Enhancing institutional knowledge and preparing for AI with iManage Insight+

iManage launched Insight+ in December 2023, providing a knowledge search and management solution designed to help lawyers and other knowledge workers find the content they need quickly and confidently.

To mark a year of growth for Insight+, we will highlight current usage to improve knowledge access, several recent updates, and what's coming soon.

Knowledge, knowledge, everywhere, but where to begin?

It's an experience unfortunately all too familiar to many knowledge workers: a project commences, or new instruction is received, there’s a wealth of knowledge within the organization, but where do you find what you need? And if you know where to find it, there can be an overwhelming number of sources of internal knowledge you need to review to get started. Faced with an extensive library of documentation to search through or a roster of potential knowledge holders to engage with, or sometimes with the problem that you simply don’t know where to go, it can be a struggle to surface relevant, actionable knowledge to move the project forward.

We have been supporting knowledge workers since 1995, and in that time, we have heard countless stories from customers that show that this situation and others like it are nearly universal; if a firm deals in knowledge work, chances are its employees will run into challenges effectively finding and using its knowledge assets. For them, the solution is initially found in implementing a knowledge library or knowledge bank through a document management solution (DMS) or other generic cloud storage option.

However, we have learned through working with our customers, that those solutions present problems of their own; lacking functionality tailored toward quick and easy knowledge access, information silos and other barriers to access remain. Moreover, we have seen firsthand that such technology can introduce issues around information governance, sidelining knowledge curators and inviting version control and permissions conflicts. In the end, knowledge workers are little better off, and the same risks of a diminished pace of work, lower quality client experiences, and even threats to retention remain.

A smarter way of Making Knowledge Work™

That's the scenario iManage Insight+ was developed to solve. Insight+ introduces new ways to add valuable context to an organization's knowledge with knowledge metadata — context that makes it even easier to source the proper knowledge for the job. For instance, this context can come by way of providing structure to support tags such as document class, governing law, practice area, and so on. Insight+ was developed i n accordance with the philosophy behind the Knowledge Work Maturity Model™ and builds upon the principles that have made iManage Work a trusted resource for document management.

Enhancing an organization's knowledge does more than just make knowledge easier to find and share. Curating knowledge also builds a strong footing for the implementation of AI-based technology such as Microsoft CoPilot or iManage AI to provide meaningful responses. Insight+ has three core interfaces, each providing ways to make institutional know-how more easily accessible.

Insight+ has three core interfaces, each providing ways to make institutional know-how more easily accessible.

1. Discovery: This is where professionals use the extensive text search and filtering capabilities of Insight+ to quickly and easily find the curated knowledge they seek.
2. Curation through iManage Work 10: Here, designated teams or individuals such as knowledge managers can curate documents submitted by their end users from Work 10 and apply metadata that adds crucial context to the documents and greatly enhances users' ability to find and manage the knowledge within.
3. Configuration: Insight+ configuration takes place in the iManage Control Center, where administrators can manage submission forms, taxonomies, landing pages, information panels, and more.

Working behind the scenes in support of these capabilities is Microsoft Power Automate, which grants organizations the ability to customize curation workflows, along with iManage Knowledge Metadata , which greatly enhances users' ability to curate, tag, classify, and enrich knowledge assets.

One year on: What's new with Insight+

Since its launch, we’ve been guided by customers to ensure that our Roadmap reflects their collective needs. As a result, we have introduced several new and expanded features to Insight+ to add even greater value to the tool. What follows is a brief look at some selected additions and refinements made to Insight+ since becoming available.

Enhanced landing pages

We have improved the Insight+ Landing Pages to serve as the ‘go-to’ page for our Insight+ users when they want to quickly find their most frequently used knowledge, and knowledge that has been ‘pushed’ to them by their knowledge admins. The Landing Pages are driven by a taxonomy selected by the knowledge admins, commonly based on Practice Area or Topic.

