If this problem is widespread with vendors, how do we change things?

- Mary

If this problem is widespread with vendors, how do we change things?

- Mary

@Jack (hey mate!): the last big vendor visiting me took the example of collaborative writing of a book. Not only he demonstrated the document versioning instead of the wiki, but he was convinced that in libraries our job is to write books.

@ Wendy Reynolds: I like your approach.

- Mary

I am not sure whether they really think it is a KM solution (naievity on their part), or whether they think it will sell better if they call it a KM solution (naievity on the part of the market).

I suspect the latter

- Mary

“Tough to repeal human nature, the gullible will always find someone to sell them snake oil. Next up: Semantic Web solves KM!”

http://twitter.com/JBordeaux/status/1727192618

I was once asked to speak at a conference on the provocative topic: “can effective search solve the knowhow problem?”. I thought it was hilarious that knowhow was a problem that needed to be solved, but rather than re-wording the question in true exam style, I agreed to take it on.
I referred to an article in Harvard Business Review by Jacobson and Prusak called “the cost of knowledge” (this was a couple of years ago) where they said that KM efforts focused too much on expensive search engines; in their view this was not the right place to focus attention. They advocated focusing on helping employees use the knowledge that they find. They based this on studies showing that 20% of a knowledge workers' time was spent searching, the rest on eliciting, interpreting and applying what was found. This mirrors what we've found at our law firm.

Where I think that good search undoubtedly helps KM:
- ensuring that employees have the right knowledge at the right time
- making knowledge systems easy and useful (obviously the content itself plays a key role here too!)
- integrating internal and external knowhow
- finding knowledge that is most relevant to clients
- ROI: time spent searching gets written off if it doesn't bring results;
- even if you don't accept that argument, think of how much time partners spend preparing for pitches, looking up what deals they've worked on for whom, what relevant points arose, what similar work has been done by the firm;
- lawyers fear they are missing something so search with broad search terms; they then get way too many results and can't do anything useful with them
- it's often difficult to search outside your own office or practice area
- if you can't find what you want, you reinvent the wheel; are clients really going to pay for this?
- lawyers get frustrated with search and the underlying KM systems, and don't use them in the future.
- search can help you find the right people to solve your problem; this has to be the ultimate goal.

We've had some success with federated search; at least this allowed us to search multiple repositories at once. But it ultimately relies on the underlying “native” search engines; those frequently relied on lawyers having the advanced search skills of information professionals; of course, they can't be expected to have these skills – on the other hand, they do have high expectations of search thanks to Google. I believe that the new generation of search engines (especially faceted search) can help a lot by allowing lawyers to do powerful advanced searches with only basic search skills.

But what doesn't it solve?

- obviously let down by the quality (or lack of) in the knowledge itself. If the underlying content adds no value to the client, it doesn't matter how good your search is. But even beyond this pure-KM point…
- you need excellent content management (with approval, review, etc.)
- a strong knowledge sharing culture in which creation of new knowledge is paramount
- a lot of value of explicit knowhow comes from its context, the way it is structured; search just returns lots of related knowhow but fails to add value by means of context and structure
- even the best search engines rely on good taxonomies, despite what the vendor may tell you. Has anyone seen reliable automatic concept extraction yet?
- search as a pull mechanism will only go so far; lawyers need to see relevant knowhow being delivered to them at the right time and place, ie. in the document they are drafting. Query whether search engines have really got there yet.

I think that most firms still have a way to go to have solved the search problem, let alone the knowhow problem. Good search can help make knowledge more useful and easy, but surely only part of the struggle.

I wonder if the vendors just follow the money? They've been able to charge significant amounts for the search engines they produce. As far as they are concerned, it's a great solution — to their own business needs.

- Mary

amesM <james.mullan@cms-cmck.com> (unregistered) wrote:

Mary – how funny, why is that Vendors seem to think search is the answer to everything? I could understand why they might think this is they had experience of working in a LAW Firm, but most of them don't.

I'm still waiting for enlightment.

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