projects in particular.
A key take away that I hope I shared appropriately is to communicate widely. Many of the KM projects that have been resolved at my firm have been communicated to everyone, even though they were conceived by and would be mainly relevant to the practice group that initiated them.
Communicating widely means showing the stakeholders the completed work, documenting how to use the tool, ensuring that tools are as widely available as possible, keeping content current and letting stakeholders know when and how content is updated. It also means, at least for us, making sure that specialized tools are discoverable by anyone via our diversely grown intranet practice area pages and broadcasting regularly about KM tools through the firms daily email news.
I might have titled this post Use Your Word, which would have also reflected a tip shared about deployment. Many of the KM tools we have created could be an ode to hyper-linking in MS Word. That is a story for another post, and also for a lightening talk at next weeks Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference in Moncton. If you are coming, bring your ukulele!
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