Above and Beyond KM

We marked a major milestone in the life of our family by having dinner at an extraordinary restaurant this evening. The restaurant was Blue Hill at Stone Barns. This restaurant is exceptional in many ways: it’s located in Pocantico Hills, in the beautifully renovated old barns of the Rockefeller estate outside New York City; it acquires many of its delicious ingredients from the organic farm on the estate; and it is blessed with a truly gifted chef and staff.

Now, you might reasonably expect a memorable meal in a restaurant like this, and you would be right. However, it was the menu that made this restaurant unusual. What was so special about the menu? There is no menu. Every night is culinary improvisation. Instead of a menu, the restaurant provides you with a list of some of the fantastic ingredients available in the kitchen and then asks you if you have any food allergies or aversions.  Once you’ve provided the necessary information, the chef tailor makes a menu for you based on the best available ingredients.  Your only decision concerns the number of courses you’d like in your meal. That’s it.

Having given the chef our minimal requirements, we sat back and enjoyed the meal as it unfolded.  Every dish was a work of art, every mouthful a revelation. But beyond the food, much of the fun was in watching the delight on the faces of all around as various courses were presented and tasted.  No two tables received the same dinner, but every diner was patently happy.

On the way home from dinner, I found myself wondering what it would be like if we approached law firm technology and law firm knowledge management in the same way as the chef at Blue Hill? What would we need in place in order to offer this level of personalized service?  What would be required to provide a comparable level of user delight? As we move towards user-selected tools and user-defined services, law firm IT and KM departments will be pushed to provide customized work environments and support.  In fact, we may well be approaching the end of a one-size-fits-all approach to law firm IT and KM. If this is so, the challenge will be to stretch beyond the bare minimums to a level of personalized service, care, consideration and user delight comparable to that of Blue Hill. Are you ready?

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]

Critics says that the inability of knowledge management proponents to settle on a universally accepted definition of KM is a sign of failure. Others say that the lack of definition and resulting ambiguity present marvelous opportunities. If you are like me (i.e., firmly settled in the second camp), then it is doubly important not to let the discipline’s perceived lack of definition translate into a personal lack of definition. Knowledge managers who lack definition make administrators very nervous.  And that is not career enhancing. So the real challenge for knowledge managers is to define themselves and their work, and then help the administrators understand and accept that definition.

If you’re interested in defining your role in new and interesting ways, you would do well to start by considering Seth Godin’s 16 Questions for Free Agents.  Among these, perhaps the most pertinent for knowledge managers are:

• Who are you trying to please?
• Are you trying to make a living, make a difference, or leave a legacy?
• How will the world [or your organization] be different when you’ve succeeded?
• Is it more important to add new customers or to increase your interactions with existing ones?
• Would you rather have an open-ended project that’s never done, or one where you hit natural end points? (How high is high enough?)
• Are you prepared to actively sell your stuff, or are you expecting that buyers will walk in the door and ask for it?
• Which: to invent a category or to be just like Bob/Sue, but better?
• Choose: teach and lead and challenge your customers, or do what they ask…
• How long can you wait before it feels as though you’re succeeding?
• How close to failure, wipe out and humiliation are you willing to fly? (And while we’re on the topic, how open to criticism are you willing to be?)
• What does busy look like?

Once you have a sense of what you believe, consider your organization and its goals.  Is there a good fit?  If not, do you need to educate your colleagues about your style of KM or do you need to find a better fit?

No matter how happy you are in your job, you owe it to yourself to ask these questions periodically.  The answers might give you the added boost we all need from time to time as we labor in the vineyards.

[Photo Credit: Jovike]

Lawyers pride themselves on being logical. Our work lives are focused on problem solving and we relish the intellectual challenge of finding innovative solutions to the issues that vex our clients. It’s therefore not surprising that in designing law firm knowledge management systems we tend to focus first on a rational design and sensible implementation.  However, once the hoopla of the launch is over, we’re often left wondering why adoption rates are so low.

Next, take the challenge posed by good knowledge management practice, which frequently requires our users to behave differently.  We know that the recommended change in behavior will lead to all sorts of beneficial effects and we usually tell our users this.  But is that enough to make them change the way they behave? Usually not.

Have we been going about this the wrong way? According to Dan Heath, we’re absolutely wrong.  He believes that knowledge alone won’t change behavior.  In a recent article in Fast Company entitled Want your organization to change? Put feelings first, he cites change management expert John Kotter:

John Kotter, one of the top gurus on organizational change, [says] that most people think change happens in three stages. You analyze the situation, and you think really hard about the solution, and then you just change. But he says that’s almost never the way change happens. He says that in his experience, it’s a different three-stage process: people SEE something that makes them FEEL something that gives them the fire to CHANGE. SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

So coming back to our KM system — perhaps we should focus on design that makes the user feel good rather than design that appeals simply to the intellect.  And, what about those pro-KM behaviors of knowledge sharing and collaboration?  Perhaps the key there is to help users experience the reality of those benefits rather than simply preaching the theory of the benefits.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad about working in a logical, systematic fashion.  However, if we want to effect change, we can’t eliminate emotional content from our work product.  At the end of the day, if we can’t make our colleagues feel something, their indifference will bury KM.

