Doug Cornelius .com

I remember listening to David Jabbari, Global Head of Knowledge Management, Allen + Overy LLP at LegalTech 2008. He spoke on a panel entitled: Technology Integration – The New Face of Knowledge Management. Part of presentation focused on the growing use of wikis and blogs at his firm.

Mr. Jabbari has now gone on to embrace Knowledge Management 2.0 in an article in the ABA‘s Law Practice Today: The End of ‘Command Control’ Approaches to Knowledge Management?

“If you see knowledge as an inert ‘thing’ that can be captured, edited and distributed, there is a danger that your KM effort will gravitate to the rather boring, back-office work preoccupied with indexes and IT systems. This will be accompanied by a ritualized nagging of senior lawyers to contribute more knowledge to online systems. If, however, you see knowledge as a creative and collaborative activity, your interest will be the way in which distinctive insights can be created and deployed to deepen client relationships. You will tend to be more interested in connecting people than in building perfect knowledge repositories”

As he writes in the article, Mr. Jabbari first caught onto this idea after seeing a seminar on Wikipedia a few years ago. He now sees knowledge management as a three prong approach: Collaboration, Location and Navigation.

I like the focus on these three areas so this is my take on them:

Collaboration. We must encourage the unregulated proliferation of content online (internally and externally). At law firms, this is already this occurring in our document management systems. Moving it online is just changing the forum. Even though enterprise 2.0 is more open, it surprisingly easier to monitor the content. As wikis are growing at The Firm, our KM team is taking on the role of wiki gardeners, as well as wiki champions.

Location. Google has raised the expectation of people when looking for information. The junior associates coming into a law firm are used to finding whatever they want at the snap of their fingers. Law firms need to have that same capability internally. This can work by just pointing the search engine at your document collections. But then you lose the inter-relationship between the content. The use of wikis and enterprise 2.0 tools allows you link to relevant content found elsewhere.

Navigation. Search is great, but you also need to guide people to the good content. Search is important when you are not sure what you are looking for and navigation is important when you do know what you are looking for.

Also see:

• Mary Abraham‘s view: So You Think You Should “Command and Control”?
• Mohamed Amine Chatti‘s view: The End of ‘Command Control’ Approaches to Knowledge Management?

“Why is that I can search the billions of pages of the World Wide Web in seconds, but I can’t find the agreement I drafted last week in our own internal systems?”

The web has changed our views on how we should be able to find and interact with our information and knowledge.  Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo of AIIM surveyed over 500 individuals on findability. They looked at how people search, navigate, discover and retrieve content.

Dan and Carls’s AIIM Market IQ on Findability is now freely available for download. It has over 65 pages and 70 charts/figures. A majority believe that Findability in their organization is “Worse” to “Much Worse” than their own organization’s consumer-facing web sites and 49% of respondents have “No Formal Goal” for Enterprise Findability within their organizations.

Key Findings:

• 49% of respondents Agreed or Strongly Agreed that Finding the Information I Need to Do My Job is Difficult and Time Consuming
• 69% of respondents believe that 50% of their organization’s information is searchable online
• 49% of respondents have No Formal Goal for Enterprise Findability within their organizations
• 50% of respondents believe that Findability in their organization is Worse to Much Worse than their own organization’s consumer-facing web sites

In my view, one of the goals of knowledge management is to make information findable. One of the issues with early knowledge management systems is that they merely created yet another separate place to try to find content using a unique search methodology.  One of the goals of knowledge management 2.0 is to capture that content as part of the workflow, in systems with integrated search and search methodology.

I am still reading through the report and hope to write more about it later this week.

On June 20,  I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster.

A replay of that webinar is now available on the ILTA website: Connections in Context – Who Mentioned CRM?

Enterprise search has become the standard for helping to make organizations’ information retrieval processes more efficient. Improving user access to data across the enterprise is key.  But effective search can do so much more than just improve existing business processes, it can transform your business network by exposing otherwise hidden expertise, customer relationships and cross-selling opportunities. In this session, Oz Benamram demonstrates how to transform your business development process with enterprise search by automatically sharing relationship connections and context throughout the enterprise and provide the benefits of a contextual, searchable network to your stakeholders to achieve maximum adoption and effectiveness.

An article in this week’s The Economist discusses the endowment effect: It’s Mine I tell You. The endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion):

“is a hypothesis that people value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established. In other words, people place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they do not. In one experiment, people demanded a higher price for a coffee mug that had been given to them but put a lower price on one they did not yet own.”

I look at this behavior as to its impact on knowledge management. One of the many challenges in knowledge management is getting people to contribute. You need to build a cultural and enable the tools to get people sharing what they know. There are obvious technology challenges to this sharing. But the soft side of encouraging the sharing has been the bigger problem.

The endowment effect now seems fairly obvious to me. People are less likely to share because they have a sense of ownership over the knowledge. Inside the law firm, this knowledge is usually acquired through the assets of the firm. The attorney probably started with some existing agreement from the document management system, used their secretary and junior attorneys to help craft the knowledge and attended seminars on the firm’s dime.

The endowment effect seems to explain why people are less likely to share. One of my approaches to knowledge management is to look for ways to capture the knowledge of the attorney in a way that is more useful to the individual attorney. That the knowledge is being shared is just a by-product. I have seen this approach labeled personal knowledge management and knowledge management 2.0. The most important consumer of an individual’s knowledge assets is that individual.

A blog is a classic example. Especially inside the law firm, the blog is a great tool to “catch the butterflies” of knowledge as they pass through your day. It is a quick and easy way to capture interesting articles, thoughts and ideas that may otherwise end up in a stack or file folder. With the blog you can categorize your butterflies and search for them in a way that makes sense to the individual. That others inside the enterprise can find them is merely a by-product. It is an important by-product for knowledge management. But the focus of the tool is on the individual, not the firm.

