Knowledge Management Made Mandatory?

In my earlier post, Knowledge Management Made Easier, I reported on Tim Leberecht's proposal that we use widespread blogging within organizations to make tacit knowledge explicit. I was very taken with the idea of providing everyone with an easy way to capture and share their learning, and even imagined, for a moment, what it would be like to have a vibrant organizational culture in which people felt comfortable with this level of transparency.

Since then, others have weighed in on this issue. Take, for example, Dave Snowden whose post, Oh When Will They Ever Learn, trenchantly argues that making blogging mandatory violates the very nature of social computing. For him, social computing is intended to make collaboration and sharing possible for those who wish to participate. Or, as he puts it:

Aside from the perpetuation of the myth of tacit-explicit knowledge conversion ..., the idea of compulsion flies in the face of all theory and practice in social computing. Its a classic; find something which is working, then ruin it by compulsion.

In a similar vein, Patrick Lambe's comment on my prior post directed me to the wisdom of Dr. David Vaine on the subject of Forced Corporate Blogging (a.k.a. "Flogging"). Dr. Vaine clearly does not believe that compulsory blogging is either useful or wise.

While I understand and sympathize with their objections, I'm mindful of another approach. For years, authors such as Julia Cameron have recommended that people who wish to increase their personal creativity engage in the practice of keeping a daily journal. While this isn't mandatory (in that there isn't any external enforcer), making a good faith attempt to meet the challenge actually does improve one's writing and expands creativity. I might say the same for those of us who try to blog regularly. The more we exercise the blogging muscle, the better we get and the more rewarding it is.

Although mandatory blogging may seem like a contradiction in terms or an exercise in futility for proponents of a purely voluntary system, it could also provide an opportunity to participate for people who wouldn't otherwise think of trying this. Given that businesses need access to the learning of all their employees (and not just those who choose to share), there might be merit in finding a middle path between the mandatory approach and the completely voluntary approach.

Is there a better way that achieves higher levels of participation reasonably quickly without doing violence to the nature of social computing? The answer to this question could transform your KM program and your organization.

Investing in Knowledge

Today is a national holiday in the United States. And, since it seemed downright unpatriotic to go to the office on Independence Day, I've just spent the afternoon with two remarkable men named Benjamin: Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Disreali.

While it's never entirely wise to quote out of context, I do think these two have something interesting to say that bears on the practice of knowledge management. First, Ben Franklin:

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."

This is just what every knowledge manager in the USA wants to hear -- a founding father who seems to be acting as booster for your line of work. If it's good enough for old Ben Franklin, it's got to be good enough for your firm, right? Well, not quite. He wasn't talking about building repositories of documents or creating firm-wide taxonomies. He was most likely talking about enriching the mind. In fact, he suggests "emptying half a purse" into your mind, as if to say that spending half your fortune on cultivating your mind is the best possible use of that money.

So what about Benjamin Disraeli? Here's what he had to say:

"Knowledge must be gained by ourselves. Mankind may supply us with the facts; but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our mind."

So here, we have an eminent thinker telling us that knowledge really can't be separated from the person. It is an integral part of that person and their experience. Further, knowledge can't be handed to someone like a package. It can only be created by and for that person after applying their experience to the available facts. What can be separated and stored and codified and searched and retrieved and re-used are "facts" or information.

So, can someone explain to me why we call ourselves "knowledge" managers? Who are we kidding? At a minimum we are information managers: we provide easy access to the information our colleagues need to create knowledge. In some cases, we are collaboration facilitators: we provide tools and opportunities that allow colleagues to share information and develop that into something more. In other cases, we are subject matter experts who contribute our own learning to the existing store of information. If we are really fortunate, we're occasionally present at the creation of knowledge. But we almost never can actually "capture" and store that knowledge. We deal in information.

If my two Benjamins are a bit too retro for your taste, spend a little time with Patrick Lambe, Larry Prusak and Dave Snowden. In Patrick Lambe's post, Dead KM Walking, you'll find a podcast he created of a fascinating conversation among these three men regarding the state of "knowledge" management. You'll find that they tend to view knowledge in the same way as my two Benjamins. And, they have some rather disquieting things to say about the current state of our line of work.

It's good to face these questions squarely from time to time. If we aren't honest about what we're trying to do, how on earth can we communicate the nature and value of our work to others?

