Informationoverlord

There is a nice straightforward article by Thomas Vander Wal on Zdnet blogs about Taxonomies.  In it he explains why - as many of us know - that withi an organisation it should not be a choice between traditional taxonomies OR social tagging/folksonomies, but that it should be an AND choice with the latter informing and feeding into the former.

The fact that a Taxonomy should be a living thing is one I have seen overlooked in companies before.

 Vander Wal uses the following table to show how by combining them each of their strengths accounts for the other’s deficiencies.

Good article. Well worth a read.

“most knowledge managers lost sight of the fact that the real value is in creating new knowledge, rather than simply “managing” existing knowledge.”

Interesting article on the Harvard Business Review blog by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown (Deloitte) entitled “A Better Way to Manage Knowledge”

They explore the idea of ‘creation spaces’ (and looked at how people work together and pool knowledge in World of Warcraft, for example) and why these and not traditional KM systems are the best way to leverage knowledge.

Their view is summed up by the following quote: “Knowledge management systems desperately try to persuade participants to invest time and effort to contribute existing knowledge with the vague and long-term promise that they themselves might eventually derive value from the contributions of others. In contrast, creation spaces focus on providing immediate value to participants in terms of helping them tackle difficult performance challenges while at the same time reducing the effort required to capture and disseminate the knowledge created.”

An interesting idea, and one which I feel has a lot of merit; however it also seems to be throwing up an either / or option that shouldn’t exist. Surely the true value is created by having both creation spaces and also a method for capturing the output of those spaces as well as any ‘existing knowledge’. I sound like a broken record on this but as I have said many time before, in relation to Law Firms, knowledge is what we sell – we don’t sell law. A case in point , we have examples of agreements/licences that have long been out of date in relation to UK law, but suddenly become gold dust when dealing with emerging market companies starting to go through similar processes that the UK did 20 years ago etc – I’m not convinced a creation space would capture this, whereas the boring old KM system did and has.

Anyway, the article is well worth a read.

Amber Corrin has written a very interesting story on Federal Computer Week entitled ‘DOD finds knowledge management a tricky fit’.

What made me laugh was how easy it was to replace mentions of the Defense Department with lawyers in statements like:

“As much as Defense Department officials like the idea of knowledge management, they are finding the discipline often does not fit easily into their daily operations.”

I don’t really know any lawyers who don’t think capturing and having access to the knowledge and expertise within the firm isn’t important, but I know less who regularly contribute to the systems and practices that achieve those ends. I think most of us recognise that the key is to try and get processes seamlessly intergraded into how our lawyers work – almost getting them to contribute without realising they are doing it, selling any benefit as a benefit to them individually in the first instance – things that benefit the individual with an associated benefit that benefits the wider community have always seemed to have a better chance of success to me.

Another great quote from the article comes from Robert Neilson, knowledge management adviser at the office of the Army Chief Information Officer who is quoted as saying:

“If you think you’ve [succeeded in knowledge management], you aren’t doing knowledge management. “There is no timeline.”

I would tend to agree with this, it should be an evolving, rolling processes, and it should be an integral process within every business and organisation. This is particularly true in cases such as the law, when what differentiates a law firm from another is their knowledge. That is what they are selling, that is their product: Knowledge. A fact often overlooked or not recognised by many withing the profession.

However, neither of these was my favourite quote from the article though. That is reserved for Bobby Caudill, solution architect, Global Government Solutions at Adobe. Now it was unclear whether he was talking generally or was being specific to the DoD when he said:

“People are not accustomed or trained for collaboration. It’s a cultural issue.”

I’m hoping it was generally, because if the armed forces aren’t trained for collaboration, then who exactly is?!!

That aside, I’m also not sure I accept the statement, or at least without contect. Most people - outside of work at least - are more than accustomed to collaboration through things such as teams sports. I would agree, however, that in the workplace we have yet to fully rid ourselves of the ‘knowledge is power’ idea, where people hold on to what they know believing it gives them an advantage or power over others they work with.

It is an ongoing fight, but slowly people are starting to see that - to paraphrase the great Mr Spock ‘that the knowledge of the many outweighs the knowledge of the few or the one’.

Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Blog (yes them again) has a post entitled ‘KM’s View of E2.0 - Savior or Harbinger of Death?’ which I read on the way home. It interested me because earlier in the day I had been reading a post by Sourcepov on ‘KM Evolution’ and touched on some of the same themes: KM Vs Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) /Social Computing (Media).

Greg says “if you look closely, it seems that push of E2.0 into the KM process seems to be coming from external (read: Vendors) rather than from internal (read: KM managers).”

