It’s wise to creep out of our law firm silos from time to time to see how people in other walks of life approach knowledge management. Each time I venture out I inevitably discover that some of the challenges facing law firm knowledge management personnel are shared by our colleagues in other industries. Better still, when I make the effort to find out about KM in other spheres, I almost always learn something worthwhile.

Here’s a case in point. A recent report entitled “Revolution @State: The Spread of eDiplomacy” by Fergus Hanson provides a panoramic view of the US State Department’s eDiplomacy program:

The external social media aspects of this are fascinating, but I’ll leave that for another day. Today I’d like to focus on knowledge management at the State Department. In reading the description of the KM challenges faced by the State Department, I realized that with a few small wording changes, the report could be discussing any major law firm.  For example, here are some of the challenges noted:

• the Department’s principal asset is the knowledge held by individual employees
• paper records are relatively easy to store, but hard to retrieve, share or pool
• email is prevalent, but presents challenges regarding storage, retention, sharing and pooling beyond silos

The solution to these problems was a concerted effort to improve knowledge sharing.  In 2003, the Department approved a Knowledge Leadership Strategy that set the following goals:

To accomplish these goals, they developed four specific tools that are supported by the Knowledge Leadership Unit of the Office of eDiplomacy:

• Corridor — an internal professional networking site designed to have the look and feel of FaceBook.  Built in 2011 using free software (BuddyPress), it now has nearly 7000 members and over 440 groups. Information contributed to member pages allows rapid searches for members with specific skills (e.g, language skills). Over time, those pages may well have more current biographical information, thereby allowing HR to augment its databases. Groups may be formed within Corridor for business/professional reasons or for reasons of personal interest. Corridor allows rapid messaging among members (often resulting in faster response times). Members can also share knowledge by sharing links to internal documents and materials on the Internet.
• Communities@State — this program provides issue-specific blogs to over 70 active communities within the State Department. Since the start of the program in 2005, these communities have contributed “46,500 entries and over 5,600 comments that cover a broad range of areas from policy and management, to language and social interests” (e.g., leadership best practices, visa issues, and resources for people who bike to work). The discussions permit communication and collaboration across agencies and departments. Unlike Corridor Groups, the discussions within Communities tend to be detailed and are viewed as a more permanent resource (they are archived and searchable).
• Diplopedia — the State Department’s internal wiki is designed to look like Wikipedia and is built using the same software (MediaWiki).  Created in 2006, Diplopedia has become “the central repository of State Department information.” It is a key “knowledge exchange and dissemination tool.” Its usage statistics as of October 2011 are impressive: “it had 14,519 articles, 4,698 registered users, 42,217 weekly page views and over 196,356 cumulative page edits.”
• Search — the State Department implemented enterprise search in 2004. The search engine has since handled 65,792 search queries (as of the beginning of October 2011).

Moving from the world of diplomacy to the world of legal practice, what are some takeaways to consider?

• Find Comes First.  If you look at the chronology, the Knowledge Leadership Unit started with Search (2004) and then create communities of practice (2005), a wiki (2006) and then, finally, a networking site (2011). This makes a lot of sense.  First make sure that people can find the information that exists. Then give them user-friendly platforms that make it easier to share information.
• E2.0 Tools are Key. Enterprise search, blogs, wikis and social networking are all part of the Enterprise 2.0 suite of tools. The rapid adoption of these tools behind the State Department firewall is a testament to their usefulness. What’s interesting to me is that no mention was made of email strategy or document management systems. Email and documents are the mainstay of legal information management.  I’d like to know more about the role they play in the State Department and how the E2.0 tools they adopted augment or replace email and traditional document management.
• Better KM Through E2.0. Based on this report, knowledge management activities at the State Department are primarily focused on using social media tools behind the firewall. While law firms have been using portals and intranets for some time, I wonder how robust their internal wiki, blogging and networking functions are?  Besides Freshfields’ impressive use of wiki technology, are there other firms that have adopted a knowledge sharing strategy heavily based on the use of social media tools?
• Colleagues are People Too. In establishing the communities of practice and the networking site, the Knowledge Leadership Unit has enabled knowledge sharing for both business/professional purposes as well as personal purposes.  I’m not sure how many law firms have permitted this type of blending of the personal and professional outside of email.  Allowing people within the organization to know their colleagues as people with many interests and dimensions (as opposed to merely functional cogs on an org chart) helps build a sense of community within the organization. Why don’t more US law firms do this?

This August, the International Legal Technology Association’s annual conference will include a session on what we can learn from the US military and intelligence services about social media and knowledge management. After the foregoing glimpse of what’s happening in KM at the State Department, I’m eager to attend that ILTA2012 session to see what else I can learn from government about effective KM.

