Is KM a real force multiplier in your firm? That’s the challenging question I recently put to 40 senior law firm knowledge management professionals.  This led to an interesting hour of honest conversation that was so worthwhile that I’m recounting its highlights here in the hope that my readers might try this exercise in their own organizations.

Background:

As you may remember, I wrote a few months ago about the concept of force multiplication. In Are You a Force Multiplier? I focused on whether the projects we pursue individually have the effect of helping our organizations perform significantly better. A force multiplier is a factor that enables a fighting force to improve its performance many times over.  For the military, force multipliers range from technology and training to terrain and morale.  Each of these can equip a small force to fight with the strength and effectiveness of a much larger group.

The key to force multiplication is not to settle for incremental improvements, but to aim for dramatically improved results.  While it may not always be possible to calculate down to the last dollar and cent the actual value of your force multiplication efforts, it is wise to try to identify the indicia of impact that help you distinguish merely helpful projects from the projects that result in true force multiplication. For purposes of illustration, I showed the group how one might calculate the impact of a typical law firm knowledge management project: enterprise search.  According to a Google White Paper, the average knowledge worker spends one-quarter of their time looking for information. If you implemented a good enterprise search engine and were able to cut the time spent searching by one hour, what would be the impact on your firm?  One way to calculate the aggregate value of restoring one productive hour to each fee-earner is by the following formula:

[the number of fee-earners] X [their blended hourly rate] X [the number of working days in a year] = the value to the firm that year

The Exercise:

The participants sat at round tables to facilitate discussion. We asked each participant to write on separate index cards the three activities currently undertaken by their KM department that consume the most resources.  (Those resources could be time, money or psychic/emotional energy, for example.)  To ensure forthrightness and promote confidentiality, we asked the participants to refrain from putting anything on their cards that would indicate the identity of the firm or knowledge manager involved. Once everyone at the table put their completed cards in the middle of the table, each table sorted through the cards to see the range of activities.  Finally, we asked each group to rank the activities in terms of which ones represented true force multipliers and which ones were least effective as force multipliers. As part of this process, we asked the people at the table to consider the indicia of impact of each activity in order to find an objective means of measuring the extent to which an activity was (or was not) a force multiplier.

The Activities:

If you work in law firm knowledge management, you won’t be surprised by the activities listed by the participants.  These are the activities that currently consume the greatest resources for their departments. What about yours? Take a look at them and then, before reading further, see how you might rank these activities in terms of force multiplication.

• Arguing with IT over priorities and resources
• Building smart systems, processes and workflows
• Categorizing or manually profiling documents
• Creating and maintaining content — legal models, practice guides, templates, etc.
• Data transfer
• Design — to ensure the KM systems fit with how people work and do not cause unnecessary barriers to adoption
• Enterprise search
• Firm politics
• Getting buy-in from lawyers and management
• Intranet management
• Matter profiling/tracking
• Promoting KM adoption practices
• Providing a portal
• Research/Search requests (KM concierge)
• Responding to individual requests for assistance
• Training
• Vendor demos

The Indicia of Impact:

As the participants were weighing the relative benefits of the activity list above, they identified the following factors that helped them separate the merely helpful activities from the force multipliers.  This is not an exhaustive list, but certainly is a good starting point.

• allows efficient, on-demand self-service
• generates use/traffic
• increases convenience across the firm
• provides consistency and coherence across the firm
• provides leverage at all levels (firm, departments, practice groups, individuals)
• reduces time spent
• replaces multiple fragmented activities with a single, more coherent system
• the number of users affected

The Consensus:

The True Force Multipliers:

• Building smart systems, processes and workflows
• Enterprise Search
• Investing in design — to ensure the KM systems fit with how people work and do not cause unnecessary barriers to adoption
• Matter Profiling/Tracking
• Promoting KM adoption practices
• Providing a portal
• Training

The Low-Impact Activities:

• Arguing with IT over priorities and resources
• Categorizing or manually profiling documents
• Creating and maintaining content — legal models, practice guides, templates, etc.
• Data transfer
• Firm politics
• Getting buy-in from lawyers and management
• Intranet Management
• Research/Search Requests (KM Concierge)
• Responding to individual requests for assistance
• Vendor demos

Conclusion:

This is a tough exercise.  Many of us realized that the things we were doing really did not provide much more than an incremental benefit to our firms.  It was cold comfort to understand that we did these things because our firms asked them of us. Unfortunately, it is precisely those low-yield activities that many of our firms think knowledge management should focus on.  Why?  Perhaps because it fits with a narrow view of how to help practicing lawyers — by creating and expanding the lawyers’ form files,  with a little technology thrown in.  Or, it provides the benefits of a really good research assistant to help get an individual lawyer’s work done quickly. At the end of the day, this narrow view focuses on the individual rather than on the impact on the overall firm and does not result in true force multiplication.

