Above and Beyond KM

It's Moving Day

2009-01-10T00:40:00.007-05:00

It's Moving Day and this blog is moving from Blogger to a new home in its own domain: AboveandBeyondKM.com.

This move has been in the works for some time. In fact, once it became clear that Above and Beyond KM was going to be an important part of my life, it began to make more sense to give it a home of its own. So I've taken the plunge and gone solo. And now, The Pleasure of Your Company is requested at the new site. Please join me over there, take a look around, and let me know what you think of the new digs.

On your way over, please remember to subscribe to updates on the new site so that we can continue the conversation. It's that conversation that has made this blog so rewarding for me. And, because of that, I want to thank you for your company on the journey thus far. It's been incredible.

Best,
Mary

[Photo credit: Oldtasty, Creative Commons license]

Take An Expansive View

2008-12-31T01:18:00.001-05:00

Knowledge managers around the world can learn a great deal from the example of the Hon. Judith S. Kaye, Chief Judge of the State of New York, whose tenure ends on December 31st. Besides being the first woman to hold the state's highest judiciary office and author of some landmark decisions, she will be remembered for her reform of the judicial system in New York. Chief among these reforms was expansion of the jury pool by eliminating the automatic exemptions that excused far too many from serving on a jury. Prior to the repeal of these exemptions, you could be excused from jury service if you were, for example, a doctor, a lawyer, an embalmer, a maker of prosthetic limbs, a wearer of prosthetic limbs, etc.

Chief Judge Kaye tells an amusing story about why expanding the jury pool was necessary: her daughter discovered that it was "a great place to meet guys." As any loving mother knows, you increase your daughter's chances of making a good match by increasing the number of potential mates in the pool (regardless of the real purpose of the pool).

What works in matchmaking works in knowledge sharing as well. The bigger the pool, the greater the available knowledge on which you can draw. Users of social media are discovering that by interacting more regularly and transparently with their social networks they are able to learn and share more than ever before. In the process, the pool grows and the participants themselves grow. Despite this reality, finding a way to bring the power of the bigger pool inside enterprises via social media tools continues to be a challenge for knowledge management.

In 2009, look for more ways to take an expansive view -- not only in how you work, but in the tools you provide that help make the pool bigger for everyone. If social computing has taught us anything, it is that this generosity is returned time and time again.

Why People Resist Change

2008-12-29T00:29:00.002-05:00

We're two-thirds of the way through the eating marathon composed of Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's Eve. And, as surely as night follows day, many of us are considering our expanding waistlines and the necessity of a diet in the New Year. Just as predictably, many of us will fail in our quest to change our eating habits and keep that weight off permanently. Similarly, in these waning days of the year, our thoughts often turn to the resolutions we plan to make on January 1 regarding the changes we know we need and the great expectations we hope to realize. Unfortunately, we likely will be as unsuccessful next year as we were this year in making radical changes.

Why is change so hard? According to a recent article in Scientific American, from our mid-twenties until our late fifties, we tend to be less open to new experiences and this makes us more resistant to change. As we face the challenges and responsibilities of adult life, our brains seem to prefer the security of stability rather than the chaos that change represents. According to Gerhard Roth,

The brain is always trying to automate things and to create habits, which it imbues with feelings of pleasure. Holding to the tried and true gives us a feeling of security, safety, and competence while at the same time reducing our fear of the future and of failure.

The final nail in the coffin of change is our tendency to have unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved. This is known as the "false hope" syndrome in which we attempt more change than is wise or possible, and then fail. No wonder most of us find it so difficult to change.

So what happens when your knowledge management program requires a change in behavior on the part of the lawyers in your law firm? You should assume that you will meet passive if not active resistance. But that doesn't give us a free pass to avoid change. Since change often is necessary, we need to plan carefully to ensure that the proposed change can be achieved. This suggests that we set reasonable goals requiring incremental (rather than radical) change and that we frame the change in a way that is least threatening to the sense of stability and security of our users.

Incremental change rarely results in banner headlines, but given what we now know about human psychology, it may be the only kind of change that is viable.

Great Canadian Content

2008-12-26T16:04:00.001-05:00

Growing up in Canada, we were the "beneficiaries" of Canadian Content, a government policy designed to ensure we had enough exposure to homegrown culture that we didn't succumb to the allure of those cultural hegemonists south of the 49th parallel. When I first moved south of the 49th, it was hard to find overtly Canadian content (although media watchers will know that there are a surprisingly large number of Canadians active in US media.) Today, however, we have access to lots of great Canadian content -- not because of government regulation, but because of the excellence of the content and the open nature of the internet.

To celebrate that excellence, our blogging colleagues in Canada have instituted the Canadian Law Blog Awards, or CLawBies. The creator of the CLawBies, Steve Matthews (the terrific Vancouver Law Librarian and founder of Stem Legal), has implemented an innovative nomination process this year with the goal of fostering "some audience sharing & link-based infrastructure between members of the Canadian law blog community."

In deciding which blogs I would nominate, I was interested to discover that in every case I read these blogs because they are consistently good rather than because they are Canadian. (The fact that they are Canadian is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.) Here are the Canadian blogs I've enjoyed in the past year:

Connie Crosby -- I read Connie's blog regularly and follow her on Twitter. Her background in law libraries and social networking gives her insight into those knowledge management issues that keep me occupied. Above all, how can you not pay attention to a great "Info Diva"?

Law21 -- Jordan Furlong's blog is a must-read for anyone thinking hard about intelligent ways to practice law. And, even if you're not, he's such a good writer that I'd recommend you read him anyhow!

Slaw -- This is a category-busting blog: a community effort that covers a wide range of legal and cultural topics. There's always something of interest and, due to the number of contributors, there is always something new.

Finally, I do want to thank Steve Matthews personally. He has been a terrific supporter of legal blogging on either side of the 49th parallel. Steve's efforts to promote individual bloggers and legal blogging generally are marked with the kind of personal generosity that makes the blawgosphere such a rewarding place for those of us interested in good conversation and community. Thanks, Steve!

Christmas Lessons and Carols

2008-12-24T09:58:00.000-05:00

One of our favorite holiday traditions is to listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King's College Cambridge. It provides a glimpse of a useful knowledge management lesson -- in this case regarding innovation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the service of lessons and carols, it is a tradition that began in 1918. It tells the story of prophecy and fulfillment, drawing on sources in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The lessons read from the Bible each year are the same ones read in 1918. What changes from year to year are the carols chosen. After each lesson, the superb King's College choir sings two different carols that are thematically related to the lesson just read. These carols draw on centuries of Christmas music and always feature some golden oldies. However, every year the choir commissions one new carol to be premiered during the service. This year, the new carol is entitled "Mary" and was composed by Dominic Muldowney.

I've written before about the value of incremental change. Not every law firm needs a revolution in order to have a great knowledge management effort. However, every law firm will benefit from knowledge managers who are constantly focused on making incremental improvements to the KM program, especially if those changes result in improvements in the way the firm delivers superior service to its clients. The key incremental change offered by King's College is the newly-commissioned carol. Commissioning a new piece of music is not something you do on the fly. It requires planning, inspiration, effort and time. It also requires the consistent excellence in delivery for which the choir of King's College is famous.

Plan for constant incremental improvements. Cast your net widely to find your inspiration and then cull those ideas until you find something truly worth the effort and time required. Next, be sure that you have staff and systems that operate at a level of excellence. With all these elements in place, your KM program and your law firm will be able to reap the benefits of constant incremental improvement.

Merry Christmas!

An Early Holiday Gift from Dennis Kennedy

2008-12-23T00:23:00.001-05:00

Our family has a strict rule (guaranteed to drive children crazy): first send the thank you note and then enjoy the gift. In this case, however, the gift arrived electronically and put an immediate smile on my face. In fact, I've been enjoying Dennis Kennedy's gift for hours and this note of thanks is a little tardy.

And what was the gift? Dennis Kennedy was kind enough to include Above and Beyond KM on his 2008 list of notable blogs, also known as Dennis Kennedy's 2008 Law-related Blogging Awards (The Blawggies). I was surprised and delighted to find myself in the company of some terrific bloggers. I invite you to spend a little time with the blawgs and blawggers Dennis called out for recognition. The list covers a wide range of law-related subjects and provides lots of thought-provoking reading.

All of this starts with Dennis, one of the pioneers of legal blogging. I was reading his writing before I even realized what a blog was. He has set a high standard not only for great content and longevity in this business but, most of all, for generosity.

So, thank you Dennis Kennedy!

With best wishes for the Holidays,
Mary

***********

And, because I couldn't resist, here's an excerpt from my post on April 15 in which I quote Dennis Kennedy:

In the inimitable words of Dennis Kennedy: "I have no doubt that Tom Mighell has mentioned many more new legal blogs than the number of blogs that have links back to his blog. He's a saint – I'm not quite that saintly." Dennis makes this observation in the course of a post entitled "What are the Most Common Mistakes a New Legal Blogger Makes," in which he reminds bloggers who are lucky enough to be mentioned by a more established blogger that they should not be delinquent in thanking the experienced blogger.

Pay Attention to People

2008-12-22T00:22:00.002-05:00

At the heart of every knowledge management effort has to be the people we hope will use and benefit from it. Yet far too often, they are not considered sufficiently in the design or implementation stage. Most of the time we plan based on our "impressions and preconceptions" of how our target audience will behave. These "impressions and preconceptions" are what we call experience, but they often block us from truly working with people as they are now, rather than how we thought they once were.

What's the corrective for this? Pay attention to people -- pay close attention. In a post about living artfully that is well worth reading as we approach the season of resolutions, Dustin Wax has the following observation about why paying attention to people pays off:

When we pay attention to people, really pay attention, it brings forth something in them that’s amazing. This is something I learned as an anthropologist – people love to tell their stories
. All they need is someone to really listen to them. And when people give you their stories, it enriches your own story.

It's those stories that allow us to match our KM program to the current needs or pain points experienced by the people we serve. It also helps prevent our deploying programs that miss the mark. Pay attention to the people first and then see how technology can help. You won't regret it.

Choosing Among 31 Flavors

2008-12-19T00:42:00.001-05:00

There is a particular kind of paralysis that can overtake a person standing in front of an ice cream shop counter, trying to choose among 31 (or more) flavors of ice cream. Sometimes you end up choosing vanilla just because it seems impossible to make a single choice from all the available options. That's how I felt when Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog asked me to send him my favorite blog posts. We're fortunate that there are so many folks who have interesting and intelligent things to say about knowledge management, social media, human behavior and all the other topics I like to follow. So nominating some for his consideration was a pleasure. But then came the difficult part: which of my own blog posts did I like the best?

(Cookies `n Cream? Heath Bar Crunch? Mint Chocolate Chip? Butter Pecan? Help!)

So here's what I did. I looked at the blog posts my readers seemed to like the most (based on site traffic reports and comments received) and then I thought about the posts I particularly enjoyed writing. Here's the list I came up with today:

Is Your KM Department Serving Fish?

The Problem with Low-Hanging Fruit

Overcoming Hurdles to Web 2.0

Is Your Knowledge Management Strategic?

Why KM Needs Good Design

KM and the Pantyhose Fallacy

Putting Blinders on to Enhance Productivity

Just One Thing

If you asked me tomorrow, I might come up with a different list. But, for today, this is my multi-scoop alternative to plain vanilla.

Be sure to check back with 3Geeks and a Law Blog. They're planning to publish today the list of all the recommended blog posts. I'm looking forward to reading them.

[photo courtesy of ulterior epicure under a Creative Commons license]

In Vino Veritas

2008-12-18T00:18:00.002-05:00

We just spent the evening at the home of friends who are in the wine importing business. As you might imagine, we didn't drink much water. There is an old proverb: "in vino veritas." It simply attests to the fact that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of wine consumed and the degree to which one can edit one's conversation. In fact, you learn the most interesting things when your companions are under the influence...

With the advent of social media, teetotalers and imbibers alike now have multiple opportunities to converse online without editing themselves. In case you have blindly assumed that it doesn't really matter how you behave online, you should know that lawyers are now beginning to think about the e-discovery implications of Twitter.

To be fair, if you've ever thought that your activities via social media are entirely private, you've been deluding yourself. Google owns your personal archive. Facebook knows who you know. And millions of folks like you are surfing in and out of your online life. Now more than ever, you need to manage your web presence like Hollywood agents manage movie stars. You no longer can limit your image to the four corners of your resume. Now, every time you hit the Web you add to the world's understanding of who you are. And your digital profile can be powerful -- particularly when it doesn't square with your resume. Be aware and be careful.

[photo courtesy of Rob Bieber under a Creative Commons License]

Shall I Tell You Where to Go?

2008-12-17T00:17:00.005-05:00

Do you know where you're going to?* That's the critical question Mark Gould asks in his recent post on social media, in which he makes the fair point that there really isn't a one-size-fits-all social media strategy. Each person and each organization has to figure it out for themselves. And it all begins with knowing what you're trying to achieve. Then you choose the tools that will get you to your goal.

That said, I know folks are always looking for the silver bullet, the one sure-fire way of achieving success. Putting to one side the fact that I don't know how you define success, let me make a suggestion: Go where the conversation is. In the brief time I've been using social media tools, I've been struck by how well they facilitate conversations that cut across status, age and geography. Above all, I've been impressed by the richness of those conversations. But don't be fooled by the fact that they can be brief, casual and, on occasion, banal. The reality is that these online conversations build relationships, and those relationships enrich your life. In fact, they can even be profitable in your professional life.

There was a time when the critical business conversations happened on the golf course or in particular private clubs. Increasingly, they are happening online. So if you want to participate, find a social media tool that works for you** and then use it to go where the conversation is.

[*When I first saw the blog title, "Do You Know Where You're Going To?" I thought Mark was joining me in my series of blog posts based on popular songs. Unfortunately, it was not the case. However, for those of you who don't mind a trip down memory lane, here's the song I had in mind.]

[**And, for those of you who have read this far, here's a small bit of advice: try using Twitter for three weeks and then let me know what you think. There are great conversations to be enjoyed there. If you wish, you can find me on Twitter using the tag @VMaryAbraham.]

Straight Talk About Social Media

2008-12-16T00:16:00.009-05:00

It's been fascinating to watch the reaction of law firms to social media. Some firms have jumped right in and experimented enthusiastically with the new tools. Others have tiptoed around the edges, exploring their options, but not really diving in. And then there are the firms that aren't going to "do it" until all their peer firms "do it," or who believe that social media doesn't offer them anything they don't already have the old-fashioned way.

For the firm that is skeptical about the usefulness of social media, here is some straight talk (not snake oil) from Kevin O'Keefe, who has been equipping law firms all over the country to participate effectively in the Web 2.0 world. When asked which three social media tools deliver the most bang for the buck, his answer is very clear: blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn.

In his typically direct fashion, here's how he describes the value of these tools:

Blogs? Got to have one. How else can you develop a central place where clients, prospective clients, and the influencers (bloggers, media, and social media hounds) pick up on your passion, philosophy, reasoning, and skill? How do you get seen when people search for info? You think I'm picking a pig in the poke by reading a lawyer profile on a website or Martindale? That's nuts.
Twitter? Single biggest learning, brand building, network expanding, and reputation enhancing tool for me this year.
...
LinkedIn? LinkedIn has won the professional social networking/directory space. The race is over. I get invites from professionals inviting me to join their network elsewhere. Other than LinkedIn and Facebook I ignore them.

So there you have it, straight talk from a man who has been at the forefront of law firm social media deployments. Now, let's hear your questions and concerns. What's holding your firm back from engaging fully with social media?

Why KM Needs Good Design

2008-12-15T00:15:00.009-05:00

If you don't believe design matters, read this post, buy a can of Altoids and reconsider. I heard a great story at lunch on Sunday of a presentation made by Claudia Kotchka, Proctor & Gamble's design and innovation maven, who explained what made Altoids great. And then, to drive the point home, showed her audience what would result if the green eye shade guys designed Altoids. Once they removed the tin (too expensive) and the paper (unnecessary), they ended up with something Claudia Kotchka calls "Proctoids." The packaging was "a box made of cheap white plastic from P&G's baby-wipe containers." Very appealing. In fact, according to one report, "[w]ith uniform beige ovals jammed into the container, fewer colors on the lid, and no paper, Proctoids taste like Altoids, but they look as appealing as a pile of horse pills." Unfortunately, people aren't as willing to pay the 400% premium for unappealing horse pills in a plastic case as they are for the pleasure they get from opening that Altoids tin.

Now, let's think about knowledge management systems as if they were P&G consumer products. What would your intranet look like if Claudia Kotchka was in charge of its design? What about your blogs and wikis? Your document management system? Not sure? Well, here's the test: Would the lawyers in your law firm pay a 400% premium to use your KM system? If not, you should consider applying Claudia Kotchka's design principles as reported by Chas Martin at Innovativeye:

1. Make it user centric through a deep understanding of user habits [and] need – physical and emotional.
2. Make it collaborative. Never work alone. There is no one right answer, so it’s not cheating to share information. A mix of skills are essential. (See Ten Faces of Innovation)
3. Challenge Mental Models. Ask different questions. The problem will look different, requiring a different type of solution.
4. Abductive. Start with prototype solution and test it. Learn backwards and logic the way to explain the result.
5. Experimental. Designers prototype with visual and tangible models. It’s easier to discuss something you can see. Prototyping starts the dialogue. It’s not the solutions, but [the] first of a continuous series [of] possible solutions. The second version can be radically different.

Good design is about problem solving, making things work better, and finding new opportunities. According to Tom Armitage, web developer at Headshift, "Design is not how it looks." A.G. Lafley, the CEO of P&G, understood this when he asked Claudia Kotchka to incorporate design into P&B's approach to business. In his words: "The goal is to transform the company from a place that's good at selling `more goop, better' into one whose products infuse delight into customers' lives."

Are your customers as happy as P&G's? If not, make sure you incorporate the principles of good design at the planning stages of any KM implementation to ensure an end-product that works beautifully and delights your users.

The Wrong Kind of Marathon

2008-12-12T00:12:00.000-05:00

Here in New York City, we know something about marathons. The NYC Marathon rightfully is famous as one of the sporting highlights of the year. It takes an enormous amount of dedication and effort on the part of participants and organizers alike to prepare for and complete this marathon.

Unfortunately, NYC also hosts another type of marathon, which occurs daily. It's the "meeting marathon." Worse still, NYC isn't the only town with this sporting event. We've all been in a meeting marathon -- the ultimate corporate test of endurance and, in some cases, sanity. Folks have responded by ignoring the discussion at the meeting and focusing instead on buzzword bingo, texting, doodling, daydreaming ... you get the picture.

I've written about meetings being the credible alternative to work. However, there are times when holding a meeting is exactly the right thing to do. For example, if you're trying to implement innovation by teamwork, a meeting will undoubtedly be necessary at some point. So what should you do? To begin with, be very sure that the person who is calling the meeting actually knows how to run a productive meeting. By this I don't mean that they can convene a meeting without chairs or use some similar gimmick. Too often, the only thing these approaches ensure is that the participants are uncomfortable. They don't necessarily result in a high-quality productive meeting.

Here are some proven techniques for delivering a productive meeting:

- set a clear time frame and stick to it -- this is useful discipline

- be sure the purpose of the meeting is publicized and understood

- realize that the very act of asking the key question changes the outcome of the discussion

- make preparatory materials available before the meeting

- identify potential issues/hurdles and try to address them before the meeting

- understand the constituencies that will be participating -- where they sit in the organization will determine where they stand on the issue you're discussing

- decide whether the goal is to air issues, test a proposal, reach a consensus or close out a discussion and then structure the meeting accordingly

- be clear whether you need a neutral facilitator or a facilitator who actual advocates for a particular position

- be sure you have a meeting facilitator who has the social skills and discipline to help move the conversation along without unnecessarily offending participants

There is no substitute for good preparation. In fact, the quality of preparation is almost always reflected in the quality of the meeting. Chances are that every meeting marathon you've ever attended lacked adequate preparation or was chaired by someone who did not have the necessary skills and focus. Thankfully, preparation, skills and focus can all be addressed and improved. There is no longer any need to waste time at meeting marathons. Insist on productivity!

[Photo courtesy of the City of New York]

What Numbers Can't Do

2008-12-11T00:11:00.002-05:00

Recently I had the interesting experience of reading survey results relating to a subject I actually knew something about. At first blush, the numbers were quite impressive. And then I read a little more closely and discovered that the presentation gave the impression of results that were better than warranted by reality. Since just the "bare numbers" had been reported, important context and nuance were lost. As a result, the story the numbers told was a little misleading.

So how do we restore context, nuance and meaning? And, more importantly, how do we help initiate needed change within our organizations? According to the folks at Anecdote, the answer lies in telling good stories and then listening properly to those stories:

Surveys and metrics can uncover trouble in an organisation, but they usually don't help you identify the reasons for dysfunctions, let alone generate the resolve to springboard people into action. Instead, learn to use stories as listening posts and tap into the emotion to spark action. From time immemorial, stories have contained collective lessons in condensed form. When gathered and examined, stories that are told in your organisation reveal important themes and patterns that in turn indicate effective solutions.

To be clear, I'm not trying to trash quantitative analysis. However, I do believe there are some things that can be communicated best by numbers and other things that can be communicated accurately only through narrative. Be very sure that when you make your choices about what to measure, how to measure and how to report the results, you choose the right tools and methods. If you cut corners here you will compromise your project and, possibly, your credibility. Why risk it?

[Thanks to Stan Garfield for pointing out the Anecdote post.]

A Place for Every Thing

2008-12-10T00:10:00.002-05:00

There is an old adage: "A place for every thing and every thing in its place." And yet, if you've ever shared space with another human being, you know how hard it can be to (i) identify that one place and (ii) get everyone to put each thing in its "proper" place. (As I write, I'm staring at a bottle of dish washing liquid that always ends up on the "wrong" side of the kitchen sink, despite my best efforts!)

So why is it we think we can do better in our law firm knowledge management programs? The reality is that people often define the "proper place" for content differently. You only have to look at the variations in social bookmarking to see this. So, for example, instead of creating a rigid top-down taxonomy that imposes a regime of a single place for each thing (and then devoting the necessary resources on enforcement), why not spend your energy creating systems that allow users to organize the content as they see fit? After all, the point is to enable their easy use of the content -- it really isn't about ensuring that they find and use that content only in particular places.

At the end of the day, the purpose of the adage of one thing/one place is to eliminate options so that that you always know where to find your keys, your wallet, your cellphone, etc. With the advanced search tools available today, we don't need to worry about this quite the same way when it comes to electronic content. So instead of enforcing a single way of doing things, meet your users where they are. I guarantee they'll be happier -- and then so will you.

Persistence Pays

2008-12-09T00:09:00.003-05:00

Persistence pays ... when applied correctly.

We all know someone who just keeps at you like a battering ram until you throw up your hands and agree to whatever they are asking. This application of persistence is not dissimilar to the modus operandi of many three-year olds. It may provide short-term benefits, but it invariably takes a toll on relationships and may well jeopardize long-term gains.

By contrast, there is the story I heard recently of how a friend of mine (a knowledge manager at another law firm) obtained the cooperation of the head of his firm's technology committee who had become a roadblock to necessary change. At issue was integrating into a single user interface the firm's intranet with an enterprise search tool. My friend made his case to the partner and asked nicely for cooperation. It was not forthcoming. So, my friend waited a while (presumably checked his own assumptions to confirm they were correct) and then went back a second time. No dice. My friend is famous for his persistence, so he went back a third time and was successful.

