Doug Cornelius .com

According to a recent survey, 83% of workers rate relationships with co-workers as a critical reason for joining and staying with their employer, and alternatively, one in four people quit a job due to feelings of isolation. Organizations that provide talent with tools to connect, build and manage their personal and professional networks, bond people to each other and to the organization. Moreover, organizations that offer employee social networking have an edge in attracting talent who thrives on these tools to exchange knowledge and ideas.

Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst at the Burton Group, presented this webinar, sponsored by SelectMinds.  The webinar was a production of the Human Capital Institute.

Social structures are influenced by team location:

1. Co-located teams interact primarily as face-to-face
2. Virtual teams interact primarily through electronic means with occasional face-to-face
3. Far flung teams rarely interaction face-to-face

In this world of electronic communication, is “where you are” still important?

Mike proposed that people are less likely to contribute to a centralized storage system without the personal positive recognition. Workers may feel they are giving away their value and may feel alienated due to physical location and lack of reciprocity.

You should humanize people.  A sparse photobook makes you look like a mere phone number.

How does technology affect the social interaction:

• Email – inbox is overloaded and conversations are fragmented
• Instant messaging is promising but the interruption issues need to be resolved
• Portals can work, but they suffer from poor navigation, there is a lack if interaction and there was little personalization
• Content management systems are difficult to use and poor user experience
• Discussion forums suffer from overload and clutter
• Virtual workspaces get cluttered but turn into a file dumping ground

Can Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 help?

• Blogs can help you to communicate
• Tagging and social bookmarking enable user-centric discovery and findability
• Micro-blogging (twitter) is the is the next-generation water cooler
• RSS feeds offer an opt-in information delivery to employees
• Wikis enable co-creation and co-ownership of information. You can build communities around shared interests
• Social networks allow for flows of communication, information and collaboration

A corporate “facebook” can act as a destination and social hub.  The enterprise should look to taking down artificial barriers to communication and collaboration.  By opening the lines of communication and collaboration you can tap into a bigger pool of talent and knowledge.

Points for the Business Case:

• Aging workplace pressures to transfer knowledge
• Establish better learning environments
• Better brainstorming
• Informal feedback can improve situational awareness and decision-making
• Employees as brand ambassadors

Use Case Scenarios:

• Professional support for returning employees
• Referral programs for alumni and employee referrals
• Retiree programs to continue contribution
• Improved travel information
• Expertise location

In reading the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, I came a cross an article by Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg, and Linda-Eling Lee: Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model.

The authors put forth four drives that underlie motivation:

1. The drive to acquire. We are all driven to acquire scarce goods that bolster our sense of well-being. We experience delight when this drive is fulfilled, discontentment when it is thwarted. This phenomenon applies not only to physical goods like food, clothing, housing, and money, but also to experiences like travel and entertainment—not to mention events that improve social status, such as being promoted and getting a corner office or a place on the corporate board.

2. The drive to bond. Many animals bond with their parents, kinship group, or tribe, but only humans extend that connection to larger collectives such as organizations, associations, and nations. The drive to bond, when met, is associated with strong positive emotions like love and caring and, when not, with negative ones like loneliness and anomie. At work, the drive to bond accounts for the enormous boost in motivation when employees feel proud of belonging to the organization and for their loss of morale when the institution betrays them. It also explains why employees find it hard to break out of divisional or functional silos: People become attached to their closest cohorts. But it’s true that the ability to form attachments to larger collectives sometimes leads employees to care more about the organization than about their local group within it.

3. The drive to comprehend. We want very much to make sense of the world around us, to produce theories and accounts—scientific, religious, and cultural—that make events comprehensible and suggest reasonable actions and responses. We are frustrated when things seem senseless, and we are invigorated, typically, by the challenge of working out answers. In the workplace, the drive to comprehend accounts for the desire to make a meaningful contribution. Employees are motivated by jobs that challenge them and enable them to grow and learn, and they are demoralized by those that seem to be monotonous or to lead to a dead end. Talented employees who feel trapped often leave their companies to find new challenges elsewhere.

