Seth Godin recently wrote about Derek Sivers (founder of CDBaby), who built his company with one thought in mind: “What could I build that would be like a dream come true for independent musicians?” The post ends with the following provocative statements:
If your business is a dream come true for customers, you win. Game over.
Too often, I hear about businesses that just might be a dream come true for their owners, but hardly for the people they seek to recruit or the customers they hope to snare. What do your prospects dream of? What would get them to wait in line?
Those of us working in law firm knowledge management have the privilege of working with two sets of clients: our internal clients and the clients of the firm. Within those sets of clients are lots of subsets of people with specific needs. How much time have your spent lately thinking about what service your knowledge management department could deliver that would be “a dream come true” for any of your clients? How many of your services currently are “a dream come true” for any of your clients?
If we want to move knowledge management out of the category of mere cost center that is a “nice to have” into a critical “must have” for our law firms, we have to be in the business of making client dreams come true.
[Photo Credit: Pensiero, Creative Commons license]
Above and Beyond KM 
Great Post Mary,
A very true topic and another one close to my heart. I believe we need to remember that we are here for our customers whether internal or external and asking them what they want is critical to any success in delivering information and implementing knowledge management tools.
/craig.
Craig –
Organizing our work around client needs is critical. However, the challenge in this is determining what those client needs are — especially when (as with our external clients) we may not have direct access to those clients and may not have an opportunity to ask them directly what they want.
– Mary