What made the difference? Here are my observations: It wasn't a typical battering ram approach. Rather, between the second and third visits, my friend worked on his relationship with his colleague. In a natural (not manipulative) way, he got to know his colleague better. And, his colleague got to know him better. As a result, when that third conversation occurred, each had a deeper understanding of the other's concerns and in the process put more capital in the bank of their relationship. This foundation allowed the partner to step aside and permit the proposed change, despite his own misgivings.

When seeking collaboration or cooperation, it is not enough merely to be persistent or to impose your views through sheer determination. By doing so, you undercut the very ground on which collaboration is based. Rather, take the time to establish understanding and trust with your proposed collaboration partner. We've heard time and again how critical trust is to collaboration. It's equally important for good professional relationships which, in turn, are critical to your success.

So be persistent ... at building trust. You'll reap the benefits sooner than you imagine.

Innovation is a Team Sport

2008-12-08T00:08:00.001-05:00

A recent New York Times article touted the benefits of collaborating to innovate. Debunking the myth of the lone genius who creates in solitude, the article suggests that the best innovation comes about through collaboration -- where many people and perspectives intersect to create and refine ideas. However, it isn't enough just to put a group of people in a room and ask them to brainstorm. In fact, according to the article, brainstorming is not nearly as productive as we'd like to believe. Instead of asking folks to "solve a problem" or "devise a new strategy" (favorite brainstorming topics), the better path is "systematic inventive thinking" in which the participants are asked to identify products and processes that work, break those down into their components, and then think about how those components can be put to other productive uses.

When I read this description of systematic inventive thinking, I realized that it appeared to share some of the principles of appreciative inquiry, which encourages us to build on our strengths. What a difference from the traditional approach of focusing on what does not work! (In a prior post I talked about the benefits of asking What Went Right rather than What Went Wrong?) Further, when you ask a group to focus on what's good, you stand a better chance of avoiding some of the negative dynamics that emerge in problem-solving sessions such as refusing to speak up out of fear of failure or a desire to hoard ideas.

Whether you attempt innovation in solitary confinement or through a group process, research has shown that innovation isn't a flash in the pan. According to Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company .... Just the opposite: innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.

So what would it take to build innovation into the culture of your company? Sawyer believes that even the lone genius is part of a wider web of ideas and people -- the people the genius talks to, the people who write the things the genius reads, etc. This suggests that a company that wants a robust innovation culture has to build robust social networks that facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas.

How can knowledge management help? KM knows all about social networks and social media tools. KM knows how to reduce information silos and enable information sharing. KM knows how to foster collaboration. We've often said that the whole point of knowledge management is innovation. With this focus on group genius, it's becoming clearer how the things that knowledge management does well can be deployed to build a vibrant culture of innovation within every company.

[Thanks to Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog for pointing out this article.]

Just One Thing

2008-12-05T00:05:00.005-05:00

Here is a brief recipe for sanity that should make next week better than this week. As you go through your work today, look for Just One Thing that meets any of the following criteria:

- it is a drag on your efficiency
- it does not contribute to the revenue of your firm
- it could reasonably be done more cost effectively by a colleague
- it is done more from habit than conviction

and then, eliminate it.

Rinse and repeat each business day.

If done effectively, this should remove from your plate tasks you shouldn't be doing and give you more time and energy to focus on those areas in which you really can make a difference.

The result of this exercise? Sanity.

All you have to do is begin today with Just One Thing.

Being a Cost Center in Difficult Economic Times

2008-12-04T00:04:00.001-05:00

It's budget season in many law firms. If that weren't bad enough, we're preparing budgets against the backdrop of disturbing economic news. And worst of all, most law firm knowledge management departments are cost centers. What are you going to do?

Traditionally, there have been two approaches to dealing with difficult economic times: cut costs and grow revenue. As you plan your budget for 2009, chances are you have been asked to take a serious look at your costs. In a recent APQC KM poll, 44% of respondents expected to cut their KM budgets in 2009, 35% expected to hold the line on their budget and a fortunate 22% expected a slight increase (1%-9%) in their 2009 budget.** The reality is that even holding the line requires great discipline with respect to costs, so fully 79% of the respondents will be extremely cost sensitive in 2009.

Cutting costs in knowledge management programs requires close scrutiny of your KM operations. Do you have the right mix of staff? Are your KM projects aligned with your firm's business strategy? Is each staff member engaged in the right mix of projects? And, is their work being done in the most cost effective way possible? Once you can answer yes to all of these questions, you've probably done all you can do with respect to sensible cost cutting.

If cutting costs is tough, growing the revenue of the KM department can be even tougher. It may be possible for KM staff to get involved in client billable work, but chances are that the billable work will at best account for only a small fraction of total time spent. So how about helping grow the revenue of the firm? Now we're onto something interesting. As you think about implementing KM projects that enhance fee-earning capability, first see if you can identify activities for which there is a direct line between KM efforts and revenue. (We've talked before about the challenges of KM ROI, but that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility of looking for ROI opportunities.) These opportunities can run the gamut from improving realization rates (by maximizing the value of the services rendered) to helping to develop new client services or new market share. Regardless of which revenue enhancing strategies you pursue, be sure that at the planning stage you identify appropriate metrics and methods for tracking KM's contribution to the top line. Too many successful KM programs have gone unnoticed by law firm management because knowledge managers failed to institute a reliable approach to metrics early in the life of the program.

Over the course of the next 18 months, we will be hearing stories of firms that managed (seemingly against the odds) to turn in good results. Pay particular attention to those cases where smart knowledge management made a difference. Hopefully, your firm will be one of those success stories.

(** I've reproduced the numbers faithfully, even though they add up to 101%.)

Chasing a Moving Target

2008-12-03T00:03:00.001-05:00

When I first began talking years ago about the need to consider more than technology when implementing a knowledge management program, it seemed like a good start to have my technophile friends concede that there just might possibly be elements of user behavior, business process and corporate culture that could have an impact on their roll-out of a cool new tech toy. Now, however, it's time we thought in more granular terms about corporate culture.

In a recent post on culture and knowledge management, Carl Frappaolo reminds us that culture is not static. Like many things in life, it responds and adapts to stimulus in its environment. He takes the example of current economic conditions and the impact they are having on previously happy-go-lucky Millennials who had been approaching life quite optimistically based on their relatively adversity free existence to date. Suddenly, they can't find jobs and their outlook on life changes. And, as that outlook changes, the culture of their generation changes.

Similarly, corporate culture changes as it reacts to its environment. Here's how Carl describes that process:

...the culture of a corporation can change, can move backwards if you will, if serious underlying conditions of an organization change. A culture thriving in “self actualization”, comprised of individuals that readily embrace knowledge sharing and social computing can see itself slip backwards, further down the evolution chain, should it be threatened or altered by radical change in profit, a poorly managed merger or acquisition, a change in leadership, or any such situation that alters the states of basic safety and stability.

Taking Carl's reminder to heart, it's not enough to assess your corporate culture early in your tenure and then treat it as a constant. Rather, you have to take regular readings. Are conditions around or inside your law firm shifting? Is the firm's culture shifting to respond? As we move from the years of plenty to the lean years, are people changing the way the way they work and the way they spend? Of course. So, how are you adapting your law firm knowledge management program to suit this cultural shift?

Context Matters

2008-12-02T00:02:00.002-05:00

Mark McGuinness would like you to test your perception. Take a moment to read his post, Are You Trapped in Black-and-White Thinking, and then tell me which square is darker. He uses this test to illustrate his concern about our tendency to think concretely in black and white terms -- no ambiguities, no shades of gray. In his view, this rigid approach cuts off creativity at the knees.

Spending a little time thinking about the restrictive lenses we use in daily life and how they affect our ability to think creatively is definitely a useful exercise. However, I'd also like to draw your attention to another aspect of this black/white test: Context Matters. When we saw the square surrounded by dark squares, we assumed it was lighter than it was. Equally, when we saw the square surrounded by light squares, we assumed it was darker than it was. In each case, however, the squares in question were exactly the same color. It was the immediate context of those squares that led us to perceive them differently. But, when we look at both of those squares in the context of the entire board, we get a much clearer sense of their true color.

Without getting carried away by this optical illusion, it is helpful to think about the value of context in knowledge management where there isn't always an objectively right answer. There is a lesson here for folks who think super-search is the ultimate answer to knowledge management challenges or who believe that extracting explicit knowledge and warehousing it in a KM repository is the best solution. With each of these approaches you run the risk of losing valuable context that can help the user make sound judgments about the content in question. In the language of law firm knowledge management, model document X may be the perfect precedent in situation Y and a complete disaster in situation Z. The only way you are going to know for sure is by looking at document X in context.

As you think about your approach to content, think about whether you're doing a good job of providing the context necessary to allow users to make wise decisions about the content they choose to use. Context matters.

[Thanks to ProBlogger, Darren Rowse, for pointing out Mark McGuinness' post.]

Safe Mode

2008-12-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

I spent some time this past weekend working through some problems I was having on my home computer with Mozilla Firefox. After doing a little research, I found the way through the problem by using the safe mode Mozilla provided. What a brilliant option!

We've talked often about the need to tolerate failure in order to maximize the opportunities for innovation. However, for many risk averse businesses, this prospect is too scary to contemplate much less implement. Dave Snowden draws the useful distinction between the fail-safe approach versus the safe-fail approach. The former is the favorite of anxious risk managers who don't want anything to go wrong -- ever. The latter is favored by managers who understand that innovation usually is the result of trial and error.

If we're serious about innovation, we should consider developing some safe modes of operating in which temporary changes can be tried without great risk. If we, like Mozilla, can find a way to reduce the downside of failure, then we open the door to innovation. Of course, sometimes the really great breakthroughs come about only when we take large gambles. However, until we're ready to really roll the dice, testing incremental improvements in safe mode may be a happy compromise. After all, innovation that results in improvements -- no matter how small -- moves your knowledge management program and your organization forward. The alternative is safe stagnation.

Rothko and KM

2008-11-28T00:28:00.001-05:00

Those of you who follow the art scene will know that the Tate Modern in London is hosting a celebrated exhibition of Mark Rothko paintings. Thanks to the BBC, those of us outside London can have a taste of the exhibit via a brief video tour by the sculptor, Anish Kapoor, and Sarah Montague.

The conversation and controversy surrounding this exhibit provide interesting lessons that can be applied to knowledge management. First, consider the description by Anish Kapoor of the "restricted vocabulary" with which Rothko worked. That vocabulary contained only color, a field and a foreground. In Kapoor's view, Rothko worked successfully within the constraints of that limited vocabulary to "draw on deep human emotional realities." For those of us who tend to spend our time protesting our constraints, there is an important lesson here in using our contraints to move ourselves to richer insights and more creative output. For those of us thinking about KM budgets during an economic downturn, it's worth thinking harder about how financial and staffing limitations might provide opportunities for new and innovative work. When you consider what Rothko was able to do with some black paint, you realize that we don't always push ourselves to make the best use of what we have.

The second lesson relates to the dispute as to whether some of these Rothko paintings were hung incorrectly. Critics have charged that two of the paintings in Rothko's Black on Maroon series should have been hung horizontally rather than vertically. Nonetheless, the curator and gallery are sticking by their decision to display the paintings vertically. The discussion about the "right way" to hang the paintings was a salutary reminder to me that sometimes breaking with tradition or convention can provide fresh perspective and insight. As knowledge managers, we can get caught up in the role of librarian or guardian of the canon. In fact, our primary function is not archival; rather it is to provide the resources necessary to facilitate innovation and growth. Key to that function is offering a new perspective on what our organizations know. If that means turning things on their head from time to time, so be it. The purists may protest, but if you've facilitated insight and innovation, it's worth it.

Coming full circle, if you find yourself working with severely limited resources, consider whether trying a different angle on an old KM program or resource might provide the opening you need to achieve something new or useful. Now is not the time to play it safe. Otherwise, you'll find your programs and impact shrinking faster than your budget.

Gratitude on Thanksgiving Day

2008-11-27T00:27:00.002-05:00

It's good to have a day to remember the good in life. And, it's even better when that day is a public holiday. As usual, we'll be spending the day at the home of some dear friends who happen to be phenomenal cooks and generous hosts. In addition, they have a talent for gathering a congenial group around their table. As a result, we have a great deal to look forward to and be thankful for today.

Before heading downtown to eat, drink and make merry, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the wonderful folks who read this blog from time to time. For those of you who have left comments or sent me e-mails about my posts -- I give you my heartiest thanks. A big reason for this blog was that I wanted to be part of the larger conversation that's going on about knowledge management, social media, law firms and life. Your comments help move that conversation forward in very interesting and rewarding directions. For those of you who have told me you read my blog, but haven't yet left a comment, please accept my thanks and my invitation to you to join the conversation. Jump right in -- the water is fine.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Behind Every Successful KM Effort

2008-11-26T00:26:00.005-05:00

In the November 24 edition of Newsweek there's a humorous quote:

There is no one more surprised than I -- except my husband. You know what they say: "Behind every successful woman, there is an astonished man."

These are the words of Gen. Ann Dunwoody, while speaking at a ceremony held recently in Washington, D.C. to recognize the fact that she is the first woman to achieve the rank of four-star general in the US military. Of course, she's playing with the old adage: "Behind every great man there is a great woman."

Reading her words made me wonder -- what lies behind every successful KM effort? I'd suggest vision, a collaborative firm culture and entrepreneurial knowledge managers. You also need great teamwork with IT. I'm not sure you need a lot of money or a large staff. But, then again, I've always been of the opinion that working within financial or staffing constraints often leads to game-changing innovation.

What would you add to this list?

Sending Out an SOS

2008-11-25T00:25:00.001-05:00

Help! Woman drowning!

That's increasingly my reaction as I consider the Herculean task that social networking presents to time-strapped people. It started with this blog. Then LinkedIn and a little Twitter action. Now I'm told I've got to invest in both Facebook and FriendFeed, not to mention several social bookmarking sites.

In a recent post, Chris Brogan laid out a personal social media strategy. It's filled with great tips, however, I need something more: clear guidance on how to engage with social media while still holding down a job, spending face-to-face time with family and friends, and taking care of the mundane chores of life.

If you've got some useful advice, I'd love to hear it. Just toss that life preserver in my direction soon, please.

You Get What You Measure

2008-11-24T00:24:00.002-05:00

You get what you measure. This isn't news -- first you decide what you want to achieve and then you design your metrics to let you know when you've arrived. That's good practice and it's the message of my earlier post, The Metrics Mess. Simple stuff, right? Wrong. You'd be amazed how often folks misunderstand where true success lies and, therefore, collect metrics that drive them in the wrong direction.

Let's take the example of the typical law firm. How does it define success? Profits per partner? Long-term client relationships? Employee attrition? Recruiting rates? The reality is that there are many bases on which to judge success. So, what do firms typically choose to track? Billable hours. When you track hours, you send the unmistakable signal that you are interested in time -- lots of time. After all, time spent equals money. However, where in that equation is the notion that time spent well is worth more than money? At the end of the day, you know the cost of the time spent. But, do you know the value to the firm or, more importantly, to the client?

If we defined success as delivering high-value services to clients, what would we track? If we defined success as building value within the firm as an institution, what would we track?

For law firm knowledge management, the issue of metrics is a persistent problem. We've chased various ways of trying to prove return on investment, but with little success. What should we track to show how our efforts provide value to clients and to the firm itself? Until we've conquered this challenge, we can't expect to achieve any real measure of permanence within a law firm. And, that's a problem when the economy is heading south.

Millennials and the Achievement Gap

2008-11-21T00:21:00.001-05:00

As we face the onslaught of Gen Y/Millennials in the workplace, it's wise to remember that these new employees present some special management challenges by virtue of the way they have been educated. Tom Wagner has taken a look at how children are raised and educated in the United States and his conclusions are troubling. In his book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need — and What We Can Do About It, he identifies 7 key survival skills that they appear to lack:

* Critical thinking and problem solving -- at every level in the organization, people need to be rigorous thinkers who test assumptions and don't rely on preconceived notions.
* Collaboration across networks and leading by influence -- increasingly people need the skills to lead across departmental lines by influence rather than authority.
* Agility and adaptability -- given the rate of change, today's job may not exist tomorrow. So, we need people who can learn and change, rather than relying on static technical skills.
* Initiative and entrepreneurship -- we need self-directed people who can find creative solutions to difficult problems.
* Effective oral and written communication -- without good communication skills, it's hard to collaborate, influence or lead.
* Accessing and analyzing information -- we need to be able to select and process information efficiently and effectively.
* Curiosity and Imagination -- we no longer want drones who merely carry out orders. Instead we need employees who participate creatively by adding value to both the process and the end product.

Unfortunately for the employer, you can't just rely on credentials to ensure that prospective employees have these critical skills. A good transcript from a name brand institution may simply indicate that the person in question has learned how to take tests. In Wagner's view, these new graduates may have an even bigger problem:

A senior associate from a major consulting firm told me that recent hires from Ivy League business schools were constantly asking what the right answer was — in [other] words, how to get an “A” for the job they were doing — and were not always very adept at asking the right questions, which was the single most important skill senior executives whom I interviewed identified.

As we prepare to integrate Millennial new hires, we're going to have to be very deliberate in the way we assess their mastery of the 7 survival skills and the way we coach them to improve that mastery. Equally, it would be wise to take a fresh look at the Boomer and Gen X members of your team to see if they have developed and are using these 7 survival skills. The success of your organization depends on it.

The Metrics Mess

2008-11-20T00:20:00.005-05:00

I recently saw the perfect illustration of how we can get ourselves completely tangled up in unproductive activity by measuring the wrong thing. In this case, it was someone on Twitter who thought they had hit the jackpot because they had hundreds of followers. Further, this person was offering advice on how to increase the number of followers his readers had. This struck me as misguided at best. To be honest, there are folks I follow whom I'm sure don't realize I exist. Equally, there are folks who follow me, but I'm largely oblivious to them because our paths don't cross very often. So the numbers alone don't tell the whole story and may, in fact, tell a misleading story.

The real issue isn't size of following as much as it is scope of impact. How many of these folks are really paying attention to you? How many do you actually affect? Unless you know this, you don't have a good understanding of your interaction with Twitter. Admittedly, there are Twitter stars whom everyone likes to follow. And, assuming we follow because of their established reputations, we're more likely to pay attention to what those Twitter stars say. For the rest of us in the Twitter mob, however, the number of our followers is a poor (and possibly inaccurate) proxy for our impact.

Coming back to law firm knowledge management, take a moment to consider whether your efforts to measure the wrong thing are leading you into unproductive activity. Don't focus on bulk -- focus on impact. For example, counting how many times a particular document is opened via your portal or document management system may be interesting but not helpful. What you really want to know is how many times was it opened and actually used? And, how often was it exactly the thing the user was searching for? In the latter two cases, you learn much more about the quality of your content and the quality of your search engine.

Consider the following: a document was opened 10 times and used each time, but then opened 20 times and discarded because it was not on point. For someone looking at bulk alone, they'd say, the document was opened 30 times, declare victory and go home. However, someone measuring impact would say it was used 10 times not 3o, and then would ask why. When you ask that question you create the possibility of learning and insight. That's when you know you're on the path to using metrics intelligently.

[permission to use granted under a creative commons license]

KM vs Social Media: Give Peace a Chance

2008-11-19T00:54:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago the blogosphere was hopping in response to the KM vs SM generational war piece Venkatesh Rao launched on an unsuspecting world. I responded at the time that declaration of war was first published, as did other thoughtful folks. Now Venkat's piece has been republished in Social Computing Magazine, alongside Jeff Kelly's rebuttal.

Jeff argues that while some resistance to change is inevitable among human beings, it is unfair to characterize all knowledge managers as resistant to change. In Jeff's personal experience, there are "many more eager adopters than resistant dinosaurs." In fact, many knowledge managers I know have been excited and energized by the possibilities for KM offered by social media. To be honest, much of the resistance to social media that I've observed lately has been exhibited by managers who were skeptical about KM in the first place. This isn't so much about age as it is about outlook and experience.

I'm inclined to agree with Jeff that there is much more constructive peace than destructive war between the generations on this issue. His prognosis of the current situation rings true:

Our technology and society will continue to evolve; people will continue to be resistant to (but finally adapt to) change; youth will continue to disdain their elders until they become tempered by wisdom; and the opportunities to learn and prosper will continue to grow for those wise enough to do so.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Welcoming the Millennials

2008-11-18T00:18:00.000-05:00

At some point, most of us realize that fighting the tide is an exercise in futility. The wise among us look for ways to work with and harness the tide. In that spirit, I offer this post on why law firm knowledge management should welcome the Millennials. However, this is NOT about the technological improvements many KM folks have been hoping Millennials will force on our firms. This is about more fundamental improvements in the way we operate.

If reports about Millennials are correct, they are a group of people focused on and motivated by issues and goals that are quite different from those of Gen X and Boomer employees. The latter two groups could be managed by dangling the brass ring in front of them and then reinforcing performance through a strong command and control structure. The boss made the decisions and the Gen X and Boomer employees executed those decisions. Simple and straightforward. By contrast, Millennials are looking for something other than the brass ring. They want opportunities for learning and growth. They want to engage in projects and activities that are personally meaningful. And, they want to maintain a reasonable perspective on work -- as children of workaholics, they want a life with better balance.

What's so crazy about their aspirations? Perhaps the truth is that we're just jealous.

The challenge for Gen X and Boomer knowledge managers is to harness this Millennial energy in a constructive way as Millennial aspirations and methods come up against established ways of doing things. Rather than forcing them into existing rigid structures, consider how a focus on growth and learning might change for the good the types of projects we tackle and the way we carry them out. By giving every member of the staff an opportunity to contribute creatively to the work of your knowledge management department you elevate them from mere worker bees to co-creators and, in one fell swoop, you finally achieve intellectual and creative leverage (which is the basis of any successful law firm).

In making these recommendations, I don't mean to minimize the stress this approach will place on traditional or authoritarian knowledge managers who know what they know and are just looking for employees who will carry out assigned tasks with minimum fuss and maximum efficiency. This is a warning that managers like that will soon be facing a supply problem -- they may find it difficult to find Millennials willing to work on these terms. Then those managers have the choice of either fighting the tide or surfing it. It will be interesting to see what they choose.

Just the Way You Are

2008-11-17T00:31:00.001-05:00

For those of my readers who were secretly hoping that I'd lose interest over the weekend in my current fascination with popular music and management, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I was getting ready to stop and then I discovered that Billy Joel is not only a philosopher, but a pragmatic one. His song, Just the Way You Are, is viewed by the more romantic among us as an extraordinary statement of the complete acceptance many hope to find in a relationship. For those of us more pragmatically minded, we realize that he is just stating the obvious: it's really hard to get a person to change -- so you might as well get along with what you've got.

While optimism and a deep belief in the perfectibility of humankind are an important part of the culture of the United States, it would be foolish to base a knowledge management department or KM program solely on the hope that folks will change. There are some fundamental elements of human nature that simply can't be undone, although they may be tweaked around the edges. For law firm knowledge managers, understanding the basic personality type of lawyers is an important prerequisite to organizing a law firm knowledge management program that has a prayer of succeeding. For all knowledge managers, understanding the patterns of behavior in your employees and users will allow you to be much more effective.

So, let's return to the prior discussions about the importance of recruiting the right people to your team, really knowing the people who work with you (their values, strengths and weaknesses), and then deploying them strategically so that they achieve their highest and best. If we take Billy Joel's song to heart, getting the recruiting right is critical. By hiring people who have the right values for your team and demonstrate the ability to think critically, work creatively, learn and grow, you free yourself to pursue an ambitious knowledge management program without having to waste precious time in the nearly futile task of trying to change their fundamentals.