This exercise confirmed for me the importance of focusing knowledge management efforts on practices and systems that have a beneficial impact across the firm.  In all honesty, this can be tough to do when you work for a partnership and every partner has a point of view, sense of ownership and specific client needs.  This exercise forces you to take an institutional view, but you may not be popular initially for doing so. This is where having enlightened leadership in firm management makes all the difference.

While it can be dispiriting to learn that much of what you spend your time doing has no material positive impact on your firm, the purpose of this exercise is not to depress. Rather it is to help us focus our limited resources on the activities that will provide the greatest good for the firm.  As stewards of firm resources, isn’t that really our job?

[Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds]

The day after Steve Jobs died, a knowledge management colleague at another law firm asked why a man who had such a profound influence on technology had seemingly little influence on legal knowledge management.  That stopped conversation for a moment.  Tongue firmly in cheek, I countered with the proposition that if Steve Jobs had turned his attention to legal technology, it would work a great deal better and be easier to use than it is.

All joking aside, my colleague’s question started me wondering about Steve Jobs’ legacy with respect to knowledge management.  After a little Google research, I must admit I haven’t found anything that Steve Jobs said directly about knowledge management.  However, I have found lots of things he said and did that legal KM should not ignore:

• Focus on Simplicity. Steve Jobs was famous for his commitment to simplifying tools and processes. His drive to eliminate fussy, confusing buttons from the cellphone led to the iPhone. Stephen Wolfram says that Jobs stood out for his astonishing clarity of thought.  He “took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.” Sometimes lawyers and legal KM professionals can make the error of over-complicating matters.  Steve Jobs would not approve.
• User Experience Trumps All. Cliff Kuang, writing for Fast Company, said:  ”Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live….”  In short, Jobs was a “user-experience savant.” Kuang continues, “It’s not that Jobs doesn’t think like a consumer-he just thinks like one standing in the near future, not in the recent past.” Even if you don’t have someone like Steve Jobs in your firm, you can achieve better results by listening carefully to your internal clients.  Steve Denning argues that even with Steve Jobs’ famous aesthetic sense and conviction about what the customer wanted, Apple listened to its customers very carefully.
• Plan Early for the Next Improvement. The launch of a system or application doesn’t mark the end of the project, it’s just the beginning.  Cliff Kuang describes how this fact has become reality at Apple:  ”[Jobs] has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions. Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation.”  Now contrast that with the plausible view that nothing much new is happening in legal knowledge management.  Things would be different in legal KM if Steve Jobs were in charge.
• Knowledge Sharing is Essential for Innovation. There is a famous story of the visit Steve Jobs paid to Xerox’s R&D facility.  Daniel Stuhlman recounts it in the following way:
  

  The computer mouse and the graphical interface were invented at Xerox’s research center. Steve Jobs went on a tour of the facility and was able to get enough ideas to create a new computer software system that eventually led to Mac OS and Windows. Xerox was never able to capitalize on its own discovery. Steve Jobs did not steal an idea, he took a great idea and developed it. I wonder if Xerox had a knowledge management problem or was Steve Jobs a gifted visionary?

If you are wondering what law firm KM might look like had Apple taken an interest in it, look no further than Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator.  I bet the lawyers in your firm would kill for a system like this.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0

[Thanks to Ron Young for reminding me about Knowledge Navigator.]

[Photo Credit: Cornelia Kopp]

Dig deeply enough and you’ll find that every knowledge management or IT professional has a story about a deployment gone bad.  If you push them hard enough, they might even confess that they were partially responsible for the unsatisfactory results.  Of course, the less than honest will blame the vendor or, more often than not, the end-user.  But, at the end of the day, shouldn’t adoption by the end-user be the whole point of your project?

If you don’t believe me, consider the Kindle.  It wasn’t the first eReader and perhaps wasn’t technologically the best.  However, it has been a commanding presence in the world of eReaders, even in the face of competition from acknowledged technology stars such as Sony.  According to Adrian Slywotzky, Amazon beat Sony not on the strength of its technology or design but rather on the strength of its vision. Unlike Sony, Amazon envisioned and delivered a complete package.  Where Sony offered decent technology to deliver a tiny collection of books. Amazon took that technology and found a way to deliver an enormous collection of books wirelessly.  Slywotzky refers to this complete vision and package as the “behind-the-screen elements that make up a product’s backstory” and build consumer demand. In The Real Secret of Kindle’s Success, Slywotzky writes:

Look at the Kindle, and you don’t see the wireless connection, the relationships between Amazon and the publishers, the vast online bookstore, or the personalized book recommendations. But all these backstory elements dramatically enhance the e-reader experience, making Kindle magnetic in a way the [Sony] Librie never was. The first production run of Kindles sold out within five-and-a-half hours.

