Above and Beyond KM

“Drinking your own champagne” was how Jo Hoppe, CIO of Pegasystems, described the process that some with a less elegant turn of phrase have called “eating your own dog food.” It means using your own products and taking your own advice.  It also means moving out of the world of the theoretical into the painfully practical. Jo Hoppe calls this becoming “a living laboratory.” And nowhere is this needed more than in knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0 deployments.

Knowledge managers (at least in the legal industry) are accomplished when it comes to identifying the “things lawyers won’t do.”  You don’t even have to buy a law firm knowledge manager a drink before they start complaining about how lawyers don’t attend training sessions, or won’t spend enough time in an application to see its full range of capabilities or won’t take a few minutes to properly profile or file a document.  This conversation can rapidly disintegrate into a pity party unless you have a real life corrective.  So, I suggest that we all drink our own champagne.   But, before we can open that bottle of bubbly, we need to have a few moments of honesty and ask ourselves some questions along the following lines:

• Do we take measures to “walk a mile in the shoes” of the lawyers we seek to assist?
• Do we follow processes within the KM group that promote transparency and mutual accountability?
• Is our natural tendency within the KM group to behave competitively or collaboratively?
• Are we using Enterprise 2.0 tools to facilitate the information flow within the KM group?
• Do we have personal experience of the benefits of social media tools before trying to sell it to our colleagues?
• Do we keep ourselves up to date on the training we need to be productive?

What are your answers?  Are you in the “do what I say, not what I do” camp or do you actually drink your own champagne?  One director of knowledge management I know posts all of her team’s projects on her firm’s intranet, showing goals and achievements (as well as shortcomings) against plan.  In so doing, she embraces the transparency that is a key part of social media use within the firewall, shines a little light on the work of her team and makes herself accountable for the work of her team.  Others use wikis and blogs to manage KM projects, thereby giving their teams invaluable first-hand experience of the benefits and deficits of the software and processes they are using.  They are world-class quaffers of champagne.  What about you?

[Photo Credit:  Waldo Jaquith]

Rees Morrison reports that clients get unhappy when their lawyers have internal meetings. According to some of the general counsel he works with, these meetings are seen as unnecessary additions to the bill. Meanwhile, their outside counsel know that these meetings have been a traditional means of sharing important matter information and, thereby, promoting efficiency.  For the general counsel who are concerned about this issue, Rees goes on to provide some strategies they might employ to reduce the financial impact of internal meetings.

I would respectfully suggest that there may be a better, less contentious approach. If we can agree that general counsel and their outside lawyers understand that there is great value in knowledge sharing and that we are all invested in promoting this sharing, then we should work to find a more efficient and cost-effective means of knowledge sharing rather than making the sharing financially difficult for the outside lawyers.  Instead of old-fashioned meetings, could we perhaps try … Enterprise 2.0?

The promise of Enterprise 2.0 is that it offers low-cost, light-weight ways of creating information streams so that participants can share their knowledge as and when needed.  This has the added benefit of eliminating some unnecessary meetings and emails – especially those regarding status updates.  Of course, there is no substitute for face-to-face meetings and sometimes meeting in person is the best and most efficient thing to do.  But for those other times, we should consider taking advantage of current technology to maximize knowledge sharing while minimizing the financial impact on clients and firms alike.

[Photo Credit: ryancr]

I had nearly finished drafting the legal documents for a hot new online start-up when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.  With the sudden end to the stratospheric stock prices for these new media companies, everyone felt free to criticize.  Do you remember how the bricks-and-mortar supporters derided the notion of doing business virtually?  Do you remember the anxiety about how to regulate and evaluate online business activities?  Ten years later, some of those concerns seem unwarranted.  And, more importantly, online business activity has become a significant part of the way we all live our lives.

If you look around, you’ll see some of the same issues with respect to Enterprise 2.0 and social media generally.  There’s lots of concern about how to evaluate its efficacy.  And even more concern about how to regulate it.  Some companies have clamped down on their employees, while others have taken a more moderate approach, presumably emboldened by the potential they see in these new communications channels.  Whatever mode your company’s in, take heart from the fact that we’ve seen this pattern of behavior before.  If you doubt it, watch the  5 1/2 minute video below entitled “Card-Carrying Capitalist Supports Nationalization” provided courtesy of The Wall Street Journal Online.  In this video, author Matthew Bishop explains why he thinks bank nationalization can be a good thing.  While I’m not in any way endorsing or criticizing his point of view, I was interested in his suggestion (about 2.5 minutes into the video) that bubbles follow innovation.  And, because it’s hard to understand properly what’s really going on in a period of great innovation, it’s easy for abuse to occur during that bubble.  However, companies that can find some sound operating principles that take advantage of the innovation will be able to ride out the bubble and emerge in a stronger position.  The role of social media evangelists is to help companies find that oasis of calm and sanity amid the hype and frenetic activity surrounding web 2.0 tools so they are well-positioned to thrive after the bubble bursts.