Understand early who they are and then take them "just the way they are."

Hop off the bus, Gus.

2008-11-14T01:15:00.010-05:00

I really didn't intend to write a series on management skills and popular songs but, after yesterday's reference to "Love the One You're With" by Crosby, Stills & Nash, here we are today with staffing issues again and Paul Simon's classic "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."*

The impetus for the journey from one song to the next came from some thoughtful reactions to yesterday's post that I received in the form of blog comments and some sidebar e-mail conversations. The folks who wrote to me pointed out that sometimes there simply is a mismatch between the employee and the needs of the law firm and, in these instances, you really have to part company with that employee for the firm's sake and theirs. They are right about this. However, before things get to this state it's important to be sure that you've really taken the measure of the person in question.

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins makes an interesting observation about the importance of staffing:

We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats -- and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage "People are your most important asset" turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

Why this focus on people? According to Collins,

First, if you begin with "who," rather than "what," you can more easily adapt to a changing world. ...Second, if you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. ...Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won't have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Interestingly, in separating the right folks from the ones that don't measure up, his research indicated that skills were not necessarily the deciding factor:

...the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience. Not that specific knowledge or skills are unimportant, but they viewed these traits as more teachable (or at least learnable), whereas they believed dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values are more ingrained.

So coming full circle to yesterday's discussion, spend the time you need to be sure that you understand the employee in question -- their character, values, motivations, knowledge and skills -- and then see if they meet the demands of being a part of an A+ team, regardless of the tasks to be tackled. If they have the necessary fundamentals, invest in them. This may mean moving them around the bus a little until you have them in the right seat. If they don't have those fundamentals, get them off the bus.

*For those of you who are really paying attention, let me apologize for misquoting Paul Simon in my title. The actual lyrics of the refrain are as follows:

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

Love the One You're With

2008-11-13T00:13:00.003-05:00

Two stories this week from senior managers I know made me think again about the responsibilities of managers with respect to their staff. In the first case, the manager was a senior executive in a financial firm. He said he was struggling with what to do with certain members of his staff who "would never meet their career objectives." The problem was that while he might have fired them in better economic times, secure in the knowledge that they could most likely find work in a less challenging firm, he was equally sure that these folks would not be able to find work easily given current economic conditions. Add to that the fact that his firm has a strong culture that emphasizes the "firm as family" and you have a difficult managerial challenge.

The second story comes from a manager who felt that his staff was stretched, exhausted and needed assistance. However, when he made his request for additional staffing, he was told that his company was in a cost-cutting mode and there could not be any additions to headcount in his department.

What's a manager to do?

When assessing how well your staff members are performing and whether they are able to operate at their highest and best level, consider your role as manager. Two qualities that set an excellent manager apart from the herd are (i) the ability to understand what talents and abilities each member of staff has and (ii) the ability to provide a framework that allows that staff member to utilize those talents and abilities to the utmost degree to the benefit of the firm. Adherents of the strengths-based approach to staffing and management will tell you that encouraging folks to build on their strengths and successes rather than focusing primarily on their shortfalls inevitably results in higher performance for the group overall.

In the case of the manager with the under performing staff member, consider whether they are not meeting expectations because you've set the wrong expectations. In other words, is their under performance because they haven't been given the opportunity to set goals and work in an area in which they have demonstrated talents and abilities? (E.g., I can practice 8 hours each day with all the determination in the world, but because I don't have the necessary innate ability, I will never play baseball as well as Derek Jeter. If recruited to the Yankees, I would never "meet my career goals.") In the case of the second manager with the exhausted staff, consider how much effort your existing staff members must expend to get things done. Are they working in their areas of strength or struggling in areas for which they are ill-equipped. Asking your staff to do things for which they don't have natural talents or abilities requires them to spend additional time and energy to get up to speed and overcome their own hard-wiring. Sure they can do it, but at what cost? Contrast that with the speed and ease with which people are able to do the things for which they are hard-wired. (E.g., with enough training and perseverance, any educated person should be able to read an actuarial formula -- but never as easily as someone who is naturally highly numerate and enjoys that strange language actuaries speak.) With a reasonably diligent staff, they will try hard to get the job done, but it will take longer and be more painful than if they had the necessary talents and abilities. As a result, they will be perpetually over-stretched, unable to complete all the work, and your department as a whole will under perform.

So what's the take away from all of this? In these hard economic times managers have a greater responsibility to ensure that they are deploying their staff in a way that takes the best possible advantage of the unique talents and skills these folks bring to work. This approach maximizes the probability of high performance and high morale. Don't waste time thinking about how you could replace these employees. Except in special circumstances, you won't be allowed to spend the necessary funds to recruit and train someone new -- assuming, of course, you're even allowed to hire.

So, in the words of Crosby, Stills & Nash, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

[Here's a link to hear a recording of the entire song: Love the One You're With, Crosby, Stills & Nash]

Aspiring to KM Geekdom

2008-11-12T00:12:00.001-05:00

While I don't have a snowball's chance in any place warm of ever achieving geekdom, I couldn't resist testing my abilities against Gizmodo's The 50 Skills Every Geek Should Have. I flunked -- but I'm not too worried. In fact, I suspect that I'm in pretty good company.

That said, I do sometimes wonder what a comparable list for knowledge managers would contain. To do our work well, we need a strange mix of technical and people skills, as well as substantive legal knowledge if you're working in the world of law firms, for example. So here's my first stab at a list for knowledge management -- in no particular order:

1. Superior listening skills
2. Empathy
3. The ability to translate from user speak to "geek speek"
4. Skills in organizing chaos
5. Analytical ability
6. Superior persuasive writing and speaking skills
7. No tendency to technophobia
8. Deep knowledge of human nature
9. Openmindedness
10. A willingness to plan cooperatively via an iterative process rather than imposing solutions
11. Basic kindergarten competence (i.e., plays nicely with others, doesn't run with scissors, etc.)
12. Ability to build strong and productive teams
13. Creativity
14. An understanding of database configuration and functionality
15. An understanding of social computing
16. An understanding of law firm (or your industry's) economics
17. ?

What would you add? What would you omit? Why?

Creating a Great KM Department of One

2008-11-11T00:11:00.002-05:00

In my earlier post, Is Your KM Department Selling Fish, I asked what a great knowledge management department staffed by only one person would look like. This is not a purely academic exercise. To begin with, every member of your staff has to be willing to step up as if they are the only ones responsible for the productivity of your department. But beyond this, I wanted to encourage us to think in more organic terms about what we are and what we can be.

Every acorn holds the potential of a giant oak. What sort of acorn are you? What sort of oak tree will you produce?

Is Your KM Department Serving Fish?

2008-11-10T00:10:00.002-05:00

Have you ever heard an administrator say that their department could fulfill its mission without additions to headcount? Yet in this economy, more and more administrators are going to be told that they must meet their institutional obligations with a smaller staff. Before we let panic overtake us, let's spend a moment thinking about the wonderful opportunity this mandate presents. Necessity drives us to think critically about our mission, how we've chosen to tackle it and how we've chosen to staff it. In these last few years of feasting, many have become bloated. Now we have to rethink our approach.

Rather than thinking small, let's blow up the model and start again. What would you do if you could afford only a knowledge management department of one? What would you have that person do? Suddenly, routine chores that consume so much time and effort are much less justifiable. Equally, expending energy on projects that benefit relatively few is short-sighted. So, for example, instead of grinding away at database maintenance chores of marginal value what high-impact project would you tackle? In the context of law firm knowledge management, drafting a model document that might be used occasionally by a relatively small group of lawyers becomes less compelling. So does working on a lawyer's pet technology project, unless the resulting opportunity cost is one the firm is prepared to tolerate. Instead, spending time to train lawyers to filter and organize the flood of information that comes to their computers daily so that they and their colleagues can find this material efficiently makes much more sense. So does giving them centrally-accessible places to store and exchange the tribal lore that sets the great law firms apart from their competitors. In each case, you make individual lawyers self-reliant and leverage the efforts of one to benefit many.

In the language of economic development, this is about teaching people to fish so that they can sustain themselves over the long-term rather than handing them fish for a single meal. In the days of plenty, we could afford a large knowledge management staff to find the fish and serve it to hungry lawyers. Things have changed now and everyone will have to know how to do their own fishing. Are you and your firm prepared for this?

Ask and You Shall Receive via Enterprise Microblogging

2008-11-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

A lot of electronic ink has been spilled on the possibility of adapting microblogging technology for use behind the firewall. As with other social media tools, the ability of many to imagine enterprise uses for microblogging (or microsharing or microlearning) has been constrained by their encounters with the microblogging tools some of us have learned to love in our leisure hours such as Twitter. A casual visitor to Twitter sees lots of social interchanges and some downright inane ones, and wonders in their skepticism if this is a plague that should be inflicted on their law firm. (Included in the mix is plenty of useful work-related information, as well as recommendations for reading** and for life, but a casual observer may not notice those right away.) Others will say, given the existing worries about of information overload, we should not add to the pressure by exposing law firm employees to loads of trivia.

As with most things, we know what we know and don't know what we don't know.

For those of us in need of having our vision expanded a little on this topic, I'd recommend you take a look at a terrific piece in Fast Company by Marcia Conner entitled Enterprise Micro-Learning. In it she provides lots of examples of how these tools could improve social conditions and business productivity within an enterprise. For knowledge management folks, there is a gem in that article that is worth thinking about a little further:

Too frequently organizational knowledge-sharing mirrors the news-cycle society around us, in which we share the highs and lows, ignoring the ordinary stuff in the middle. It's in that middle ground people make sense of the work done around them, understand how we can play a part to help fulfill the vision, and know where we can turn to find the help we need. It's the middle stuff that's truly interesting and helps us connect with one another.

She is absolutely right. For many, law firm knowledge management is about capturing and sharing the "high value items" such best practices and models. In most cases, we don't have the time or tools to handle the items from any other part of the spectrum and allow requests for those to clutter e-mail or go unfulfilled. Yet, it is those requests for the "ordinary stuff" that actually allow folks within the law firm to work more easily and productively. Enterprise microblogging could fill this need.

And what about the information overload issue? To begin with, unlike e-mail, the user can choose with laser-like precision from whom they would like to hear (or "follow" in Twitter speak). So, you get to put together your own cabinet of advisers: perhaps the partner from the capital markets (or bankruptcy) practice to shed light on current economic conditions + the savvy junior associate who is completely plugged in + the person who makes great recommendations regarding what's good to eat in the law firm cafeteria. In addition, there are technologies emerging (such as TweetDeck) to help you filter what could be a constant stream of inputs. With these tools, you can decide whom you'd like to follow and how you'd like to group those folks. So each user could create, for example, a practice-focused group, a client or matter focused group, an economy alert group, a firms news group (including your cafeteria advisor), a collection of lawyers in your affinity group, etc. With this structure in place, you could then follow at any particular time the group that is most pertinent for your work or life.

Microblogging presents lots of possibilities for productivity and for building community within your law firm. Don't make the mistake of discounting this technology just because you haven't yet had an opportunity to broaden your experience and vision with social media tools.

[**I discovered Marcia Conner's article through a tweet by noted social media industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang.]

Another Reason to Resist Change

2008-11-07T00:35:00.004-05:00

In a recent post in the Forrester blog, Tim Walters discusses some of the reasons why IT (and knowledge management) folks cling to their top-down one-size-fits-all approach and resist the drive to enable personalization of their offerings. He clearly finds this frustrating since, in his view, personalization is now a matter of "Thurvival".** Unfortunately, the folks resistant to change have a new compelling excuse to hide behind. Here's how he paraphrases it:

It’s the economy, stupid. The trouble with a trial and error approach to personalization is that it harbors the possibility (and probably guarantees the occurrence) of error – and error is an expense that, at this juncture, we’d best avoid. For now, let’s stick with what we know works, and we’ll indulge in experimentation when our corporate head is back above the surface of the water.

So now it's the state of economy that gives them license to cling to the Pantyhose Fallacy. Yet, in Walters' view, taking the one-size-fits-all approach ensures that your site "will be really relevant and engaging for almost no one. " That's quite an accomplishment.

In light of this, it appears that we have two options. We can either sit tight and hope to weather the economic storm without daring to risk anything in the short-term or we can take a radically different approach in which we permit a few short-term risks in order to gain some significant long-term benefits. Tim Walters definitely favors the latter approach:

...now is the time to make selective, small scale investments in personalization tools and skills. Yes, your experiments will produce errors, and the effect will probably not be as favorable as your “sure bets.” But in addition to whatever financial benefits you achieve, you’re building up a knowledge base, intellectual capital, and competitive advantages that will be extremely valuable later.

So what are you going to do? Make a smart short-term investment (at the price of a few managed errors) or hide behind the economy as a reason to resist change?

** According to Tim Walters, "Survival during the downturn + Ability to thrive afterwards = Thurvival."

When People Care...

2008-11-05T01:10:00.000-05:00

...they participate.

We've seen extraordinary voter turnout in this election. What caused these voters to break through their apathy and actually participate in record numbers? They cared.

There's a lesson here for knowledge management. You don't need incentives. (Not even the free coffee one vendor offered to all voters... and then all customers.) You just need to give folks a reason to care. We saw that on November 4, 2008 in the United States. How will you do that in your law firm?

The Mysteries of Human Behavior

2008-11-05T00:05:00.001-05:00

Let me introduce you to My Little Pony Scootaloo. According to the manufacturer, "SCOOTALOO pony loves to play games and be outside. She’s always on the go to meet and play outdoors with all her pony friends!" The suggested retail price for this toy is US$4.99.

To be honest, My Little Pony is not something I've spent any time thinking about before, but last Saturday night I couldn't avoid thinking about it as I watched a My Little Pony toy just like the one pictured get auctioned to the audience at the current Broadway revival of Equus. After the curtain call, the cast asked the audience to bid on the toy in order to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. By the time the bidding ended, they had raised US$800. That's impressive considering the prize normally sold for US$4.99.

What accounts for this incredible increase? You can find chapter and verse online about the psychology of auctions. Were the folks who bid on the toy completely irrational? Some (like Seth Godin) would say yes. However, that isn't the complete answer. What I observed that evening was an audience that got caught up in the excitement of the show, the unscripted interaction with the cast, and the perceived value of the prize. It should be noted that the perceived value likely had less to do with the great work Broadway Care/Equity Fights AIDS does and more to do with the fact that members of the cast (including Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame, Richard Griffiths (History Boys) and Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek: Voyager)) had autographed the toy.

People don't always act rationally. However, people do tend to react predictably -- if you know enough about human nature. When implementing a knowledge management program don't assume that people will always do the right thing or even the sensible thing. People usually just do the thing they've always done. But they can be swayed by powerful countervailing forces. So while you're drawing up your neat, logical plans on paper, make sure you spend a little time thinking about human psychology, documented user behavior, and key elements of your law firm's organizational culture. That way you can plan for the way the very real people in your law firm are most likely to react. And, if a countervailing force is needed, you can dedicate the necessary time and effort to arranging it. To be clear, this is less about offering incentives (which according to many do not work), than it is a warning that perfect paper plans that assume rational user behavior rarely result in flawless implementations. Above all, you need to account for the messy and sometimes mysterious behavior of the users you are trying to help.

Go Vote

2008-11-04T00:04:00.003-05:00

Unless you've been under a rock these last few months, you'll know that today is Election Day in the United States. Go vote as if your life depended on it. Voter apathy diminishes a country that holds itself out as a defender of democracy.

Given the importance of this election, I suspect very little but the most essential billable work will be completed in law firms across the country. There will be time enough tomorrow to worry about that and about knowledge management. For today, use your web 2.0 tools and your social networks to ensure that the election is free and fair and to encourage your friends and family to exercise their rights as citizens. Do your part. Go vote.

Our Social Media Romance

2008-11-03T00:46:00.001-05:00

Every so often, the rhetoric gets so heated that you might be forgiven for thinking you were reading a romance novel where the swashbuckling hero is a web 2.0 tool. Far too many consultants, vendors and KM bloggers have become so enthused with the potential of social media that they seem to be viewing it through a vaseline-coated lens.

However, at some point even the biggest romance novel fan has to acknowledge the differences between fictional romances and the gritty reality of a relationship -- dirty socks and all. And now, it appears that we've arrived at that point courtesy of two recent reports on web 2.0. The first is the McKinsey Global Survey on Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise in which we learn that

... after an initial period of promise and trial, companies are coming to understand the difficulty of realizing some of Web 2.0’s benefits. Only 21 percent of the respondents say they are satisfied overall with Web 2.0 tools, while 22 percent voice clear dissatisfaction. Further, some disappointed companies have stopped using certain technologies altogether.

If that isn't a sufficiently shocking piece of reality, take a look at the recent Gartner report on the failure of social software projects:

...many IT organizations fall into the trap of following "worst practice," installing social software in the expectation that productive communities will emerge spontaneously. Gartner's discussions with clients suggest that the "install and they will come" practice rarely succeeds; about 70 percent of the community typically fails to coalesce. Furthermore, of the 30 percent of the communities that do emerge, many revolve around interactions that planners didn't envision, that don't provide business value and that may even be counterproductive.

Now that reality has intruded on romance, what should we do? Gartner suggests that we pay more attention to ensuring that the right social communities exist (or are formed) to support the use of the software. In Gartner's view, the right social community will have a well-defined purpose, which should be front and center when designing the implementation of web 2.0 tools for that community. According to Gartner, there are seven characteristics of a well-defined purpose and, by extension, a successful social software implementation:

- Magnetic -- draws people in, explains "what's in it for me"
- Aligned -- with the business
- Low Risk
- Properly Scoped -- start with minimal scope and then scale up as warranted by the community
- Facilitates Evolution -- the purpose selected must be one that can be built on as scope broadens
- Measurable -- the business and community value should be measurable
- Community Driven -- the value must come from the community

Lest you think all is doom and gloom, the McKinsey report does contain some good news. Notably, the firms that have implemented social media tools successfully are discovering that they are able to increase their use of these tools, and leverage them to change their own management practices and organizational structures in fundamental ways.

So a relationship with Web 2.0 is possible, as long as you keep your feet firmly on the ground.

Ask a Simple Question

2008-11-01T00:36:00.000-04:00

It all started with some folks in Australia that I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting: Laurel Papworth, Kate Carruthers and James Dellow. Each of them asked a simple question: How do you decide how/what/when to blog? James tagged Samuel Driessen, John Tropea and Jack Vinson. And then Samuel tagged me.

So how do I decide how/what/when to blog?

The HOW of blogging is relatively easy -- at my iMac with a cup of something caffeinated nearby; multiple drafts until I get the content and tone right; and then a firedrill as I publish, discover the inevitable typo, fix it and republish.

The WHEN of blogging used to be early in the morning. However, as I've discovered more readers in other time zones, I've learned it makes more sense to write and publish at night. This means that by the time I've poured my morning cup of caffeine, my friends and readers elsewhere have left comments on my blog to continue the conversation. It's a great way to start the day.

Closely related to WHEN is HOW OFTEN I blog. Over time, I've steadily built up the pace of my blogging from once or twice each week to once each weekday. Since I don't blog from the office, posting multiple times during the day really isn't practical. To be honest, publishing even once each weekday is pretty demanding and I don't know if it is truly sustainable over the long term. Time will tell.

WHAT I blog about is really the hardest question to answer. I started out with a fairly clear focus: dealing with the non-technology elements of knowledge management that often end up being overlooked, even though they are so critical to KM success. What I soon discovered is that this focus encompasses a fairly wide territory. Deciding which section of that territory to explore on any given day is largely dictated by chance: What did I read or hear that sparked my curiosity? What have I been thinking about that could benefit from the rigor of writing? What issue has been troubling me and won't give me peace until I've wrestled with it in writing? What question would I like to put into the blogosphere in order to have the benefit of the many thoughtful points of view provided by my favorite bloggers?

While I draw on my own experience and the experience of friends and colleagues, I tend not to blog about the personal. And, despite the considerable temptations provided by the US election cycle, I've refrained from discussing politics and religion. Money and gender do come up from time to time, but I'm only human.

And, while I'm doing this, I try to stay true to myself. A dear family friend recently told me that my blog posts sounded so much like me that reading my blog was like having a conversation with me. I was pleased to hear this since it has always seemed to me that authenticity of tone is critical in the blogosphere where so many of our relationships are virtual.

Enough about me. Who is next?

Early in October, I had the great pleasure of serving on a terrific panel on the topic of Blogging as Knowledge Management. Doug Cornelius convened the group and the other panelists were Bill Ives and Jack Vinson. Jack has already participated in this meme, so I'd like to draw in Doug and Bill and ask them to answer the question. In addition, I'd like to tag some bloggers I haven't yet been fortunate enough to meet in person, but whose posts I always read. They never fail to be thoughtful and thought-provoking. So, here are the bloggers to whom I'd like to issue an invitation to participate:

Doug Cornelius (KM Space)
Jordan Furlong (Law21)
Mark Gould (Enlightened Tradition)
Bill Ives (Portals and KM)
Patrick Lambe (Green Chameleon)

Thanks, Samuel, for providing today's blog post topic. All I've been able to do is offer a provisional answer. I expect it's something I'll come back to and answer differently from time to time.

Scary Times for IT

2008-10-31T00:31:00.004-04:00

In honor of Halloween, I thought we might take this opportunity to scare our information technology colleagues, as well as those knowledge management folks who have been unable to rise above and beyond technology. Let's start with an interesting piece by Susan Cramm entitled IT Project Funding: Less is More. In it she confronts the reality that IT budgets are likely to be slashed during the downturn, and proposes a new way of working in face of this reality. She suggests that the old "boil the ocean" approach of grand projects based on years of painful analysis is not going to cut it any more -- especially in light of her assertion that while "only 1/3 of IT-enabled business initiatives deliver as planned, project success declines dramatically as project size increases."

Continuing with her theme that bigger is not necessarily better, she recommends the following alternative approach:

Given that only about 20% of applications functionality is typically used (and which 20% is unpredictable), it's impossible to figure it all out in advance. The key to bringing the future forward is getting tools in the hands of the users as quickly as possible. If they use them, you are on the right track. If they don't, find out why and give it another go.

This stumbling and bumbling, learn-by-doing approach may seem a little chaotic, but it's reflective of how organizations, and people, change and grow. Mistakes will be made, but it's better to make a series of small mistakes and mid-course corrections, than it is to make one huge, multi-million dollar mistake from which there is no way to recover.

Without a doubt, this approach will be infinitely more successful if you have the kind of corporate culture I described yesterday in my post When Failure is Fine. However, even if you don't yet have that culture, take advantage of the constraints imposed by the economy to manage and change the expectations of your users. Since your law firm is unlikely to set aside unlimited funds for a large technology or knowledge management project, dial down expectations and ask your users to join you in a journey through the land of perpetual beta. They trade the possibility of perfection (which rarely is realized) for the actuality of functional and timely technology. Even the most demanding users will come to realize that having the technology in use is better than having unfulfilled paper plans.

