Above and Beyond KM

It’s raining in New York City. In fact it’s been raining for days and days with no end in sight. The net result is a subdued, gloomy, sodden town.

Although I’d much prefer blue skies and sunny weather, I must admit that the weather is strangely appropriate this week as we prepare for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. All around us are signs of that anniversary:  notices of solemn remembrance services, TV and radio shows recounting the events and their aftermath, and a heightened police presence.  This week of all weeks we are reminded that things have not been the same since 9/11.

In a post I wrote in 2008, 9/11 and Knowledge Management, I noted that investigations after the attacks revealed that the government had had much of the information that it needed to identify 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.

Last week, John Moore published an article entitled How knowledge management helps keep the US attack free in which he describes how much has changed since 9/11:

Although the attack and its aftermath affected broad swaths of IT, it also helped transform one area of particular importance to the homeland security community: the collection of tools, technologies and practices, known as knowledge management.

Originally considered a means of preserving the institutional memory of longtime workers as they moved from one job to another or retired, the 2001 terrorist attacks brought an urgency to the uses of KM as a tool for intelligence collaboration and coordination, according to experts in the government IT community.

…knowledge management practices expanded to accommodate more ways to aggregate and share critical information. From an architectural point of view, installations are less monolithic. Single knowledge repositories are giving way to multiple databases. Agencies may wield a number of collaboration tools to curate intelligence insights as opposed to a single, specifically designated knowledge management system. [emphasis added]

In that article Moore gives some interesting details regarding how government agencies have used the experience of 9/11, coupled with the availability of new tools, to change the way they handle their information:

• Widespread use of tools such as portals (e.g., Microsoft’s SharePoint), unified communications and social media “have pulled knowledge management in new directions.”
• “Defense Knowledge Online, which had been a critical DOD knowledge management system, is giving way to file sharing among the rank and file using Microsoft SharePoint.”
• “DISA’s Defense Connect Online, a 380,000-user network … lets personnel exchange unclassified and secret information with authorized mission partners” using conferencing and chat tools.
• The Army is emphasizing communities of practice, in which personnel with longtime professional interests in common share information. Its Army Professional Forums include more than 200,000 members. These forums use collaboration tools such as wikis, Google Docs and online conferences.
• Rather than acquiring a single monolithic purpose-built KM system, agencies are working to harness the various resources they already have and then to share those resources across agencies.
• Key elements of this new approach are portals, collaboration products, unified communications systems and social media tools (including effective search engines).

As a taxpayer, I’m relieved to learn that our public servants have been improving how our government works.  But I must admit that I’m curious to know the extent to which private organizations have improved the way they handle information.

• How widespread is the use of collaboration tools and social media within your organization?
• Do you have a portal or other significant knowledge repository that is central to your business and widely used?
• Do your personnel operate in a vacuum within their own information silos or is there widespread sharing of critical information across functional groups?
• Do you have an effective search engine that can help surface information hidden in silos?
• Have you created communities of practice that actively share useful information?

If you don’t have positive responses to these questions, what has your knowledge management group been doing these last 10 years? Paul Romer once famously quipped that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” If the most significant result of 9/11 is enhanced security in your office building, you have wasted a wonderful opportunity to change things for the better.

[Photo Credit: Guillaume Cattiaux]

If there are days when you doubt the value of knowledge management, take a closer look at Project ECHO:  it saves lives by sharing specialist knowledge from teaching hospitals with a wide network of primary care physicians in far-flung areas.  As a a result, the patients in those areas get the benefit of cutting edge medical treatment without having to travel hundreds of miles to academic centers.

Founded by Dr. Sanjeev Arora and his colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (Project ECHO) has become a shining model for innovative medical practices and for KM.  Here’s the back story:

In 2003, nearly 30,000 New Mexicans were infected with Hepatitis C, yet only 5 percent were able to access treatment which is available almost exclusively through specialists at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque. The plight of these underserved patients inspired Sanjeev Arora, one of the top Hep C specialists in the country to develop a plan to deliver state of the art treatment to these communities through Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes).

