Its time to acknowledge that metrics matter both behind and in front of the firewall.

Keep It Simple Stupid is an expression almost as dear to me as the goal of Simple, Elegant, Intuitive, Fast - and when it comes to metrics about intranet usage we all should have a lot more simplicity in our lives.

Whilst no ecommerce site would leave home without a metrics and analysis suite, when it comes to many intranets around the world, usage metrics are simply nowhere to be found.

Of course there is server monitoring to make sure that the server is alive courtesy of our IT friends, but often little attention is paid to whether people actually use the content, and what content they actually use. In part this is because the major analytics packages are designed for ecommerce and internet sites where click analytics mean money, with the result being that the stats packages tend to be very powerful and designed for use by an analyst rather than by the content owner. There are some excellent web traffic analysis tools available, ranging from the free Google Analytics, to hosted approaches like Click Density, through to packages like Webtrends and Omniture. Whilst we are big fans of Gooogle Analytics and Click
Density for public websites, security and risk concerns about sending intranet usage traffic outside the firewall often tend to rule them out for intranet use.

In an intranet context, where the strategic goal is to have only that content which is organisationally valuable arranged in a way that is easily found, usage metrics are equally important. From a knowledge management perspective, we want to know how many times a given piece of content is visited, where people came from, what links were clicked on the page, and what sort of distribution of use we are achieving. Is the 4 clicks per day just one person who happens to be the content owner……

Now, in line with keeping it simple, metrics are not helpful if they are just telling us how many hits have been received. “This page has been accessed 54,000 times since 2 June 2007″. Yikes, is that a good number or a bad number? We need to do mental math to work out what that means.

Surely the computer can do the maths for us to tell us something more useful in a framework we can understand - perhaps 34 views per day, 170 views per week and 680 view per month?

When we have the data presented like that we can quickly consider what level of daily traffic we would expect for the content item, and then get a sense of whether we are seeing the right levels and take appropriate action. In some cases it may signal more education is required, or the content is too difficult to find - but at least it can start activity to address the situation and make the intranet more relevant.

But wait.

If we now have the click traffic by person (with privacy protected), that means we can easily also retrieve the top 20 sites visited by the current user - that might be useful as well to place on an intranet home page perhaps - personalised, updated most valued links? Keeping it simple?

Now the good news.

To help you capture and share metrics for your intranet we have created MPAStats, available either as a Sharepoint webpart or as an html snippet which can be inserted into intranet pages. It is designed as a footer which sits happily at the bottom of the page, tracking activity, and displaying aggregate and detail stats with an ajax enabled click of a “More” link at the bottom of the page. All of the click data is stored in a database, which means you can still have an analyst easily produce customised reports and analysis.

Stats sit as a footer at the bottom of each intranet page in an expanding panel. Click the More link and analysed details of how people got to the current page, and what they clicked are displayed for easy review.

If you are considering remodelling your intranet or perhaps moving to Sharepoint, add MPAStats to your current site for a couple of weeks and then your discussions about your new intranet can be grounded in actual data rather than what people “think might be important”.

Starting at just USD3,000 you no longer need to continue to fly blind on usage of your intranet. Of course, if you want to arm an analyst with a fully functioned analytic engine in addition to providing in page feedback, then you might want to acquire a Webtrends or equivalent in addition to MPAStats. We’ve found that for intranets, data collected by the MPAStats is more than sufficient to support better strategic decision making on intranet content management.

Of course, there are other ways and tools one can use to retrieve usage stats from Sharepoint (CardioLog and Ontolica spring to mind).  These tools tend to be focused on Administrators and Analysts, and take a different approach to sharing the data, where we place a premium on simple, in-page numbers at an attractive price point. Where detailed stats are required, running the tools in parallel might make sense. The price, processor, storage and bandwidth requirements of our web part are very low by comparison to running even the most basic Sharepoint infrastructure and our approach can be used to analyse non-Sharepoint infrastructure as well.

From a Data Protection perspective (important for those with operations in Europe), giving content owners access to the raw data may actually make available an inappropriate level of person-specific details. Our approach obfuscates the details of individual users (displaying “Person A”, “Person B”, etc), while providing transparent access for everybody.

So, the thought for the day. Bring some reality and some management to your intranet life with MPAStats, visible at the bottom of every page, kept simple, and helping you progress to a more business focused intranet.