Being a kind and generous person, let me offer a treat to offset the trickiness of the fast-delivery approach advocated by Cramm. She recommends that you have the following in place if you wish to maximize your chances of delivering the right technology quickly:

Executive leadership: Don't confuse sponsorship with leadership. Sponsors show up at steering committee meetings when invited, leaders demonstrate passion and commitment by showing up in cubicles and conference rooms uninvited
Clear definition of success: Use process measurements that impact financial performance and baseline them at the start of the project
Predefined kill switch: Take the emotion out of the decision making process by defining what defines failure, so that the project can fail fast and be restarted when conditions are more favorable
Small, experienced team: Wait to start your project until you have a seasoned project manager supported by a small team (less than 12) of full time, subject matter experts
Laser sharp focus on critical requirements: Avoid defining requirements by committee by using the success measurements to manage scope
Respect for the future and the past: Factor in the implications of existing business and technology plans while accelerating progress by leveraging legacy systems and existing infrastructure

There you have it -- a cautionary tale for Halloween. Scary times are ahead, but a willingness to adapt (together with some nimble footwork) should allow you to make useful advances with respect to your firm's technology despite the economy. In the process, you'll shed the tendency for bloated IT and knowledge management projects, and adopt a sleeker, streamlined approach that is more in keeping with the times.

When Failure is Fine

2008-10-30T00:30:00.000-04:00

Every so often, we're fortunate enough to hear about an organization that has mastered the art of innovation. In the arena of social media, Best Buy is getting a reputation for innovation and success. This week I learned about an extraordinary feature of Best Buy's corporate culture when I read Cam Gross' blog post regarding their implementation of Mix, which he described as "a start-up offering a mashup of email, SMS and Twitter-like functionality. " When I wrote about Mix in an earlier post, I was impressed by their repeated attempts to broaden the conversation among Best Buy's employees. Given their success with Blue Shirt Nation, I assumed that they ultimately would be successful with Mix. (Blame the lawyer in me for relying excessively on precedent.) What I didn't fully understand was that, apart from their prior achievements, they had one of the most critical ingredients necessary for success. Here's how Cam Gross describes it:

We have had almost zero conversation about Mix outside of the development group. When the article by Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) came out ... word traveled inside Best Buy Corporate. A couple of departments have already raised their hands anxious to test/sample Mix. You just can't beat having an environment where people want to try and are OK with "fail" as long as something is learned. [emphasis added]

Now, be honest. When was the last time you heard someone say that about your company?

We talked earlier about the value of mistakes when pursuing growth and innovation, and Dave Snowden has included in his Seven KM Principles the truth that we learn more from failure than from success. But have we ever gone so far as to say in our workplaces that it's okay to fail as long as something is learned? Rather, don't we circumscribe our actions and ambitions in order to avoid failure at all cost? Admittedly, if we do find ourselves staring failure in the eye, we're usually willing to attempt to redeem that failure by looking for a nugget of learning. But I'd suggest that the Best Buy attitude goes further than that. It sounds like they don't circumscribe actions and ambitions for fear of failure, but rather choose to risk doing something new -- knowing that they can learn from it. With that orientation to innovation, they are bound to succeed.

Trust But Verify

2008-10-29T00:29:00.004-04:00

In one of the articles that accompanied the AmLaw Tech Survey 2008, Alan Cohen reports on a conversation he had with Bob Craig, chief information officer at Baker & Hostetler. According to Craig, the next big challenge is to change the way the IT department relates to the lawyers of his firm. He likened the current relationship between the two groups to the relationship between "a teenage driver ready to hit the road and a nervous parent wary about forking over the keys." Under the current model, "all new technology gets controlled, vetted, and often limited by the technology department." In Craig's view, that approach is untenable with the advent of the new web 2.0 tools. Instead, he wants to change the way IT departments work with lawyers, by implementing a "trust but verify" system that allows users to install the tools they need without permission, provided that IT can check to make sure "no harm is done."

Bob Craig's vision of the IT/Lawyer relationship is laudable:

We want IT to inspire lawyers to unleash their creativity - not lock them down. ... The fundamental concept of Web 2.0 is to empower users to contribute and collaborate. If we're going to take advantage of Web 2.0, there's a whole mind-set shift that has to take place in IT. "Trust but verify" is the precursor.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

The Firm of the Future

2008-10-28T00:15:00.000-04:00

Whether you agree with its conclusions or not, you owe it to yourself to read Ronald J. Baker's article in the November 2008 issue of the Journal of Accountancy. That article, The Firm of the Future, makes an interesting case for moving beyond leveraging people hours to leveraging intellectual capital. According to Baker, the formula for success of the Firm of the Past is:

Revenue = People Power x Efficiency x Hourly Rate

Baker argues that we should move away from this tired approach to the formula for success of the Firm of the Future:

Profitability = Intellectual Capital x Effectiveness x Price

In highlighting the contrasts between the two systems, Baker notes:

Micromanagement of knowledge workers is the culture of most firms. Tracking time in six-minute increments, measuring productivity, measuring efficiency, and measuring relative worth all are driven by time sheets. The management attitude that anything that is not billable is not worthwhile has destroyed the intellectual pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement that is critical to the long-term success of every professional knowledge firm.

The examples cited in this article are drawn from the world of accounting, but the parallels to the law firm world are close enough to allow them to be a reasonable proxy. Both professions have come to value headcount and efficiency as the most reliable means to success. In the process, they attempt to sell clients "time," despite the fact that clients are looking to buy solutions not time. From that mismatch comes a persistent disagreement as to the true value of the solutions clients want. By contrast, Baker argues that the real source of wealth in the Firm of the Future is intellectual capital. When the firm is in the business of selling its unique intellectual capital coupled with practical applications of that knowledge, then it is finally offering something clients value.

In his scheme, intellectual capital is not just the knowledge of the firm's workers. Rather, intellectual capital has three components, all of which need to be nurtured in order for the Firm of the Future to realize its potential and be successful:

- human capital (i.e., the knowledge of its people)
- structural capital (i.e., its systems, software, tools and resources that allow it to perform work)
- social capital (e.g., clients, firm reputation, vendor relationships, referral sources, alumni, alliances, networks, etc.)

The implications of this new approach are marvelous for both knowledge workers and knowledge management. With respect to knowledge workers, focusing on intellectual capital and effectiveness encourages managers and knowledge workers alike to value learning and the sensible application of that learning to client problems. This in turn sets the stage for personal growth, creativity and innovation.

The focus on intellectual capital and effectiveness also puts a premium on the tools and methods of knowledge management that facilitate the growth and sharing of knowledge, and assist knowledge workers to improve their personal effectiveness. In one fell swoop, that pesky question of knowledge management ROI becomes a little less elusive.

Ron Friedmann and others have long argued that it would be healthier for firms and clients alike to move to fixed fee or value billing rather than hourly billing. And, advocates of this approach have looked to clients to insist on it. Thus far, few clients have exercised the necessary muscle to bring about this change. However, given the current economic climate, the stars may be aligning in such a way as to make this new approach more plausible and thus more possible.

[Thanks to Dennis Kennedy's dkennedyblog posts on Twitter for pointing out this article.]

KM and Ad Hoc Communities

2008-10-27T00:15:00.002-04:00

National Public Radio is experimenting with new ways of using social media tools to involve their audience in the creation of live radio shows. One of the most recent examples is their effort to form ad hoc communities, as demonstrated by the new wikis related to the Brian Lehrer Show's 30 Issues in 30 Days series. This is how these wikis are described:

Each Friday throughout the series, we're doing a "30 Issues Wiki." For these six segments, we've created an easily edited page where you can collaborate with others to help produce the segment. On this page you'll be able to suggest angles; do research; write copy and questions; suggest guests; and suggest audio to be included in the on-air segment. In other words, you'll do everything a normal Brian Lehrer Show producer does every day.

Through social media, listeners of this popular talk radio show were invited to collaborate in the creation of specific broadcasts. For example, a group of listeners spontaneously came together in an ad hoc community to consider how best to frame the issues for a broadcast entitled "Drill Baby Drill?: Oil vs Alternative Energy." In the days leading to the broadcast, they edited a wiki page that reflected their concerns and points of view. Then the collaborative work of this group was transformed into a radio show that was broadcast on October 10 and is available for you to hear now. These folks may never meet and may never collaborate again. But for a brief moment in time, they came together to create something useful.

An ad hoc community can also be triggered by breaking news, such as catastrophes. This is another instance in which the news media can use its natural strengths to initiate greater participation by its audience, thereby turning that audience into a group of citizen journalists. In the post The Power of Portals: Ad-Hoc Communities we learn,

Ad hoc communities primarily emerge for the purpose of information dissemination; thus, news portals are the perfect environment to foster such communities.
[...]
Ad hoc networks need to be low involvement and facilitate information exchange. As they are short lived and focus on time sensitive events, ad hoc communities could be a great way to extend the reach and increase the value of content.

Now let's take the concept of ad hoc community and translate it into the environment of law firm knowledge management. During the economic upheavals of the last few weeks, how has your law firm's KM group or IT department responded? The press has reported that lawyers in various firms have formed ad hoc communities to act as economic crisis response teams. Have the KM departments in those firms provided adequate tools to support those response teams? Are there RSS feeds to supply the latest news and commentary? Are there wiki pages to collect each team's analysis and learning? Are there blogs to record their Q&A and market updates? Or are these teams struggling to get by on e-mail and static HTML pages on their firm intranets?

The beauty of social media tools is that they are wonderfully flexible and easy to use. Once the platform is in place, the users can dive right in to create and organize the content in a manner that is useful and appropriate to their needs without much (if any) administrative support. For knowledge managers looking for an opportunity to demonstrate the power and utility of social media tools, you may not need to look any further than the current economic crisis.

The Pantyhose Fallacy and the Reality of Pants

2008-10-24T13:15:00.002-04:00

In my earlier post today, KM and the Pantyhose Fallacy, I begged the indulgence of my male readers with the following words: "Stick with me, gentlemen. I'm sure there's a male equivalent to this that I haven't thought of yet." Well there is an equivalent (or near equivalent) that is instructive: pants.

Traditionally, better quality men's trousers have been sold in the following manner: they are ready to wear except for the fact that the hem is unfinished so that each wearer can tailor their pant legs to suit their individual preferences. This is a great example of the new operating principle I proposed in my prior post with respect to how we should deploy knowledge management tools in the 21st century:

Facing this challenge requires switching from anodyne mega projects to deploying technology that is capable and robust enough at the core to permit users to lightly tinker with its functionality around the fringes without requiring a team of IT experts. Following this path, you should end up with tools that perform their basic functions reliably and well, while allowing individual users to tailor those tools to meet their immediate needs.

This will require a new kind of discipline from knowledge managers and their IT colleagues. Rather than looking for an application that merely meets the expectations of the lowest common denominator of users, we'll need to look for intelligently-engineered apps that do the basics well but that can be tweaked by users to meet their (reasonable) needs. The trick here is to find software that permits this kind of tailoring, yet does not require a great deal of money, training, time or IT intervention to accomplish the modifications. In other words, wiki-like simplicity and Facebook-like flexibility.

Here endeth my disquisition on knowledge management and clothing -- at least for now!

KM and the Pantyhose Fallacy

2008-10-24T13:05:00.003-04:00

The Pantyhose* Fallacy may not yet be a term of art in knowledge management and information technology, but I can guarantee that you already understand its underlying principle. [Stick with me, gentlemen. I'm sure there's a male equivalent to this that I haven't thought of yet.] Here's the Pantyhose Fallacy: for years retailers have sold us a bill of goods -- that it is possible for people of varying sizes and shapes to wear an article of clothing sold in a single size. They call it "one size fits all." The sad truth is that the one size fits badly and doesn't remotely fit all.

In the world of knowledge management, vendors have led us to bland, standardized implementations of tools that barely meet the needs of users. Perhaps we were unduly influenced by the big legal publishers who insisted we do it their way or not at all, but far too many KM efforts have forced square pegs into round holes. The imagined benefits of standardization caused us to overlook the real benefits of judicious customization to meet the needs of individual users. And now, those users are rebelling. Forget the rigid top-down taxonomy. They want to tag and organize content on the fly. Forget about limiting them to a small collection of recommended content. They want easy ways of identifying, segregating and then sharing their own "favorites." Forget about hermetically sealing employees behind the firewall. They want to be able to mix and match the best of internal and external content as the spirit moves or the circumstances dictate.

The challenge for KM is to give up the imagined security of rigid standardization and adopt more flexible means of meeting user needs. This challenge moves KM personnel out of the role of prison warden and into the role of companion and facilitator. Facing this challenge requires switching from anodyne mega projects to deploying technology that is capable and robust enough at the core to permit users to lightly tinker with its functionality around the fringes without requiring a team of IT experts. Following this path, you should end up with tools that perform their basic functions reliably and well, while allowing individual users to tailor those tools to meet their immediate needs. Although we've been told that few users actually take the time to customize or edit, I wonder if this will change as more users begin to use flexible internet apps in their leisure time, and thereby learn the value of customizing tools to meet personal preferences and maximize personal expression.

But, even if you're not entirely sure about the 21st century trends for technology, remember that 20th century example of pantyhose: One size almost never fits all.

[*A note to readers outside North America: pantyhose is also known as tights in many parts of the English-speaking world.]

The Futility of Bottling Knowledge

2008-10-23T00:23:00.004-04:00

Are you trying to bottle knowledge? If you view knowledge as a "thing" to be captured, packaged and delivered, you're trying to bottle knowledge. How's that working for you?

Knowledge management gurus will tell you that bottling knowledge is a very KM 1.0 approach and ill-advised. Experts from the school of hard knocks will tell you that trying to bottle knowledge is an exercise in futility. You'll never ever bottle enough to really make a difference; even if you bottle some good stuff, your customers will always want more; and when you're in the bottling business you run the risk of creating bottlenecks.

Not convinced? Consider this:

Fish : Water ~ Humans : Information/Knowledge

In other words, fish swim in water and we swim in information. Trying to bottle information/knowledge is as difficult as trying to contain our environment.

So what should you do instead? Switch metaphors.

Instead of viewing knowledge/information as a "thing," think of it as water. Rather than trying to bottle all that water, think about channeling it. Think about creating small reservoirs as necessary. Think about distilling it. Think about broadening access to it. If you're not convinced, consider how very difficult it is to contain water over the long term. It goes where it will. Why fight its natural tendency to flow?

Viewing knowledge/information as water will lead you to some fresh new ways of handling law firm knowledge management. Less about command and control, more about channeling and collaboration. It will also inexorably lead you to social media tools. They are far better equipped to help broaden access to knowledge than the KM 1.0 tools we've been working with.

And, if you really want to broaden your perspective, switch metaphors again. How about this metaphor: try thinking about knowledge as "love." If you're curious about this, read Is Knowledge Stuff or Love?

Do You Have What It Takes?

2008-10-22T08:34:00.001-04:00

Knowledge management folks have to interact with technology daily. In fact, all knowledge workers have to interact with technology daily. There's no other way to do your job well in the 21st century. The problem is that those of us who are 40 years old or more learned to be knowledge workers at a time when there was much less technology, and the technology we had didn't work terribly well. In the nearly 20 years I've been in the workforce, we've seen enormous changes: from the IBM Selectric to desktop computers to fully mobile computing; from telephones to e-mail to microblogging; from internal memos to enterprise blogs and wikis. And there's more change coming down the pike.

Are you ready?

Are you sure you're ready?

Being ready is not just about knowing about the tool or knowing how to use the technology. It's about changing your attitude and approach to the technology so that you really know how to use it well. For example, if you were trained to find information in a time when information appeared to be scarce, you developed some great sleuthing skills. (Remember having to go to a library, and then to the card catalog, and then to the place on the shelf where the book should have been, only to find it missing? That's one form of info scarcity -- when finding it is hard.) Now contrast that with our current situation, where you can Google "knowledge management blogs" and get 6,760,000 results in 0.15 seconds. That's not just information abundance, that's information overload. And that overload calls for different skills; it calls for filtering skills.

In a helpful post, New Work and New Work Skills, Tony Karrer sets out some benchmarks against which we can measure our readiness for 21st century work in an age of information abundance. Here are some of the ways of working he believes we should learn:

How to take notes on a laptop, PC
How to work with mobile devices and keep them in sync
How to effectively filter
How to reach out and find expertise
How to use Social Media to Find Answers to Anything
How to Learn through Conversation
How to keep track of information, organize it, refind it and be reminded about it

And here's his quick test to see how well we've adopted the change in attitude and approach necessary to master the new technology:

I effectively use the Google filetype operator
I know what the Google "~" operator does
I'm effective at reaching out to get help from people I don't already know
I'm good at keeping, organizing my documents, web pages that I've encountered in ways that allow me to find it again when I need it and remind me that it exists when I'm not sure what I'm looking for
I'm good at filtering information
I'm good at collaboratively working with virtual work teams and use Google Docs or a Wiki as appropriate in these situations

So, take the test and tell me. Do you have what it takes to be an effective knowledge worker in the 21st century?

[Thanks to Bill Brantley for pointing out Tony Karrer's post.]

Age is a State of Mind

2008-10-21T00:21:00.005-04:00

It was so common, that it was a joke -- celebrating one's 39th birthday for the 10th time. However, now we're seeing Baby Boomers who have worked and worked out in order to beat Old Man Time. Their birth certificates may say one thing, but their energy levels, flexibility, physical strength, mental agility and willingness to innovate say another. Finally, the stars are aligned so that your age need not entirely be defined chronologically. Now, it really is plausible to say that age is more a state of mind.

These changes in society have important implications for knowledge management. While some may say we are doomed by our chronology, the reality is that more and more enterprises are finding that the facile assumptions they had at the beginning of a social media implementation are being disproved by their users. Take, for example, Intellipedia, the online wiki for federal intelligence information sharing. According to KM Experts Dispute Age Gap, Intellipedia's actual usage patterns "do not always fit standard expectations."

Chris Rasmussen, social software knowledge manager at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (and a top contributor to Intellipedia), recently reported on how the users of Intellipedia have defied the generational assumptions lots of experts make:

For example, people assume Intellipedia users in their 20s would be the most prolific, but that is not necessarily the case, he said. One of the most active editors is in his 60s. Of the two-dozen most active editors, most are in their 30s and 40s....

(Just for the record, Rasmussen is 33.)

While GenY/Millenials may come to work with greater ease with social computing and more hard computing skills, they don't always have the substantive knowledge or inclination necessary to make valuable contributions at the office. By contrast, Gen X and Baby Boomer employees have the edge on substantive knowledge, but may not have the skills or confidence to try social media tools. Thankfully, most of these tools are intuitive and easy to use. If we can just get them into the hands of these information and experience rich older workers, we should see huge gains in knowledge management programs.

Don't write off your Gen X and Baby Boomer users. Instead, get to know them. You may discover that they are much better candidates for your social media tools that some of their Gen Y/Millenial counterparts. In either case, ditch the generational stereotypes and focus on the individuals. They are only as old as they act and feel -- age is a state of mind.

Social Media Undercover

2008-10-20T08:27:00.010-04:00

Since social media tools became impossible to ignore on the internet, knowledge management folks have been worried about how to introduce something "social" behind the firewall. Most are beginning to realize that it takes an unusual senior manager to understand the value of creating strong communities within the enterprise. To be fair, many managers do get the value of strong teams within specific units or departments, but try asking them to transplant that success to a more macro level and they get lost.

So what should a conscientious knowledge manager do when they realize that social media tools are exactly what their enterprise needs?

Jack Vinson suggested recently that the best approach was simply to stop calling these tools "social" and focus on specific real world uses such as "inferred" expertise, real-time status indicators, easy-to-use file sharing, etc. And then, in a response to comments to his post, he wrote: "Our friend Mary would jump... It's NOT the tools."

Our friend Mary. That would be me.

And, Jack was right. I'm jumping.

We should just give up on finding a label for these tools. The decision-makers within our organizations don't care what these tools are called as long as they work. If you want to avoid a losing argument, removing "social" from "networking" doesn't help as much as you might hope. From a decision-maker's perspective, networking (social or not) is something you do to land your next job. Now tell me, why would a manager who is not in lay-off mode want to spend corporate resources assisting you with that? As for building social or business networks within the enterprise, many managers view that as a "nice to have" rather than a "need to have."

So what's the better strategy? Jack pointed to it in his response. Here's the fuller quotation:

Our friend Mary would jump... It's NOT the tools. Maybe this is one of the other problems with calling it social networking - that sounds like a tool looking for an application.

In my ideas above, I was attempting to suggest problems or issues that business people might actually be interesting in solving, rather than specific tools.

Jack is right -- focus on the problems or issues that decision-makers are interested in solving rather than specific tools. As I wrote in an earlier post, don't fall into the trap of finding business problems to justify purchasing the tool -- look for established business processes that people know should be improved. And then deploy the tool knowing that it will have a much greater impact because of its secret "social" weapon: by building community, these tools facilitate and expedite information sharing.

Yet, there is a caveat here that needs to be raised: We know there are lots of processes that could be improved by social media tools. However, most business managers don't care. Unless they are charged with squeezing every last of ounce of productivity out of each process, they tend to focus on the squeaky wheel. Therefore, you should too. Find a good way to fix that squeak and the manager will provide the grease (i.e., cash) -- even if it's for purchasing a web 2.0 tool. And, you won't even have to beg.

Again, the key here is to focus on processes that, from a business perspective, must or should be improved. Not could be improved. When your solution lines up neatly with the decision-maker's problem, you've reached the sweet spot. And, in that sweet spot, even social media tools are welcome.

So listen to your users. They don't have the time or energy to listen to you tell them all the ways you think you can help them via social networking. All they want is a simple solution to their pressing problem. And, if that solution happens to be fun and easy to use, that's all the better.

As Mary would say: It's NOT the tools!

Using the Right Map

2008-10-17T08:02:00.005-04:00

In these days of Google Maps and Mapquest, it can be hard to remember that you actually do need to use different kinds of maps for different kinds of journeys. Members of my family have on more than one occasion rescued sailor wannabees who made the mistake of renting a boat for the day and then tried to navigate with the assistance of only a road map. (It's true. You can't make this stuff up.)

A similar situation has sprung up around the conversation Venkatesh Rao started regarding what he viewed as the Social Media vs Knowledge Management battle for the soul of users. He used a specific map (generalizations about generational differences) to navigate the discussion. This map led him to his desired destination: KM is doomed to fail because it is championed by the rapidly aging and completely misguided Baby Boomer generation. By contrast, he believes that SM will prevail because it is championed by Millenials, who are as we speak defining the new dominant ways of interacting online.

Venkat has posted a response to the reactions of this blog and others. I suspect this discussion isn't over yet, but I would make the following observation: generalizations about generational differences are just that -- generalizations. It's like using the map the car rental company provides when you really need a detailed road atlas. The generalizations can help orient you (maybe), but you're unlikely to reach your destination without the necessary detailed analysis.

In the case of law firm knowledge management, it's probably fine to start your analysis regarding your chances of launching social media tools with the generational map provided by Venkat. However, generalizations set in abstract situations are no better than that car rental company map. You need to know the topography of your particular firm. How exactly do the employees in your firm fit within the generational boundaries -- as determined by date of birth AND by preferences? Despite the chronological facts, do you have a firm culture that is adventurous when it comes to technology? Despite the generational distribution, does your firm have a tightwad culture, making any investment in new social media tools difficult? Has your firm taken on so many financial obligations that it doesn't have the necessary economic cushion to weather the current market turmoil, much less launch a new way of working online?

As you can see, most of these questions have very little to do with the age of the employees of your law firm, but the answers can have a profound influence on the discussion and ultimate decision regarding social media in your firm. As you head down this path, be sure you are equipped with more than generalizations. Otherwise, I can virtually guarantee that you will get lost.

Virtual Water Coolers

2008-10-16T00:56:00.003-04:00

In times of high anxiety, people seek ways to get information, commiserate with fellow sufferers, test rumors and gain perspective. Traditionally, this happened in the office around the proverbial water cooler. However, in this new age of BYOBW (i.e., bring your own bottled water), there are fewer water coolers in offices. And, with the recent uptick in telecommuting, there are fewer hours in a shared physical space.