Project ECHO creates a one-to-many “knowledge network” of specialists and … rural providers, who meet by videoconference to co-manage specific patients and share two-way teachings in which the ECHO staff works with remote clinics to coordinate and educate. Sanjeev calls this aspect of ECHO the “workforce multiplier.”  Through the “knowledge networks” of the clinics, specialists co-manage patients and teach rural medical professionals to be mini-specialists, to whom patients from that area are increasingly referred, This eventually saturates the state with the ability to treat Hep C and also helps deconstruct stereotypes and prejudices that often have existed between specialists and providers.

By pushing the ability to treat chronic, complex diseases down the work chain, ECHO is not only bringing specialized treatment to thousands of patients who would have otherwise gone untreated, but it is also keeping remote providers where they are most needed. Retention rates for rural medical professionals in New Mexico are notoriously low, and Sanjeev’s work is changing this by empowering isolated providers with stimulating, practical, cost-effective continuing education.

The key components of Project ECHO are:

• Use technology to leverage and share scarce specialist knowledge through knowledge networks
• Create best practice protocols for treating complex diseases and then share the protocols with primary care clinicians
• Specialists in academic centers mentor physicians in rural areas using the same case-based learning these doctors learned in medical school
  • through videoconferences, groups of rural physicians hold “virtual rounds” in which they present cases and collaborate with academic and rural colleagues to identify the best course of treatment
  • these sessions build communities of practice and facilitate knowledge sharing, thereby spreading expertise across the state
• Use the internet to track outcomes in order to have the metrics necessary to establish ROI on the program
• Knowledge sharing + mentoring + technology act together as a “force multiplier” for the delivery of high-quality services

While you may not have the responsibility for saving lives in your daily work, Project ECHO is a wonderful reminder that smart KM together with good technology can have a transformative effect.  Remember that on the days when you find yourself struggling with KM skeptics.

*******************************************************

Here are some brief videos that will tell you more about the impressive work of Project ECHO:

Project ECHO: Spreading Access to Quality Healthcare:

Project ECHO:

TEDMED Q&A with Dr. Sanjeev Arora, Project ECHO Director:

A new Canadian study reveals that companies are suffering from a “knowledge hiding” epidemic.  Or, as Kimberly Weisul puts it, the $73 billion that companies spent on knowledge management software in 2008 (according to AMR research) might possibly be a complete waste.

That’s a thought that should strike terror in the heart of every knowledge management professional.

So what’s going on?  Apparently, companies have invested in marvelous (and expensive) knowledge management systems without first properly identifying and addressing the barriers to knowledge sharing that exist within their organizations.  As a result, their systems lack the key content that make them mission critical. Instead, the people with the goods are keeping them hidden.

The study by Catherine Connelly, Jane Webster and David Zweig cites the following popular methods of knowledge hiding:

• ignoring requests for assistance
• claiming that the requested information is confidential and cannot be shared
• pretending ignorance

The study also provides some reasons why colleagues indulge in knowledge hiding:

• they are distrustful of co-workers or management
• they feel an injustice has been done to them
• they are retaliating for someone else’s bad behavior
• their organizational culture encourages secrecy rather than sharing
• they believe that they can get away with it

In a similar vein, Ian Thorpe has noted in his KM on a dollar a day blog the following reasons why people won’t share information:

• the requested material is “rough and ready” — fine in the hands of the originator, but not safe in the hands of others
• it is a preliminary draft and has not been perfected
• the material was not intended for external consumption
• it may not conform to the public position of management or the organization
• it may be based on evidence or arguments that have not yet been properly vetted

So what are the best antidotes for knowledge hiding? The key is to build an organizational culture of knowledge sharing.  However, that is easier said than done.  In light of that, what do the study’s authors recommend?