I must admit I found this to be the exact opposite of my personal experience within law firms where it has very much been the internal Knowledge and Information staff who have been the main drivers in pushing E2.0 and recognising its potential to their firms. It has seemed to me that many vendors have been slow to try and exploit the market.

Greg links to a post by Carl Frappaolo entitled “NOW knowledge management is possible - Whaddya Kidding me?” which looks at whether E2.0 is causing an “evolution” or a “revolution” in KM [and also has some funny comments on the idea of ‘pure’ and ‘impure KM] On this, I agree with Greg when he says “KM process is “evolutionary” and can adapt to new ideas such as E2.0 brings to the table”

I agree even more with Doug Cornelius, who in the comments to the post claims “Enterprise 2.0 is savior to Knowledge Management”, and makes a point I keep repeating to people I know looking at E2.0 and this evolving idea of KM, which is: ‘ think selfish’

As Cornelius says, for a long time tradition KM has been focus of the big picture and the need to contribute for the benefit of the wider organisation, but contributing your ‘knowledge’ to a big pot. The problem was (and is) people, whilst seeing there is value to contributing to the pot, also see that it offers little direct benefit to them.

Cornelius adds, “I think of Enterprise 2.0 as more analogous to the personal knowledge management. These are tools focused on the individual or small groups. That is where the direct benefit lies. A by-product is the ability of others to find the information.”

I totally agree. I save (and share) things to delicious/Diigo/Google Reader, not because I want to contribute to creating a knowledge base, but out of selfishness. The fact that the bi-product of my doing that benefits others makes me happy, but is not my prime reason for doing so. Exploiting this natural feeling within the enterprise is the best way to drive KM and the idea of betting knowledge sharing.

P.S. Can we also just agree that Knowledge Management is a stupid term? How do you ‘manage’ knowledge? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Greg Lambert at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has a short review of a lawfirm publications aggregator called myCorporateResource.com. About a year ago I wrote a comparison article of three other aggregators: Lexology, Mondaq and Linex Legal for Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0 entitled Mining the Value of Law Firm Publications [Note to self: Add to link my articles tab]. I must confess I would not have thought there was a need or indeed room in the market for another similar site, but at first look, myCorporateResource.com looks like a useful and welcome addition to the club.

All law firms write client memoranda and articles. These publications are primarily written for the benefit of in-house counsel/lawyers in organisations, and function – when done properly – as an excellent source of free know-how that can be used as excellent primer material on a given topic, especially if a firm has been brave to enough to actually take a position on a particular subject, rather than just sit on the fence (still the usual approach).

Companies such as Lexology, Mondaq and Linex Legal now do the hard job of aggregating the content for you: allowing you to search by firm, legal topic/sector, jurisdiction and keyword, and saving you the trouble of monitoring each firms’ website individually to find new material.

My Corporate Resource can now be added to these three as an additional source of aggregating and disseminating these useful publications and updates.

The site splits itself into nine main areas:

Corporate Team: This is an interesting idea. The site tries to identify which updates would best appeal/be of most use to different people within a Corporate Team : Directors, Senior Executives, Legal team, Finance Team, Accounting Team, HR Team, Compliance Team, Company Secretaries. Each of their groups get their own separate “portal” on this site with the latest in legal alerts, regulatory press releases, rules announcements and industry insider blogs
Client Memoranda: Browse and search by Industry, Corporate Role, Area of Law & Geography.
RSS Feeds: The site offers 70 feeds broke down by Industry, Professional Role, Area of law, and Geography
24 (Memo)rable Hours: An overview of the latest updates
Lex Pop: The most read/popular content on the site
Hot Topics: Exactly what it sounds like, articles and updates covering the latest ‘big’ thing.
The SEC: A page dedicated to the SEC and covering their press releases, a calendar, blogs, and rules releases
Standout Material: This doesn’t seem to link anywhere yet, but offers a brief reason behind their review process.
Memo of the Week: What the editors of the site think is the most interesting memo of the week.

………………………………..

Source Material

Like Linex Legal, the approach they have taken is to link out to the source material as hosted in the individual law firms’ sites, rather than hosting copies of the material themselves – the approach taken by Lexology, and Mondaq. Law firms tend to like this approach, as it feels less like someone is trying to take their content to build a business.

Reviews

What they do, which make them unique is that they review a selection of the updates that come through, offering commentary on the commentary. I quite like this, although as there is no information on the site about just who the people are that are doing this ‘reviewing’ , it is hard to place any weight on these reviews.

Coverage

Whilst it does have some non US content, the coverage is distinctly American, which is where it falls down when compared to the wider international coverage of the three other services, and which will make it a less useful research tool for lawyers, PSLs, and Library and Information staff in UK/EU law firms. It would be nice to see the international side of things developed a bit more, and maybe the addition of some non US blogs too.