So where do you go during regular business hours for companionship, comfort and anxiety-busting info when there's no water cooler? E-mail is a possibility, but it's a poor way to build community. Google is another option. It provides access to lots of information, but no personal interaction and little context.

While law firm knowledge management programs tend to focus on projects that directly affect client services, you might consider creating an effective virtual water cooler as a more general means of improving the business of your firm. The obvious way to do this is to deploy social media tools behind the firewall to strengthen a sense of community, enhance employee morale and provide an easily accessible forum for the exchange of information. While this information may not always relate directly to any specific client matter, it can go a long way to containing and diminishing anxiety levels. This, in turn, allows employees to focus better on client services.

Imagine a blog that allows practice group leaders to broadcast information on the new client work they are doing despite the economic slowdown, thereby signaling the economic viability of the firm? Or a wiki that enables community members to post links to resources for coping with a collapsing client or a collapsing 401(k) account? A microblog that distributes one of the best antidotes to anxiety: humor. Or RSS set up to provide a client team with the most recent news about the client and its industry so that the team is well-prepared to identify business opportunities and respond to client overtures?

Social media tools behind the firewall can help bolster employee morale and strengthen the fabric of your firm. This in turn helps the employees of your firm deliver better client services. Better client services lead to greater revenues.... You get the picture.

Go ahead and prepare that business case for wiki pages to manage client matters. But while you're at it, include a proposal to build an employee facing site as well. It may well turn out to be the better investment.

See also, Coping with Anxiety: Change What You Can, Accept the Rest

Laughter: Geek & Poke and the perennial favorite for office humor, Dilbert

Minimal Impact KM

2008-10-15T00:15:00.004-04:00

Dr. David Vaine has done it again! In his video address to the actKM Conference, he gave an illuminating overview of the scope and benefits of Minimal Impact KM. In the process, he recognized the seminal work of "Dennis Snowden" in giving knowledge managers the excuse of complexity to explain inaction and "David Greenteen" for encouraging people with clear ideas to talk themselves into a tangle of confusion and inactivity.

For those of you who may not be up on the latest trends in knowledge management theory, minimal impact KM touts the benefits of doing a great deal without in any way affecting the work lives of your colleagues or the results of your enterprise. (This reminds me of a brillant Dilbert observation: We have achieved unprecedented levels of unverifiable productivity.)

Dr. Vaine identifies several proven methods of achieving minimal impact KM:

- depreciative inquiry
- social network paralysis
- corporate flogging
- six stigma

As you come up to budget season and are preparing proposals for your law firm knowledge management programs for the upcoming year, give some thought to whether you qualify as a leader in the area of minimal impact KM. If you do, what are you going to do about it?

[Thanks to Dave Snowden for pointing out this masterpiece by Dr. Vaine. And, thanks especially to Patrick Lambe for keeping us honest.]

The Customer is ALWAYS Right

2008-10-14T00:22:00.007-04:00

At a recent gathering of law firm knowledge managers, I was told that I could make their lives easier by enabling subscription by e-mail to Above and Beyond KM. To be honest, until that point I had mistakenly assumed that nearly everyone in this social media savvy crowd had migrated to RSS readers. Therefore, I hadn't bothered to set up e-mail subscriptions when I first launched this blog. I should have known better.

Lawyers live in Outlook. And, despite expert advice discouraging the practice, many treat their Outlook Inbox as their To Do list. If you don't make it onto that list, you get ignored. While acknowledging the shortcomings of e-mail, some have made impressive strides in finding more inventive and efficient ways to use (and misuse) the tool. Clearly, if I was going to reach readers who either loved their e-mail or couldn't overcome inertia sufficiently to deal with RSS, this Mohammed was going to have to go to the mountain. So as of last weekend, you'll find in the right-hand column a quick and easy way of subscribing to this blog by e-mail.

Ask and you shall receive -- because you're the customer, and the customer is always right.

Web 2.0 Resistance in Law Firms?

2008-10-13T00:13:00.003-04:00

Penny Edwards at Headshift characterizes the 2008 AmLaw Tech Survey as a "disappointing read from a social software/organizational change perspective." Alan Cohen, who reported on the survey in Law.com's Legal Technology section, admits that while there's lots of talk within law firms about social media tools, relatively few of those firms have deployed many of these tools given the ubiquity of these tools on the internet. And, those that have attempted to take a walk on the wild web 2.0 side have limited themselves to "ho-hum stuff by internet standards." The survey reports that 43% of the firms have at least one blog and 24% have internal wikis, but I suspect that much of this has happened because these tools were bundled (albeit imperfectly) with the SharePoint platforms these firms have deployed. With a few notable exceptions (see Penny Edwards' post), we haven't heard about many truly transformative deployments of social media tools within law firms.

Why?

According to Alan Cohen, law firm CIOs and IT directors are definitely thinking about web 2.0, but in the following terms: "What emerging technologies are worth investing in -- and which aren't ready for prime time? " Prime time? When folks all over the world are diving into social computing with remarkable enthusiasm, can you really treat these technologies as experimental? Perhaps the real issue is that law firms have not yet identified uses for these technologies that feel like incremental rather than revolutionary changes to current business processes. So, to the extent you can use a blog or wiki to do something that is already done by e-mail, it's a safe option to propose to your firm -- provided you can convince folks to leave their Outlook cocoons. For law firm knowledge management programs, the usual approach is to identify and implement these incremental uses of social media tools and then coax your colleagues a little further out of their comfort zone with more ambitious implementations of these tools. Unfortunately, this "substitution innovation" does not take advantage of what Penny Edwards considers the greatest asset of "new technologies like RSS, micro-blogging, social tagging and networking tools, [which] offer possibilities for radical change in the way in which things are done."

The other significant challenge that results in what appears to be law firm resistance to web 2.0 is that for quite some time now the big IT issue for these firms has been electronic discovery. And, eDiscovery has led to a whole host of new tech problems that law firm IT departments are forced to tackle. Therefore, while web 2.0 tools may be the latest wave to sweep the technosphere, law firm CIOs and IT directors believe that they have more pressing issues to handle, such as ... data storage.

Add the inevitable slowdown in IT spending that is emerging in the current economic environment, and you have yet another reason to decide that web 2.0 is not yet ready for law firm "prime time." To be honest, however, is the real issue that law firm knowledge managers and their IT counterparts are not themselves ready for web 2.0?

[For other helpful analysis of the IT Survey, see Ron Friedmann's Strategic Legal Technology blog, which reports, among other things, that the survey provides "good confirmation for those struggling with these issues daily."]

7 Principles of Law Firm KM

2008-10-11T17:58:00.001-04:00

Dave Snowden's 3 Rules of knowledge management have expanded to 7 Principles, now that he is focusing on law firm knowledge management. (Perhaps there is just something about lawyers that invites the creation of more rules). Here are the 7 Principles:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
4. Everything is fragmented.
5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
7. We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.

This is a list worth chewing over. I expect I'll come back to it several times. In the meantime, I'd urge everyone involved in law firm knowledge management to take a hard look at their KM programs and measure them against these 7 principles. A large number of firms are engaged in classic KM 1.0 efforts: trying to convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, creating precedent collections and brief banks, writing practice guides to convey best practices, etc. These methods seem to violate one or more of the 7 Principles. It would be worth spending a little time to determine if you are achieving the levels of success you and your firm anticipated from this efforts. If not, how much of that is due to the fact that your projects do not conform to these principles? If you are truly successful in your KM 1.0 approach, we should talk. You may have identified an interesting exception to the 7 principles.

[Hat tip to Dennis Kennedy's microblogging on Twitter.]

War Between Social Media and KM?

2008-10-10T07:53:00.001-04:00

Connie Crosby pointed me to Ralph Poole's post, Social Media vs. Knowledge Management. In it he discusses Venkatesh Rao's assertion in the Enterprise 2.0 blog that there exists a generational war between the proponents of knowledge management and the proponents of social media. In Ralph's experience, this rings true:

I have seen it in the way Microsoft SharePoint, with minimum Web 2.0 capabilities, is embraced by IT departments while open source web 2.0 are shunned.

For Venkat, the combatants in this battle are the Boomers (born 1946-62) and the Millenials/Gen Y (born 1980 -). Here is how Venkat draws the battle lines:

Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. ...KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0.

Venkat sees top-down knowledge management as the product of the Boomer generation, while bottom-up social media is more reflective of Millenial values and aspirations. Caught in between are the Gen X folks (born 1963-79) who are not numerous enough to open a new front of their own, but may prove to be the perfect intermediaries between the opposing factions. According to Venkat, each of these generational groups approaches social media in different ways, which leads to the battles we're seeing in some workplaces regarding whether and how to adopt social media behind the firewall.

Venkat goes on to identify the 5 social dimensions of the war, and then the following 5 technological dimensions of the war:

1. Expertise locators are not social networks. For Venkat, expert idolatry is the fixation of Boomers who just love authority. By contrast, he finds that Gen Xers and Millenials believe in "situational" experts, a more transitional phenomenon.

2. Online communities are not USENET v3.0. Venkat draws the distinction between, for example, the Millenials' fondness for wide-open Facebook groups that nearly anyone can join vs GEn X LinkedIn groups that have gatekeepers.

3. RSS and Mash-ups are Gen X ideas. According to Venkat, they derive from the Gen X need "to reuse code and content to conquer overwhelming complexity."

4. SemWeb isn't Next Gen, it's Last Gen. In other words, SemWeb is the Boomers' revenge. For Venkat, "both KM and SemWeb set a lot of store by controlled vocabularies and ontologies as drivers of IT architecture." No more unconstrained folksonomies, thank you very much.

5. SOA and SaaS are Gen X; Clouds are Millenial. Venkat bases this assertion on his interpretation of the words used to explain these related concepts. For him Service-Oriented Architecture and Software as a Service are typically pragmatic (and, in his view, unimaginative and ugly) Gen X approaches to what Millenials describe more metaphorically (and imprecisely) as "clouds."

Venkat ends with the following prediction:

It takes no great genius to predict how the war will end. The Boomers will retire and the Millenials will win by default, in a bloodless end with no great drama. KM will quietly die, and SM will win the soul of Enterprise 2.0, with the Gen X leadership quietly slipping the best of the KM ideas into SM as they guide the bottom-up revolution.

The problem with this approach is that it under-rates KM and, perhaps, overestimates SM. In the conversations I've heard lately regarding social media, the KM folks have been working hard to find points of intersection and common interest with social media. They are treating this as an evolution rather than a revolution. Some have even gone so far as to say that social media is just the new marketing spin for KM. That assertion is likely to send Millenials running for the Maalox, but it appears that KM isn't ready to be declared dead quite yet. Rather, it's trying to transform itself from a purely archival discipline to a more dynamic and informal approach that puts people in direct touch with each other, without the obvious intermediation of a knowledge manager.

[Full disclosure: I'm a Gen Xer as far as Venkat is concerned. The previous paragraph could be read to confirm his contention that Gen Xers tend to pragmatism and compromise.]

Nonetheless, it's useful to be reminded from time to time that our preferences are shaped by more than our intellect or experience. Sometimes an accident of birth can dictate how you respond to complexity and innovation. For Venkat the Boomers, Gen Xers and Millenials have distinct and different approaches to technology, information and community. Think hard about how you fit into this generational view before you make your next decision about social media.

Update (12 Oct 08): Take a look at Mark Gould's thoughtful related post -- Oh good grief. He tackles the "generational" straw man relied on from time to time by advocates of the next new thing.

Microblogging: Private Conversations at a Live Mike

2008-10-09T07:32:00.000-04:00

In ReadWriteWeb's report on microblogging at BestBuy, Laura Fitton (of Pistachio Consulting) writes about her conversation with Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt regarding their implementation of Mix. Mix (built on HeadMix) is described as an "enterprise microsharing application," which is intended to faciliate networking, problem solving and idea sharing among Best Buy's 160,000 employees. According to this report, Best Buy's deployment is the first of its kind at a large company.

In reading through the report, a couple of things struck me. First, Koelling and Bendt acknowledge the weird dynamic that gets going with microblogging: you're having quasi-personal conversations in a forum where you can be overheard by the world. While it's easy to forget that fact when you're in the middle of some witty Twitter repartee, none of this is private. Interestingly, a quick check on Twitter indicates that there seems to be a wide range of responses to this fact of microblogging life. Some users are extremely circumspect or even cryptic. Others appear to damn the torpedoes and blab full speed ahead, with little regard for the consequences.

When you transplant this issue to the work environment, you find the problem compounded. Here's how it's described in the Best Buy context:

There are what, 160,000 employees at Best Buy? It’s like a few of you are thrown into a dark room together. You don’t really know who anyone is or who to trust. You’re told it’s okay, they’re all employees, go ahead, talk. But trust is an issue. Who are these people? How do we know them? What can we say?

This is a challenging context in which to try to foster the open exchange of information. Unfortunately, the report doesn't explain how the system's designers plan to increase the levels of trust. As I've noted earlier, trust is a critical element without which collaboration is virtually impossible. And, in our KM 2.0 world, collaboration is key. It will be interesting to see what the adoption rate is at Best Buy and whether the quality of the information exchanges meets expectations.

The other striking thing for me was the basis on which the designers chose HeadMix. Besides liking the developer team and the flexibility of the application, the other positive attribute in their estimation was the application's ease of use:

We liked that it’s simple, but had the extra features when you wanted them. It sounds goofy, but we really liked the Outlook plugin — that’s where our employees live. That will make it easier to use.

Here, they clearly were trying to reduce the barriers to entry -- to the point that they allowed easy access from Outlook. These folks are not microblogging purists who insist that if you want to use the tool you too must be a true believer who is willing to leave the Outlook cocoon in order to microblog. Instead, they made the boundary between the two applications permeable. There's an important lesson here as we consider how best to integrate new knowledge management technology into existing work flow, calibrate it to user comfort levels, and thereby increase user adoption.

Koelling and Bendt established themselves with their implementation of Blue Shirt Nation, a social networking tool for Best Buy employees. It will be interesting to see how they overcome the trust issues to achieve a productive company-wide conversation via Mix.

When is a Wiki Worth the Effort?

2008-10-08T00:08:00.003-04:00

Mark Gould has an interesting post on Enlightened Tradition entitled, Social software in law firms. In it he cites the rule of thumb regarding participation inequality in social networks:

- 90% read, but do not contribute (i.e., "lurkers")
- 9% contribute occasionally (i.e., "dabblers")
- 1% contribute regularly (i.e., "true believers")

Unfortunately, it does get worse:

- the participation inequality demonstrated in blogs is 95 - 5 - 0.1
- the participation inequality demonstrated on Wikipedia is 99.8 - 0.2 - 0.003

This level of participation may be tolerable for Wikipedia, but it won't make for a convincing argument when you're trying to persuade your firm managers that a wiki is essential for your law firm knowledge management program. Nonetheless, should you take the 90-9-1 rule as gospel? We're told it applies to voluntary social networks on the internet, but does it apply equally to social media tools deployed behind the firewall? Some have argued that it need not apply within the enterprise if you take a few strategic measures:

- make it easier to contribute
- encourage editing over creating
- reward contributions
- promote quality contributions

Above all, the measure most likely to increase wiki participation is to embed the wiki in your work flow. For example, if the partner in charge of a matter decides that all team updates must be posted in the wiki and may not be circulated via e-mail, you will see a significant increase in the rate of participation. This suggests that when introducing social media tools behind the firewall, you can't adopt a strictly laissez-faire attitude. While an "if you build it they will come" approach may work on the internet, it's a different thing within the enterprise where inertia and heavy workloads tend to keep busy lawyers from discovering your new tools. By inserting the tools intelligently in lawyer work flow, you give them a good reason to break out of established routines and try something new. If you've deployed the social media tools correctly, this should be all the incentive lawyers need to move from lurker status to dabbler or (better still) true believer status. Then I'd suggest you quit while you're ahead.

Collaboration -- All or Nothing?

2008-10-07T00:07:00.005-04:00

In my prior post on Culture and Technology, I talked about the need to match carefully the social media tools you are offering in your law firm knowledge management program with the organizational culture of your firm. Now we need to go a little deeper. Many discussions on this topic treat collaboration in a binary fashion -- either you've got collaboration or you don't. And, if you don't, you get a free pass on deploying social media tools. In reality, your choices are not just wide open collaboration or nothing. As Andrew Gent points out in his post, The Alternatives to Collaboration, there are several ways of working that result in productivity. We need to be sure we take account of all of these and provide the appropriate tools.

Here's how he identifies two different modes of working that are alternatives to open collaboration:

Conspiring is very common among senior contributors within a team. Conspiring is simply a form of collaboration where the"community" is limited, usually to select members who the contributor trusts. Rather than speak out or agree during meetings, this individual will seek out others who they feel will understand and appreciate their contribution and work with those people to flesh out their ideas. They may even strategize privately about how to bring the rest of the team "around" to their way of thinking. (This is the conspiratorial part of the equation.)

[...]

Competing, on the other hand, happens out in the open. Competing is founded on two basic assumptions:
Ideas reached by consensus are not necessarily the best ideas. Rather, they are ideas that sound most agreeable or that provide the least resistance to current conditions (in other words, ruffle as few feathers as possible).
By openly pursuing multiple approaches in parallel, you can test more possibilities and (the key to competing) inspire each group to reach farther and develop a more complete and creative solution.

If you have wide open, top to bottom collaboration, then you're closest to the internet model of social networks and should be able deploy the standard tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, forums, distribution lists) with minimal adjustment for the realities of corporate life. If you have a significant number of productive "conspirators" then you need tools that allow wide open collaboration within this very small group of trusted colleagues (e.g., IM, limited access wikis and blogs). For competitors, you need to provide a forum where they can battle their way to victory (e.g., open access wikis, microblogging).

By acknowledging that collaboration may not be possible for all, you give yourself permission to identify other productive ways of working within your law firm. Once you understand how these other methods work, you're better placed to introduce effective social media tools that fit neatly with established modes of working. This requires moving from a monolithic view of organizational culture to a much more nuanced one. Done correctly, this should result in higher adoption rates within the various sub-groups that exist and thrive within your law firm. Do this with enough sub-groups and you'll have reached enterprise 2.0 nirvana.

Culture and Technology

2008-10-06T00:06:00.002-04:00

Knowledge management without cultural awareness rarely is successful. You can be on the verge of deploying the best technology tools in the world, but if those tools aren't in synch with your organizational culture, you might as well distribute quill pens and parchment. Carl Frappaolo (VP Market Intelligence a AIIM International) and Dan Keldsen (Director, Market Intelligence at AIIM International) made this point very clearly in a terrific presentation they gave on October 3. (For helpful summaries of their presentation, see Ron Friedmann's blog and Jack Vinson's blog.)

Carl has posted their slides on his blog, Taking AIIM. When you get over to that blog, pay particular attention to slide 16, which shows the stages of cultural evolution, overlaid with the stages of technology. This slide demonstrates that you need an organizational culture that reflects a specific level of collaboration before you can implement particular tools successfully. If you've got folks working in splendid isolation with no desire to change their modus operandi (i.e., "islands of me"), they won't be receptive to your brilliant web 2.0 technological advances. You can coax, you can beg, you can embarrass yourself anyway you choose, but they just won't get it. And they most certainly won't adopt your new tool.

Besides the degree of collaboration prevalent in your organizational culture, you also have to be aware of the limits your culture puts on information. So, you want a wiki? Make sure you've got an organizational culture that permits the free and open exchange of information. If you're in an organization that discloses information on a need to know basis only, don't be surprised if your wikis are under-utilized. Equally, if you're in an organization that is excessively hierarchical, don't expect junior folks to contribute to your new blog or wiki without explicit permission from senior managers. In each case, the organizational culture will severely curtail the open information exchange that blogs and wikis promote.

The trick here is to get better at anthropology and then pitch the tools to meet the culture. If you've got your heart set on yanking your law firm knowledge management program into the 21st century by introducing social media tools, wait until you see specific forms of collaboration or conversation emerging among your lawyers. Let them enjoy that for a while and then watch for stresses or pain points to emerge. If they do, offer a tool that can alleviate the pain. If there's no pain, it's unlikely there will be much user interest in changing how they work. Busy lawyers rarely push for new technology if what they've got basically functions -- even if there is something that would objectively work much better. They sensibly weigh any inconvenience of their current methods against the perceived gross inconvenience of learning something new. As with most things, overcoming inertia is tough. However, it's a much easier battle if you harness the natural forces of your organizational culture.

The Art of Creating Possibilities

2008-10-03T00:03:00.004-04:00

The whole point of KM is Innovation. We aren't putting people in conversation with each other, soliciting their stories or helping them exchange their learning just because it makes for a nicer workplace. We're also doing this because it's precisely that cross-pollination of ideas and experience that helps birth new ideas and new ways of doing things. Knowledge management done right helps create an environment that fosters healthy change.

The "science" of knowledge management pushes us to find better, less intrusive, more effective and efficient ways to ensure that the essential information is exchanged, and exchanged in a manner that permits easy and accurate understanding. This isn't about knowledge extraction and capture or centralized control. It's about KM getting out of the way so that just in time exchanges of information can occur in context. Unless you've been living off the grid for the last few years, you probably have already realized that this approach to KM undercuts the old KM 1.0 drive towards creating and maintaining repositories and databases. KM 1.0 is based on an outdated notion of knowledge manager as archivist.

The "art" of knowledge management is by its nature a little harder to get your hands around. It's about an orientation, an approach to work and life. Good KM is closely attuned to and respectful of organizational culture. Good and effective KM ultimately helps shift that organizational culture toward more openness, more collaboration, more innovation. This view of KM is based on a notion of knowledge manager as facilitator.

If we are true to the demands of the "art" of knowledge management, we knowledge managers have to embody and demonstrate that orientation toward collaboration and innovation. This means finding new ways to engage in productive conversations that expand understanding and don't reduce every interaction to a zero-sum game. This isn't necessarily how we've been taught to behave in the corporate world, so it can be a significant challenge for a lot of us. Further, it's an approach that assumes a certain level of personal maturity and goodwill.

Innovation rarely results from the occasional brainstorming sessions. It comes from applying what you're learning to what you know, taking information from one domain and mixing it with experience in another domain to see what results. It's life as a lab. It's indulging your sense of curiosity, tempered only by the constant question: how does this make things better?

Since far too many of us push through life with our heads down, shoulders forward -- simply trying to get things done -- we often don't remember to take the time required to be open to possibility. A bent to innovation requires some under-used muscles. Chandni Kapur at Anecdote, provides a humorous reminder of one way to find and exercise those muscles in her post Practising the art of creating possibilities:

People respond so differently to new ideas. While some people jump with excitement at the thought of new possibilities and irrational ideas, unfamiliarity can [make] others uncomfortable, give up, or find it safe to be a skeptic. This is so well illustrated in this conversation between Alice and the queen in Through the Looking Glass.

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.
"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Being able to rise above the restrictions of what is, to imagine what might be, and then to create the map that moves your organization to that potential requires vision and leadership, a marriage of both the art and science of knowledge management. A little bit more queen and a little less of Alice.

How Wikis Mess With Your Mind

2008-10-02T00:02:00.002-04:00

This seems to be my week for web 2.0 experiments: first Twitter and now Wikis. You can read about my first forays into Twitter elsewhere, but here I'd like to talk about one of the most interesting things I'm learning about wikis: namely, how they work with (or mess with) your mind.