As of 1 May 2008 Neil Richards and I are now up and running and open for business as Matthew Parsons & Associates, working with law firms and in-house counsel in setting and implementing their knowledge management strategies. Neil brings deep technology skills to our team, especially in relation to intranet frameworks, enterprise search, knowledge repositories and measurement tools, and I am glad to have him join me.

As we enter on that journey, we thought we might share our views on how knowledge management, and knowledge management strategy, is evolving in law firms. We see some changes at work which suggest that it may be appropriate for firms to revisit and update their knowledge strategies to respond to the profound changes in the marketplace over the last few years.

It starts with people and leaders

Knowledge management in law firms is first and foremost about the decisions and actions of people - generally partners and practice leaders. It is about leaders for whom managing the stock of intellectual capital and tools for their lawyers is an understood element of their strategy to achieve their business objectives.

From this conscious decision to better maintain and leverage the knowledge of their practices springs commitment, investment, cultural expectations within the team, and in due course, outcomes. The actions of lawyers within the group follow from the commitment and engagement of the practice leaders – sometimes even in advance of the organisational mechanisms for recognising individual contributions. Indeed knowledge oriented practice leadership is one of the key characteristics of enduring and successful knowledge management within law firms.

Having said that, technology often has a very important role in enabling and supporting the implementation of those practice knowledge strategies. This close relationship between knowledge and technology was quite marked at the various sessions at the recent Ark Group Legal Knowledge Management conference in London at which both Neil and I spoke. Many of the sessions were technology related. Effective knowledge management in a law firm context is people and commitment led, but supported and enabled with technology to facilitate storage, distribution and search – the two elements cannot be held distinct.

A changing landscape requires strategic reassessment

It seems to us that there are four significant forces at work requiring firms to fundamentally reassess their knowledge strategies:

• content that would traditionally be drafted internally drafted is now available from content providers;
• a step change in both the maturity of enterprise search, and the maturity of ubiquitous web content management platforms and richer interfaces
• increased opportunities for knowledge process outsourcing; and
• increased activity and investment in knowledge initiatives within major clients applying pressures on firms both for content and for knowledge management advice

A firm’s knowledge strategy set even two or three years ago can no longer be considered appropriate, as the market has simply moved on in these key dimensions.

In assessing the effectiveness and appropriateness of the firm’s current knowledge strategy, and to set the direction going forward, are we seeing two distinct levels of strategy setting and organisational responsibility.

First, there is a firmwide strategy, and secondly there are practice and business services specific knowledge strategies. The clarity on the boundaries and inter-relationships of those strategies is vital to aligning the knowledge management strategies of the firm with the overall business strategy of the firm. These are very different things, with the firm knowledge strategy focussed on the strategic value to be accorded knowledge in the organisation, the organisational goals as it relates to knowledge, and the approach and processes by which the organisation will work to achieve those goals. Below is a discussion of the key elements of the firm strategy, and the elements of the practice strategy will be the subject of a later post.

At the firm level the knowledge strategy addresses three strategic, and three operational elements:

Strategic elements

Strategic intent: There are a series of strategic choices which the firm needs to consider that will shape its overall approach to knowledge. At the heart is the decision as to what extent does the firm want to build and leverage its collective expertise within and across practices? For some firms, the answer may be that search of previous work product is a sufficient extent. For others, focussed proactive effort to leverage the organisational best-practice around specific topics will be a better strategic fit.

Is knowledge building and sharing core tenets of the firm, or something which is an optional goal for each practice? What are the overall knowledge quality and investment levels which the firm wants to make, and that it recognises as appropriate? What is the approach to build versus buy on content, and what content can be outsoured? How does the firm want to be positioned in comparison to competitors in relation to knowledge for use by its lawyers, and by its clients – to what extent does it want to create and project new knowledge into the marketplace to clients ? How global or local does the firm want to be in its knowledge objects – is the default orientation to as global as possible, or as local as possible? What structures, reporting framework and roles will support that strategic intent?