Knowledge admins now have the capability to add bespoke links for their Practice Area, as well as customized text for the page, to cover anything from announcements, to information about how to use the resource. Admins can also configure selected filters across all pages to make it easier to find, for example, certain knowledge types or jurisdiction-specific resources.

Users can select their Practice Area landing page as their homepage, reducing clicks to high frequency knowledge. This change persists across both user sessions and browsers and allows users to access the content most relevant to their needs more quickly without additional navigation.

URLs are searchable knowledge

Not all knowledge is found in the form of a document. A lot of valuable knowledge sits behind URLs, including automated contracts, training videos and links to external resources such as Practical Law templates. Users and admins can now submit URL item types as knowledge, so that they can be curated and tagged, enabling these resources to be surfaced in the results list in Insight+.

Streamlined main page, sub-landing page, and locator navigation

New improvements to Insight+ now make it easier than ever to navigate. Now, when users select "Show all Knowledge" from the landing pages, the Knowledge Locator opens in a new tab, keeping the Landing page accessible. The iManage logo and a new home icon on the left-hand panel both direct users back to their designated home page or the default landing page if no home page is set.

Improved curation experience

The new version control increment option allows administrators to control document version increments in the Curate and Publish workflows. When workflows are configured to use controlled versioning, knowledge managers are given an option on the Knowledge Properties tab to decide when to create a new document version while curating or publishing a document or email.

A bulk submission option in Curation now supports submitting documents and emails in bulk.

And finally, there is now support for French and French Canadian in both the Insight+ and Curation interfaces.

For more information on these and other updates to Insight+, visit the iManage Help Center (login required)

What's on the horizon for Insight+?

Insight+ has seen many enhancements in its first year of availability, a trend that will continue in 2025. Additional locators are in development to provide even more ways to use stored knowledge more effectively, some working in tandem with iManage AI services to accelerate knowledge acquisition even further.

Matter Locator, for example, will introduce a way to search on matters with additional business data content, bringing law firm data warehouse integration to Insight+. Matter Locator will offer a specific search experience and dashboards which will give users new ways to find relevant matter details and take an analytical view of data related to those matters, such as client and billing information. These analytics tools will help facilitate analysis of case efficiency and document use.

Deal Locator is also on the roadmap for 2025, building an additional grounded data layer around sets related to closing documentation. Deal Locator will support integration with services like iManage Closing Folders and Work, building workflows supporting automated curation for deal-specific fields and summaries. Deal Locator will also enable users to add curated data from other data sources, such as a data warehouse. This will enable users to surface contextual deal information, such as who was involved in the transaction, when the transaction took place, how much was billed, and so on. Like Matter Locator, Deal Locator will exist as a separate tab for easy navigation.

Preparing organizations for AI

AI in business applications is increasingly prevalent, and the ever-increasing number of use cases in which AI can be embedded to introduce time- and cost-saving benefits means that the trend is here to stay. For organizations that are preparing to dip their toes into AI but are unsure if their data is sufficiently grounded for a smooth rollout, Insight+ can help them answer that affirmatively. Insight+ delivers effective tools for curating vital data sets with robust content security and governance, extended metadata fields, and relevant context to give organizations confidence that their knowledge is suitable for AI integration.

In 2025, Insight+ will be releasing its own generative AI tool, Ask Knowledge, that will form part of a hybrid search experience across the Insight+ product. Ask Knowledge provides a natural language search interface on top of a vector search capability that runs over the organization’s trusted knowledge data. It uses that data to create starting points with generative content, in response to natural language queries. Crucially it also provides the source documentation which the user can reference, to continue their research.

Insight+ has had a remarkable first year as customers around the globe begin to recognize the importance of implementing a modern, secure knowledge management system to better serve their organization’s knowledge workers and clients. As that recognition grows and as AI becomes more prominent in knowledge workflows, we believe that the business case for Insight+ will become even more pressing.

Learn more about how Insight+ is helping organizations enhance knowledge search and management and how you can prepare for successful AI implementation today.