Until now, most Wiki converts/addicts have talked up the collaboration benefits of wikis. It's a beautiful thing -- everyone sharing and caring towards building a common resource. However, there seems to me to be a slightly less rosy view of wikis that might potentially be more powerful in terms of productivity. What I'm talking about is the awful weight of transparency and the impact that has on human accountability.

If the wiki is used to collect the musings and contributions of a community of practice, you expect that folks will participate only to the extent the spirit moves them. Because of wiki transparency, you know who is contributing and who isn't, but that transparency doesn't in and of itself compel participation. Delays in editing can always be ascribed to work/home/bailout pressures and distractions. This kind of wiki will grow in the hands of enthusiasts, but probably won't reflect the views of all of the community since so many of them will form a "silent majority," lurking on the sidelines.

There's another way in which the transparency of a wiki becomes a powerful tool for productivity. But this works best for a project that isn't purely voluntary and where the participants are aware of the real consequences of failing to deliver the project on time. Here's an example: what if you and your boss set up a wiki to draft a report and then agreed on milestones for moving sections of the report along towards completion. Sure you could leave it until the last minute, but every time the boss came to edit her section of the report, she'd know that you hadn't done your share. Knowing that, how long would you be willing to procrastinate? Knowing that she could see exactly what value you were adding every day, how long would you be willing to make only superficial changes?

Now imagine using a wiki to write a book? Or a legal brief. Or a strategic plan? Or a merger agreement. Or a Bailout plan?

Granted, in a document management system you can check the history of a document to see who edited it and when. However, you won't know exactly what they've done and won't be able to begin to assess their contribution until you've compared the latest version of the document with the prior version. Now how often do we do that with respect to the work of colleagues?

By contrast, the wiki provides a running commentary on who did what when. It also allows collaborators to pick up seamlessly where their colleagues left off. All without a complicated e-mail explaining the status of things. From a knowledge management perspective, this is all good.

For those of you who are self-starters, a wiki simply brings into the spotlight all your good work habits. And, you will shine. For those tending more towards distraction, multi-tasking and procrastination, this kind of transparency is either going to make or break you. Regardless, it will change you. Knowing that, you can begin to understand how wikis can mess with your mind.

[For lots of great information on using wikis productively, see Stewart Mader's terrific Grow Your Wiki.]

Getting Serious About Collaboration

2008-10-01T03:20:00.002-04:00

A large number of professionals in knowledge management appear to have drunk the kool-aid regarding the value of collaboration. And now, collaboration is the latest buzzword tripping off the tongues of academics, activists, reformers, consultants and web 2.0 vendors. That many people can't be wrong, can they?

Perhaps it's time each collaboration advocate put their money where their mouth is. Now is the time to collaborate on a project worth doing. And what is currently the most critical BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) we could address? How about finding a viable way to achieve a sensible bailout of the US economy? (Is that big enough for you?)

There has been a complete failure of leadership in Washington. Given where we are in the US political calendar, it will take a great deal of leadership and goodwill for politicians of both parties to abandon any perceived election year advantages to help each other (and the world) to a sensible solution. Unfortunately, it's hard to be optimistic about this after the empty theatrics of the last week.

So how could the rest of us model good collaborative behavior to address the economic crisis? We could, for example, create an "open source" solution for a Better Bailout. How about a wiki to collect and refine the best proposals for reforming and restoring the US economy? What if anyone with a positive contribution to make were able to participate? Could we harness the energies and intellect of a world-wide community to solve this problem?

Clearly, not all of us have the training to conceive effective solutions to the complicated problems presented by the current economic crisis. However, I've got to believe that somewhere in our respective social networks, we have friends or acquaintances who could add value to such an effort. Perhaps those of us who did not get past Economics 101 could make our contribution to the solution by recruiting to the effort capable people with the requisite integrity, training and freedom from partisan rancor to make a meaningful contribution.

If you're happy with the job your representatives are doing in Washington, feel free to sit this out. If, however, you'd like to see a solution that deals honestly and fairly with the US taxpayer who has to foot the bill, now is the time to get involved. And, if you really believe in the power of collaboration, now is the time to prove its value.

[If you'd like to participate in A Better Bailout, e-mail BetterBailout@gmail.com.]

Moving at the Speed of Molasses

2008-09-30T06:30:00.000-04:00

It doesn't really matter how great your law firm knowledge management team is at creating and planning effective KM projects if the bureaucracy of your law firm doesn't let you get things done in a timely fashion. While all of us have experienced project delays from time to time, one of the most frequent complaints I hear about law firm KM is that it seems to move at a rate comparable to molasses in January. (Of course, there are notable and laudable exceptions to every rule.)

Some may say that the complaints are simply the result of the whining nature of knowledge managers, but that sweeping condemnation really is not fair. Nor is it fair to say that we're suffering from the "grass is greener on the other side" syndrome, since there are too many of us who can tell sorry tales of delayed or abandoned projects. It might be instructive to hear from Neil Richards, who has worked in law firms and who discovered it was a completely different experience to work in a bank:

This recent exposure to life outside law firms has provided a stark contrast as to how things get done, which got me thinking. My experience and the experience of friends who work in law firms indicates that projects and plans take a long time to execute. Simply getting a project up and running can take months.
By way of comparison, my current project has only been on the books for a short time. Internal bureaucracy is squashed, decisions are taken and progress is made on a daily basis. The bank has well over 100,000 employees, easily more than the combined sum of the employees of the top 10 UK law firms.

While a sample of one is neither scientific nor dispositive, Neil's experience as recorded in his blog post, Life in the fast lane, is instructive. And, it probably accords with what we've been suspecting for some time.

So what accounts for the difference between KM in a law firm versus KM in other types of businesses? Is it that a partnership inherently operates differently from a company? Do law firms lack the vision and leadership to get KM projects done? Is it that law firms aren't really geared to operate as effective businesses? Are bureaucratic rivalries more prevalent in law firms? Do IT departments in banks understand the value of knowledge management better than IT departments in law firms?

As with most things, you can't always generalize. It's best to ask these questions in the context of your own firm. How does your law firm stack up against the bank Neil is working for? Can you honestly say that at your firm, "[i]nternal bureaucracy is squashed, decisions are taken and progress is made on a daily basis"? If not, why not?

Perhaps once we have answers to these questions, we'll be able to get a little bit closer to what Neil has had the pleasure of enjoying at that bank:

What I do know is that it’s remarkably more satisfying to work in an environment where one’s own brain is the bottleneck as opposed to the inner machinations of one’s firm, and that means it will continue to be challenging for firms to keep the high-performers within their back-office.

So pay attention to this issue. Neil's experience contains both a warning and a goal. If you can't deliver KM projects in a timely fashion, not only will you have trouble hanging on to the best members of your team, but you and your KM effort will lose credibility within your firm. By contrast, when you're finally at the point where your "own brain is the bottleneck," you'll have hit the sweet spot for law firm knowledge management. And then, the sky's the limit!

Twitter Discipline

2008-09-29T23:56:00.001-04:00

I've taken the plunge. Yesterday I decided that I couldn't publish another post about Twitter without trying it out for myself. So here I am 24-hours later -- a Twitter neophyte. Luckily, I've found some kind guides in @dougcornelius, @stevematthews and @jackvinson. Thank you, gentlemen.

A single day does not an expert make. Nonetheless, one of the first things that struck me as I tried tweeting today was that Twitter's 140 character limit can be a real challenge. This, of course, led me to the following conclusion: every lawyer should be encouraged to tweet. Regular use of Twitter would teach the discipline of being concise. No more run on sentences. No room for legalese. More short, declarative, pithy phrases. For those of us who endorse a Plain English approach, this is nirvana.

So based on my one day's worth of experience, I'd suggest that we start promoting Twitter in our law firms. If we're really lucky, it could change legal writing for the better. (Okay, I admit that I'm getting a little carried away here. Chalk it up to the enthusiasm of a beginner.)

For others interested in taking the plunge, here's a great introduction to Twitter by Meg Roberts, with some helpful links to get you started.

Why Bother with Web 2.0?

2008-09-29T06:29:00.003-04:00

As discussed in my post, Overcoming Hurdles to Web 2.0, the rate at which law firms have adopted web 2.0 has not been impressive. There seems to be a great deal of organizational resistance to giving up the "command and control" approach to knowledge management and moving to a more dynamic, grassroots approach. And, because of the slow rate of adoption among law firms, law firm knowledge managers can't even point to the Web 2.0 successes of many other law firms in order to goad their own firm into implementing social media tools. In this environment, it's easy to ask "why bother with web 2.0"?

If your firm is stuck in the KM 1.0 rut, take a look at the impressive results of a shift from KM 1.0 to KM 2.0 at Cap Gemini. In his post, From CoLLection to CoNNection, Jon Husband reports on a presentation by Yves Noble at KMWorld & Intranets 2008 in which he recounts the fantastic success of Cap Gemini's adoption of web 2.0.

The post contains Jon's live-blogging notes, so it is in sound bites rather than paragraphs. Nonetheless, it contains some real gems. Here, for example, are the notes on Cap Gemini's situation under the KM 1.0/"Collection" model:

Problems with old KM Solution ?

Plenty of good content, well-organized, well-structured - but people did not use it

20% year-over-year decline in use

Average age [of] document in the system 3.5 years

7 years to refresh knowledge content (wow, papyrus grows faster than that)

Complex and confusing for non-experts

Many disconnects between tools, processes and the organisation

Costly infrastructure

And here's what happened when they switched to using web 2.0 tools and a "Connection" model:

Speed and scope of adoption (official deployment has not yet started)

27,00 registered users

900 communities

500 forums

500 wikis

250 blogs

.. and have not spent even $1.00 in “communications” thus far

Remember these are the results before official deployment! It's enough to make most folks in law firm knowledge management bright green with envy.

Take a closer look at this presentation. It covers everything from the state of their old system, through the long process of moving minds and implementing new tools, to their stunning results. The Cap Gemini experience is a great answer to the question "why bother with Web 2.0."

Yves Noble provides a valuable road map. Follow it!

Knowledge Management Blogs

2008-09-27T09:52:00.006-04:00

Who needs caffeine on a Saturday morning if you can have a Knowledge Jolt instead? I was about to put the kettle on this morning and stopped to check my Google Reader. That's where I found Jack Vinson's post, A Study of KM bloggers, in which he reports on a recent "explorative study" by Pumacy Technologies that analyzes metrics on a variety of knowledge management blogs.

Looking at the month of August, they considered frequency of posting, number of comments, Google page rank and Alexa rankings. (There may be other criteria as well, but we'll have to wait for Pumacy Technologies to explain further.) In any event, they've provided a list of over 50 KM blogs, sorted by blog activity.

Since I'm always interested in finding new KM blogs to add to my personal reading mix, I decided to click through to take a look at the blogs Pumacy Technologies identified. For regular KM blog consumers, most of the names on the blog list will not be surprising. Some of the best and most active commentators in this discipline are on that list. For example, Jack's blog shows up as #11. What surprised me was that Above and Beyond KM was on the list as well as #15!

A closer look revealed that some good KM blogs were not on the list. While we don't have a complete explanation of the study criteria from Pumacy Technologies, a quick review of the list indicates that they seemed to be tracking blogs that cover knowledge management generally as opposed to highly specialized knowledge management blogs.

In any event, do take a look at the list. You'll find some well-known, well-established KM bloggers there. However, you're also bound to discover a few new KM bloggers who have interesting things to say. So explore the list, read the blogs and join the conversation.

Above and Beyond KM began on January 21, 2008. Thanks to Pumacy for giving me this great way to celebrate 8 months of blogging.

Hitting the Twitter Wall

2008-09-26T06:26:00.005-04:00

It's a sad commentary on life in a web 2.0 world when a successful social networker discovers that there's an inverse relationship between the size of her network and the quality of her network. Corvida, guest blogging on Chris Brogan's blog, recently disclosed that she's decreasing her connections while increasing her network. And it's not a good thing. Here's how it works: when she had no more than 400 (!) followers on Twitter, she claims she was able to make real connections with them. As she put it,

I knew who the majority of my followers were, thereby enabling me to utilize Twitter to its maximum potential. I was able to connect, refer, analyze, and reflect on what I was getting from my followers.

Unfortunately, Corvida has been a victim of her own cybersuccess. Here's her description of her current sorry state:

Now, I couldn’t tell you who half of my followers are. I really don’t know who I’m following and who I’m not following. I don’t even know why certain people are following me. In turn, my conversation on Twitter has deteriorated along with the amount of time I used to spend on Twitter.

Corvida has hit the Twitter Wall. She can grow her network of followers infinitely, but she can't sustain a human connection with all of them. When this happens, it leads to some perfectly predictable results: a loss of energy, a loss of interest, a loss of enjoyment.

There's a limit to the number of meaningful relationships any human being can nurture on a regular basis. While web 2.0 tools provide an easy way to make contact, that ease can also get in the way of focusing on the relationships that matter. We've been swept up in the allure of easy connections and they are cluttering our lives.

That's when we hit the Twitter Wall or the Facebook Wall or the LinkedIn Wall. At that point, what exactly do you do with the 500+ or 1000+ people who think they have a claim on you? As Corvida points out, now we've got a problem:

We don’t have a clue on where to begin to make deeper connections as our networks continue to grow. In turn, things may just get out of hand. You start adding people just because they added you with no desire to establish a real relationship with anyone that you haven’t already befriended beforehand.

Corvida wonders if we just need better electronic tools? I don't think so. What we need is a bit more focus and discipline. (These are key to any successful personal knowledge management effort.) While size matters with respect to certain issues, quality matters much more than size if you want a meaningful social network. Perhaps someday someone will come up with a great (open source) social media tool that ensures quality relationships within a network, but until then we'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: identify the folks that matter in our lives and then focus on developing a meaningful relationship with them.

It's either that or face an extended period hitting our heads against the Twitter Wall.

Thought Experiment #2: The Perfect Law Firm KM Program

2008-09-25T09:25:00.008-04:00

In yesterday's post I discussed the value of thought experiments (in the right hands) and outlined a thought experiment that could help you break out of a rut in your law firm knowledge management program. Today, I'd like to propose another horizon-expanding thought experiment.

What if you could start your KM program from scratch and had the ability to create the perfect law firm KM program by cherry-picking the best elements from the KM programs of other law firms?

- Which elements would you choose?
- Why?
- What changes would you make to adapt them to your environment?
- What changes would you make to improve their functionality?
- Which elements of your own KM program would you keep?
- How would you enhance them?

This is not intended as an exercise to feed the green-eyed monster that sits on your shoulder. Nor is it intended to send you into the depths of depression. The point of this exercise is to get you thinking critically about what a great KM program in your law firm could look like, drawing on the successes of your colleagues. This should help you with goal setting and priority setting. There's a wealth of knowledge management experience in your peer firms. This is a way to gather those riches and analyze them objectively, with a view to improving the offerings of your own law firm knowledge management effort.

If you don't get past the wish list phase of this thought experiment, you won't get much value from the exercise. You really need to push your analysis to be sure you understand what makes a law firm knowledge management program great and what would make that great program successful in your law firm. With that knowledge, you can move a substantial distance on the path to running a KM program that your colleagues in other law firms would love to steal.

Thought Experiment #1: The KM R&D Budget

2008-09-24T09:27:00.003-04:00

Thought experiments are a useful tool for trying things out for size, before you actually commit money and resources. Of course, they aren't always as highly predictive as a well-designed pilot, but they can be very valuable -- in the right hands. If you don't believe me, ask Walter Isaacson who made the following observation in his biography about Albert Einstein:

Based purely on thought experiments -- performed in his head rather than in a lab -- [Einstein] decided to discard Newton's concepts of absolute space and time. It would become known as the Special Theory of Relativity. [And, resulting from this thought experiment, he proposed an addendum in which] he posited a relationship between energy and mass. Out of it would arise the best-known equation in all of physics: E=mc2.

Now, don't get me wrong. You don't have to be Einstein to perform a successful thought experiment. You just need to set aside a little time and really probe a question (or group of questions) to see where the answers lead you. It's not necessarily about finding a single solution as much as it is about sensing a new direction and opening new vistas for your planning

So here's today's thought experiment: What if you had a knowledge management R&D budget?

(And what, you might ask, is a KM R&D budget? It's an amount of time, money and resources set aside for research and development, which in our case means to try new tools and techniques in a sandbox before you get to a proof of concept or pilot. It's a way of expanding your horizons and seeing if an approach that's worked elsewhere will work in your environment. It's an experiment without a huge price tag. It's a chance to do an end run around the mandatory six to 18 months of IT business analysis so that you have some relevant evidence on which to build your business case. It's a chance to explore, a chance to play with purpose.)

So let's resume the thought experiment: What if you had a KM R&D budget?

- how much would you need?
- how would you justify it?
- what would you do with it?
- who would you involve?

To do this right, you should set aside at least 20 minutes to think this through. At a minimum, it will be diverting. If you're lucky, this thought experiment could push your knowledge management effort in a whole new and productive direction.

As was once said, the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth. Save yourself from the rut (and an early grave) by indulging in this thought experiment often. It might well give you and your law firm knowledge management effort a new lease on life.

Records Mis-Management

2008-09-23T00:21:00.001-04:00

Do you know where your records are?

Simon Chester, blogging at Slaw, reports on a disturbing trend of missing government records:

Countless federal records are being lost to posterity because federal employees, grappling with a staggering growth in electronic records, do not regularly preserve the documents they create on government computers, send by e-mail and post on the Web.

Unfortunately, this problem is not confined to government. The flood of electronic information is not being captured effectively by all law firms. Lawyers, legal assistants and secretaries can't stay on top of their e-mail and are falling behind in their efforts to put their electronic correspondence in their firm's records management system.

This is a major law firm knowledge management problem. Not only does this correspondence contain valuable know-how, but in some cases it constitutes an important part of a client's record file. Yet gaps persist and the problem grows in magnitude.

Some firms have tried to address this by making it mandatory to file client-related e-mails in their central records system. Others have encouraged lawyers to do the right thing and have even offered relatively easy tools and training sessions to help with the process. However, far too many firms have effectively closed their eyes to the problem, evidently hoping that it will just go away of its own accord.

Document retention policy? Hardly. But, these chickens will come home to roost some day, most likely in the form of an unpleasant law suit. Is your firm prepared for that eventuality or is it in denial about its records mismanagement? Now's the time to ask the tough questions and implement some sensible solutions.

Information Overload is a Cop-Out

2008-09-22T09:17:00.001-04:00

Clay Shirky has fired a shot across the bow of every person who ever complained that they couldn't get things done because of information overload. He suggests that our current approach to the Internet has infantalized users. As he points out, there have always been more books in any given bookstore than you can read in one sitting. So how do you deal with it? You make choices based on quality, price, needs, interests and personal taste. Now contrast that with the multitude of materials to read on the Internet? Do we make intelligent choices? More often than not, we abdicate personal responsibility and resort to complaining about information overload. The main difference between the bookstore and the Internet is the price of the information presented. Now that we have access to a vast array of free information, we can't use the price filter. However, there is nothing about the virtual information source that relieves the consumer of the necessity of making choices based on the other filters of quality, needs, interests and personal taste.

For some, law firm knowledge management's answer has been to spoonfeed the lawyers by using administrative staff and tech tools to scour the resources, make editorial choices, and then pass on the cream of the crop to the lawyers. And, we lawyers have enjoyed the service, while complaining when those editors don't quite make the right choices. However, the minute the editor (virtual or real) disappears, the lawyers find themselves on the wrong end of the firehose of information with no personal tools for managing the flood. This creates a class of people who know how to consume fish, but haven't been taught to fish. That's failure of knowledge management and information technology training. It's a place where basic instruction in personal knowledge management can yield great dividends.

Continuing the fish metaphor, Clay Shirky says, "we are to information overload as fish are to water. It's what we swim in." So, from his perpective, it's time we stopped bemoaning the existence of our information environment and started paying closer attention to the filters we use. His advice: whenever it feels like you're drowning in information, stop and take a look to see if you can identify which of your information filters just broke. And, my advice? None of this works if you don't have a sensible set of personal information filters. So the onus is on you to find and use tools that tailor the information to your interests, needs and tastes. While law firm knowledge management can provide lawyers with some basic personal KM training and help identify useful tools, each individual lawyer has got to quit the moaning and start taking personal responsibility for the quality and quantity of information they process daily.

You can't (and probably don't want to) stop the information flow. All you can do is manage it effectively so that it doesn't wrestle you to the floor every day. Good luck!

For more on this topic, see the video of Clay Shirky's presentation.

[Thanks to Gina Trapani for pointing out this Shirky presentation.]

Overcoming Hurdles to Web 2.0

2008-09-22T00:12:00.001-04:00

There are some bright shining examples of web 2.0 implementations in law firms and then there are the vast majority of the web 1.0 firms. While it may be natural for law firm knowledge management personnel in web 1.0 firms to envy their counterparts in that relatively small group of web 2.0 firms, it's not a terribly productive exercise. It's more useful to analyze and address the issues that are holding the web 1.0 firms back.

Ruth Ward, head of knowledge systems and development at Allen & Overy LLP mentions a common web 2.0 hurdle in her article Know-how to network:

Drilling down from firm-wide initiatives, practice and team communities and project spaces have been at the heart of A&O’s Web 2.0 work for a number of years. We have used the same site build for over 50 sites – to improve cross-border communication and collaboration among practice groups and business teams divided by geography and time zones, and to manage business projects and initiatives more effectively. Activity on most of these member-specific sites centres on news, discussions and Q&As on the group blog, but the sites also include a wiki to use as a shared knowledge base or to collaborate on documents and reports and external newsfeeds using RSS and shared bookmarks. Our experience is that these sites work much more effectively than the traditional email, document management (DM) and intranet toolset, and my experience from talking with many law firms and legal departments over the past few years is that most people can immediately see how they would benefit their own business teams – if only they could get the IT buy-in either to buy or build them! [emphasis added]

Is the IT department the stumbling block in your firm? Why? Is it because the knowledge management group has failed to articulate clearly the business case for web 2.0? Is it because the IT folks in your firm are inherently uncomfortable with emerging technology and won't take a risk on anything that isn't widely seen as mature technology? Is it because IT sees the technology as being beneficial only to KM rather than the entire firm? Is it because your IT staff are really dinosaurs in drag? Until you've answered these questions, it's hard to identify a strategy to overcome this hurdle.

Another objection, is that law firm decision makers can't seem to think about social media tools without thinking about teens running wild on the internet. Ruth Ward puts it a little differently:

Social tools and networks can bring real business value, especially in a professional-services setting. But many partners and practices seem to struggle to get beyond their press-led perceptions of Facebook and Wikipedia, and their natural scepticism of blogging.

Either way, this is about managers not understanding that most of us behave differently at work than we do in our social lives. We know that we're expected to conform to specific rules in the workplace and usually are happy to comply in exchange for a paycheck. And, when the occasional renegade mixes up their office staff directory with their personal Facebook page, peer pressure (or a gentle nudge from their supervisor) should bring them back into line.

Another common problem is the natural conservatism and skepticism of lawyers, which often makes them reluctant to be the first to adopt new technology. I call this the Early Adoption Aversion Syndrome (EAASy) , but others might more charitably characterize it as an excessive reliance on precedent. In firms afflicted with Early Adoption Aversion Syndrome, partners and managers invariably ask what peer firms are doing with respect to the particular technology you're trying to implement. This means that an important part of your business case needs to be a good survey of those firms. I'd encourage you to read the rest of Ruth Ward's article to learn about the success Allen & Overy has been having with web 2.0. Doug Cornelius at KMSpace is another great resource for information about web 2.0 generally, and about Goodwin Procter, specifically. Ron Friedmann at Strategic Legal Technology regularly reports on innovative uses of technology by law firms.