Firm culture: Once the strategic intent of the firm’s approach to knowledge and knowledge management is determined, the next strategic question is around cultural context - what are the behavioural norms in relation to the creation, contribution and access to knowledge which will characterise the firm as a whole (both now, and in the future)? How are these behavioural norms to be reflected in performance measurement, appraisal and promotion systems? How open or closed is the culture of the firm in sharing work product outside immediate practice groups, and how is risk managed both in regards to access and redaction of previous work as part of knowledge stores? What is to be expected of Knowledge Partners, Practice Leaders, Professional Support Lawyers and Librarians? Is a focussed knowledge and training plan one of the elements of the Practice Leaders’ annual business planning process, and is centralised training of people in those roles to be provided?

Client access and services: The final strategic question relates to clients – specifically client access and services. What access (if any) should clients have to firm generated knowledge assets, or to client specific work product held in the firm’s knowledge repositories? What level of knowledge related services and assistance may be provided to important clients from the various arms of the firm, ranging from PSLs, to librarians, to people in technology whose knowledge may be valuable for the client in considering its own knowledge and technology initiatives. Whilst it is unlikely for most firms that this assistance will be a revenue generating activity, there are issues around internal charging models, and tracking and recording value to the client which should be addressed at a firm level. Where revenue generating products may be available, what is the governance and process by which they will be identified, funded, supported and delivered?

Each of these three strategic elements require detailed consultation with practice leaders, senior management, business development, human resources, training and risk, and is not something that the KM Steering Group can do alone. The role of the KM Steering Group is to catalyse the conversation and ensure the agenda is moved forward, and to supervise the process by which the strategy emerges, rather than to set the strategy as a group.

Implementation elements

Practice planning and support: At a firm level, the knowledge governance group need to determine what is to be required of each practice in planning and implementing knowledge strategies, and the level of support to be provided to them in undertaking that task. Whilst the strategy may be to achieve a certain level of quality, and a uniformity of approach, assistance, support and training will be required to assist dispersed practices and practice leadership. In a global law firm there is little, if any, legal knowledge that is created at an overall firm level which is relevant for all practices in all countries.

The realities of legal knowledge creation and use is that both the content strategy setting and the implementation is practice led, rather than centrally led.

The KM Steering Group cannot identify, or create the legal knowledge which will support the business plans of individual practices – there are no detailed over-arching knowledge content plans that covers all practices. However, it is critical that the firm level strategy provide clear guidance on how practices should develop a strategy for managing knowledge, the quality level that is expected to be attained, and the support which will be provided.

Technology platforms and systems: The nature of technology platforms is that consistent knowledge platforms are desirable from both an economic and ease of re-use perspective. A range of technology platform decisions are necessarily taken at a firm level, both as to platform and also key systems – it does not make sense to duplicate what are pieces of organisational knowledge infrastructure in different practices and locations. These are important decisions, but are increasingly not strategic decisions in the sense that core knowledge systems are increasingly like email systems - it is not a strategic decision whether a firm needs an email system – it is part of being in business.

The KM Steering Group is accountable for ensuring that the firm has appropriate plans in place for the core knowledge systems that are technology enabled: for enterprise search, intranet platform, and also the firm’s approaches for the tracking of key organisational knowledge including expertise, major clients, recommended law firms, major matters, contacts, awards, pitches, cvs, publications and the like.

The KM Steering Group should ensure that there is a considered approach in relation to each of the identified core firm knowledge systems, review the prioritisation of effort in proceeding through the list, and the degree of integration between the various stores. The great rate of change recently in Web 2.0 enabled systems, intranet platforms, enterprise search and rich user interfaces means that these priorities should be consciously re-examined and prioritised.

Audit and process: the final implementation element surrounds governance and audit, specifically the process by which the existence, quality, usage, and impact of key knowledge objects will be evaluated, monitored and acknowledged at the practice level, firm level and individual level. This draws heavily on both the strategic intent for the firm knowledge strategy, and the cultural work as that feeds through into processes for evaluation and management of practices and individuals. When auditing knowledge objects, this requires identification of the likely or appropriate usage levels of various of the core knowledge systems in order to be able to compare that expectation to actual usage levels with measurement and analytics embedded in various systems. How often should quality and usage levels be reviewed? An emerging issue will be who should conduct the audit process – there may be an opportunity to engage internal risk or internal audit functions to centralise these governance related activities. On those processes in particular, accounting firms are much more advanced than law firms in peer based quality reviews.