Collaboration is key.  We’re told by social media mavens that it powers networks and unlocks the potential within individuals and the groups with which they associate.  However, collaboration is not always an unalloyed good. Sometimes it can go badly wrong.

Now, before you throw me out of the social media club, consider the following: collaboration isn’t just about working together; it’s about working together towards a shared goal.   However, sharing a goal is not enough it you are looking to optimize the situation for your group.  Merely accomplishing a shared goal doesn’t guarantee good if the goal itself is flawed.

If you aren’t convinced, watch these two brief videos in which groups of birds act together to achieve a common goal:

Here’s an example of great collaboration to achieve a worthy goal:

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

Now, here’s an example of a crowd realizing too late that the goal towards which it was working was the wrong goal:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLrHdFT-G_s

So here’s the takeaway:  If you’re going to go to the trouble of collaborating, make very sure that the goal towards which you are working is worth the effort.  Otherwise, you might discover that your collaboration effort is for the birds.

If you thought it was safe to ignore social media since all your colleagues were ignoring it, think again. If all you wanted to do is retreat from the world and tune out, think again. It turns out that the six degrees of separation that you assumed would protect you from the unwashed masses has shrunk to 4.74 (or 4.37, if you live in the United States). A recent experiment conducted with respect to the 721 Facebook users reveals that it’s getting easier to be in touch with people you would otherwise never have met. Put another way, it’s easier than ever for them to be in touch with you!

You may have until now aspired to be Greta Garbo as far as social media is concerned. However, that may be a shortsighted goal if you wish to have any influence on your world. Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell University, told The New York Times about the potential he sees in the weak ties that shrink the degrees of separation:

“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Dr. Kleinberg said. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”

Still, he noted that such ties were hardly meaningless. “We should ask what things spread well on weak ties,” he said. “News spreads well on weak ties. Those people I met on vacation, if they send me some cool news, I might send that to my friends. If they send me something about a protest movement, I might not.”

To understand the import of Dr. Kleinberg’s views, you need to understand the concept of interpersonal ties.  While you rightly may value the strong ties you share with your closest family and friends, chances are they hear the same news you do:

Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. Specifically, more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.

As a person who earns her daily bread in a law firm, I read the report of the study in The New York Times and found myself wondering how many of the AmLaw 100 firms have a coherent strategy for taking advantage of these weak ties to bring themselves to the attention of potential clients. Do these firms have a plan for expanding their weak ties? Are these firms a reliable source for legal news? Do they communicate online in a way that is engaging and invites action by weak ties?  Stepping outside the law firm world, does your organization have a coherent strategy for building and using a network of weak ties?  What about you personally?  If not, why not?

While this study was limited to Facebook, you shouldn’t think you’re immune if you’re inactive on Facebook.  There are plenty of other social media platforms that provide similar benefits once your social network on that platform reaches a critical mass. To take a slightly more negative approach, do you really want to be left behind?

If you’ve ever been to a Disney theme park, you’ll undoubtedly have see (or even tried) the ride dedicated to global harmony — It’s a Small World After All.  If you’ve had the experience, you’ll know that once its theme song gets in your head, you’ll have a struggle to get it out. (It’s alternatively described as a gift to the children of the world and “one of the most annoying songs EVER.”) I’m not going to apologize for reminding you of the song.  I hope that its persistence acts as a goad until you find a sane way to navigate the rapidly shrinking degrees of separation online.  Failure to do so isn’t a sensible option — it’s a small world after all.

No man is an island. And no single person can do everything that needs to be done to meet client needs. So why do so many of us operate at work like islands within an archipelago?

To be fair, not everyone is misanthropic.  Some work in solitary fashion because they have not yet developed the necessary network within their organization to get things done in a way that leverages all the assets of that organization. Meanwhile, others work by themselves because they have not been given (or have not learned to use) the latest tools that facilitate collaboration. Others may work largely on their own because their organization does not have a culture that fosters information sharing.

No matter what the cause of this lonely approach, it is useful to consider the alternative. While the video below is admittedly a marketing piece, it does provide a graphic example of the type of efficiency that is possible when you have the tools and culture to connect people and share information effectively:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkP49rBrq68

Now, because I can’t help myself, I have to ask you this:  do you know of a law firm that operates like this?  If not, please tell me how your law firm would handle “The Ask” if your client needed something done quickly? How many emails and phone calls over what length of time would it take? How does your organization’s approach compare to the approach in the video?  And, please be honest — which approach do you prefer?

If you think this is all too much like science fiction and isn’t appropriate for your organization, don’t be misled. It could be the future for all of us. In fact, some lucky organizations may already be enjoying it today.  Don’t you wish you could too?

[hat tip to John Tropea for sharing this video.]