So when you hear people deriding social media and Enterprise 2.0, remember that they are viewing these new communications channels through their old bricks-and-mortar lens.  They will catch up with the rest of us once their vision has been corrected.

[Photo Credit:  h. koppdelaney]

If you’re looking for overnight success, forget about social media. Snake oil salesman who tell you it’s easy (or it’s like magic) are NOT telling you the truth. Social media success, like pretty much everything else in life, requires hard work — thoughtfully and consistently done.  A recent Mashable piece, 3 Things You Need to Know About Social Media Strategy, makes this clear with the following advice:

• Everyone Must Work Together – This definitely is easier said than done.  If your corporate culture is based on competition and bureaucratic infighting rather than cooperation and collaboration, you’ll have an uphill battle.

A company that hasn’t learned to listen to its own employees, and encourage them to collaborate internally, is not likely to succeed in integrating social media tools into its marketing mix, no matter what agency or consultant they hire.

• Top Management Must Be On Board – Although you hear about social media as a grassroots phenomenon on the internet, it is a different animal when it is grafted onto a corporate culture.  Very little happens within an organization without top level support.  They control the staffing, the communications channels and, above all, the budget.

If the direction doesn’t come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo.

• Don’t Expect Overnight Success – There is no such thing as “turnkey social media.”  You can’t just buy a tool and expect a social media revolution within your organization.  The first thing to realize that it’s not about the tools.  In fact, identifying the tool is the last stage of the process.  The first step is to understand what modes of communication and collaboration would best further your corporate strategy. Then, find a social media tool that will facilitate that.  If all you are doing is implementing the latest fad tool, your social media efforts will flounder.  And, even if you deploy the right tool for your needs, you should expect that it will take from 18 months to 3 years to gain significant traction.  That’s not my definition of overnight success. Is it yours?

If you’ve been under the illusion that implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools behind the firewall or launching an external social media campaign is easy, think again.  If you’ve been fortunate enough to accomplish one or the other with little or no pain, please let us know how.  In fact,  if you’re for real, you could probably charge a pretty penny as a social media consultant.  For the rest of us mortals, pull on your overalls and get to work because Thomas Edison could have been talking about social media when he said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

[h/t to David Gurteen for pointing out the Mashable piece]

Jonah Lehrer has written a thought-provoking piece on why we too often miss the great opportunities presented by failure. In Accept Defeat:  The Neuroscience of Screwing Up, he explains how our brains purport to “help” us by screening out information that doesn’t fit with what we believe we know.  Here’s how he describes it:

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Ignoring failure can occasionally be a sanity-preserving, efficiency-enhancing approach to life.  However, when we ignore repeated failure, we may in fact be ignoring the only feasible explanation on the horizon.  Realizing this and acting on it requires strength of mind, openness, and a certain measure of humility.  It requires a true empiricist’s approach to life.

So how do we turn perceived failure around?  How do we find an epiphany amongst the rubble of unwanted test results?  Jonah Lehrer has the the following advice:

Check Your Assumptions: Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

Seek Out the Ignorant: Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

When it comes to implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools, there’s no substitute for constant experimentation.  And, there’s no way to avoid disappointments as you struggle to find what works best in your organization.  That said, don’t be too quick to discard your apparent failures.  When viewed with an open mind, they may point the way to success.  By following Jonah Lehrer’s advice, you may be able to find a breakthrough — an Epiphany.

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Here is some additional reading on Failure:

• Host a Failure Party
• Do You Need a Failure Target?
• The Upside of Failure
• When Failure is Fine
• Safe Mode

[Hat tip to Dan Pink for pointing out this article.]

[Photo Credit: wenzday01]

KMWorld is running a survey about various tools and vendors. Among the areas under scrutiny is Social Media. Here’s what KM World wants to know:

What is your CURRENT status regarding…Social Media and related tools?

• Deployed enterprise wide in multiple departments
• Deployed effectively in specific departments
• Currently deploying; not effective yet
• Under investigation
• Don’t know

How would you answer that question?  If you work in a law firm, it’s most likely one of the last three responses (i.e., currently deploying but not effective yet, under investigation, don’t know).