We're not quite at the tipping point regarding web 2.0 adoption in law firms. That makes each decision to proceed with web 2.0 tools now critical for everyone in the legal industry. Once the tipping point occurs, the only question law firm managers will be asking of law firm knowledge management personnel is, why did you let us fall behind the competition?

Putting Blinders on to Enhance Productivity

2008-09-19T07:46:00.000-04:00

Do you remember the conversations we had within law firms when we began to consider permitting desktop access to the Internet? Everyone focused on the potential loss of productivity. To be fair, that can be a problem. You don't have to walk far in any office to find someone surfing the net. Equally, you don't have to walk far to find someone using e-mail or the telephone for personal business during business hours. Regardless of the type of technology tool (e.g., the web, e-mail or the phone), people can always find non-business ways of using that tool.

Nonetheless, withholding technology for fear of productivity losses is a little like trying to put blinders on your people to keep them focused on work. The problem is that while this strategy works with horses, it's considerably less successful with people. Never underestimate the creativity of a person determined not to work.

As various enterprises now consider bringing the benefits of social media tools within their firewalls, they can be overly-concerned with the negative aspects of social networking and fail to appreciate the potential productivity gains. As reported by Atul Rai in IBM and Social Networking, while IBM had some initial qualms about productivity losses resulting from new social media tools, the powers-that-be decided that the risk was no greater than the normal tendency to have conversations over the water cooler or in the hallway about nonwork-related topics. Now that IBM has deployed social media tools to wide acclaim, they've discovered that the tools don't interfere with an employee's ability to meet work goals. In fact, the tools have provided significant productivity benefits.

This seems like a good point to suggest that instead of withholding tools in an attempt to force employees to focus on work, we should take a closer look at what really allows people to work well.

In a recent series of posts, Daniel Pink reported on an interview he did with Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, authors of the book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. In their book they propose a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). According to Pink, key features of a ROWE are: "people show up to the office when they want, meetings are optional, and nobody’s watching the clock." (This is a far cry from most offices.) The bottom line is that "each person in an office environment is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. " [emphasis added]

One common worry raised by critics is that employees won't be able to handle a ROWE (i.e., they aren't grown up enough to be responsible for their own time and performance). Here's how the authors respond to that criticism:

... how do you know that some people can’t handle ROWE? Don’t assume what you don’t know. If you and your employees work on the clear expectations that are expected in order for them to keep their job, then set them free to reach their outcomes. Worrying that some people can’t handle ROWE is a waste of time. It’s paternalistic thinking that just doesn’t have a place in the 21^st century. We’ve found that there is so much productivity being left on the table in companies because managers are orchestrating everything according to their liking. Unleash the untapped potential around you – it’s waiting to come out!

In a law firm that charges by the billable hour, there is a natural fixation on time and how that time is spent. Further, many law firms tend to be populated by inherently conservative people who have a hard time thinking about radical changes to their work style or work environment. However, if we could look past the billable hour for a moment, we'd realize that in a ROWE it doesn't matter if a wonderful tech tool also provides a handy distraction since it's ultimately up to the individual employee to meet their performance goals in a timely manner. Therefore, as long as the firm provides useful tools, it's the employee's responsibility to use those tools wisely -- or not. In this way, the employer gives up the nanny role and gets to spend more time setting strategy, hiring good people, and then letting those people loose to meet strategic goals.

This should be the new mantra for law firm knowledge management and information technology specialists: instead of micromanaging employees to make them work, just articulate clear expectations and performance goals, provide great tools, and then set them free to work as they see fit. Don't shy away from web 2.0 technology simply because you are concerned about the social aspects of the tools. When you try to put blinders on your people, you fail. Instead of hampering their ability to goof off, you hamper their ability to work. In effect, instead of blinders, you're putting handcuffs on them. Now how is that conducive to work?

The More Things Change

2008-09-18T07:30:00.004-04:00

From time to time, this blog discusses various constant elements of human nature. Usually, we focus on the unwillingness of folks to do what they don't want to do and why this affects the adoption of new technology tools or knowledge management systems. The last few days and weeks have reminded us that there are other aspects of human nature that don't ever seem to change. If you're not sure about this, take a look at the following excerpt from a congressional report:

“During the postwar decade some 50 billions of new securities were floated in the United States. Fully half or $25,000,000,000 worth of securities floated during this period have been proved to be worthless. These cold figures spell tragedy in the lives of thousands of individuals who invested their life savings, accumulated after years of effort, in these worthless securities. The flotation of such a mass of essentially fraudulent securities was made possible because of the complete abandonment by many underwriters and dealers in securities of those standards of fair, honest and prudent dealing that should be basic to the encouragement of investment in any enterprise. Alluring promises of vast wealth were freely made with little or no attempt to bring to the investor’s attention those facts essential to estimating the worth of any security. Highpressure salesmanship rather than careful counsel was the rule in this most dangerous of enterprises.” **

This report wasn't written this week -- it was written during the Great Depression. Nonetheless, it resonates in a week where we've seen large financial institutions fail and unimaginable turmoil in the capital markets.

One of the functions of KM 1.0 is to capture and make available for reuse helpful information objects. Consider this post my knowledge management contribution to the inevitable post-mortem report that is yet to be written. Congress can entitle the report, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

[** Source: H.R. Rep. No. 85, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1933).]

Constructive Destruction

2008-09-17T09:10:00.005-04:00

A commentator on the economy described our current travails as "constructive destruction." Clearly this optimist believes that good will come out of our economic troubles. In some ways, this is not dissimilar to the fertilizing benefits of a forest fire. Short term pain for long term gain.

Since law firms are so dependent on market forces, it is a rare firm that can ignore the economic turmoil around it and continue with business as usual. For law firm knowledge management departments, there will undoubtedly be a period of retrenchment as everyone tries to hold the line on budgets until we have more clarity about the direction of the economy. This gives law firm knowledge managers a couple of choices: you can grit your teeth and trim where you think you'll feel the least pain OR you can take the opportunity to engage in a little constructive destruction.

Constructive destruction, in this context, means identifying programs that may be working decently, but not optimally. Consider what would be required to get them to optimal operations. And then consider whether that is an investment worth making, regardless of current economic conditions. If the answer is yes, make the investment. If the answer is no, kill the program. That's the destruction part of constructive destruction.

The harder part of constructive destruction comes with being constructive. Here are a few ideas to get you pointed in the right direction:

1. Before you destroy a program, make sure you've milked it for all the learning it can offer. There's absolutely no need to repeat your mistakes.

2. Once you've destroyed a program, be sure to redeploy the newly-free resources to achieve something better. Don't let them just lie around.

Painful though it may be, constructive destruction is an approach used regularly by Mother Nature and, it appears, by market forces. Try applying it to your KM program and see what benefits accrue.

Twittering Inside the Firewall

2008-09-16T08:06:00.010-04:00

Are you tempted by the idea of Twitter inside the firewall? For true Twitter junkies, it may be nearly irresistible. And, now, we're hearing about some new Twitter-clones that are designed to operate within enterprises. However, before you start pushing this as the next big thing for law firm knowledge management, consider the following: What existing workflow or tool will Twitter replace or enhance within your law firm?

In my earlier post, Are You Creating Problems or Solutions, I discussed the negative repercussions of pushing a tool versus identifying a current way of doing things that could be done better with a little technical assistance. In the case of Twitter, it could be an obvious substitute for IM. However, how many law firms have overcome their record retention questions and discovery phobia to the extent that they have actually implemented a robust IM program? If your lawyers are not IMing now, why would they start Twittering?

Alternatively, if you are in one of those rare firms where the lawyers unfailingly inform their assistants exactly where they may be found at all times, a Twitter-like tool could be a nice enhancement. However, if your lawyers tend to wander off at will, why do you think Twitter will change that behavior?

For more issues to consider before you promote a Twitter clone within your law firm, see Lee Bryant's helpful post on the Headshift blog, It's like Twitter, but for .... (For those of you who have read this far, but aren't entirely sure you understand what Twitter or Microblogging is all about or how it might operate within a law firm, take a look at the following post by Björn Negelman (recommended by Lee Bryant): Microblogging as a Corporate Tool.)

Now, before you start jumping up and down, let me be clear. This is not intended as a screed against technology generally or Twitter (or Yammer or ESME or laconi.ca) specifically. It is just a reminder that no technology is a silver bullet. As knowledge management experts will tell you time and time again, you need the right people and processes in place first or else your new tech toy will fall flat on its face.

Consider yourself warned.

Update: See also Jevon MacDonald's post, Will you Twitter inside the enterprise and Jeremiah Owyang's List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet.

Law Firm KM Reality Check

2008-09-15T08:37:00.002-04:00

It's hard not to feel a little hung over after a weekend binge that included Hurricane Ike, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the potential restructuring of AIG. As we return to our offices this morning and our safe debates about taxonomy and technology, web 1.0 vs web 2.0, mandatory participation in knowledge management efforts vs incentives for voluntary KM participation, it's a good time to remember why we do what we do: to ensure that the right information is in the right hands at the right time so that decision makers can make better decisions. After the past weekend's binge, it's hard not to wonder about the quality of decision making that preceded the debacle. It may be years before we learn (if we ever do) whether any of these firms or the government agencies involved (i.e., the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department) had viable knowledge management programs and what impact those programs had.

Law firms aren't immune from the hubris that seems to affect the financial sector and we certainly suffer the effects of the decisions made on Wall Street. In light of that reality, we should take a second look at our law firm knowledge management programs. To the extent we even can "manage knowledge," are we working with the right knowledge? Do the decision makers actually use our resources? If the answers to either of those questions is no, then you need to ask why. In times of turmoil, it's more important than ever to be relevant. If knowledge management isn't in the thick of things and making a difference, then why are we doing what we're doing?

How Leadership Makes a Difference

2008-09-12T07:43:00.010-04:00

If you've got a generous budget and an appropriately-sized, energetic, motivated and productive staff, you can stop reading now. Clearly you've got more assets than most knowledge managers and must, as a result, be achieving great things in the world of knowledge management. If, however, you aren't so fortunate, you might want to read further.

In this political season (or as one of the presidential candidates called it, this "silly season"), there's a lot of talk about leadership. Unsurprisingly, much of that discussion is superficial. When you look back at some great leaders in this country, you realize that some of the talents they brought to the table are innate and simply cannot be purchased or developed. For example, George Washington was universally known as a great leader and, undoubtedly, that reputation was due to more than the mere fact that he was often the tallest man in the room. However, while having an imposing physical size was not sufficient, it certainly was helpful. Unfortunately, that's exactly the sort of asset that is hard to purchase or develop. A different kind of asset is the moral compass Abraham Lincoln had or the personal courage Theodore Roosevelt had. While they may have been flawed men in many ways, they also had enormous strengths that ultimately made a huge difference in how they led and what they accomplished for this country.

For the purposes of this discussion, however, it's useful to put Franklin Roosevelt front and center in your mind. The manner in which he led involved methods that can be developed in adult life. Furthermore, we are learning now that some of these methods are critical to good leadership in modern enterprises. Here are a few of these methods for your consideration:

How you deliver the message matters as much as the message itself

In day to day leadership, one of the most critical things you do is communicate what's important and how it is to be accomplished. What isn't always understood is that the way you communicate matters as much as (if not more, sometimes, than) the message itself. Looking back at FDR, he was very careful in his public appearances to project vitality, strength and optimism. But this was not just for show. Most of us, after all, have fairly good personal radar for detecting insincerity. Rather, he was able to project these things successfully because he believed them himself, truly embodied them, and had great faith in his overriding purpose.

Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq. reports on a study that compared the results of communicating a positive performance review accompanied by negative body language (e.g., frowns, narrowed eyes, flat voice, etc.) with communicating a negative performance review accompanied by positive body language (e.g., smiles, nods, good eye contact, open hand gestures, etc.) What the study found is striking: people who received positive reviews delivered with negative body language felt worse about their performance than people who received negative reviews delivered with positive body language. The latter felt encouraged and capable of making improvements. This study puts a premium on intentionality and clarity in leadership. You need to be sure that you are coherent and consistent in what you say AND how you say it.

Leadership is about more than achieving personal acclaim

By the time he became president, FDR had already been governor of a great state and had all the benefits of having grown up in one of the country's leading families. He really didn't need to burnish his résumé. Unfortunately, too many business "leaders" are in it for the glory and not as many have a cause truly worth fighting for. FDR had several Herculean tasks, including bringing the country out of the Great Depression and curtailing fascism. Are you working for anything more than your ego and your résumé?

Leadership means developing the best in others

One of the hallmarks of FDR's leadership was that he understood that historic times required historic efforts. To that end, he called on the people of the United States to give more than the they thought they could give and be more than they thought they could be. History tells us that they answered that call.

FDR clearly understood that at the end of the day, leadership is not about you, it's about the people you serve and lead. We now know that there are also some compelling business reasons for focusing on them rather than on yourself. An exhaustive study at Bell Laboratories followed the career trajectories of engineers in an attempt to identify the traits of star performers and determine how to recruit and retain the best engineers. In his paper, "Are We Selling Results or Résumés?: The Underexplored Linkage between Human Resource Strategies and Firm-Specific Capital," William D. Henderson reports that what they found was striking:

- researchers found no relationship between performance and various social, psychological, and cognitive abilities, such as I.Q
- higher productivity among knowledge workers was attributable to several distinctive work strategies that were teachable
- controlled experiments showed large and persistent productivity gains for engineers who completed the training program, with women and minority workers posting the largest increases [emphasis added]

What this suggests is that building a great team depends less on recruiting stars, and more on how you develop the people who work with you. A great leader will take the time and make the effort to ensure their team learns the "distinctive work strategies" for success that the researchers at Bell Labs found were "teachable."

In knowledge management, as in politics or any other discipline, good leadership is a rare asset. Those of us who have it will be ahead of the pack. The good news is that even members of that pack can develop some of the attributes of good leadership. And, when they do, we'll all be much better off.

9/11 and Knowledge Management

2008-09-11T08:54:00.005-04:00

It's cloudy today here in New York City. Even though the sky is not the bright, sparkling, optimistic blue it was early in the morning of September 11, 2001, there are plenty of other reminders of the events of that day.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we learned that the government in fact had much of the information that it needed to be aware of and counteract the 9/11 plot. However, some of that information was located in silos and protected by departmental rivalries. According to the 9/11 Commission's Report:

The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to national priorities.
...
The missed opportunities to thwart the 9/ 11 plot were also symptoms of a broader inability to adapt the way government manages problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. Action officers should have been able to draw on all available knowledge about al Qaeda in the government. Management should have ensured that information was shared and duties were clearly assigned across agencies, and across the foreign-domestic divide. ... The U. S. government did not find a way of pooling intelligence and using it to guide the planning and assignment of responsibilities for joint operations involving entities as disparate as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the military, and the agencies involved in homeland security.

If there was ever an instance in which knowledge sharing and collaboration could have made a difference, that's the one.

If we are fortunate, we'll never again have to face so grave a test of our government's knowledge management capabilities. If we are wise, we'll take the lessons to heart and do something to increase the culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing within the government and within our own enterprises.

Since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, some have spent time thinking about how to improve knowledge sharing and thereby improve our ability to respond to disasters and emergencies. David Bray, a doctoral candidate at Emory's business school, is one such person. On 9/11, he was the information technology chief for Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In that role, he saw first-hand the KM failures within the government. This experience deeply informs his research. Here is a glimpse at what he is studying, as reported in Knowledge @ Emory:

“I saw several instances where this workforce of 1.2 million government workers, not counting contractors—which is probably another 800,000—had significant disconnects. In fact that’s what the 9/11 report specifically comes out as saying: the United States did not connect the dots across multiple agencies,” explains Bray, currently a doctoral candidate at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “There were times with our program where we knew something at the trench level, tried to pass it up the hierarchy, but unfortunately it never got anywhere. Events like Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, anthrax, occur in part because organizational structures in which we trust, particularly for government—but also for most large businesses—aren’t built to respond quickly to turbulent environments,” contends Bray. “And now, in part because of globalization and also because of technology, things can change so quickly half a world away.”

In his paper “Exploration and Exploitation: Managing Knowledge in Turbulent Environments,” Bray, along with Goizueta co-author Michael J. Prietula, a professor of information systems and operations management who also researches responses to disasters, develop a theoretical model about knowledge management in organizational hierarchies. Bray extends an existing model of exploration and exploitation to consider the context of multi-tier hierarchical firms faced with environmental turbulence, and then considers whether a knowledge management system that enhances knowledge exchanges across the organization alters the ability of the organization to match the conditions of a turbulent environment. Bray’s model considers different management approaches, such as a bottom-up cultivation strategy or a top-down command-and-control strategy.
“We wanted to explore whether having a top-down or bottom-up strategy would help or hurt organizational hierarchies when faced with environmental turbulence” says Bray. “We specifically were testing the idea that while top-down hierarchies may be great at command and control and maintaining internal control and reality, they’re bad at addressing a changing outside environment; a change in the marketplace, a change in competition, or an emerging national security threat.”
Bray’s research finds strong evidence that top-down hierarchies that stress command and control are ineffective in managing knowledge in turbulent environments because they decrease a hierarchical organization’s ability to maintain accuracy with its outside environment. [Emphasis added]

The work of David Bray and Michael Prietula suggests that bottom-up collaboration and knowledge sharing is the most effective way of keeping knowledge silos and human rivalries from hoarding critical information in times of change. And, because of the culture of collaboration, this sharing allows us to make better decisions and respond more effectively to the unexpected.

On the anniversary of September 11, 2001, it's good to know that we've actually learned something and are headed, albeit slowly and fitfully, in the right direction.

When KM is Supported by the Top Brass

2008-09-10T08:58:00.009-04:00

Most knowledge management treatises and guides will tell you that it is hard to carry out an enterprise wide knowledge management program without the full support of senior management. Unfortunately, within a lot of enterprises the members of senior management are sometimes those least likely to understand or use a KM system. Therefore, their support can be theoretical and that gets communicated to the rank and file as a lukewarm endorsement. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess how the rank and file react to a mandate from above that doesn't seem to have any teeth.

With respect to law firm knowledge management the problem is widespread. The senior partners or administrative partners will certainly understand on paper the potential benefits of a knowledge management program. They may even remember back to the days when they were junior associates facing a new assignment without models or practice guides. However, they've come a long way since then and have platoons of associates under them who deal with those issues firsthand. And, with that distance comes a loss of urgency to pursue knowledge management.

Another problem that arises in law firm knowledge management occurs when senior lawyers have acted on their natural tendencies to create order out of chaos and have developed personal knowledge management systems that increase their own efficiency. Even when presented with a reasonably-effective firm wide knowledge management system, they are often reluctant to give up their own tried and true approach.

Finally, there's the culture of most law firms: an aggregation of people who are fiercely autonomous and largely introverted; people who wish to practice law, but don't always want the bother of running an efficient business. These folks cherish their independence and only grudgingly submit to community edicts and systems. It's hard to sell KM systems to these lawyers until you've answered adequately their fundamental question: what's in it for me?

I'm still working on effective solutions to all of these problems, but found it instructive to look at a case in which the "top brass" truly supports the KM program. The top brass I have in mind are senior managers in the US Army. In his article, Army Retools Knowledge Culture, Brian Robinson reports that the Army has taken a decisive move away from its 2001 position of focusing its knowledge management efforts on information technology. They have now decided they need to broaden their focus to encompass people and culture, process, and technology -- in that order. Further, they are taking the radical step of moving away from a culture that fiercely protects the security of information to a culture that emphasizes openness and information sharing:

The culture has historically protected information closely and released it on a must-know basis. Now, Army managers need to learn to see broad information sharing as a natural military skill.

“It’s all about increasing collaboration, and that has huge implications for warfighters,” said Bob Neilson, knowledge management adviser to the Army’s chief information officer. “It’s about not only sharing information but having the responsibility to provide knowledge across the enterprise.”

The 2008 knowledge management principles adopt the move to collaboration that is increasingly prevalent in society:

The creation of a collaborative culture is embedded throughout the list of 12 principles and was the major rationale for the expanded approach to knowledge management that Army Secretary Pete Geren and Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey offered in a memo they sent in July introducing the principles.

They firmly embrace an Army enterprise perspective, they wrote, and “will create an Army where good ideas are valued regardless of the source, the existing knowledge base is accessible without technological or structural barriers, and knowledge sharing is recognized and rewarded.”

All in all, this Army initiative contains a great deal that civilians could learn from and follow. Pay particular attention to the 12 principles articulated in their policy. They would be as apt in a law firm or any other enterprise. The only catch is that in the Army, senior management really appears to understand and endorse effective knowledge management. And, when the top brass speaks in the Army everyone listens. Those are benefits not all of us can claim.

Do You Have What it Takes to Collaborate?

2008-09-09T19:15:00.002-04:00

Basic web 2.0 allows us transparency, a window into another's life. Multiplied over many people, web 2.0 helps them connect with each other and strengthen an existing or emerging social network. Providing these connections is helpful, but it isn't collaboration. True collaboration is more than just getting along. It's working together towards a common goal. Unfortunately, in this world of competitive achievers, it's hard to find someone who really knows how to collaborate.

Like many other things, collaboration is an orientation as well as a set of skills. Deciding to be more intentional about collaborating is a good first step, but it takes more than that. According to Shawn Callahan at Anecdote, there are seven critical personal skills necessary for effective collaboration:

"How to apologise
How to advocate your point of view without harming your collaborator's feelings
How to spot when a conversation gets emotional and then make it safe again to continue meaningful dialogue
How to listen and get into the shoes of your collaborator
How to define a mutual intent that will inspire action
How to tell and elicit stories
How to get things done so you have something to show for your collaboration"

Based on this list, collaboration requires more than mere technical knowledge. It requires drawing on sometimes dormant interpersonal relationship skills -- listening, empathy, consideration, etc. These are skills that have been undervalued within businesses for far too long.

So take a close look at this list of necessary skills and then take a closer look at yourself. Do you have what it takes to collaborate?

[My thanks to John Tropea's Delicious links for alerting me to Shawn's blogpost.]

So You Think You Should "Command and Control"?

2008-09-08T23:18:00.001-04:00

For too many years, law firm knowledge management has focused on centralized efforts to capture and disseminate "knowledge." Under this approach, knowledge is a thing, an object that must be found and corralled. And once you've found and organized all those knowledge things, you then tackle the daunting task of wresting tacit knowledge out of the heads of your colleagues and into your databases.

David Jabbari at Allen & Overy describes this effort in the following way in a recent issue of Law Practice Today:

"If you see knowledge as an inert ‘thing’ that can be captured, edited and distributed, there is a danger that your KM effort will gravitate to the rather boring, back-office work preoccupied with indexes and IT systems. This will be accompanied by a ritualized nagging of senior lawyers to contribute more knowledge to online systems."

That's the job too many law firms have assigned to their knowledge management team. If you're a practice support lawyer (PSL) in such a firm, how's it working for you? David Jabbari describes this approach as "command and control":

"The command and control approach to law firm KM focuses on the systems and management structures needed to capture and publish knowledge. In this approach, knowledge is often created in a very centralized way, using techniques such as commissioning, or forming ‘project groups’, and then publishing the output in centralized content stores. The fact that no more than 25 per cent of material stored in databases is ever accessed does not seem to deter people from thinking that placing material in a central store constitutes a success of some type."