4. The drive to defend. We all naturally defend ourselves, our property and accomplishments, our family and friends, and our ideas and beliefs against external threats. This drive is rooted in the basic fight-or-flight response common to most animals. In humans, it manifests itself not just as aggressive or defensive behavior, but also as a quest to create institutions that promote justice, that have clear goals and intentions, and that allow people to express their ideas and opinions. Fulfilling the drive to defend leads to feelings of security and confidence; not fulfilling it produces strong negative emotions like fear and resentment. The drive to defend tells us a lot about people’s resistance to change; it’s one reason employees can be devastated by the prospect of a merger or acquisition—an especially significant change—even if the deal represents the only hope for an organization’s survival.

The authors then tie these drives into levers that the organization can use to lever.

In reading the article I see many areas where knowledge management can help with employee motivation.

Culture is an area where knowledge management can make a big difference. Sharing, collaboration, social bonds and teamwork are all pillars of a knowledge management program.

I also think the use of enterprise 2.0 tools are very useful when it comes to transparency.  If the firm is creating a new firm-wide policy, it is easy to post a draft policy and allow comments to the draft.  The policy-maker is accessing the collective knowledge of the firm to improve the policy.  They are also finding the resistance points that will need to be overcome to implement and enforce the policy. They are also getting the employees engaged by recognizing that their opinions matter.

Law Technology Now put up podcast on how client relationship management and social networking tools will change the way we practice law: Almost Live from LegalTech West Coast: Tom Baldwin — Social Networking. (registration required).  The podcast was a recording of Tom Baldwin‘s presentation at Legal Tech West Coast. The podcast is about 12 minutes long.

One of the pillars of knowledge management is that who you know is as important as what you know. Tom surveyed broadcast emails and found that a huge portion of those email were asking for information about people.  Attorneys were looking for outside experts, internal experts, service providers, matchmaking clients, pitching clients and clearing conflicts.

Tom has found Client Relationship Management systems to be lacking.  CRM systems have grand ambitions of pulling the firm’s contacts into one place.  Tom has found that most CRM systems get relegated to managing external marketing lists.

Tom has become more of a fan of Enterprise Relationship Management systems like Contact Networks and Branch IT.   ERM systems mine external email traffic to identify relationships. [My post on Contact Networks: Contact Networks - Enterprise Relationship Management.]

Tom also sees some tools coming from entity extraction. In court filings, you should be able to extract the party names, the judge and the jurisdiction. That information is in fairly standard locations in a document.  Then when looking to see what experience the firm has with a particular judge or in a particular jurisdiction, the entity extraction system can help answer that question.

One warning about the podcast. I understand that Law Technology Now needs effective advertising to make money. But this is the first podcast that inserts an advertisement into the middle of the podcast. I found it very jarring to cut off in the middle of Tom Baldwin’s presentation to an ad for Blue Arc.

I watched a presentation by XMLaw of their OneView suite of information management tools for SharePoint and in particular, their OneView Connect product. OneView Conncet is a framework for connecting systems and building portal sites.

OneView ties into other data systems in the firm and allows you display the content from those other systems in a SharePoint webpart. Among the standard connectors are those for SQL databases. They also have connectors to InterAction, Interwoven’s Worksite, and Open Text eDocs as part of what they ship in the box.

One a single page, you can show the contacts at a client (from InterAction), their billing status (from the time/billing system) and documents (from Worksite). One View also makes it easy to build tabs into a SharePoint webpage to flip between content pages.

The paradigm they use is rendering the content from the other system into a SharePoint list. Then you can format views of the information in a way similar to other SharePoint lists.

Their product is a really powerful tool that allows SharePoint to be more of portal into all of the firm’s information, instead of SharePoint merely acting as a separate repository

In the interest of disclosure, Rob Saccone, the President of XMLaw, used to lead the development team at The Firm.

A new survey reveals that almost 50 percent of attorneys are members of online social networks and over 40 percent of attorneys believe professional networking has the potential to change the business and practice of law over the next five years.

The 2008 Networks for Counsel Survey was conducted by Leader Networks and sponsored by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. You can download the results from the Leader Networks’ site.

