Doug Cornelius .com

Just about everyone I talk to expects 2009 to be a difficult year for the economy as the job cuts and corporate failures of the last quarter really come into effect. Law firms with their thin capitalization and thick layer of fixed costs are bracing for a difficult year. I keep hearing “Flat is the new Up.”

Where does knowledge management fit in this climate for law firms?

Two articles address this topic in the January issue of KIM Legal magazine. Karen Battersby in: More Than Just An Overhead and Toby Brown of Fulbright and Jaworski in: Doom and Gloom, or Time to Prosper? both look ahead to the challenges.

• The efficiency gains from KM should be welcomed when clients are more likely to challenge every item on the bill.
• With layoffs (whether formal or performance-based) it is important to transfer the knowledge from individual lawyers to teams of lawyers.
• KM can allow senior lawyers to delegate more to junior lawyers, allowing the senior lawyers to focus on client relationships.
• Use KM to increase the level of client service.
• With extra capacity is some areas, it is a great time for law firms to use that capacity on knowledge management activities.  
• Focus on expanding the use of existing systems instead of going out and purchasing something new.

You can read more from Toby at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

I listened to a profound presentation on the benefits of inefficiency and its implications on enterprise social networks and enterprise 2.0.

One of the many great things at The Firm is the Life Series. The Firm brings in interesting outside speakers to speak about interesting things. A few weeks ago, Devon Harris spoke about his experience as member of the 1988 Olympic Jamaican Bobsled Team and Captain of the 1992 and 1998 Jamaican Olympic teams.

This week Dr. John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University spoke about how we, as individuals in a complex, modern society, can resist the tendency to allow large institutions to get the better of our human natures.

About 15 minutes into the presentation, I realized the implications of his presentation on justifying knowledge management, enterprise 2.0 and enterprise social networks. I did not have my laptop or even a pad of paper, so I started taking notes of the blackberry. (I think everyone around me thought I was ignoring Dr. Lachs and sending emails.)

Dr. Lachs put forth a proposition about the impotence of large institutions. They break the unity of action. He defined the unity of action as having three parts: (1) intention, (2) execution and (3) the enjoyment or suffering from the action.

People lose interest inside large institutions because they lack control of the three nodes of the unity of action. They are going through the motions because someone else is making them. They are stuck with policies for which they had no input or comment.

The misery of the modern world comes from there being so many of us and our institutions are too big. People do not feel good about it. We can’t go back to living in small communities. (Although there are a few left over hippies from the 60s.) But, there are great things about living in the modern world. (You can have grapes in the winter!)

Institutions need to make things more transparent. The CEO needs to spend time with front line workers. People inside institutions need to get to know what others are doing inside the institution.

What are the consequences?

1. Its okay to be a little less efficient if we can be more human. There is no need to keep secrets when making policies. Why are doing this? How could we do it better? How does it impact the enterprise as a whole? All of these questions can be better answered by exposing the policy-making process to a larger audience.

2. We have to lodge responsibility and accept responsibility. We should hold people at the top of ladder as responsible for bad acts of the institution as we do for those people who commit the bad acts.

Institutions, even if built on best intentions, can become inhumane. Sheer size causes institutions to become inhumane. There is a break down in communications. The larger the institution, the bigger the chain of command and the greater the problems.

Using new communication techniques, we may be able to break down some of the barriers and the breakdowns in communications. It is better to be less efficient in order to share information with a larger group.

How do you take the time in our time-sensitive culture? It takes less time then you think. Can you say hello to everyone? (On twitter or yammer you can!) Instead of creating a policy, say “what do you think?” It is actually more efficient because the opening up of the process allows for improvement of the policy. A larger audience will provide greater insight on the impacts of a policy and how it can be improved.

Dr. Lachs wrote the book “Intermediate Man” on this subject.

International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference presentation on how to start a knowledge management program.

Speakers:

• Cherylyn Briggs
   Director, Knowledge Management, Dickstein Shapiro LLP 
• Mara Nickerson
   Director, Professional Development, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
• Elizabeth Ellis
   Partner, Torys LLP
• Nola Vanhoy
   Director of Practice Innovation, Alston & Bird LLP

My Notes:

This is the first session for me at the ILTA conference

Organization and Leadership

Who should lead a knowledge management initiative?  There were professional service organizations that were doing KM long before law firms got on board. There is no right answer or wrong answer. It depends on the culture of the firm and the leadership of the firm.  Inevitably, you are going to be stepping on someone’s toes.  KM tends to stick its fingers in lots of different areas, both legal and administrative.  That means you may be intruding into an existing area.