It’s still early days for social media within law firms, but that’s no excuse for sticking your head in the sand. This is promising technology that has the potential to make our workflows and information flows easier and more intuitive. It’s also challenging technology that rarely can be implemented out of the box with stellar results. There are no shortcuts.  You have to do the hard work of tailoring it to the people, culture and processes of your organization. However, if you are up to the challenge, you stand to win significant rewards.

If you are interested in improving your firm’s social media deployment behind the firewall, here are some resources to help you along the way:

• Oscar Berg, The secret sauce to successful E2.0 adoption
• Carl Frappaolo & Dan Keldsen, Keynote: From the Enterprise 2.0 Horses’ Mouths (video)
• Dion Hinchcliffe, 12 Adoption Strategies for Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 in 2010
• Dion Hinchcliffe, The State of Enterprise 2.0
• Michael Idinopulos, The Five Forces of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
• Jon Mell, Principles of wiki and Enterprise 2.0 adoption
• Sameer Patel, Five Ways to Avoid Enterprise 2.0 Failure
• Carol Rozwell, Do what I say, not what I do
• Euan Semple, The secret to success with Enterprise 2.0
• Gil Yehuda, Why Wikis Should be a Standard Workplace Tool

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The editors of the ABA Journal have recognized Above and Beyond KM as one of the top 100 law blogs of 2009.  They are requesting your votes to help them determine which of these blogs are the most popular.  To vote for this blog and your other favorites, please click on the picture below.  Thanks a million!

Perhaps it was irrational exuberance, but the frothy buzz surrounding social media was nearly irresistible.  According to the social media happy talk, all we had to do was start sharing at work and the world would be a better place.  We were told that social media was the next big thing and we’d better hurry and jump on before the train left the station.  So some of us jumped and were initially heartened by the success stories.  Remember the praise for the spies who discovered the joy of sharing via Intellipedia?  However, like all bubbles this one was bound to burst when it confronted reality.  And now we’re told that Intellipedia is facing its own midlife crisis.  It turns out that much of that initial success was the work of early adopters and enthusiasts.  Now that they’ve made their contribution, things are in a holding pattern waiting for the next big surge.

So what will it take to trigger that surge?  They are going to have to find a way to embed social media in their essential business processes.  It’s hard to get real enterprise-wide traction as long as you treat social media as a geeky parlor trick or as part of a carnival sideshow.  When business critical reporting is done via a blog or wiki, you’ll have excellent adoption rates.  Similarly, if company benefit plans are administered via social media tools, you’ll find that everyone will want to learn how to use those tools.  It’s not complicated in theory.  The catch is that this requires more than a handful of tech savvy cowboys inciting under-the-radar grassroots efforts.  To get access to business critical processes, you will need some management involvement.  And obtaining the necessary management approval will require some convincing facts and figures.  Now you’re talking hard work.

When you try to sidestep the hard work and rely on social media happy talk, you create situations like the one discussed in a recent BusinessWeek article about Social Media Snake Oil:

… the buzz around social media has led many companies to buy these systems before they’re ready to put them to work. Jennifer Okimoto, associate partner at IBM Global Business Services, says many corporations took the plunge into social media and now are sitting on loads of uninstalled software. “I’m working with a company that has made huge investments” in social software, she says on a phone call from Switzerland. Yet only a small number of employees at the company use it. A Forrester Research (FORR) study shows that despite buzz around Enterprise 2.0, less than 15% of the knowledge workforce makes use of internal blogs, wikis, and other collaborative tools. “E-mail is still dominant,” says Ted Schadler, author of the report.

Social media happy talk involved a fair amount of optimism. That optimism was not necessarily misplaced, but now it needs to be backed up with results.

[Photo Credit:  chemisti]

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The editors of the ABA Journal have recognized Above and Beyond KM as one of the top 100 law blogs of 2009.  They are requesting your votes to help them determine which of these blogs are the most popular.  To vote for this blog and your other favorites, please click on the picture below.  Thanks a million!

An eminent Mary (Mary Meeker that is, not Mary Abraham!) has just presented her views on Internet Trends 2009 at the Web 2.0 Summit. Her key trend for 2009 was “Mobile Internet – Is and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think.” She goes on to list 8 key mobile internet themes, but here’s the one that caught my eye:

Next Generation Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) Driving Unprecedented Change in Communications + Commerce.