Now let’s come back to those failed deployments.  Did you have all the critical backstory elements in place? Did you have a complete vision, a comprehensive package? Did you offer something that would have a magnetic attraction for the end-user? In other words, was your deployment planned and executed from the perspective of the end-user?   Did you figure out what the end-user really wanted?  Amazon certainly did.  To its credit, Amazon realized that we weren’t really interested in buying eReaders.  Rather, we were interested in reading.  So Amazon gave us an unrivaled opportunity to read and then supported that with adequate technology.

But here’s the kicker:  through Kindle, Amazon made it so easy for people to think about purchasing and reading eBooks that many of us have stopped buying eReaders altogether and simply read eBooks on our smartphones, tablets and computers.**  And how do we buy and read books now?  Via a free Kindle app that lets Amazon focus on its original business of selling books.  However, now it has the added advantage of lower costs since there is no need to store physical inventory.

So in exchange for its complete vision and backstory elements, Amazon has happy customers and a booming business in eBooks.  How does your deployment compare?

__________________________________

** If you have an Apple device, you should note the new App Store restrictions on purchasing books from Amazon. (Here’s a work around or do as Amazon suggests and bookmark amazon.com/kindlestore on your iPhone. For the  iPad, consider the Kindle Cloud Reader.)

[Photo Credit: K. Todd Storch]

The Florida Supreme Court wants lawyers to behave nicely with respect to their opponents.  Here’s how the court’s recent action is described in a press release by the American Board of Trial Advocates:

Commenting that `concerns have grown about acts of incivility among members of the legal profession,’ the high court noted ABOTA’s efforts to stress the importance of civility in the practice of law.  The Supreme Court emphasized to Florida lawyers old and new that practicing law is an honor that comes with responsibilities, paramount among which is civility, an often overlooked cornerstone of the legal profession.  The Court added to the Oath of Admission the following: `To opposing parties and their counsel, I pledge fairness, integrity, and civility, not only in court, but also in all written and oral communications.’

It’s well and good that some lawyers will show their kinder and gentler sides to their opponents, but what about colleagues within their own firms?  The hard truth is that law firm knowledge management faces some rather particular challenges based on the population we serve.  If you doubt this, take a look a some of my earlier posts on lawyers and lawyer personalities:

• What Makes Lawyers So Challenging?
• Personality and Law Firm Knowledge Management
• KM and Change-Resistant Lawyers

Now, let’s consider some specific challenges that all knowledge managers face.  Jack Vinson has done a terrific job of gathering in one place some things we know to be true about how people share knowledge.  In Rules of Knowledge Management, Jack starts with a summary of Chris Collison’s amusing take on Tom Davenport’s “Kindergarten Rationale” for sharing:

• You share with the friends you trust
• You share when you’re sure you’ll get something in return
• Your toys are more special than anyone else’s
• You share when the teacher tells you to, until she turns her back
• When toys are scarce, there’s less sharing
• Once yours gets taken, you never share again

These observations of kindergarten children are entirely consistent with what we know about “mature adults” operating in a work context.  In fact, the lack of trust coupled with some nasty lessons learned about the downside of sharing can lead to an epidemic of information hoarding within an organization. If this is what happens in the general working adult population, what can you expect from a lawyer population? Given their natural skepticism, high degree of autonomy, low sociability and resilience, and adversarial natures (see What Makes Lawyers So Challenging?), this group may find it even harder to share than your typical kindergartener.  While I’m not sure it is possible to change anyone’s fundamental nature (and that certainly is well beyond the capabilities of a knowledge management group), we can work with senior management to change the environment in which lawyers operate. Taking guidance from Fighting the Knowledge Hiding Epidemic, I’d suggest the following strategies:

• 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, perhaps we are really about trust management rather than knowledge management (to the extent either trust or knowledge can, in fact, be “managed.”) [Photo Credit: Kathy Cassidy]

On most days, my To Do List seems longer than the Nile River.  It contains everything from the quotidien (remember the milk!) to the critical — tasks that trigger serious consequences. On days when it seems like I add two tasks for every one I complete, it can be tempting to focus on the noisiest ones.  What are noisy tasks?  The tasks with the most pressing deadline or the most vocal sponsor. And so it goes, racing from one due date to another, with barely enough time for a breath much less a moment to consider the true results of what I am doing.

Writers on productivity, time management and strategy have told us for a long time that we should focus on the IMPORTANT not the URGENT. That’s excellent advice.  However, I’ve recently started thinking about another lens through which to view and prioritize tasks:  Will the completion of the task (or project) act as a force multiplier?