[Photo Credit: Joan Campderros-i-Canas]

Andy McAfee hosts this discussion with Paul Greenberg (The 56 Group), Marcia Conner (Altimeter) and Ted Schadler (Forrester).

[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:

• What’s New?. The term “social” is going away. Collaboration is fading as a buzz phrase too. Meanwhile, senior HR leaders in large corporations are thinking about using social software to get things done in their organizations. So, HR is about to become a big focus for social software. Some of this is because there has been a gap in companies in terms of who or what improves productivity. This allows HR to help free the potential of 90% of their employees rather than devoting all their time on the 10% of employees who present compliance or risk challenges. Another important innovation is that companies are deploying command centers that track customer feedback. Radian6 is one of the companies that makes is possible.
• When will things actually change? Within three years Marcia Conner believes that most employees will be taking action for themselves to obtain the social software they need to get their work done. This should force organizations to start deploying these tools on an enterprise wide basis. Ted Schadler says that 50% of employees now say that their technology at home is better than what they have at work. Two-thirds of Gen Y employees say their personal technology is better. Similarly, 35% of employees say they purchase their own work devices. Employees are moving ahead of their employers when it comes to technology. Meanwhile, as long as senior management remains entrenched and unaware of these shifts, the organizations will not formally change. Paul Greenberg says, however, that the communications revolution is leading some companies to allow some experiments under the radar. The manager may not completely understand social software, but they are willing to let their people try.

Rawn Shah (Business Transformation Consultant, IBM) and Hardik Dave (Senior Business Analyst, IBM) talk about how to create a strategy to collect the metrics that are best for your social business implementation.

[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:

• Why do you need metrics?Metrics help demonstrate value — particularly value to customers. Metrics also can help demonstrate operational excellence. Finally, metrics can shed light on what makes the people and culture of your organization special.
• Who will use the Metrics?The intended users and uses help identify the necessary data points that you should be collecting. For example, Marketing and HR have very different business goals and may need completely metrics. That said, they both may want similar metrics regarding how their content is consumed.
• What Types of Metrics Do You Need? Metrics reflect qualitative, quantitive, attitudinal, or behavioral characteristics. All are related to demographics. The business value comes from providing the right metric to the right person. The metrics chosen often depend on the role of the recipient. For example, one person may be interested in content consumption rates, another interested in brand management or sentiment. Both may be tracking activity, but for different reasons.
• How do you collect metrics?Collection methods depend on the type of metric. For example, activity or traffic data may be collected passively by your social software. By contrast, attitudinal data would be collected by surveys, anecdotes, day-in-the-life studies, interviews and focus groups. However, the type of survey you use to assess group vitality (attitudinal) will be quite different from the survey used to assess interactions.
• When do you collect Metrics?The timing is a function of the maturity of your social business. Start with basic satisfaction, social activity and content activity data. As the program matures, add social graph and group vitality data. Further along, you can measure brand reputation and individual reputation.
• Surveys.As long as you ask the right questions, surveys can help identify gaps. Later, you can use surveys get feedback from early adopters to obtain guidance on technical issues. For example, the IT department at IBM has a workplace effectiveness survey with respect to social business. They asked which social activities were most important to employees and how satisfied they were with the available tools. The resulting data helped the IT department understand which social business tools were most important and which needed to be improved first.
• Interviews and Focus Groups.Interviews and focus groups are an effective way to collect anecdotes. As you are doing this, always be on the lookout for success stories, as well as early warning signs of potential problems.
• Day in the Life Visioning.This a great tool for understanding business process in real life. By random sampling across people in similar jobs, you can reveal patterns that are firm wide.
• Activity Logging.How and how often are people using the social tool? How are they interacting with the content, with each other?
• Content and Sentiment Analysis.This data helps provide aggregate understanding of brand, reputation and the content. What are people talking about?
• It’s not the size (of the data) that matters. It’s what you do with it.
• Making a Social Analytics Strategy Map. Start by understanding what business issue you need to address and then consider what data will help illuminate the problem and solution. Once you have the data, you can starting making some interesting connections. For example, how does group vitality affect content sharing? What is the impact of sentiment on collaboration levels? Make sure you understand properly the direct impacts, the correlations. At IBM, they have done a study of high performing sales people and the extent to which they are also high performing collaborators. A study like this requires data across multiple years. (Rawn released this data on SlideShare in 2008.)
• What’s the Dollar Impact?Don’t always assume that the data will lead directly to a dollar impact. However, it should help the business leaders understand their business better and make better decisions.

Debra Lavoy (Director, Product Marketing, Digital and Social Media, OpenText) and Tyler Knowlton (Chief Strategist on Digital Innovation for the Chief Trade Commissioner, Dept of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Government of Canada) discuss how critical meaning is for engagement. They go so far as to say we either need to find purpose or perish.