What was evident from the conference was that different firms are at very different places across these six issues, with some having made quite strong advances in response to the forces at work, and others at advanced planning stages in relation to fundamental initiatives. At the end of the day, being in the knowledge management business means being in the change business, and our sense is that the next few years will see significant change and maturing of firm’s approaches to knowledge management and greater clarity on firm and practice strategies and a stronger focus on audit and quality.

As with everything we post on KnowledgeThoughts, please feel free to add your thoughts and views to the discussion.

~Matthew

An interesting little post by Toby Ward on Enterprise intranet wikis which carries the same theme as Matthew’s presentation at KM Legal.

Toby shares one story about the usage of wikis at Cisco:

“There are tens-of-thousands of wikis… and the number of wikis about equals the number of employees (65,000)”

I can’t imagine how 2000 wikis in a 2000 person firm would make any sense at all. I struggle to see how it would make sense for Cisco.

He also quotes analyst Janus Boye, who has recently released a “Wiki in the Enterprise” report:

“Wikis often grow out of hand very quickly and consequently many employees simply ignore them. Enterprises also face the risk of an explosive information growth far beyond their capacity to manage that information”

Ooops.

So, some thoughts from an Intranet expert which are mildly concerning. However, he does mention a succesful ThoughtFarmer implementation (circa 2006) where a project manager was able to share a cost-saving technique with international colleagues to the tune of $500k. Not bad, but again:

“Currently, about 50% of Placemaking employees do not edit the intranet. 44% are occasional editors, and 6% are active participants. Although participation is high compared to internet-based social systems, Intrawest is still hoping to improve and look at new ways to get the 94% of low- or non-participators more involved.”

The usage is pretty high, but how much time should lawyers contribute? Sounds like more evidence supporting a case for careful & considered use of wiki platforms and not just for law firms.

More thoughts to come…

This presentation about Sharepoint governance provides some further insight into issues that should be considered. As with my previous links, some of the content is a bit techie, but it’s reasonably clear.

The presentation is courtesy of Sharepoint Joel, who in turn developed the presentation using ideas and resources from the Burton group.

As promised, some additional links for people, this time from Cleverworkarounds.com, a blog authored by an Australian system administrator who has written a series on why Sharepoint projects fail.

He comes at it in very much the same fashion as my presentation, but directed towards a more technical audience.

Some of his observations about Sharepoint are really worth considering. For example, he compares Sharepoint to the new security product (Active Directory) which was launched in 2000.

What was interesting about that time was that “Active Directory”
became somewhat of a buzz word, and it was marketed as the
be-all-and-end-all of life, the universe and everything…

…fast forward 8 years and we now have a ton of collective real world
experience, a set of mature best practices, and countless books on the
subject. Active Directory projects are really not that complex at all.
But back when it first came out, there was no collective expertise, and
mistakes were made.

I have been involved with a few Active Directory revamp projects over the years, and every one of them was
a project of consolidation, clean-up and simplification from the
previous attempts at it. To this day I have never been called in to increase the complexity of an Active Directory to solve business issues.
Why am I telling you all this? Quite simple really, SharePoint is
still in the hype stage, real world experience is still lacking, but
more importantly, best practices are not mature. This
is not helped by the way Microsoft and partners market the product.
Right now, that is also very similar to Active Directory in 1999-2001.

It’s a good series of articles, and required reading for your technology folks. The above exerpt piece comes from Part 4.

• Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? - Part 1
• Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? - Part 2
• Why do SharePoint Projects Fail - Part 3
• Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? Part 4

Hope it’s useful for you.

Update:

Part 5 has just been uploaded

Slides from my presentation on Sharepoint and Legal KM (subtitled “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly”) which I shared during the KM for the Legal Profession conference this week.

I ran the same session twice, with great audiences both times. Indeed, the best part of each was the discussion which followed afterwards. Many firms had stories of the challenges they faced which will hopefuly help those looking at an implementation in the future.

One of most worrying problems came from the people who had Sharepoint selected (and sometimes installed) without their input.  Staggering.

Other issues raised included:

• the complexity of an implementation was not made clear to customers
• the hidden challenges of an implementation can make your project more difficult, late and overbudget.

Of course, we also had some examples of its simplicity and success which I hope people found encouraging.

I shared some links earlier and if people find them useful, let me know and I’ll share some more.

I’ve shared some of these links in the past, but promised I’d share them during a presentation earlier today. There was a keen interest for “non-techie” resources which people could use to get more familiar with Sharepoint.

