Beyond knowledge management to better management
When the first Sinatra Duets album was released in 1993, I was completely surprised. Frank Sinatra and his producers had taken some of his classics and given them a new twist by pairing Sinatra with a curious group of artists, several of whom had little or no experience with the American Songbook. The result was... Continue Reading →
Current economic conditions have given birth to a new frugality in business. I saw that recently in my response to a request from a colleague who was looking for a new way to organize client materials. There was a time when that request would have triggered fun research into the coolest available technology. Instead, my... Continue Reading →
Regardless of official job descriptions and titles, one of the most important functions knowledge management performs is that of corporate matchmaker. The matches KM makes are often transitory, but can be very important in the moment. If you're looking for advice, we find you an expert. If you're looking for an example, we find you... Continue Reading →
Those of us who chase knowledge for a living have learned the hard way that our target frequently is elusive and the available tools and methods are not always adequate. Despite this, we do strive to identify and follow the best route for achieving the knowledge management goals set by our firms. In a prior... Continue Reading →
In a recent meeting, a vendor said with great enthusiasm, "Let me show you our KM solution." For a brief moment of intense joy, I actually thought I was about to experience KM enlightenment. I should have known better. After a bit of fanfare, he unveiled ... a search engine. Admittedly, it appeared to be... Continue Reading →
Over the weekend, I met a rather opinionated person. (Although, perhaps it is overstating it a bit to use the word "person.") She was very insistent that we do things her way and really wasn't open to a conversation about alternative approaches. If we decided not to follow her advice, she'd repeat insistently, "off-route, recalculating,... Continue Reading →
Sometimes we just want someone to tell us what needs to be done and how to do it. For those moments, there are hundreds of "how-to" books that purport to tell us how to "do" knowledge management -- beginner's guides, dummies' guides, idiot guides, lazy person's guides, etc. They are in the bookstores and their... Continue Reading →
In a prior post I talked about how to sort out priorities for your knowledge management department by imagining what you would choose to focus on if you were trying to do it all by yourself. Now, here's a tougher thought experiment: What if your law firm believes that in the short term it cannot... Continue Reading →
Do we really have as much control over our KM department priorities as we'd like to think we have? I asked variants of this question during a follow-up conversation based on my prior post, What's Your KM Priority? In the course of this second conversation, we took a look at how our various law firms... Continue Reading →
A friend at another firm e-mailed me today thanking me for my earlier post, What's Your KM Priority? In her e-mail she said, To me KM has to be `strategic' to avoid being depressing. On this gray, rainy day in New York City, I know exactly what she means. The purpose of strategy is to... Continue Reading →
Above and Beyond KM 