JAG Connect:Army Lawyers go Social #ILTA12

Col. Scott Reid is the Chief Knowledge Officer of the US Army JAG Corps. The JAG has about 2,500 lawyers, plus almost an equal number of support staff, plus the same number again in the reserves. Their offices are in 21 countries.

[These are my notes from the International Legal Technology Association’s 2012 Conference 2012. Since I’m publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I’ve made any editorial comments, I’ve shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Their Strategy for Enterprise Social Networking. They aimed to create the largest network possible, keeping in mind costs, intuitive usage, respect for the Department of Defense firewall. They had very senior support from the start. Their key knowledge management presence is on milBook, which is part of milSuite. It is built in Jive. They also have a blog function (using WordPress) and are working on Eureka, an idea generation/evaluation tool. The JAG presence on milBook is called JAG Connect.
• Support/Administration. Each group in milBook is is hosted by a lawyer who is given specific responsibility for the role and community. They have over 15,000 individuals participating in 2660 communities. Approximately 20% of the members are contributors. (This is far better than the 90-9-1 participation rule.)
• Gamification in milBook. They award points to contributors. You can win extra points for providing an answer that someone else finds helpful. This gamification has proven to be a very helpful way to motivate and reward participation.
• More Like This. MilBook uses tags to find similar content and serves it up to the reader automatically.
• Lessons Learned. (1) Have a strategic plan. (2) Have communities that reflect functions rather than just the organizational map. (3) Marketing is key to encourage participation. (4) Include a pilot to test bugs and to win senior support. (5) When considering how to motivate participation, consider Daniel Pink’s observations regarding autonomy, mastery and meaning. These are key intrinsic motivators. The gamification also helps, but it provides extrinsic motivation.

[Scott, please review and let me know if my rapid transcription contains any errors. You and your colleagues have a terrific story. I want to be sure I reported it accurately. Thanks!]