Connected to this content issue, the site lacks information on how many firms (and who they are) it covers, outside of a general ref to covering the AM Top 100.

Other issues

There is also some inconsistency on the site:

Labelling of Articles: when covering items written by Freshfields, sometimes the site refers to the shortened name and sometime to the full Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
Use of Descriptors: Whilst using the term ‘Corporate Role’ in its Client Memoranda pages, it then uses ‘Professional role’ to describe the same subset on its RSS page.

Conclusion

I think there is a lot of potential for this site, especially if you’re a US based lawyer or legal information worker. If you’re in Europe and /or rest of the world, then you are still going to be better served by Lexology (my current number one choice), Mondaq and Linex Legal.

Also part of the service offered by these three is around selling Law Firms data on the number of hits their articles get via the site, emails and rss; who is reading them, where they are from; who they work for, and other statistics. So far I cannot see evidence of my Corporate Resource doing this.

What I will say is that if my Corporate Resource decide to take the rest of the world and publications / updates from smaller firms more seriously, then all three will need to watch out. This is already a good resource and one you should certainly add to your list of sites for finding and accessing law firm content.

Paula Thornton at The FASTForward Blog has a great piece on Enterprise 2.0: “Enterprise 2.0 Isn’t a Checklist”

Whilst it doesn’t contain any radical new thinking on the way to success for Enterprise 2.0 – It’s the people, stupid – I do like the way her mind thinks and how she expresses things. I agree in particular with her assertion about the role of IT and how traditional organisation IT thinking is something that can kill Enterprise 2.0.

“If you’re building a spaceship and lives are at stake, these practices are a must. If you’re running a company in today’s turbulent marketplace, everything that is locked down and fixed prevents the real human capital of the organization from adapting to constantly changing circumstances. There is never an ideal process or system and there will always be exceptions. IT cannot respond fast enough to these changes. That means the flexibility has to be built into the systems.”

I think having organisations that are adaptable is key. This also touches on an idea explored in the excellent book ‘Starfish and the Spider’ by Ori Brafman and Rod Becksrom about how being more decentralised in business can help to make your more efficient. This in itself often needs for there to be a cultural shift in the organisation away from command and control and practices and a culture that reinforce such behaviours. As Paula Thornton says “A different culture is not a prerequisite, it’s a corequisite.” I like that. ” It should evolve as enabled by the other changes. Such cultures have to move from ‘rules’ to ‘guidelines’; from ‘fixed processes’ to ‘governance models’; from binary to heuristic (obvious exceptions will be for those industries and/or business artifacts subject to legislation).”

All this must, of course, go hand in hand with enterprise 2.0 tools only being introduced to enhance and improve actual working processes. There is the danger that companies, who give lip service to having an open cultue, but who are in reality still very much command and control, decide to ‘get’ enterprise 2.0 and start telling people what the wiki , blog, etc SHOULD be used for,rather than making people aware of the tools and allowing them to discover how certain tools can best help them do there job better/quicker etc.

I was alerted, by James Mullan , to a post on social software adoption in law firms on Michael Idinopulos’s blog.

Michael’s view is that most law firms take exactly the wrong approach to social software rollout. “They try to “chip away” at social software implementation by starting with “easy” use cases like know-how. In my experience, however, firms are most successful when they introduce social software right into the heart of their business: Client-specific collaboration.”

First off, I’m not sure I would call the know-how use case ‘easy’, as in practice it tends not to be. Secondly, there really isn’t as much client collaboration as people outside of law firms tend to think there is, which is why client extranets and deal room platforms have tended to be regarded as being unsuccessful over the years. . I will admit that these expensive platforms can now be created cheaply, and for lawyers and their clients working on a draft of an agreement, there seems little reason why this could not be done via a wiki, with the document formatting done at the end of the process.

This adoption is likely to be client lead though, with specific clients asking the law firm to work this way, rather than the other way around. Indeed,what is perhaps more interesting is that clients are now wanting more access to their law firms knowledge - with many wanting some form of access to a firm’s know-how. This makes finding ways to make that know-how more accessible, structured, and current more, not less important.

I also think the post makes the mistake of equating success of law firm social software adoption with lawyer adoption. Around half (or more) of most law firm staff are non lawyers/support staff/business services staff. The use of social software can greatly enhance the way many of those staff do their jobs within the firm, which in turn will provide benefits to the firm as a whole. For example, even something as simple as using a wiki page for online meeting agendas and subsequent meeting minutes writing up, can cut down on email traffic and save time.