The paper suggested that companies can overcome knowledge hiding by having more direct contact and less email communication with employees, highlighting examples of trustworthiness, and avoiding “betrayal” incentives, such as rewards for salespeople who poach another’s clients. (Jordan Press, Ottawa Citizen, May 16, 2011) [emphasis added]

In addition,

• Build trust — emphasize positive relationships among employees
• Demonstrate the mutual benefits that result when colleagues share information
• Treat all workers fairly and respectfully, thereby reducing feelings of injustice and the need for retaliation

At the end of the day, if you want to get value out of your expensive knowledge management systems, you have to spend the time and effort to ensure that all the people involved are willing to cooperate and share.  Don’t let a technology vendor tell you otherwise.

****************************

For further reading, see: Jack Vinson, Knowledge hiding among co-workers.

[Photo Credit: Susan NYC]

Is your firm or law department still counting its pennies? Or is your firm or company so optimistic about its prospects that you’ve been given a large budget to spend freely on knowledge and information management projects?

The headlines in the legal technology press often feature impressive, state of the art, large-budget projects. However, what if you don’t have a large budget? What if your firm is maintaining a tight control on costs? How do you undertake effective KM and IM projects?

At this summer’s ILTA Conference, we’re hoping to provide practical advice and real life examples of law firms and law departments that have found frugal ways to meet ambitious KM/IM goals. To that end, we’re looking for legal technologists who have implemented successful and cost-effective KM/IM programs. Specifically, we’re looking for legal technologists who have done so using free or very inexpensive resources. Perhaps they have found helpful open source software. Perhaps they have found a way to partner with vendors, clients or business partners to reduce or share costs. Perhaps they have found ways to use standard law firm tools like Microsoft Office to improve their KM/IM activities. Perhaps they have taken basic steps like creating a firm-wide taxonomy or ensuring that information flows smoothly without unnecessary duplication of effort.

If you are a successful frugal innovator or know someone who is, please let me know.  We’d love to hear your stories and learn from your success.

[Photo Credit: smackfu]

In a world run by bean counters, knowledge managers sometimes fear that they will get short shrift if they cannot marshal the data necessary to impress the folks in green eyeshades. The problem is, of course, that it can be challenging to find compelling metrics to support the case for KM. In the context of law firm knowledge management, we often say that KM done well helps lawyers work more efficiently and effectively.  But has anyone at your firm produced recent data to support this proposition?

This comparative lack of data has always made me uncomfortable.  We may shrug and say that trying to prove KM ROI is a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t always dispel the lingering discomfort. Consequently, I was heartened to receive a reminder this week from a master of data, Dr. Hans Rosling, of the value and limitations of data. Dr. Rosling is famous for making data sing. If you want an impressive demonstration of his abilities, take a look at his four-minute video below: 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes - the Joy of Stats.  By any measure, it’s a tour de force. Unfortunately, it isn’t one I could reasonably replicate standing before the executive committee of my firm.

So what is to be done?

Draw inspiration from Dr. Rosling’s most recent TED Talk about the Magic Washing Machine.  In  his usual fashion, he presents a stunning array of data relating to global population, income distribution and energy consumption.  All of it is interesting, however, the statistical pyrotechnics are slightly depressing for a data-challenged knowledge manager like me.  But then suddenly, at the 7:50 minute mark, he explains the magic of washing machines and does so without a single data point. Rather, he relies on anecdote and illustration to make his point very powerfully. At the end of the presentation, I remembered his explanation of the magic, not the specifics of the  data he provided during the bulk of the presentation.

When making the case for KM, don’t ever underestimate the power of storytelling.  In truth, Dr. Rosling’s greatest strength is his ability to tell a compelling story.  That story may be grounded in data, but it’s the narrative line rather than the scientific detail that remains in your memory.  You don’t need to be statistician or magician to pull this off.  Rather, you just need to be able to recognize —  and tell — a good story.