It may work having KM under the CIO/IT dept. (You can do KM with technology, but it just makes it harder.) 

There is a generally a good synergy with the Library. They hold lots of substantive information and are used to finding and organizing substantive knowledge.

Most important is finding a champion. Who in the organization really understands KM and wants KM to succeed? It is easier to start off as part of an existing sphere of influence.

The Stealth Approach

Don’t label it as KM.  Start small and create success, then build on these. It may be easier to get resources dedicated once you can show the value.

Identifying and Prioritizing the Need.

Start by making sure that KM is aligned with the firm’s business plan.  If the firm is planning to expand, find ways for KM to add value in the expansion. As a firm gets bigger, you need better tools to find resources and expertise.  Look for piles of documents and information on shared drives or disparate locations.  Look for silos of information that could benefit the firm by being more open and accessible.

Cherylyn shared two stories from Dickstein Shapiro, they cataloged a hard copy collection of information and published it to the firm’s intranet. The second step was an early implementation of WestKM.

It also important to highlight that KM is not about purchasing a single technology program. There are technology tools that are useful for KM, but there is no single application that will solve all of the KM goals.

How do you pick the first KM project?  Research first. Find out what other firms have done and how successful they have been.  Then find the pain points inside your firm.  It is better to find an existing pain point to create early value, instead of a high level, conceptual or expensive project. Look for existing activity that is KM, but does not have a KM label.  Lawyers are always doing knowledge management, just not intentionally. (Let’s face it. Lawyers sell knowledge. They collect their own knowledge resources. Knowledge management is really about knowledge sharing.

Getting Management Buy-In

Be realistic when you start. Management sees KM=cost.  You need to show value. It is hard to show ROI, but you can gather success stories to show value. Tangible examples can sway management. Pictures and real-life examples work best for showing the benefits.

Knowledge management is all about context.  It is about substance, not technology. Lawyers deal better with other lawyers. It is better to appeal to the lawyers and get them to understand the need and the problems that need to get solved. If you are in KM, you need to talk with the lawyers.

Knowledge management needs to be institutionalized.  We need to keep people from building silos.  KM is about integrating information and making it accessible, wherever it may be.

Download the presentation, reading list, and speaker bios

My ILTA Schedule

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.

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.

I previously pointed out Ray Sim’s collection of 43 Knowledge Management Definitions. If you look at the comments to his post and the pingbacks of others discussing his knowledge management definitions, you can see that he stirred up quite a discussion.

I figured I would add to the discussion by posting our current working definition of Knowledge Management at The Firm:

The purpose of the Knowledge Management Team is to promote and support within the firm:

• Collaboration, both within and among groups,
• Efficiency in producing high-quality work quickly, and
• Putting the firm’s experience and expertise at your fingertips.

The Knowledge Management Team does this by:

1. Creating ways to capture and organize internal information about our work.
2. Creating ways to find internal experience, prior work product and administrative information.
3. Communicating the existence of these tools and practices to the firm.
4. Teaching the firm how to use these tools and practices.
5. Being the firm’s go-to experts in finding internal experience, prior work product and administrative information
6. Partnering with the IT Department to bring the view of experienced legal workers to technology selection, implementation and training.
7. Collaborating with the Practice Areas, which are the firm’s most important knowledge management platforms.
8. Collaborating with other firm support functions, especially Research & Library Services, Marketing, Training and Financial Reporting, to create efficiencies and profit from common interests.

One of current projects is to better define what fits within our umbrella to help in addressing what projects to take on and how to prioritize them. The first step was to work out what we thought knowledge management is at The Firm and what knowledge management should be at The Firm.

Neil Richards has joined Matthew Parsons to start Matthew Parsons & Associates. To kick it off they have put together their views on how knowledge management and knowledge management strategy is evolving in law firms: Open for Business.

The post is an excellent primer on the basics of knowledge management.

• It starts with people and leaders
• A changing landscape requires strategic reassessment
• Strategic elements
  • Strategic intent
  • Firm culture
  • Client access and services
• Implementation elements
  • Practice planning and support
  • Technology platforms and systems
  • Audit and process

Congratulations to Neil and Matthew on their new endeavor.