I would, however, agree with the point Michael makes about self interest. Indeed I would go as far as the say that this is the key to social software adoption, full stop. The way most people see the value of things such as tagging, social bookmarking etc is when they can see the value to them - not the value to the firm or anyone else: if they can see the added value to the way they work and operate they will then adopt something and the by-product of that is the wider benefits that can be derived from that self interest. Encouraging people to care about personal information management can help bring about a social software revolution.

I got sent a link this morning to a fascinating conversation on KM between Patrick Lambe with Dave Snowden and Larry Prusak. (it last 42 mins)

In the video they talk about the history of KM and whether KM is an idea that is dead. They speak about the 3 generations of KM: (i) just information management; (ii) collaborative technologies, and (iii) now an approach which is more set of principles - not one size fits all - and is more organic.

Dave Snowden points out that the fundamental assumptions of the dominant theories of KM don’t match the organic nature of human interaction. Building on this idea they say that the traditional view of KM is dead but wont lie down: What’s dead?

• that it is mostly a technological subject;
• that documents in repositories equals knowledge;
• taking IM and calling it KM;
• that a large Bureaucracy, run by the central part of the organisation, is a good idea for working with knowledge;
• that knowledge exists outside of people;
• that knowledge itself can be measured in some way, that you can ROI knowledge.

Asked, will still be Knowledge Managers in 5yrs time ?

Dave said Yes, but they will be junior members of IT department. Larry, on the other hand thought the job title would die, and they would be called practice coordinators/knowledge brokers - whose job it would be to keep track of ‘ the knowledge of the group’ . Patrick chimed in here with “or even librarians.”

This was interesting as they then made the point that librarians who are interesting in knowledge often leave librarianship in order to seek roles within KM. The reason’s they see for this are that: whilst being a librarian is very valuable work , it’s often a poorly paid position, with low status within the organisations, and as Larry quips, is also something everyone thinks they can do.

The latter point is certainly a true one, although I sometimes think that we librarians are partly to blame for this, as we often fail to promote ourselves and what we do within an organisation. How is the head of the organisation to know what you ‘actually’ do and the ‘actual’ value you provide without highlighting these aspects of our work, our skills, and the resources that we utilise. The initial point of librarians often leaving the profession in search of knowledge (so to speak) is, again, one with which I am all too familiar. We do have a profession that puts you in a box and wants to keep you there, and it is often only by dropping the ‘L’ word, that more expansive and challenging roles and opportunities present themselves. This in some ways could lead onto a question , not of is KM dead, but are librarians and librarianship dead or dying? One to ponder.

Patrick, Dave and Larry also discuss the codification concept of KM, and how blanket codification of things doesn’t work. Larry argues that whilst codified repositories, are not bad in themselves, they are often mistaken for being actual knowledge. He states it is “wrong to say you are going to work with something as elusive, human, complex, contextual and local as knowledge, by managing knowledge in a repository - It’s like saying I’m going to mange an apple tree by building a cabinet”. He see this as part of the myth that knowledge, which is a very human thing, can be managed by technological means.

Dave is even more forthright stating there is “no excuse for document libraries other than as archivists. Active documents should now be in dynamic information structures, which is the wiki type concept, and variations - possible with publication points, possibly with authorisation.” This is an interesting view, which basically sees two type of document: - active and archive. I think this is a good approach, although people like the think of things as finished/final/complete, and not as a work-in-progress. You want to say: look these guidelines are finished. In truth the guidelines almost always will not be finished, and the document for them should be live and open, until the need for the guideline has ceased.

Dave comments - and this is something I agree with wholeheartedly - that social computing is doing a lot of what were the original intentions of KM, but accidentally, and from the bottom up. He sees blogs as replicating the school/university common room - bringing together people from different disciplines to chat and exchange ideas. This, for me, is right on the money. Social computing allows KM to be transformed and allows for that organic growth by allowing networks to form in organisations, and for the learning and exchanging of ideas to no longer be confined to set groups who purportedly ‘know’ about the subject matter under discussion.

It isn’t a panacea for everything, but it starts to capture and replicate the way people interact in ‘the real world’ , and how they really think - the terms someone might use to tag a document/web page etc says a lot about how that person’s mind operates, when not tied down by rigid taxonomies. This is why facebook etc work and most organisation intranets don’t, because the trust is being placed with the individual to manage their relationships instead of the organisation trying to manage their relationships.

I could go on and on, but I will just say that if you have any interest in how knowledge and information are handled within an organisation, then listening to this is a must. I will also add that there is - some might say controversial - stuff in the discussion that I would have liked to have heard Dave and Larry expand on, especially their views on eLearning (which they think is a waste of time), and Myers-Briggs (ditto). I obviously need to go in search of more of their work.