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - the Joy of Stats:

Dr. Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine:

[Hat tip to Michael Mills of Neota Logic Inc. for sending me Hans Rosling's TED talk on the Magic Washing Machine.  Hat tip to Evangeline Warren and Mark Salamon for sending me Dr. Rosling's talk on the Joy of Stats.]

[Photo Credit:  Black Country Museums]

Forty years ago today, my parents packed up their children and every material possession they had to move to the other side of the world.  In retrospect, I can only marvel at the bravery involved in taking that step.  With that move they had to start all over again –  in a culture and climate that were very foreign to them, far from the comforts of family and home.

Since that time, I’ve moved to and lived in two other countries. The first one was to pursue an educational opportunity, the second one was to pursue an professional opportunity.  Unlike my parents, each of my moves involved countries that on paper shared a great deal.  Nonetheless, after each move I discovered that the local culture was quite different from the one I left.  As a result, I had to learn new ways of being and acting.  Most surprisingly, even though each of these countries was English-speaking, I soon found that I had to learn a distinctly new vocabulary and way of speaking in order to communicate.

When I made the move from client-facing lawyer to lawyer-facing knowledge manager, I found myself in yet another immigrant experience.  Suddenly I was faced with the need to analyze and understand the organizational culture around me in a new way so that I could maximize my effectiveness in my new role.  This involved an anthropological exercise that I return to often in  order to be aware of the changes in the culture around me.  Interestingly, even though I’ve been with the same organization for twenty years, I’ve found it very useful to keep the mindset of an immigrant in order to perceive cultural shifts as they occur.

Knowledge managers often find themselves in a particular organizational world, but not of that world.  While this can mean initial frustration as you struggle to learn the folkways of the organization’s culture, that distance can be hugely helpful when you try to understand objectively how the people around you work and succeed.  Learning to observe the signs, find and pull the cultural triggers, and, ultimately, shift the organization into a more knowledge-sharing culture are critical to a knowledge manager’s success.

Without a doubt, immigration is a challenging experience.  For knowledge managers, I’d argue that it is a necessary experience that helps develop a sense of inquiry and understanding.  So don’t get too comfortable — there’s too much to learn.

[Photo Credit: Craig James]

Hello everybody!
Look at yourself.  Now back to me.
Now back at yourself.  Now back to me.
Sadly… you are not a Monster.

[A MONSTER????!!!]

Those are the words of Sesame Street’s engaging blue monster, Grover, spoken in a clever twist on the now-famous Old Spice Man television commercial. (See below) These videos show examples of an eye-catching monster (or man, as the case may be) and then ask you to contrast your humdrum existence (or man) with what might be if you were a bit more blue or he were a bit more studly.

In each case, you are invited to indulge in that all too human tendency to compare your situation to that of another. In the face of such monster (or masculine) superiority, is it any wonder that we find ourselves believing that the grass is in fact greener on the other side?

Lately, law firm knowledge managers have been comparing themselves to project managers, alternative fee wizards and marketing mavens.  This exercise has left many feeling just a little inadequate and a touch insecure.  Nonetheless, the answer to that uncomfortable feeling is not to jump on the nearest bandwagon.  Rather, it is to think more strategically about the value you bring to your organization. Focus on your core competencies.  What do you do better than anyone else? Then think about which of your abilities and activities provide high impact with relatively little effort. If you need some help sorting your high-value activities from the low-value ones, follow the advice of Oz Benamram and try placing all your activities on an Effort-Impact Grid. Done correctly, this will help you improve your ability to deliver value to and have an impact on your organization.

You may not be a blue monster, but with this information in hand you should understand better how to be exactly what your firm needs.

Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession is the subject of the Ark Group’s conference I’m attending in New York City. Here are my notes.

Toby Brown is involved in Client Teams, Alternative Fee Arrangements and Knowledge Management at Fulbright & Jaworski LLP. He’s also a recovering economist. This presentation focuses on the strong role KM can play in establishing fixed fee arrangements (AFAs) within firms.