I watched a webinar sponsored by GoLightly on Corporate Knowledge Management in a Web 2.0 World. The presenters were Abby Shaw, Web Channel Management, Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company and Christopher Dworin, Vice President of Business Development, GoLightly, Inc.

Abby started off with her take on what is Web 2.0. She included the usual suspects of blogs, wikis, user comments, discussions, ratings and rankings, community contact tools, file sharing, federated search and mashups. She pointed out that this is not the right way to present Web2.0. Her take is creating an efficient, resourceful and engaged communities of interest.

How has Web2.0 changed knowledge management?

• Facilitate, don’t manage. You have been willing to let go. Remove control.
• Higher value knowledge is smaller, flatter and broader in scope. Small chunks of information.
• Reduces overhead. The capture, catalog and distribution of KM can be part of ordinary work activities

Some participants were concerned about review prior to publishing. She had her lawyers look at it. Her lawyers said that they are protected from liability as long as they reviewed content regularly and remove the offending content.

Abby focused on the importance of social networks outside the hierarchy of a firm’s structure. This recognition of social networks was especially important during a merger. It was key to keep those social and communications channel open. She also emphasized that employee profiles should be opened up for employees to add content. HR could not effectively add enough information.

Abby laid out some hard benefits:

• improved work quality and cycle time
  - improve employee access to employee expertise
  - improve usefulness of public (intranet content)
  - speed time from question to answer
• employee engagement and retention
  - informal knowledge transfer is cheaper and more effective than formal training
  - recognize key players in informal knowledge-sharing networks
  - much more effective than handing out company swag
  -Picture on the front page of the intranet was one of best rewards in a poll of employees (more so than cash).
• corporate compliance
  - Automate governance and document business process
  - if information is more available outside the company then they will go there instead of your internal sources
  - better to have employees using an internal social network and keep the information inside the firewall, rather than all of that information and communication happening outside

Knowledge is power; but the sharing of knowledge is even more powerful. Knowledge hoarders just end up out of the loop.

How do you validate the information if you are not reviewing information before it is published? People are using inaccurate information already: outside sources, email notes that are now outdated, etc. It is easier to monitor and address bad information if it is in a public space.

How do you deal with personal opinions? – Opinions are knowledge. You need to stop bad behavior. Abby’s example: are you worried about employees in your lobby pushing each other around.

Chris took over to talk about the GoLightly products and their upcoming webinars.

It gives you everything you need to get your online community up and running. Includes: Community Home Page (easy to update), Searchable Member Directory, Unlimited Groups, Unlimited Email Lists, Resource Library, Forums/Bulletin Boards, Unlimited Blogs, Unlimited Wikis, and Training. And all of this with your Branding!

Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge started a new column in KM World magazine. Borrowing from Dave Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, he calls it Everything is Fragmented.

“I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the “chunked” material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems.”

Since I started following the Enterprise 2.0 movement, I have shifted my philosophy of knowledge management. I fall pretty close to Dave’s position.

“It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.”

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are still useful. But, as Dave Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, everyone has a different view on what the structure should be. Whatever taxonomy I create or a group decides upon, it will only be meaningful to some of the people some of the time. As the taxonomy gets more and more complex, the less useful it will be.

On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.

The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.

If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.

We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.

That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo’s social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.

One of the challenges of knowledge management is comparing the ability to find information inside the firm, against the ability to find information outside the firm.

Google, in its quest to organize all of our knowledge, has set the bar very high for us trying to organize all of our knowledge inside the firm.

One of the most common requests I get is: “Make it a Google-like search.” Obviously the information inside the firm is not organized in the highly linked and interconnected way of webpages that makes Google so successful.

But one of the keys in producing content and publishing content is how it comes back in a search for information. It is key in knowledge management to sit down like a regular person at the firm and try to the find the content you just produced. People are not willing to sit down and create a complex query or fill in a lot of fields to get an answer. They want to fill a few words into a simple search box and get results.

One of the new features of SharePoint is the ability of individual list items to be returned in search results. The SharePoint list function allows you to organize information in a structured way. For example, collecting a list of precedent acquisition agreements and noting specific characteristics. You can go into the list and filter for a particular set of results. Or, if the list is structured properly, you can just use the simple SharePoint search to return the individual items on the list.

There are questions that cannot be answered by Google and there are answers that cannot be answered by your intra-firm search. But we need to make sure that more and more questions can be answered.

Photo by snakeplisken.