To understand this better, let’s spend a moment on force multiplication.  The military calls a factor a “force multiplier” when that factor enables a force to work much more effectively.  The example in Wikipedia relates to GPS:  ”if a certain technology like GPS enables a force to accomplish the same results of a force five times as large but without GPS, then the multiplier is 5.”  Interestingly, while technology can be an enormous advantage, force multipliers are not limited to technology.  Some of the force multipliers listed in that Wikipedia article have nothing at all to do with technology:

• Morale
• Training and Education
• Reputation
• Strategy and Tactics
• The Advantage of Terrain

Now come back to that growing To Do List and take another look at those tasks.  How many of them are basically chores — things that simply need to get done in order to get people off your back or to move things forward (perhaps towards an unclear goal)? How many of them are (or are part of) force multipliers — things that will allow you or your organization to work in a dramatically more effective fashion?  Viewed through this lens, the chores seem much less relevant, akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, while the force multipliers are clearly much more deserving of your time and attention.

The challenge of course is that the noisy tasks grab your attention because others insist on it.  They want something when they want it because they want it.  They may not have a single strategic thought in their head, but they are demanding and persistent.  So how do you limit the encroachment of purveyors of noisy tasks?  One answer is to limit the amount of time available for chores.  To do this credibly, you’ll need to know where you and your activities fit within the strategy of your organization.  If the task does not advance strategy, don’t do it.  Or decide upfront to allow a fixed percentage of your time for chores that may be of minimal use to you, but may be important to keep the people around you happy.  Another approach is to get a better understanding of the task and its context.  If your job is to copy documents, one page looks much like another.  However, it matters if the document you are copying contains the cafeteria menu or the firm’s emergency response guidelines. Finally, you need to educate the folks around you.  With your subordinates, do your decision making aloud — explaining how you determine if a particular task or project is a force multiplier. With your superiors, ask them to help you understand better the force multiplication attributes they see in the tasks they assign.  (This will either provide you with more useful contextual information or smoke out a chore that is masquerading as an important task.) Finally, with the others, engage them in conversation. When you cannot see your way clear to handle their chore, explain your reasoning.  They won’t always be happy about it, but they will start learning when to call on you and when to dump their requests on someone else.

Of course, the concept of force multiplication goes far beyond your To Do List.  Do your projects have a force multiplying effect on your department?  Does your department have a force multiplying effect on your firm? These are important questions for everyone, but especially for people engaged in the sometime amorphous field of knowledge management. Sure, most of what we do helps.  But do we make a dramatic difference?  If not, why not?

[Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds]

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]

This session is presented by John Stepper (Deutsche Bank) and Bryce Williams (Eli Lilly).  You can find the session slides athttp://www.e2conf.com/boston/2011/presentations/workshops.  Username: workshop; Password: boston2011.

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011 in Boston.  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:

• Some Big Challenges of Working in a Regulated Industries
  • “Regulations present a perfect reason to do nothing.” Some of this is because few truly understand the rules, although all fear them.  Therefore, there is little incentive to change what works.
  • Early in the process, involve the key people who understand the regulations and need to be part of developing your governance structure. Build smart compliance into your system.
  • Even if you are being innovative, try to find precedents in your industry so that people in your company aren’t faced with the daunting task of testing the rules. Membership in organizations like the Social Business Council can help you learn about success stories in your industry.
  • Take smart risks. Some risk is necessary for innovation, but don’t bite off more than you can chew.  Incremental change is better.
• Communities of Practice. Start here.  They are focused on real business issues and are close to the frontlines. Use the experience of your communities of practice to identify and spread success stories and best practices. Consider bringing community leaders together into an internal council to help with compliance.
• Eli Lilly’s Social Collaboration. They had some challenges related to regulation and existing technology.
  • Their collaboration tool could house only transitory information.  No documents of record.
  • For privacy reasons, they could not pre-populate the collaboration space with content. Further, they decided not to link to their document management system.
  • They had to use an opt-in method, rather than rolling it out across the enterprise with a full participation default.
  • They had to integrate their SharePoint Portal with their Jive collaboration platform.
  • They used their collaboration tool to facilitate internal communications in connection with various Eli Lilly events (e.g. anniversary celebrations, humanitarian efforts, etc.)
  • They use the tool to crowdsource news, activities and events with community questions/clarifications.
• Key Benefit of Eli Lilly Social Business Effort. It makes it easy for Eli Lilly people to help their colleagues.
• What about SharePoint? Consider the waste and expense associated with users across the enterprise trying to turn SharePoint into a collaborative website. If you implement a proper social business tool, you will spend a great deal less on SharePoint waste.  With those cost savings, all the proven benefits of collaboration within the enterprise are just gravy.
• Focus on Value. One key value of collaborative tools is that they help reduce the number of times the same questtion needs to be answered time and time again.  Before launch, consider asking the service/answer providers within your organization to pre-populate your collaboration tool with FAQs and answers to questions that are critical. This should help reduce their workload going forward.

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:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lBfyOlL4_s

Project ECHO:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MIgLAv9Tww

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HjwtVTGohY

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.

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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]