I know we lawyers love our BlackBerries, but is this where the action is?  Maybe not so much.  According to one report, iPhone users account for 65% of the mobile data usage even though they constitute only 11% of the market share in the US.  What does this mean for the future of BlackBerries in the enterprise?  Meeker suggests that RIM’s installed base will give it a 1-2 year advantage, but after that all bets are off given the sky-high rate of iPhone purchases.

So if we don’t have passing grades when it comes to mobile, how are we doing with social networking?  Meeker’s data show that huge numbers of users are flocking to powerful new publishing/distribution platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Demand Media.  Yet every day we hear more and more alarming statistics about the number of companies that are blocking access to social networking platforms.  If this is true, does Mary Meeker’s prediction apply only to folks outside the corporate/legal world?  Or are we about to see a shift in acceptance and participation behind the corporate firewall?

And what about your law firm?  Is it ready for mobile + social?  Or are you hoping to try to sit this one out?

[Photo Credit: mattjb]

I’m about to do something foolish — I’m going to allow a soundbite (regarding a discipline in which I have virtually no training) to inspire a blog post.  Nonetheless, I’m persisting in my foolishness because today’s announcement of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom included references to concepts that rang social media and knowledge management bells for me.

Ostrom has studied how people use, and govern the use of, shared resources. Here’s how The New York Times describes her work:

Ms. Ostrom’s work focuses on the commons, such as how pools of users manage natural resources as common property. The traditional view is that common ownership results in excessive exploitation of resources — the so-called tragedy of the commons that occurs when fishermen overfish a common pond, for example. The proposed solution is usually to make users bear the external costs of their utilization by privatizing the resource or imposing government regulations such as taxes or quotas.

Ms. Ostrom’s empirical research has shown that this explanation is “overly simplistic,” the prize committee says: There are many cases around the world in which common property is “surprisingly well-managed.” In these cases commons users “create and enforce rules that mitigate overexploitation” without having to resort to privatization and government regulation (which can both pose their own practical difficulties).

In an interview I heard today, Elinor Ostrom talked about various failed attempts by central authorities to dictate the sensible use and sustainability of shared resources.  She then contrasted this with the success of people on the front lines in cooperating to manage these resources by adapting rules to local conditions, something the central authorities often have trouble doing.  These themes are echoed by the Nobel prize committee:

The lesson is not that user-management is always preferable to all other solutions. … Rather, the main lesson is that common property is often managed on the basis of rules and procedures that have evolved over long periods of time. As a result they are more adequate and subtle than outsiders – both politicians and social scientists – have tended to realize. Beyond showing that self-governance can be feasible and successful, Ostrom also elucidates the key features of successful governance. One instance is that active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules appears to be essential. Rules that are imposed from the outside or unilaterally dictated by powerful insiders have less legitimacy and are more likely to be violated. Likewise, monitoring and enforcement work better when conducted by insiders than by outsiders. These principles are in stark contrast to the common view that monitoring and sanctioning are the responsibility of the state and should be conducted by public employees. [emphasis added]

Freely admitting that I have never studied Elinor Ostrom’s work, I find myself wondering whether her research regarding the importance of the active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules could be transferred to the modern enterprise and its quest to control the uses of social media. If people can be trusted to manage precious natural and man-made resources, is it a huge leap to allow them to manage a shared resource like a social media platform?  If centralized authorities have trouble adapting to local conditions with respect to certain resources, why should it be different with resources within an enterprise.  Are some things better left in the hands of the people on the front lines?

I do hope someone with training in economics takes another look at Elinor Ostrom’s work, with a view to determining its applicability to knowledge management and shared online resources.  In the meantime, however, I’m going to think some more about why our drive for safety leads us to command-and-control structures that often are futile and ultimately undermine the safety we seek.

[Photo Credit:  Indiana University via Getty Images]

What’s the biggest barrier to innovation?  According to Tom Koulopoulos, founder of Delphi Group,  your past success is the biggest barrier to your ability to innovate.

His theory is interesting.  When you have a success under your belt, you have something to protect: your reputation, your confidence, your sense of well-being.  Once you’re in protection mode, you’ll find that you’re unwilling to do anything that might upset your equilibrium.  You are reluctant to consider change or take new action.   You subsist in complacency.

In Tom Koulopoulos’ view, one of the great benefits of social media is that it is disruptive.   It brings new ideas to you, it asks new things of you, and it is beyond your control.  Despite the threat social media can present to the successful and complacent, if they are able to get over their defensive posture, they’ll find that social media provides a very effective spur to innovation and action.

[Photo Credit: papalar]

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For additional information on Tom Koulopoulos’ ILTA09 keynote speech, see Sean Brady’s blog:  This Year At ILTA.