[Photo Credit: Kevin Labianco]

Am I creating value? That’s the key question to start and end every working day.

For knowledge management professionals, it can be a tough one to answer honestly. Why? Because many of us struggle with proving the value of knowledge management efforts. We know that we’ve helped individuals, but we are often hard pressed to explain how much we have in fact helped.  For example, you might truly believe that the enterprise search engine you’ve painstakingly implemented will save lawyers time and effort, ultimately saving clients money.  But do you have any metrics to prove it?  Unlikely.  So how do you know that your search engine project creates value?

One approach is to sit next to your colleagues with a stop watch measuring the time spent on searches before and after your enterprise search engine is implemented. Then you should have the data necessary to prove value numerically.  But how do you measure user satisfaction? You could ask users to complete a survey.  With tools like zoomerang or surveymonkey, it’s almost too easy to do this.  However, the real challenge lies in how the survey is constructed and interpreted.  An additional problem is that it can be hard to coax busy lawyers to complete your survey.

If you’re looking for ways to show how much value you’ve created, consider the example of Morrison & Foerster.  On a page whimsically entitled “Geek Power,” the firm makes the following claims about their knowledge management program:

They back this up with an exercise they undertook in 2006 to prove value.  Specifically, they retained Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq to talk to MoFo attorneys about their experiences before and after AnswerBase.  According to Bruce MacEwen:

I was retained by Morrison & Foerster to lead an analysis and review of AnswerBase vis-a-vis its predecessor Knowledge Management system during last summer and fall, and reached the resounding conclusion that AnswerBase was strongly superior to the firm’s legacy systems, by providing highly relevant documents and discovering genuine subject-matter experts within the firm with impressive accuracy.   By interviewing a broad cross-section of lawyers at the firm’s New York offices, I was able to determine that the design and functionality of AnswerBase essentially replicate, as I put it in my report, “the way lawyers think” rather than reflecting technical considerations or limitations.

Admittedly, hiring someone of Bruce MacEwen’s caliber will be hard to justify for every small project on your to do list.  However, I’ve recounted this story to remind you (and me) that sometimes it makes a lot of sense to bring in an impartial third party to help you and your colleagues see what is right in front of you.  And if in the process you manage to demonstrate that your KM efforts have created value, that’s all the better.

[Photo Credit: Dave Elmore]

Today's Librarian Wordle

The spirited response to my last two posts (Librarians vs Knowledge Managers and Content Catalysts) regarding the relationship between librarians and knowledge managers drove home to me the importance of not getting too stuck on labels and stereotypes. To be honest, I did use for the purpose of argument a rather stereotypical (and as Nina Platt pointed out) old-fashioned view of a librarian and an equally stereotypical view of knowledge managers. While this approach might have some limited utility in that it creates straw men that everyone can knock down, I now want to shift gears to think more about functions than labels.

If we look at the range of activities in which information professionals engage, we’d include research (targeting both internal and external resources); analysis; content selection, collection and management; creating and deploying systems for use in sharing information; archiving; risk management; and compliance.  There are librarians that do this work and there are knowledge managers that do this work.  In fact, in many law firms, there are practicing lawyers who do this work.

At the end of the day, it’s critical to know what work needs to be done and then assign the right people to the task based on their talent, experience, temperament and inclination.  That is a far better approach than to match people to tasks on the basis of labels or stereotypes.  In other words, we should catalog content, not people.

Here endeth the sermon!

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

Additional Resources:

For an interesting view of Librarians as Knowledge Managers, take a look at the following slides from a presentation by the inimitable Dave Pollard to the Special Libraries Association:

Knowledge managers  sometimes divide the world into two camps:  content creators (the folks on the front lines of an organization, as well as a small handful of knowledge managers with subject matter expertise) and content managers (the bulk of the knowledge managers and librarians). In this scheme, most knowledge managers are working well behind the front lines and feel best suited to the task of organizing content rather than creating it. And, the content they seek to organize is explicit knowledge.  In reading Nick Milton’s post, KM and content management – the turf war,  I was struck by the fact that the disputed turf at the heart of this war (i.e., explicit knowledge) is relatively small.  If you look at his Venn diagram, you’ll see he identifies three types of turf:  non-knowledge information, explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.  The first usually is the domain of librarians, and the last the domain of knowledge managers.  Both areas provide ample challenges and rewards.  Yet the turf battles continue with respect to managing explicit knowledge.   When you consider whether many (or any) of us should be fighting over KM 1.0 efforts to create and organize document collections, the turf battle seems even more pointless.