[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:

• Why Purpose MattersWith a strong sense of purpose, people work harder and better. Without it, they lack engagement and often end up in confusion. Only a strong sense of shared purpose can overcome personal politics. In fact, OpenText has found that the single best predictor of success in a deployment is the strength of purpose of the team involved.
• OpenText PrizeOpenText is offering a prize to the organization that can demonstrate how important a shared purposes has been their success. The prize is a $10,000 contribution of a charity of the winner’s choice.
• Learning from the G20 Experience.The G20 is a summit of the leaders of the biggest economies to discuss the state of the global economy. The summit has a rotating chairmanship, however, there was no shared knowledge base. Therefore, each summit host country effectively has to start from scratch. As a practical matter, this means that knowledge is shared via email. When Canada became chair and host, Knowlton’s team first focused on “digital diplomacy,” but then were asked to find a better way to create a knowledge base. It started because the Canadian delegate was “sick of email.” He asked Knowlton’s team to come up with a solution that could be Canada’s legacy gift to the G20 organization. This led them to a cloud-based online solution that allowed G20 participants to communicate and collaborate. (They partnered with OpenText on this.) As they moved to this more ambitious purpose, the team became more adventurous, more confident, more decisive adn more creative. The project was so successful that the Knowlton’s team has been retained to advise each of the countries that has succeeded Canada as chair and host.

Bertie Sandie (Electronic Arts) says that the biggest challenge for Enterprise 2.0 is creating and maintaining a culture of collaboration. He asks is we have a roadmap for creating a culture of collaboration.

[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:

• What can be done to foster collaboration?Give them virtual and physcial places to share and then acknowledge their contribution. (Electronic Arts copies the contributor’s supervisor on the acknowledgement in order to provide positive reinforcement.) You also need to create an environment that stimulates collaboration. EA actually has physical spaces that encourage people to gather and share ideas (complete with comfortable seats and whiteboards). They remove barriers and move people in order to ensure lots of cross-fertilization.
• Organizaton Affects Collaboration. How are your people organized? In pods, teams, divisions, business units? Is each level of the organization optimized for collaboration? Each level will have a different culture of collaboration and one culture may not transfer easily to another part of the organization. Nonetheless, it is possible to improve culture in real-time by well-designed team building exercises.
• Change Management is Hard.Sandie cautions us that most change management and culture change efforts fail. There are a variety of models (see John Kotter), but you will need to develop a model that works well in your environment. At EA they focus on Heads, Hearts and Hands. This means changing how people think, feel and act. Sandie works in corporate learning and leads workshops to help lead change.

Ross Mayfield (Socialtext and SlideShare) talks about how social software is more about evolution than revolution.

[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:

• In the FlowMayfield credits Michael Idinopolous for reminding us that knowledge sharing happens best “in the flow” rather than “above the flow” of work. Ideally, knowledge sharing is a by-product of getting things done. Our job is to provide the social tools that facilitate this sharing. Socialtext has seen 95% levels of adoption/participation when they have put social tools directly in the flow.
• Goal-Oriented Social Software.This is where this industry should be headed. Online fundraising shows us how effective social tools can be to spread the message and create good. What would happen if we had goal-oriented uses of social software within the enterprise?

Sarah Roberts discusses why your employees will be running your company in five years. (Although she admits that in many ways employees are already running your company now.)

[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:

• Why Organizations Are Losing Control.In most organizations, employees are “choiceless doers.” They are directed to act in a particular way, but rarely have choices or the discretion to act. Rather, the decisions and choices are made exclusively by senior management. This approach communicates the message that employees should check their brains at the door. This leads to disengagement and declining service quality. Now, however, there are indicators that employees are not just sitting back. Some high performers are leaving the company and are not giving their best companies to the company while they are there. (You may be able to make information flow down, but can you make knowledge flow up?) Others are withholding on discretionary effort. Since their hearts are not in their jobs, they are not going above and beyond to get the job done. Meanwhile, others act subversively — just to get their jobs done.
• Change Management Must ChangeIt’s no longer about just getting buy-in. (Sarah Roberts believes that buy-in is just code for forcing people lower down the chain to agree to decisions made higher up the chain.) It’s also no longer about three-year change management plans. Since change is constant and needs to happen quickly, we no longer have the luxury of a long lead time.
• Allow Bold DiscretionRitz Carleton gives employees an allowance of $2000 per day to solve customer problems or to make a customer’s experience delightful. In reality, employees spend much less, but by giving them the freedom and resources to act, they innovate and move the company forward. This prompts employee engagement and accountability.
• Giving Up Control Need Not Mean Being Out of Control