#1. Analyzing billing data rarely reveals what you need.

Analyzing time and billing records tends to provide limited useful data because until now billing practices have focused on creating a narrative a client will accept and have not been about providing data that help the firm understand the phase, task or type of work involved. Further, going back in time more than two or three years won’t be useful since approaches to legal practice have changed dramatically and continue to change. For example, today it is rare to deploy enormous teams of associates on matters. Finally, Toby’s analysis of the data from similar matters did not reveal the existence of easily identifiable budgets or even strong trends. In fact, he found that the greatest influence on fees came from the specific facts and circumstances of a each matter.

#2. Firms need more knowledge about their work; KM can help provide this.

KM approaches to aggregating knowledge, coupled with improved approaches to creating billing narratives, can help build a knowledge store that is suitable for analysis. Toby believes that KM tools for collaboration, search and analysis. This will help the firm gather the necessary data, which will allow the firm to establish prices with greater certainty. Toby uses Redwood Analytics to analyze data and create a pricing model for a particular matter. Use KM practices to learn from your experience of analyzing the data and creating models. What worked? Where were the proposed prices wildly wrong? What should we change?

#3. KM can have a strong role in monitoring variance of cost to budget.

Toby says this is the “hot thing” on his project list. He is focused on trying to figure out how to provide more effective monitoring, coupled with an early warning system to partners so that they know when they are about to exceed the agreed budget.

My friends were so worried about me that they rushed over to check that I hadn’t lost my marbles. In fairness, their response could be considered reasonable given that I had just declared to a group of law firm knowledge management specialists that much of what we collectively were doing at that time shouldn’t be done the same old way.  It was a point of view many didn’t want to hear.

Several years later, we’re enjoying the benefits of enterprise search, better document management and work product retrieval tools, and lawyers who are much less phobic about technology. As a result, I’m even more convinced today than I was back then that law firm knowledge managers need to think hard about the work they are doing.  If they are still stuck in the mode of document collection and organization, they may face the unpleasant discovery that electronic tools can do much of this work in an automated and more reliable fashion.  Even those involved with content creation (i.e., the classic practice support lawyer), may soon find that the materials they currently create and struggle to maintain can be produced and more reliably maintained outside the firm on competitive economic terms. For example, the Practical Law Company offers lawyers an up-to-date set of model documents, practice notes, checklists and guidance on market terms (among other things), coupled with the economies of scale that are possible because PLC has more practice support lawyers than most firms and can spread the cost of those lawyers across many firms.  (Disclosure: I’m on PLC’s advisory board.)  For many firms in the UK and the US, this is an attractive option.

An even more radical alternative is what Jeff Vail refers to as “open source knowledge management,” which he claims is  “the most potentially disruptive technology for law firms.” According to him, even a large firm with a KM staff will have a hard time replicating the range of resources that will become available on the web through collaborative efforts of lawyers in many firms.  Here’s how he describes it:

What lawyers do, at its core, is manage knowledge and implement systems for applying that knowledge to solve clients’ problems.  I’m not talking about case law, statutes, and other knowledge accessible via legal research here ….  Instead, what I’m talking about is the knowledge of how to apply the law, lists of best practices for doing so, and systems for applying those best practices. …[but] even the most experienced lawyer doesn’t have access to the depth and breadth of best practices available to the “crowd.”  For that reason, the potential of open-source knowledge management and development of legal systems (checklists, indexes of best practices, etc.) has the potential to truly disrupt the way most lawyers and law firms do business today.  Additionally, while many firms tout the benefit of their institutional knowledge to clients, no firm can compete in breadth and depth with a cooperative, open-source knowledge management tool that connects solo and small firms across the country.

Put another way, if a lawyer is carrying out tasks that are closely circumscribed by the requirements of statute or regulation, with little room to improvise, chances are that the task list that lawyer creates to manage that process will look a lot like the task list created by a lawyer in another firm.  In this context, an open source industry standard begins to look very appealing.