Knowledge Management Made Easier

Tim Leberecht's post, The Writing Organization: Knowledge Management Made Easy, literally took my breath away this morning. I loved the idea. And then wondered if I or any of my KM colleagues in other law firms would have the audacity to propose it to our respective firms.

Here's his suggestion:

Make it mandatory for every employee to keep an internal blog and post at least once per week. Depending on their role, employees can blog about customer experiences, sales tactics, strategy, product improvements, organizational design, competitors, market trends, and even gossip. Potential productivity losses are outweighed by the value of knowledge that is being generated and shared.

For a brief moment I had this vision of lawyers, legal assistants, administrators and support staff blogging away at their desks, capturing the minutiae of their daily lives -- those things that usually reside in the back of your brain and are never needed by the firm until you are on vacation or out sick. And then, I wondered how easy or difficult it would be to obtain firm management support for this proposal.

Those of you who have already had your morning shot of caffeine will note astutely that law firms currently capture a great deal of daily detail in the form of time tickets or fee earner logs. And some firms even search and expose those details as part of their enterprise search capability. However, these daily entries often verge on the cryptic and they only track the work of fee earners, not those who spend their days ensuring the firm is well run. Yet, in terms of the institutional health of the firm, both pools of knowledge are important.

Tim Labrecht is correct when he says that by fostering a writing culture the firm increases the chances of making tacit knowledge explicit. And that once this knowledge is explicit, it can be found and used by people who didn't know it existed or didn't know they didn't to know it. The potential power of this proposal is huge. But, can it work in a law firm?

Is Your Knowledge Management Strategic?

In honor of Canada Day, here's a Canadian perspective on developing a knowledge strategy. Courtesy of Knowledge Flow, we have an article published by the Queen's University School of Business entitled Creating a Knowledge Strategy for your Organization: A Special KM Forum Report.

This article provides a useful overview of knowledge management. For example it begins with a helpful explanation of the differences between knowledge management processes, knowledge management enablers and knowledge management drivers. For those of us who do not have a theoretical bent, here's a thumbnail sketch:

KM Processes:

* the methods "an organization uses to create, harvest and refine, store and retrieve, distribute and share, and apply and leverage knowledge"

KM Enablers:

* organizational factors (e.g., structure and culture)
* technology

KM Drivers:

* mission and business strategy
* the firm’s intellectual resources

Michael Zack, a professor who studies how firms use knowledge and knowledge management, suggests that until now most firms have focused on KM Enablers. In other words, they've tried to create the right structure and culture for knowledge sharing and then they've tried to implement the right technologies to facilitate this knowledge sharing. However, in Zack's view, this work has been fundamentally flawed in that it has occurred largely without reference to essential KM Drivers: the overall mission and business strategy of the firm. To explain how fatal this flaw is, Zack gives the example of Polaroid, a company that in his view had great commitment to KM and did a terrific job of fostering a collaborative and sharing culture. However, because that collaboration and sharing was not directed towards the business strategy of mastering digital imaging, the firm lacked the requisite knowledge to compete in this area and, ultimately, went out of business. What a waste.

Zack is unequivocal in advocating a single-minded focus on KM Strategy. As recounted by the authors of this article,

In short, stated Zack, a company can do KM extremely well but not focus it on the right things. In order for it to have an impact on firm performance, KM must be linked to business strategy at all levels in the organization. If an organization has a poor business strategy, KM may not be able to make a difference. However, if it has a good business strategy, KM can support it. Knowledge and learning must support and inform an organization’s competitive position. This is what will give a firm a strategic advantage and this in turn, will add value.

So what is a Knowledge Strategy and how do you formulate it? According to Zack, you begin by determining what a firm needs to know to compete. A firm's ability to compete is directly related to its knowledge.

Managing the gap between what a company needs to know to execute its strategy and what it actually knows is the most strategic role of KM. The more knowledge is tied to strategy, the greater the value of KM will be. The link between strategy and knowledge is a knowledge strategy. This is different from knowledge management, which focuses on the processes whereby knowledge is created, harvested, stored, distributed and applied. KM supports the management of knowledge needed by the firm, which in turn supports the firm’s knowledge and business strategy. A knowledge strategy focuses on knowledge content gaps, while knowledge management emphasizes knowledge process gaps. These two must be aligned if a firm is going to use knowledge competitively.