I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster. The presentation was a retake of the presentation he gave at the Enterprise Search Summit.

Oz has done some great work on finding documents. So I was enthusiastic to see his take on finding people.

My Notes:

The goal of CRM has been to help you find someone and to deliver information about that someone to help you decide if that someone is the “one.” We need to make it easy to find people, whether internal or external, and see our shared experience with this person.

Oz set forth Amazon.com, with all of the related content related to the product. With Facebook, he pointed out the flow of information from Facebook.

There are three keys around people: who, why and what. Who are the People and Contacts. The Why is the client, matter or project. The What are emails and documents. It also important to coordinate those with when and where.

The goal is to make the information findable in a Google-like manner. That is one simple search box that integrates all systems. It also important to filter the results like you do in Amazon or Clusty (powered by Vivisimo).

Oz moved onto a presentation of the contacts module of his AnswerBase system. AnswerBase is powered by Recommind. The tool uses a relationship analysis tool from Contact Networks (in a proof of concept). This tool looks at the email traffic between internal and external people to show the strength of relationship. They also add info from the CRM system, HR databases, document management system, billing system, matter management system and marketing systems.

They had a privacy issue related to harvesting email. They limited it to emails that were put into their email filing system. This allows you to expose the email and alleviated privacy concerns.

Oz moved onto finding contacts in context. This involved some entity extraction. They use West KM to find courts, judges and parties mentioned in the document. (This is very litigation focused.)

Oz moved on to finding internal expertise. They mash together information from the HR system, the documents the attorney has drafted, the information on the attorney’s matters and the attorney’s time entries.

Overview: Knowledge Management (KM) was the business buzzword circa 1995. Today, some say KM is dead, others point to portals, innovation management, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as the manifestations of KM today. Join noted KM author, speaker and consultant Carl Frappaolo as he updates the definition of KM practices and technologies for the 21st century. Strategy and technology models first introduced in Carl’s KM book in 2002 will serve as a framework for positioning and understanding the current state of the industry.

Speaker: Carl Frappaolo, Book Author and Vice President, Market Intelligence, AIIM

My Notes:

Carl wants to talk about the relationship of enterprise 2.0 to knowledge management. Is KM dead? The room was mostly full of knowledge management people and/or people with knowledge management in their title (including me).

“Enterprise 2.0 gave a jolt to knowledge management.” Google searches for “knowledge management” are on the up-tick. (I noticed on the ACT KM listserv that the group is working on a thread about whether “KM Is Dead.”)

What is knowledge management? Carl thinks the industry does not agree on a definition. He also thinks there are lots of different definitions of enterprise 2.0. Carl’s definitions:

• Knowledge management is “Leveraging collective wisdom and experience to accelerate and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness.” (The crowd was a bit rambunctious about defining knowledge management. I pointed out that IT and HR do not define what they are.)

Knowledge Management 2.0 is the alignment of business strategy, people, technology and process.

On process, we need the right process to disseminate, share and apply knowledge. Does the process help or hinder the capture of knowledge? We should not be asking people to do things outside of their normal process. Knowledge management needs to be “in the flow” not above the flow”.

Technology is a key enabler. (Every organizational group has a technology piece. Where would HR be without a database of employees) Never start from the technology perspective. Tech tools can help fill in the gaps in the process, people.

According to the AIIM report:

• Enterprise 2.0 a system of web-based technologies that provide a rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.” Key words: system and web-based. The cloud is a plus to have info somewhere other than your own individual computer.

Market Evolution

Enterprise 2.0 is not a revolution. The introduction of the PC was revolution. Putting computing power on the desktop was a big change. Email was a revolution. Communication with the computer as the platform. E 2.0 is not as revolutionary as either of those.

Enterprise 2.0 tools have resuscitated knowledge management. They allow us to mash-up information, putting more information around information is key to knowledge management. Online collaboration moves the communication into a platform that is easier to leverage. Processes need to change to embrace Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management. In the end the Enterprise 2.0 tools are just tools.

Technology and cultural worker models. You need to figure out where you are technologically and culturally. People in the organization may not be ready to be open and transparent in their jobs.

Carl has the spectrum of cultural from isolated to fully engaged

• islands of me
• one-way me
• team me
• proactive me
• two-way me
• islands of we
• extended we

An audience member brought up the issue of compensation structure to the sharing structure. Do I get rewarded for sharing? “Culture creeps slowly” Carl thinks you should target the highest level person in the organization who gets it.

An audience member pointed out a hole in strategy that HR was not included in the strategy. Her co-worker in HR jumped up in the back of her room.

The problem with KM 1.0 was that it was awkward and disjointed interfaces that were technology driven. There was a tremendous collision of academic treatment and reality. In some circles KM became a dirty word.

Email was 1.0. It did open people to sharing through the computer. But then the inbox became the content system. That leaves it disjointed and isolated. Enterprise 2.0 opens the communications platform.

IT does matter. KM is not about tech, but you cannot easily do it without IT.

Carl proposes four characterizations:

• Intermediation – broker those who know with those who need to know
• Externalization – capturing knowledge
• Internalization – personalize the information for me so I can find it
• Cognition – marriage of knowledge and process

Enterprise 2.0 is not web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 may be KM, but web 2.0 is not Enterprise 2.0.

Carl also handed out copies of his book, including one to me.

UPDATE: A link to Carl’s blog and his slidedeck:
http://www.takingaiim.com/2008/06/is-enterprise-2.html

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