Therefore, in an effort to shift the conversation, I’d propose to expand the roles available for information professionals.   What if we were to add a new category:  Content Catalysts?  Rick Ladd pointed to this function in his comment on my previous post, Librarians vs Knowledge Managers:

It seems to me we KM professionals have been saying for years that an organization’s most useful knowledge lies between the ears of our people; up to 80% (obviously an approximation) of the total available. What I’m seeing is the use of social media to discover, connect, build relationships . . . in other words, greasing the skids of close to real-time knowledge transfer . . . is transforming how we deal with information and knowledge.

I’m of the opinion most value – at this time – lies in developing those “social” capabilities in an organization. Not to say managing the explicit knowledge assets isn’t important (precedent and all that comes with it isn’t going to go away, whether it’s judicial or the laws of physics); merely that connecting people to people and facilitating their ability to make sense of their collective information/knowledge, etc. is likely to have a bigger payoff than organizing our explicit assets.

This seems like a more productive route for knowledge management.  As information explodes around us, we’re finding that we’re able to corral less and less of it.  Our best hope is to have search engines that find what is necessary in the moment of need while we spend our time as Content Catalysts ensuring that information flows rapidly and is shared easily within our organizations.  (This is the promise of Enterprise 2.0.) It seems to me that knowledge managers should be able to add a great deal of value to their organizations as Content Catalysts, without the distraction of engaging in outdated battles over questionable turf.  What do you think?

[Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk]

One constant challenge for knowledge managers in any organization is how to build support among your front line colleagues so that they adopt knowledge sharing behaviors and use your KM systems and tools. Some knowledge managers try various forms of marketing.  Others simply harass their colleagues with pleas for better behavior.  Still others co-opt senior management to provide incentives for engagement.  And yet, too many report that it remains difficult to create and sustain an organizational culture that supports knowledge management.

Rather than pursuing these head-on methods, perhaps we should take a leaf out of Emily Dickinson’s book and try a slanted approach. For example, a recent post by Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan in the Harvard Business Review Blog discusses the power of Spreading Critical Behaviors “Virally“.  In this case, the managers in question did not attack the problem head-on.  Instead, they identified other managers who were exhibiting the right behaviors and put them in touch with their counterparts:

If most other supervisors were not doing what these few knew worked, it was high time to do something about it. But their strong recommendation was counter-intuitive. They argued for a kind of “viral” cross-organizational exposure and interaction. No more programmatic confusion. Instead, simply get groups of supervisors together with respected counter-parts to share experiential `tricks of the trade’ in ways that would promote self-discovery. Simply put, set up small `cells of energy and insight’ — that is, credible people telling credible stories of how to get people emotionally committed to the few behaviors that matter most.

In short, they let the converted preach to the nonbelievers.

Can you identify folks in your organization who are exhibiting helpful knowledge management behaviors.  Can you match them up with skeptics and let the enthusiasts tell their story?  If you can, you may well create a grassroots movement towards better knowledge management.

[Hat tip to Euan Semple for pointing out this HBR blog post.]

[Photo Credit:  KiltBear]

Years ago, Saturday Night Live gave us the secret to effective knowledge sharing within the enterprise. In the famous words of Linda Richman on Coffee Talk: “Talk amongst yourselves!”

I was reminded of this when reading Tweeting your way to closing the skills gap on your plant floor, which cites Benjamin Friedman, the co-author of  Web 2.0: The Inflection Point for Knowledge Management.  Friedman says that while traditional top-down knowledge management methods and systems may still make sense for certain processes and bodies of knowledge that need precise documentation and uniform execution, these KM methods and systems aren’t always nimble enough to deal with many of the day to day issues that arise in manufacturing (and even in law firms).

He argues that when you let employees speak directly with each other (without the mediation or interference of a central knowledge management function) you can achieve faster, cheaper and more effective knowledge sharing. In his words:

…while traditional knowledge management solutions attempted to capture knowledge by corporate edict and with rigid tools, Web 2.0 technologies foster `organic’ knowledge management by giving workers the means to locate, organize and syndicate knowledge themselves.

The key to this is introducing Enterprise 2.0 tools into the mix of KM methods and systems AND implementing those Enterprise 2.0 tools in a manner that respects their emergent nature.  This means allowing employees outside the central KM function to use the tools as they see fit to facilitate the flow of information. Done correctly, this allows for spontaneous communication, in addition to later retrieval and re-use of information at point of need.

This marriage of formal, old-school KM approaches with informal Enterprise 2.0 tools and methods provides a glimpse of a more effective means of improving the flow of information and supporting better decision making.  Assuming we can achieve an appropriate balance between the formal and informal approaches, we may in fact be able to attain some of the goals knowledge management has been seeking to meet.  After years of hearing that KM is dead, the prospect of success is both exciting and a little overwhelming.  Consequently, perhaps we can be excused for feeling “a little verklempt.”

[Photo Credit:  PaDumBumPsh]