I’ve also thrown in some Information Architecture / Intranet links for good measure.

I’ll have a hunt around for further links over the next few days and share them as I come across them (the presentation should be up tomorrow. Slideshare’s giving me problems at the moment).

Hope you find these useful…

Neil

KMSpace

• Intranet Navigation
• Blogging in Sharepoint 2007
• Wikis in Sharepoint 2007
• How Bill Gates uses Office 2007 & Sharepoint

Bob Mixon

• Sharepoint 2007 - Site collections and when to use them (good example of issues to consider)
• Moss 2007 Site Navigation - Topical versus organisational

EndUserSharepoint.com

• A number of short video tutorials
  

Joel Oleson

• Sharepoint Training

No-code demonstration by Dustin Miller

• Sharepoint designer 2007 >> It’s for developers too

Microsoft Sharepoint user videos (less technical)

• Top 10 tips for Sharepoint Products and Technologies
• Tips and tricks to Get you started using Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies
• more…

Microsoft Sharepoint technet videos (more technical)

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Overview
• Overview of Microsoft Office Project Server 2007
• Benefits of Deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office System

Slides from Matthew Parsons’ talk about wikis and blogs at law firms at the Knowledge Management for the Legal Profession Conference.

Also, over the course of Matthew’s presentation, a number of tools were mentioned. Their sites are linked below for your convenience:

• Slideshare
• Youtube
• Meebo
• Confluence
• SocialText
• Sharepoint
• Wet Paint
• Mediawiki
  

If I’ve forgotten anything, please let me know. Also included is a link to the Tim O’Reilly definition of Web2.0.

Helping a firm capture and share its knowledge is the raison d’être for anybody in Legal KM. There are many tools and techniques a KM professional might use to guide a firm down this path. I’d like to share some reasons as to why blogs deserve to be one of them.

Some of those reasons are around effectiveness, which is pure techno-nerdery. I’ll try to cover those last (literary self-flagellation for writing too much about technology and not enough about benefits and outcomes).

More interestingly, I think blogs can help you develop a knowledge sharing culture.

KM culture

In my experience, most KM professionals struggle endlessly to prove their relevance to the lawyers they work for. When people get busy, KM happens ‘later’ (read: never). Of course there are exceptions, but KM tends to be the domain of the interested few. This is fairly topical KM leadership issue. The practice isn’t really dedicated to KM, at least not in a measurable way.

In David Maister’s book Strategy and the Fat Smoker, he equates this type of scenario to telling a smoker that cigarettes are bad for them (or an overweight person that a diet would be good for them).

Your lawyers and partners may know that KM is a good thing, but that won’t get them to do anything about it.

In Maister’s view, you need to do the following to change people’s behaviour:

1. Change their routines
2. Change the scorecards
3. Demonstrate leadership’s commitment
4. Establish principles
5. Get them to volunteer
6. Ask them “are you in, or out”

And so, the obvious question is, what does this have to do with blogs?

Simple, blogs can facilitate a number of these points.

For example:

Change their routines - Ask your people to write a short post whenever they finish an interest client project. Share news about the major client won by a Senior Associate. Do this for everything worth sharing. New boilerplate document, blog blog blog. Even if you don’t make the lawyer write the tool, KM partner roams the office asking for content.Change your scorecards - On big posters around the office (and on your Intranet), tally up the contributions at all levels AND tally up how valuable people find them (use ratings, page views, whatever). Conversely, have “absentees” list. Maister is big on embarrassment avoidance as a motivator. Contributions over the course of the year need to be consider during appraisal time.

Demonstrate leadership’s commitment - The KM partner needs to spend time reminding people about the importance of KM, and practice heads need to write posts of their own. Odds are a practice already have internal newsletters and deal announcements, so the copy for those can go straight into the blog.

Establish principles - I’ll probably lose a few people here. Give your lawyers a “KM allowance” & have the time spent count towards their YTD billable hours. The blog give people a simple way to contribute (see above) without having to create a new precedent or long-winded article.

For the last two, even I can’t think of how a blog can help you. Those are people issues, pure and simple. KM Systems are all about facilitation and are never the means to an end (despite my clear bias to all things techie). For a group that shares little or no knowledge in an organised way, they are cheap and cheerful.