If you're serious about developing a Knowledge Strategy, you will have to do the following analysis:

Assess knowledge gaps:

* What does the firm need to know?
* What does the firm actually know?
* What do the firm's competitors know?

Assess your knowledge resources:

* What knowledge is worth developing?
* What knowledge is worth acquiring?
* What knowledge is worth capturing to facilitate transfer?
* How will the firm derive value from this knowledge?

Assess your learning cycles:

* How quickly and how well does your firm learn as compared to its industry at large?
* Does this provide a competitive advantage or should your firm pursue learning more aggressively?

The article reminds us that this analysis is not something you do once and then put on the shelf. It is more in the nature of a continuous assessment. Just as the firm is dynamic, the knowledge strategy must be dynamic-- reflecting the changing environment and any shifts in business strategy. Above all, this analysis needs to be done in close cooperation with senior management. This is not an exercise to be undertaken by knowledge managers operating in a vacuum without the deliberate input of the people designing the business strategy.

By focusing on strategy, knowledge managers move from the ranks of knowledge plumbers to the ranks of knowledge architects. Are you ready for this change in status?

And, while you're chewing on that thought, Happy Canada Day!

Having a Fool for a Client?

A 2001 article by John W. Amberg on the Los Angeles County Bar Association website begins with the words

The adage that "a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client" is the product of years of experience by seasoned litigators, the Supreme Court has remarked. See, Kay v. Ehrler, 499 U.S. 432, 438 (1991). But do all lawyers know why?

It then goes on to explain all the terrible things that can happen when a lawyer disregards this adage and fails to obtain appropriate professional assistance outside the firm.

More recently, Ross Kodner reprised his earlier advice on the downfalls that result when lawyers attempt to handle their own technology and practice management projects. In a piece entitled REDUX: The True Cost of DIY Legal Technology - Why Pro Se Tech is Such an Economic Disaster, he makes the following pithy observation:

Lawyers should avoid representing themselves pro se on their tech and practice management issues.

Does the same hold true for knowledge management? Should practicing lawyers be running the knowledge management effort in their firms? Or, should they outsource this to "KM professionals"? If they outsource, should those professionals having experience as legal practitioners or is it sufficient that they have demonstrable knowledge management expertise?

To be honest, I'm not sure I have complete answers to these questions. Further, I suspect that the right answer depends on the firm in question. However, there are some things I've learned from experience that I think are universal. For example, while practicing lawyers within a firm undoubtedly are closest to their clients and understand best what is required for good client service, they rarely have the time or inclination to translate that knowledge into the wide range of content necessary for a robust law firm knowledge management system. Further, even if they are interested in creating a knowledge base for their practice area, they usually can't devote the time and attention necessary to create a coherent firm-wide KM system. This suggests that you are going to have to do some outsourcing if you want dedicated attention for your KM effort.

If you are going to outsource the work of law firm knowledge management, your choices of professionals depend on what you want to achieve and the extent to which you wish those knowledge managers to work independently of busy practitioners. If you can hire only one person, be sure that person has experience as a practitioner. Otherwise, they will not have the requisite experience to find and evaluate content for the KM system and most likely will not be qualified to create content for the KM system. If you can't face the cost of hiring a lawyer, then hire a paralegal who has worked on the kinds of matters your lawyers usually undertake. Alternatively, hire a legal reference librarian. But understand that the paralegal or librarian is more likely to act as an organizer or manager of content provided by practitioners rather than a creator of content. And, if your lawyers are busy or insufficiently engaged in the KM effort, there won't be as much content to organize.

The other option is to recruit professional knowledge managers who are new to law firms, but have considerable KM experience in other industries or professions. These folks can help rationalize business processes and facilitate the creation of useful KM systems. And they will bring to your firm a broad perspective that can be invaluable in developing your firm's approach to knowledge management. But, at the end of the day, they will need the consistent cooperation of practitioners to customize the KM system to meet your client service needs. If your lawyers are as busy as most lawyers have been recently, they simply won't have the time to provide the guidance and input needed by these KM professionals.

So, there are no easy answers. However, if this tempts you to decide that the path of least resistance is to have your practitioners just handle knowledge management on top of their client service responsibilities, remember the old adage about lawyers who represent themselves. Then go and reread Ross Kodner's article.