It sounds like a futile exercise, yet it is standard operating procedure in far too many law firms. In fact, there are regular conversations among many PSLs I know about the difficulties inherent in creating or finding materials for centralized databases, or the struggle involved in getting client-facing lawyers to take the time to create, review or share useful materials for the KM system. For these PSLs and for their law firms, success is measured by the number of documents created and centrally stored. The metrics give a comforting sense of doing something, but don't establish definitively that they are doing something useful.

With the emergence of web 2.0 and social computing, many of us have come to understand both the power of collaborative knowledge creation and sharing, as well as the ultimate futility of trying to capture the explicit and tacit knowledge within the firm. David Jabbari suggests that this move from control to collaboration allows us to focus on more productive goals:

"If, however, you see knowledge as a creative and collaborative activity, your interest will be the way in which distinctive insights can be created and deployed to deepen client relationships. You will tend to be more interested in connecting people than in building perfect knowledge repositories."

Allen & Overy is enjoying tremendous success pursuing collaboration rather than control. How does your firm compare?

[Thanks to Mohamed Amine Chatti for pointing out this article.]

True Leaders Value Mistakes

2008-09-06T14:25:00.000-04:00

It's a natural human tendency to run from failure. In our understandable need to avoid pain, we try to put it behind us and move on. (The more cynical would say, we sweep it under the carpet, shrug, and move on.) While I'd be the last one to recommend that we should wallow in misery, it is useful to remember from time to time that the main point of experience is to learn and grow. And, it is hard to learn and grow without a little reflection and analysis. Reflecting on your successes may give your ego a brief boost, but that in and of itself doesn't always equip you for the next challenge. Reflecting on your mistakes can, if you're careful about how you uncover, analyze and handle the information.

Nancy White at Full Circle Associates makes this point in her post, Learning from our mistakes, in which she reports on the remarkable after action review undertaken at Amazon after an embarrassing technical failure. What comes through her report is the integrity and decency inherent in the way Amazon handled what could have been an opportunity for upset, abuse and unhappiness in the hands of less skillful managers and a less mature organization. Their object wasn't to find fault, but to learn. As Nancy White observes:

"Pulling our mistakes out and looking with them, alone and with the aid of colleagues, is a simple and effective learning practice. But it takes both a personal commitment to productively looking at our warts (rather than simple self-flagellation or guilt) and an organizational culture that values learning along with success. And we all know it… we learn more from our failures than our successes."

I can't stress enough the importance of leadership in this exercise. Every child knows how to deflect blame and finger point. That isn't an effective after action review. That's an exercise in avoiding responsibility. In Amazon's case, the participants appear to have assumed responsibility and then taken the next vital step: they understood that this responsibility required them to learn from the event sufficiently to avoid repeating their mistakes. Very few of us do this without the right leadership. I don't know who at Amazon led this effort, but I do commend them.

Leaders help us rise above our natural tendencies and move us along the path to doing the right thing for ourselves and for our organizations. However, this isn't a isolated action. Well before the mistake occurs, a good leader will have put in place an organizational culture that emphasizes the importance of innovating, going out of our comfort zone, and taking reasonable risks. Above all, a good leader understands that innovation inevitably involves mistakes. A great leader knows how to use those mistakes to yield the maximum advantage (in terms of lessons learned and growth) for their team and their enterprise.

When you're dealing with an organization that faces liability if it doesn't reach the right result every time in a predictable, controlled fashion, mistakes take on an even greater importance. Consequently, there can be a tendency to sacrifice innovation and growth for predictability and control. In that environment, mistakes are barely tolerated and rarely encouraged. The problem is that an organization without mistakes is an organization without innovation and growth.

In our drive to avoid mistakes, we don't always spend enough time learning how to react to mistakes in a manner that is productive. Therefore, when we do respond, it is often in an ad hoc way that doesn't take advantage of the tremendous opportunity for growth presented by mistakes. The good news is that response patterns to mistakes are learned responses and can be improved -- provided participants know they won't become scapegoats or pariahs. Looking to cases like the Amazon after action review can provide some guidance on a better way to learn from mistakes, grow, and achieve greater success.

You Haven't Missed the Train -- Yet

2008-09-05T00:12:00.004-04:00

With all the flurry in the blogosphere and blawgosphere about web 2.0 and social media tools, it's easy to believe that you are the last Luddite left standing without a Facebook friend, LinkedIn connection or personal blog. Fear not -- you have lots of company. According to a recent global survey by Synovate, 58% of the population is clueless about social networking. Steve Garton, Synovate's global head of media research reports:

"We spoke with over 13,000 respondents aged 18-65 years in 17 markets around the world to find out who's connected and who's not, as well as attitudes and online behaviours. Some of what we found surprised us... like more than a third of social networkers say they are losing interest in social media. And how many people do not even know what it is."

That said, if they had interviewed only 18-35 year olds, they would have seen a different picture. However, the demographic they covered reflects the demographic in many enterprises and should not be ignored.

Interestingly, there also appear to be geographical differences in awareness of social networking:

"The Dutch were most likely to know the term with 89% answering 'yes', followed by Japan at 71% and Americans with 70% answering in the affirmative. Still, that leaves three in every ten Americans (the home of social networking) outside the world of digital friends and relationships."

...

"Overall, 26% across the markets surveyed are members of social networking sites. This peaked with the Netherlands at 49%, United Arab Emirates (UAE) at 46%, Canada at 44% and the US at 40% (though keep in mind that's 40% of a huge population)."

This suggests that a social networking strategy within a firm may have more success if targeted at workers within specific countries. Clearly one size does not fit all.

In the context of law firm knowledge management, it's time we stopped complaining about how hard it is to convince lawyers to use social media tools. We shouldn't be surprised at how slowly social media tools are being adopted within our firms since the data provided by Synovate appear to indicate that the rate of adoption outside the enterprise is not as broad and high as the hype in the popular press would suggest.

The good news is that you can stop hyperventilating. There is still time to implement a social media program at your firm without falling hopelessly behind your competitors. And, it is worth the effort to do so. These tools are a rich resource for law firms willing to use them creatively. But don't dally unnecessarily. While the social networking train has not left the station yet, it's only a matter of time.

[Thanks to HeadShift for the link to the Synovate survey report.]

Lipstick

2008-09-04T08:40:00.008-04:00

We learned last night on prime time TV that the only difference between a "hockey mom" and a pit bull is ... lipstick.

Tenacity. Perseverance. Toughness. Fighting spirit. These are some of the characteristics typically associated with pit bulls. Of course, there's also meanness and deadliness, but since this blog is NOT about politics, we won't go there.

All of this talk of groups of people and animals got me thinking about the characteristics knowledge management experts share. We need the tenacity, perseverance, toughness and fighting spirit of pit bulls. But, equally, we need empathy, intuition, ingenuity and the ability to put others at ease as we encourage them to do things they would not otherwise do. So, to be effective at knowledge management, we need to be a cross between pit bulls and ... what?

Perhaps we should look to the patron saint of animals, St. Francis of Assisi. He was a troubadour and poet, a soldier, a teacher, an evangelist, a person capable of changing how others lived, the founder of a major institution, a person who accomplished great things despite poverty, someone who was completely attuned to his environment. We could do much worse.

Why Worry About Law Firm KM ROI?

2008-09-03T09:25:00.007-04:00

From time to time, law firm knowledge management junkies twist themselves into knots trying to determine the best way of calculating the return on investment (ROI) of knowledge management efforts. I'm as guilty as the rest for engaging in this exercise. A few have suggested that thinking about ROI is not helpful to KM since knowledge management done properly should create client work product more efficiently, thereby reducing the number of billable hours required and the size of the bill presented to the client. For these folks, that's reason enough not to talk too loudly about ROI.

Jordan Furlong has a better approach. In his post, Never mind the billables, he points out that we shouldn't be conflating the cost to the client with the cost to the firm. The client will pay what the client is willing to pay. Therefore, the best way for the firm to protect itself is to reduce its own cost. Then, as the client imposes more constraints on the amount the law firm may charge, the firm can maintain or increase its profit margin by carefully containing its own costs. This is where knowledge management can help. Here's how he describes this:

Every time you reduce your costs, you create an equivalent opportunity in your profit column, because the amount you spend to render a service to your clients has no effect on the value of that service to the client. (It never has.) Your client doesn’t care how much profit you make for yourself; the client only cares that you delivered excellent value in a cost-effective (to the client) manner. How you bill your services is between you and your client; how much it costs you to deliver those services has to be your number-one business priority.

So let's take another look at knowledge management ROI in this context. Granted, for firms that can't think beyond the billable hour, this may seem premature. But for firms with foresight, separating (at least for planning purposes) client cost from firm cost should help open a competitive advantage.

Dancing and Knowledge Management

2008-08-28T00:05:00.000-04:00

In a recent conversation with Patrick Lambe and Dave Snowden, Larry Prusak described the three stages of knowledge management:

- content collecting, organizing and searching
- collaboration
- ad hoc development tailored to the needs of a specific organization

But how do you move systematically from one stage to the next?

For people new to Knowledge Management, there are any number of how-to guides and a myriad of opinionated people who offer views (helpful or not) on what constitutes KM and how to carry out an effective KM program. If you survey the offerings -- especially in the context of law firm knowledge management -- you'll realize that there are still lots of folks stuck at the initial content stage. A few intrepid souls are thinking about collaboration and social media tools, but relatively few have implemented robust collaboration programs within law firms as of yet. And what about Larry Prusak's third stage?

In some ways, that's a false question. It's not clear to me that a KM program has to move in a linear fashion through the three stages. For example, there may well be organizations that successfully skip over the first stage (content gathering) and rely on the second stage (collaboration) to collect and surface useful information in a timely fashion.

But for those of you who really feel you need an instruction book that you can follow in a systematic fashion, please go ahead and do some reading. There's lots to read. But before you get too committed to any single approach, take a look at these instructions for learning to dance. Try them out and judge the results for yourself.

There are days when I think that learning how to "do knowledge management" from instruction books is as futile as using written instructions to learn how to dance. Success in both endeavors depends on critical intangibles largely relating to the humans involved. A personal sense of rhythm and physical gracefulness for one, vision and organizational culture for the other. So as you learn to "do KM" or dance, keep in mind that the books don't know your individual circumstances and can't dictate a single best course of action. All they can do is suggest approaches that have been helpful for others. The job of the knowledge manager (or neophyte dancer) is to take that information, learn from the experience of others, and then personalize it to fit the realities of your situation.

Perhaps that gets a little closer to Larry Prusak's 3rd stage.

Use Gender Advantage: Recruit Women

2008-08-25T00:16:00.000-04:00

In an earlier post, Building a Great Knowledge Management Team, I discussed key factors in recruiting and retaining a KM team that consistently outperforms the competition. One of the cautions emerging from the study I cited was that it wasn't enough to simply recruit "stars" since many stars are incapable of reproducing their success in new work situations. One key reason for this is that their success is inextricably tied up with their support network at work. If they change jobs and don't bring their colleagues with them, these stars will have to recreate a comparable network in their new organization in order to replicate their earlier success. While it isn't impossible to design a new support network, it does take time. Unfortunately, time is a rare commodity.

The authors of the study I cited now offer a new strategy for managers who are determined to recruit stars in order to boost quickly the performace of their knowledge management team. According to Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda and Nitin Nohria, recruiting female stars can provide a distinct advantage:

Star women ... maintained their shine even after switching companies. Unlike their male peers, they thrived in new work environments. ... Analyzing the data further revealed that there are gender differences in how well stars do after they jump ship. In fact, the decline in performance was pronounced only for star men. Star women who switched firms exhibit no decline in performance.

Their explanation of why women retain their performance levels after changing firms is instructive:

Women tend to do better after a move for two reasons.
One is that they are more invested in external than in in-house relationships. There are four main reasons why star women maintain external focus: uneasy in-house relationships, poor mentorship, neglect by colleagues, and a vulnerable position in the labor market. External focus makes them more "portable" in terms of making a positive move, but can cause problems if they want to progress within their own organization, because you need a solid internal network and good political capital to get things done in organizations. Anyone who focuses mostly on external relationships will not have that.
The other reason is that women do far more due diligence when they receive a job offer than men do, because women need to ensure that the company is good for women and that they won't be treated as token females. In the process of due diligence, star women learn a lot of valuable information about the company that helps them make good strategic decisions. They scrutinize prospective employers on receptivity to women, managerial support, latitude and flexibility, and performance measurement. There's no downside to that strategy—it is one that men could benefit from just as well.

This suggests that if a manager is successful in recruiting a female star, that star is more likely to retain a high level of performance and more likely to stay. Viewed in these terms, recruiting male stars seems like a foolhardy exercise.

There's one other piece of advice for managers wrapped up in the advice the study's authors give male stars:

Don't let yourself be blinded by the money! A company that is willing to double your current salary, but will not invest in your long-term success, is not a good choice. Investigate a firm's management, its culture, its resources, the commitment it is willing to make to you. These are the things that will ultimately make you a star—and keep you one.

This advice makes it clear that a key to success for managers is to create an organizational culture that makes a commitment to invest in its employees and their success. With this commitment in place, it should be possible to create and retain a stellar knowledge management team.

The Problem with Low-Hanging Fruit

2008-08-22T00:15:00.000-04:00

When I first started in the knowledge management business, I asked a group of senior New York law firm knowledge management experts what advice they would give me. One extremely pragmatic colleague said: "Collect the Low-Hanging Fruit."

Nearly a decade later, I still find I keep an eye out for low-hanging fruit. However, now I have a better understanding of the limitations of low-hanging fruit. (For those of you puzzled by the expression "low-hanging fruit," one suggested definition is : "a thing or person that can be won, obtained, or persuaded with little effort.")

First, let's talk about the benefits of low-hanging fruit:

- they are visible and easy to identify
- they are within reach and relatively simple to address (with a little concentrated effort)

Unfortunately, there are problems with low-hanging fruit. Because these pieces of fruit are apparent to most careful observers, you probably won't be the first one to tackle them. In fruit parlance, they are bruised. In the knowledge management world, they may be projects that have been attempted and abandoned for good reason. Therefore, be very sure you have a winning approach before you publicly go after a piece of low-hanging fruit. If you fail (like all the others before you), there will be lots of folks ready to say "I told you so."

In addition to being bruised, some of that low-hanging fruit may be over-ripe or not worth the effort. Sure you can collect it, but what good will it do you? These are problems that you might easily solve, however, if the problem or proposed solution are ephemeral, then you've wasted your time. Thinking in KM terms, these kinds of low-hanging fruit often are problems that have arisen as firms have failed to keep step with advances in techology. You can provide a home-grown solution, but if there is suitable third-party technology readily available, you really haven't advanced the ball very much. These over-ripe fruit may also be problems that are aggravating, but not central to the business of the firm. Solving them may provide temporary relief, but if the problem you've solved is only tangential to the business of your firm, why bother?

Another problem with low-hanging fruit is that they tend to be scattered randomly on various trees. Even if you go after this fruit in a systematic fashion, you'll end up with a knowledge management effort that is as diffuse and scattered as that fruit. Unfortunately, this means your KM effort will appear unfocused and that rarely reflects well on you.

Collecting low-hanging fruit is a knowledge management tactic NOT a legitimate strategy. Strategy sets your goals and gives you a reason for the projects you undertake and the methods you employ. Tactics are fine, if they are deployed to advance an agreed strategy. Otherwise, they are little better than busy work. And, busy work rarely results in meaningful gains in productivity. Or, as Sun Tzu is reputed to have said: "Strategy without tactics is the long road to victory; tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Low-hanging fruit is tempting. It can provide a few easy wins to kick start your KM effort. However, if you are ever tempted to make low-hanging fruit your sole or main knowledge management goal, remember Adam and Eve. Sometimes that fruit is more trouble than it's worth.

(For a terrific discussion of strategy and tactics, see Bruce MacEwen's Adam Smith, Esq. blogpost, The Balanced Scorecard, version 5.0.)

KM 2.0: Working Smarter

2008-08-20T01:45:00.002-04:00

Dave Pollard has published a thought-provoking post on what's next in knowledge management entitled Working Smarter. In it he describes the core competencies (requiring Skills, Tools and Processes) that knowledge workers are going to need in the 21st century:

1. Personal Content Management (in lieu of large, centralized repositories)
2. Simple Virtual Presence and Enabling Conversations (to facilitate interaction in CoPs)
3. Environmental Scanning and Sensemaking (adding meaning, sense and value to information)
4. Professional Research Capacity and Risk/Opportunity Assessment (going beyond search)
5. Just-In-Time Canvassing (getting approximately right answers in real time)
6. Story Crafting, Story Telling, Story Collecting and Story Recording (conveying information in context)

Pollard goes on to say:

I see the role of Knowledge Management and of Information Professionals in the 21st century as facilitating the development of these skills and introduction of these processes and tools in their organizations. I'm not sure what we call it. Probably not KM. I've referred to it as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Work Effectiveness Improvement, Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI) but none of these accurately encompasses the six enabling roles above. Maybe we should call it Working Smarter, and staff it with a cross-functional project team with a five year mandate to measurably improve these six capacities in organizations.

Based on what I've heard from colleagues in other law firms, most firms have not yet invested in all these areas in a systematic way. Most law firms don't have cross-functional project teams addressing these issues and we aren't collecting the metrics required to assess improvement in these core competencies. Are law firms so different from other organizations that we don't have to bother with these core competencies or are we just slow starters? Given the lure of working smarter, it's surprising that law firm knowledge management hasn't been at the vanguard of KM 2.0.

Walk on the Wild Side

2008-08-18T00:12:00.001-04:00

How do you get a conservative Baby Boomer manager or a conservative law firm to take a walk on the wild side? That's the challenge for law firm knowledge managers looking for ways to introduce social media tools into their array of knowledge management offerings.

The first question most conservatives will ask is: what are our peer firms doing? You'd better know the answer to that. The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) and blogs like KM Space and Strategic Legal Technology can help answer that question for law firms.

But even if you can benchmark your firm against others, it's hard to sell technology that you haven't used. In fact, Luis Suarez suggests that the best way to sell social media tools is to use them, master them, and then demonstrate (with passion) how well they work. In his post, Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss - Don't Forget About Yourself, he cites the Twelve Ways suggested by Chris Brogan, but then goes on to say:

In short, in order to sell Social Media to our boss, we need to ensure we are passionate enough to demonstrate actively, and time and time again, the kind of impact that social software is having not only within our daily job(s), but also within our own personal lives. Because there is a great chance that passion you are willing to share with your boss is what will make it all contagious and get your management line sold out as soon as they see that excitement, that commitment, that involvement, that willingness to make a difference within your company and show everyone else it is possible. And you know why?

Well, more than anything else because you are the first one who is clearly benefiting from it all. You are the one, who, as a result, are much more productive, much more knowledgeable about your daily job, have an extensive social network of various dozens, perhaps, of subject matter experts as part of your social networks and, above all, are willing to spend some time showing everyone else why they would need to start paying attention to it, if they haven’t done so already, and engage actively from there onwards. *That*, to me, is how I would sell Social Computing to my boss!

This doesn't mean you have to race out there and start blogging today, but it would be wise for you to take the time to try these tools out and educate yourself as to what types of material improvements might be gained within your firm by employing these new tools. Given your knowledge of your firm's history, organizational culture and technology, you are well-placed to identify these potential benefits. Don't abdicate your role to a consultant.

One key advantage of social media tools is that they present very low barriers to entry. So we really have no excuse for refusing to take them out for a test drive. After all, if the knowledge managers won't do it, how can we expect the lawyers within our firms to adopt these tools?

Managing Social Media

2008-08-13T09:08:00.007-04:00

One of my favorite 40-somethings told me yesterday that he had created a Facebook page for himself. Upon further questioning, I learned that the page actually had been created by the teenage summer intern working in his office. (Nonetheless, I gave the 40-something full credit for finding a low tech way of dealing with what for other Baby Boomers/Generation Xers can seem like an impossible barrier to entry to new technology.) When I asked why he decided to take the plunge, he told me that he felt he had to since the organization he led had an affinity group on Facebook and he, as CEO, needed to be there as well.

And then came the interesting part: he told me that he was going to keep it "strictly professional."

"What happens when a high school or college buddy finds you on Facebook and wants to friend you?" I asked. "I'll accept, of course, but they'll have to `friend' me in a `strictly professional' way," he responded. I was silent, but made a mental note to myself to check back in a few months to see if it actually worked the way he anticipated.

He then told me that the helpful teenage intern no longer had a Facebook page himself. When I asked why, I was told that the intern felt he had no choice when his mother "friended" him and the intern then realized that his mother would be able to see what he was up to with his other friends on Facebook.

Strangely, this gave me heart. Even Generation Y has a hard time managing the consequences of human action and connection with social media tools.

E-Mail Addiction

2008-08-12T13:18:00.000-04:00

New York City's Daily Post reported recently that residents of the Big Apple, Washington D.C. and Atlanta tend to check e-mail more than residents of any other place. And, apparently, more women admit to e-mail addiction than men. (Although, based on what I've observed, I can't help wondering if this is more a reflection of (i) honesty in survey responses or (ii) actual practice.)

Given what we're learning about the inefficiencies of e-mail, that's a colossal waste of time. Here are some sad excerpts from the Daily Post's Report, based on the Third Annual AOL survey:

Of those surveyed, 59% percent of people who own a portable device, like a Blackberry or Treo, check email in bed while in their pajamas; 37% check it while they drive; and 12% admit to checking email in church.
...
According to the survey, the average email user checks mail nearly five times a day. Fifty-nine percent of those with portable devices check their email every time a new message arrives. Forty-three percent of respondents with portable devices say they keep it nearby while sleeping in case they get a message.
Fifteen percent of those surveyed consider themselves "email addicts" (16% of women and 13% of men), and many plan their vacations with email access in mind. About 40% of email users say access to email is "very" or "somewhat" important to them when planning their vacation; 83% of email users admit to checking their mail once a day while vacationing.

Thankfully, people increasingly are beginning to understand that e-mail is not always the right way to communicate. However, as with any addiction, the first step is admitting that you've got a problem. If you have any doubts about it, think about the last time you tried to sneak a peek at your e-mail. (According to the survey, 53% admitted to checking e-mail in the bathroom.) If you felt guilty -- you've got a problem. And, if you don't feel guilty, you may have an even bigger problem!

The next step is actually taking steps to reduce your exposure to e-mail (e.g., checking your e-mail at regularly-scheduled times rather than every time you receive a message). In addition, you need to find alternate ways to communicate that don't invade your life during and after business hours as much as e-mail. For example, using wikis or blogs to post information that people ask you for repeatedly by e-mail. Once it's centrally available, they can check that source rather than bothering you every time.

I know there will be some readers who really believe that checking e-mail constantly is an essential job requirement. That may be the case for a minority of us. But for the rest, consider the tough words of Mary McKinney, Ph.D. of Successful Academic Coaching:

In my experience, email is the most insidious, seductive time-waster we face.

In fact, for many of us, email is a pernicious addiction.

Checking and replying to our electronically-delivered messages seems like a necessary, innocuous occupation, but it is also a major form of procrastination. [emphasis added]

There's lots of advice and commentary on the web about how to manage e-mail better. Here is just a sampling:

- Seven Tips for Dealing with E-Mail Addiction
- Merlin Mann's irreverant series on managing your inbox
- Luis Suarez' reports on giving up work e-mail at IBM
- John Tropea's guidance on Re-Purposing E-Mail

Let me close by quoting Mary McKinney again:

The basic premise of these suggestions is that our email addictions preempt conscious time management choices.

DECIDE THAT YOU ARE IN
CHARGE OF YOUR EMAIL,
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.