Personally, I would focus my attention on a group blog.  Individual blogs inevitably will suffer from holidays, boredom, business, etc.  Oh, and no writing about what your cats did on the weekend.

David Maister is brilliant, plain and simple. His latest book is full of ideas which may help you on the way to KM nirvana (blog or no).

Techno-nerdery

I’ll whiz through these pretty quickly.

• Blogs are a means to produce RSS. Client news, practice news, industry news and firm news can all be rss-enabled and whisked away from the inbox
• All professionals should considering the use RSS as drastically improve one’s ability to maintain current awareness. While I worked for Linklaters, every single I showed RSS to saw it as a top KM Systems priority.
• There are tools out there which let your Outlook-living lawyers receive RSS feeds as email (by default). They don’t even have to know they’re using RSS or blogs.
• Blogs are insanely simple to setup. You can install them on a memory stick. No excuses on the technology front.

There are all sorts of techie reasons why blogs are helpful, but think hard about what you want to achieve and how you can best get your lawyers to manage their knowledge.

A while ago Column Two linked to a great article on improving Advanced Search by Stephen Turbek of Boxes and Arrows. The article talked about why people don’t use advanced search, who does use advanced search and proposes some alternate approaches including faceted searching and filtering.

I confess to being a fan of faceted search, especially as a tool for Enterprise Search.  Lawyers like it, and find it easier and faster to enter a short query, using intelligent facets to filter results. Of course, it’s best when a simple search brings back exactly what you want, but the technology is not there yet.

In some instances you need an approach for those who like to “front-load” their queries with complex criteria (information professionals & librarians tend to receive training along these lines). So for them, consider the following advice:

Define an implicit method for Boolean rules (AND and OR rules) based on normal search patterns — do not ask users to compose Boolean queries. A system that has worked for me is this: If a user selects several different search parameters, perform an AND search between them (e.g., Sony AND Portable). If they choose multiple values for the same parameter, perform an OR search (e.g., Sony OR Panasonic). However, if parameters (such as product features) are clearly non-exclusive, perform an AND search (e.g., Portable AND “HD ready”).

For simple search domains, the above approach can work well, but for more complex domains the approach can be extended. Let’s say you’re looking for a Samsung or Sony television, which must be 32 inches and HD ready (code warning).

(Brand = (Samsung or Sony)) AND (Features = (32 Inches and HD ready))

This is conceptually straightforward, and many librarians have used tools which allow these types of queries to be entered textually The challenge is to deliver an interface which allows these queries to be built point-and-click, without resorting to typed queries.

So far, the only site I’ve seen to implement this is Microsoft Live Search.

The site does allow for typed queries, but works better with a point-and-click approach. If you can come to grips with the details in the next section, this approach can be expanded to build extremely complicated queries via a simple user interface.

Underlying principles

I’ll warn you now, I’m about to go all “computer science” on you.  Run away, I understand.  If you can stand to read the rest, hopefully it provides the detail explaining how the problem might be tackled. The logic then helps to dictates the interface.

Key things to keep in mind:

• it’s ALWAYS an AND search between different types of objects eg. (make) AND (feature)
• It’s an OR search when searching for variations of the same object, you just need to get to the right level of detail (red OR blue)

Most importantly, an object can be broken into its component parts, and the above logic applies recursively (brain hurting yet?).

Let’s say, you’re looking for a bit of Tax knowhow that is specific to Energy sector clients.  It’s always an AND search, an OR search simply makes no sense.  (the entire point of search is to narrow the scope not increase it).

Would you ever really look for Tax OR Energy knowhow?  Just execute two different searches.  Isn’t that what you do with Google when you’re looking for two different things?  Forcing your developers to build a search engine that supports this is waste of time in my view.  Far better to implement a “shopping basket” interface, where you tip your knowhow into a shopping basked and checkout (i.e. print) the results when you’re done.  Just like when you get something from Amazon.

Now, that’s a simple example, but do your homework (venn diagrams help a lot), and it can scale out to some very complex searches.

From a design perspective, it means your poor developers don’t need to build an infinitely flexible user interface.  You do need to map out the taxonomy of the various knowledge assets you’re searching across and design an interface based on likely search use cases.

Hopefully the Live Search gives you a rough idea of where to start.  If you’d like to explore the idea more, send me an email or post a comment.