Obviously, risk management experts will have concerns about the reliability of open source legal resources and I don’t intend in any way to appear to be minimizing those risks.  Their concerns are reasonable and valid.  That said, I must admit that if there were a reliable open source knowledge management resource, it would be the most rational and cost-effective approach as far as clients and lawyers are concerned.  Of course, if that day ever comes, some law firm KM jobs will have to change quite radically. Are you ready?

[Photo Credit: Brooks Elliott]

Lawyers in most firms are given a lot of freedom to decide how to manage their own knowledge. In fact, it’s a rare law firm that can demand that its lawyers handle their knowledge in a particular way. For many, the battle began and ended with the document management system. At this point, most firms with document management systems have persuaded their lawyers to create and store documents primarily within the DMS. This has the signal benefit of ensuring that the firm’s work product is located in one place.  The problem, of course, is that while you can require that documents be created within the DMS, it’s much harder to get lawyers do anything more than the most rudimentary profiling of their documents.  As a result, it has until recently been extremely difficult to capture much metadata regarding a document. What’s changed? In part, it’s that lawyers are beginning to learn the value of metadata to assist in the document searches they do every day.  In addition, new document management systems are more intelligently designed and allow simpler filing of documents, coupled with the ability to let new documents “inherit” metadata from the folder in which they are placed.  Couple this with the metadata extraction capabilities of some work product retrieval systems, and the burden on the individual lawyer to create metadata is lightened considerably.

So the good news is that after nearly 20 years of document management systems, we’re finally getting to a point where the technology allows them to work more seamlessly and intuitively for lawyers.  This should encourage greater use (and more rewarding use) of the DMS by lawyers. The bad news is that relatively little of a firm’s knowledge in contained in its work product. What’s your strategy for dealing with that problem?

Unless your firm is run by Attila the Hun, you won’t be able to compel lawyers to share their knowledge via a central repository or medium.  Further, you will run into the problem observed by Steve Denning (see The Economic Imperative to Manage Knowledge) regarding the behavior of “experts” with respect to their knowledge:

As preliminary efforts to establish what the organization knew were launched, it started becoming apparent – to the surprise of many – that the organization did not know what it knew. Inquiries as to the cause of the hesitancy revealed that even the experts were not sure of what they knew. The experts even contested whether they were responsible for sharing their knowledge. They often contended that their job was to meet with their clients and deal with their needs, not sit in an office in headquarters and assemble best practice manuals.

What’s the solution? If you can’t compel sharing, you’ll need to coax sharing.  The best way to do this is to work individually with your experts to identify their personal knowledge management challenges and then find ways to address those needs in a manner  that results in a solution that is satisfactory for that expert AND yields rich material in a selectively shared content repository. Notice, that I used the words “selectively shared.”  Unless you can promise some measure of control over the knowledge, you’ll have a hard time winning the cooperation of your experts.  They will undoubtedly want the freedom to gather and organize the content as they see fit — not as necessarily as the IT department dictates. The key here for technologists and knowledge managers alike is to provide very lightweight systems that provide the individual flexibility cherished by experts. One obvious choice is the range of Enterprise 2.0 tools now available, but I could imagine implementing some firm-wide systems in a way that encourage personalization, sensible organization and sharing rather than the unmanageable wilderness currently found in everyone’s favorite content repository — Outlook.

One challenge is that your work with these individual experts will result in information silos.  However, you can go some distance in managing these new silos by ensuring that the content can be shared easily. Then, see the good that happens when your intelligently-designed system interacts with what Dave Snowden observed as our basic tendency to help in times of true need.

The bottom line is that you have to build a coalition of the willing — willing experts, that is.  Once you’ve helped them organize and find what they know, they’ll be better equipped to share that with others.

[h/t to John Tropea for pointing out the Steve Denning piece]

[Photo Credit: lumaxart]