Knowledge Management Requires Interesting Conversations

Robert Scoble summed up his current approach to life in the following words:

The real thing I’ve been doing for more than eight years now is to try to arrange my life so that I have an interesting conversation every day with someone interesting.

Reading this led to an "Aha" moment for me. I shifted from the active practice of law to law firm knowledge management years ago because I was looking for new interesting conversations with interesting people. And, in the main, I've found them. Knowledge management thrives where there are interesting conversations.

Knowledge management done correctly forces us to confront a wide range of human behavior, organizational behavior, technology wonders and technology disasters. Knowledge management done correctly allows you to make meaningful improvements in the work lives of your colleagues and in the quality of service provided to your clients. Knowledge management done correctly is a limitless source of interesting issues spawning interesting conversations.

On the other hand, knowledge management done poorly is a daily grind -- like pushing a wet noodle across a dirty floor with your nose. There's no time for interesting conversation because there are too many pointless tedious tasks to complete. Worst of all, there's no appetite for interesting conversation because you haven't had an interesting thought about your work in ages.

Fostering interesting conversations at work keeps your knowledge management effort fresh. That's what is required for innovation and growth. If you can't find an interesting conversation at work, rethink your knowledge management effort. It's gone off the rails and will wither if you aren't careful.

Robert Scoble had the right idea. Do you?

Building a Great Knowledge Management Team

When hiring we sometimes focus too much on the individual, and not enough on how they will fit in with the existing staff. An extreme version of this is to hunt and low for a "star." Each us of may define "star" slightly differently depending on the context. For example, in the law firm context, a star may be a lawyer with a great book of portable business and a track record for attracting and keeping clients. What we don't often consider is what goes into making and supporting that star, and how many people that star depends on to achieve stardom.

Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge reports on a new study that demonstrates that while past performance may be a reasonable indicator of future performance, "the quality of colleagues in his or her organization also has a significant impact on the [star's] ability to maintain the highest quality output." In other words, hiring a star without the supporting team will greatly diminish your chances of replicating or exceeding past performance.

The study's authors, Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee, have some interesting things to say about knowledge workers:

Some have pointed out that the main difference between knowledge workers and, say, manual workers, is that knowledge workers own the means of production. That means they carry the knowledge, information, and skills in their heads and can take it with them. As the basis of competition shifts to superior knowledge and information, organizations have naturally become increasingly concerned that they attract, leverage, and retain the best knowledge workers.

In addition, our culture is very enamored of stars and with the idea that extraordinary talent accounts for individuals' extraordinary performance. The business media likes to treat star knowledge workers, such as top analysts, bankers, lawyers, and CEOs, as if they are star athletes. There is an assumption that these star knowledge workers, like star athletes, actually "own" everything they need to perform at the top level and can take that knowledge and skill anywhere. They are treated as free agents who can take their top performance to work for the highest bidder.

Our study [of financial analysts] debunks that myth. Star analysts rely a lot on the quality of the colleagues that their organization provides to sustain top performance. They cannot simply replicate their top performance in any organizational context.

Since knowledge managers are in many ways the ultimate knowledge workers, it's worth thinking about the implications of this study for hiring and keeping knowledge managers. It would appear that a focus on the credentials or track record of an individual is insufficient to ensure high quality performance. Having a law firm knowledge management team comprised only of graduates from Ivy League law schools, for example, is both unnecessary and possibly useless. What counts is building a well-integrated, properly supported team in which everyone works to their full capability and has the opportunity to perform like a star.

It's a relatively easy thing to eyeball a resume and check off the great educational institutions mentioned there or the world-class organizations that have employed the candidate you are considering for a new job. It's a much harder thing to assess the extent to which this candidate is a team player (which is a good thing) and needs the support of the right team to perform at a high level (which is much more challenging). And, it is an even harder thing to be able to assess honestly the extent to which your existing staff is (or can become) a strong team, able to work effectively with this candidate.

More than anything, this study underscores the vital role managers play in hiring and deploying the members of their staff.

For managers, it is imperative to understand that stars are not self-contained silos. Producing top-quality knowledge work requires collaboration and flows of information among a network of top performers. That means any one decision on hiring and retention can have a real impact on the performance of top employees in an entirely different part of the firm. It also means that it is not enough to have a few star performers here and there within the organization. If these stars lack high-quality support and information-sharing with other star colleagues, they will have a harder time maintaining their star performance.