Of lawyers aged 25-35, 67% are members of a social networking site, while only 36% of lawyers aged 46 and older are members. Forty percent of lawyers want to join a social networking site just for lawyers. (This number is close to the same percentage of lawyers who are already members of an online social network.

The curious piece of the survey is that 48% of the survey respondents thought Martindale-Hubbell should sponsor a lawyer specific social networking site. (Of course, they were the sponsor of the survey.) Second up was 28% who thought it should be the American Bar Association. Only 1% thought it should be Legal OnRamp. But Legal OnRamp is a social networking site for lawyers. Perhaps the Martindale-Hubbell brand is still viable.

The survey was pointed out by Laxmi Stebbins Wordham on The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell: Martindale-Hubbell, LinkedIn and Online Networking. I also came across Carolyn Elefant’s take on this survey at the Legal Blog Watch: Survey Confirms That Social Networking Gains Traction With Lawyers.

Black Wave is the story of a family from San Diego sailing around the world in their catamaran. The subtitle lets you in on the upcoming drama: A Family’s Adventure at Sea and the Disaster that Saved Them. It only takes five pages into the book before the disaster strikes. The boat slams into a coral reef during the night, destroying the boat and seriously wounding members of the family.

I am generally not a big fan of stories that start with the climactic scene and then flashbacks to tell the story. It just seems to be kind of tired way of bringing people into the story. In this case, I found it worked. Interweaving the family’s background with disaster unfolding made you understand and empathize with the characters as they struggled to survive.

I really enjoyed Part I of the book which was this story told by Jean Silverwood. Part II of the book was written by John Silverwood and tells some of the history of the reef. He focuses on a similar disaster, when the Julia Ann crashed into the same reef in 1855. Part II far less interesting and not as engaging as Part I.

In the interest of full disclosure, the publisher send me a free copy of this book to read, hoping I would review it. I am big fan of human adventure stories. Before the kids I had a few years of mountain climbing and adventure racing. Now, with two kids, I am much more of an armchair adventurer. Maybe it the family man in me that got so engaged in a family trapped in a desperate situation.

Whatever the reason, I thought the the book was a good read. But feel free to stop at the end of Part I.

Dick Howe at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds in Lowell has jumped into Twitter. You can see his page and follow him at http://twitter.com/lowelldeeds. You can also follow me at http://twitter.com/dougcornelius.

Twitter is great way to stay connected people all around the world.

If you are not familiar with Twitter, here is a quick video from Common Craft:

Disclaimers

For those of you in New York City and who are members of the International Legal Technology Association, I will be speaking on Knowledge Management and Web 2.0 Technologies on July 23 to the New York Regional Group of ILTA:

Blogs, wikis and social networking are exploding in the consumer Web space. This session will discuss ways to leverage these tools inside the law firm for knowledge management, project management and many other purposes. The tools are fairly inexpensive and easy to learn for users. You can add tremendous value to your organization for very little cost.

UPDATED: With a fixed link to the event.http://tinyurl.com/5egzys

In the latest knowledge management white paper from the International Legal Technology Association is an article authored by me: Wiki While You Work [pdf].

There are some other great articles in the white paper. Here is the table of contents:

• Collaboration and Competitiveness: New Tools for Collaborating and Managing Knowledge
  By Guy Wiggins of Keely Dry & Warren LLP
• Wiki While You Work
  by Doug Cornelius
• Show Them the Value! Using KM to Bring More Value to Clients
  by Mary F. Panetta of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, L.L.P.
• Developing Document Assembly Tools: A Tale of Two Applications
  by Eric Little of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, PC
• 2008 ILTA KM Survey Results
  by Catherine Monte of Fox Rothschild LLP and
  Mara Nickerson of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP

There has been a great deal of discussion on the actKM discussion forum about the demise of knowledge management. And if it is dead, who killed it? Some of that discussion has sprung from an interview by Patrick Lambe of Larry Prusack and Dave Snowden.

Here is the video of the interview.

There seems to be some agreement that at least parts of knowledge management are dead. In particular, the big, database driven “borg” attempts at knowledge management have not proven successful. There seems to be re-invigoration of knowledge management growing from the use of social media tools as part of a knowledge management program.