Firms that already have a large stable of high-performing individuals might have built a competitive advantage. Their stars make it more likely for each other to sustain top performance. Firms that lack this advantage fight an uphill battle. They can hire or cultivate stars. But if there are only a few stars, these individuals will tend to have a tougher time sustaining top performance.

What does your knowledge management staff look like? A group of under-engaged disaffected individuals? A collection of motivated but unsupported stars? A team of diverse people that consistently produces high quality work product? The secret of success in this is in how you manage and support the team, not how many stars you hire.

Failing by Default

J.K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter, is a great proponent of failure. In fact, she entitled her recent commencement address at Harvard "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination." Her experience has taught her that it is through failure that we strip away the inessential, discover what we truly value in life, learn how resilient we are and, in the process, gain a necessary measure of humility and humanity. Above all, when we survive failure we begin to cure ourselves of the fear of failure, thereby freeing ourselves to try new things, to dare more.

As far as J.K. Rowling is concerned, the one thing worse than trying and failing is failing to try. She calls this "failing by default:"

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

In reading her remarks, I found myself wondering how many knowledge managers are failing by default. To fail by default in knowledge management is to be content with simply keeping the home fires burning rather than venturing out into new territory. It means tinkering around the edges of KM systems rather than working on the next paradigm shift. Mere maintenance rather than innovation.

Given the myriad challenges involved in actually conceiving and implementing new KM systems, it isn't irrational to be tempted to avoid innovation all together. However, therein lies the path to irrelevance, which is the equivalent of professional suicide. A KM system that isn't relevant isn't worth the time and effort expended on it.

If you need more incentive to brave the risk of failure, read The Competitive Advantage of Failing. Then, go out there and try something new.

Envious of ROI

A newly-published article on knowledge management began with the following example to illustrate why organizations should even bother with a KM program:

Siemens, the global telecommunications giant, recently won a $460,000 contract in Switzerland to build a telecommunications network for two hospitals in spite of the fact that its bid was 30% higher than the competition. The secret to Siemens success was its knowledge-management system. This system allowed Siemens people in the Netherlands to draw on their experience and provide the Swiss sales reps with technical data that proved that the Siemens’ network would be substantially more reliable than the competition’s.

I can't remember seeing a public report of an instance where a law firm was able to document a success like this attributable to KM.** Can you? Is this because law firms are hyper vigilant about confidentiality and, therefore, don't tend to talk about how they work? Or is it because law firms don't have comparable success stories? Or worse still, what if law firms do have similar successes, but they don't know it or don't know how to document it?

While envy is rarely a good thing, I suspect most law firm knowledge managers would be envious of their counterparts at Siemens. I can't say I blame them.


** To be fair, several law firms have impressive KM technology. What I haven't seen is published evidence of the ROI resulting from those tools.

Have You Contributed Enough to Retire?

My last post talked about the dangers of letting baby boomers slip out the door without first ensuring that they had left in their firm's KM system "knowledge nuggets" containing their accumulated experience and learning.  That post was intended to be a warning to knowledge managers.  But perhaps we should launch a parallel appeal to baby boomers along the following lines:

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) provides a handy online tool to help you calculate whether you have contributed enough to your retirement savings accounts to retire comfortably.  There is another non-cash account that you also need to contribute to before retirement.  Before you head out of your office door for the last time, please answer these questions:

Have you contributed enough to the firm's knowledge management system?

And, how do you know what is enough?

  -  Do your contributions to the KM system represent the best of your work product and learning over the time you've been affiliated with this firm?  

    -  Are they a suitable legacy of your work?

If individual lawyers paid as much attention to their contributions to the knowledge management system as they did to their contributions to their retirement accounts, we would have much more content in our KM systems.  And, if those contributions were made with a view to ensuring a suitable professional legacy for the contributor, we would have high quality content in those KM systems.  

It's time to set up KM retirement accounts for every lawyer in your firm.  In fact, it's time to set up KM retirement accounts for every knowledge worker within your firm.  No firm can afford to let valuable knowledge slip out the door with its retirees -- regardless of whether those retirees are lawyers or non-legal professionals.