I recently had an article published in KIM Legal on using Sharepoint to support your KM programme.  Just this weekend I followed up the article with a talk at BIALL 2009 on the same topic.  The slides are embedded below or you can download the set for extra fun & enjoyment.  As part of the presentation I promised some more detailed screenshots which form the second presentation embedded below.

If you have any questions please send them through.  Of course, if your firm needs focused assistance, I am a freelance consultant am always happy to discuss possible engagements.

I am a big fan of tools that make it simple to reuse ideas you’ve come across in the past. For bookmarks I use delicous, I write on this blog to capture my composed thoughts and for personal processes and checklists I use a private wiki.

Over the past few months I have been using Google Books for my book knowledge. It is far from perfect, but it’s a start. Google books lets you track and tag any book you like, sometimes offering a content preview. Even if a content preview is not available, the tool supports full-text search and will tell you which page to turn to.

This feature is extremely handy as it makes the lessons of each book you read that much more accessible. Simply search, get a page number and find what you’re looking for in hard copy.

In addition you get access to google book search which I believe has access to over 1.5million books. Good for finding quotes, books whose names you’ve forgotten, and the preview mode works well when its available (not all books may be previewed).

I like the personal km benefits of the tool. I only wish that having purchased the book in hard-copy, a full online version would be available (and free) for me to use. Books at home do me little good sitting on the shelf while I am at work.

Also, I would like to have the notes I take available alongside the book (and similarly searchable).

While I only caught the last day of the biall conference, I noticed several things worth sharing.

- of all the magic circle firms, only Freshfields seemed to be represented;
- there exists a high level of interest in and frustration with their Sharepoint deployments among legal librarians;
- the delegates included an enthusiastic group of librarians, bruised by cutbacks but eager to push on;
- publishers were eagerly and actively looking to enhance the use of their content; both Lexis and Sweet & Maxwell impressed me in this regard (will reflect on this later in the week

Now, I promised delegates I’d upload my presentation and include some screenshots. I’ll be putting these up tonight.

Nudge is a book about subtlety, designing situations where individuals are given options to choose based on preference, but given guidance which drives them in the direction best for them. The authors recognise how difficult it can be to “force” good behaviour, instead advocating an approach they feel is more effective.  Nudge is interesting reading for those involved in legal KM where inertia and short-term thinking are rampant.   Of particular interest for me was an example which showed how an electrical company reduced the energy use of its customers using smileys and frownies      . Here’s how author Cass Sunstein described their approach:

Another example is when some electric companies informed customers that their neighbors were using far less energy. As a result the higher-consuming customers often reduced their consumption. The companies also printed a smiley face on bills sent to customers using less than average, and a sad face to those using more.

Once people are informed, they tend to do better, both economically and for the environment. It’s also true that if people learn that their energy use is lower than the average, there’s a risk they’ll actually increase their energy use. But that unfortunate effect was prevented if people were given a sign of social approval, such as the smiley face. That’s a good example of how social norms have a big influence on people

Now, it strikes me that a similar approach may be useful for eliciting better higher levels of contributions among lawyers.  Lawyers are competitive and won’t like being “worse than their peers”.  The approach can avoid being heavy handed by delivering results to individuals rather than the group.  It explicitly tells the lawyer they are not doing a good enough job and that its being tracked.  By being clever, the approach can then cascade (i.e. a partner whose team does not contribute knowledge gets a frowney face.

Anecdotaly, a colleague of mine tried the approach to encourage people filling out their personnel details and encountered great success.  People were either pleased by their smiley faces (for complete profiles) or outraged by their frowny faces (incomplete profiles).   Those with a frowny face demanded answers:

“How do I get a smiley face!”

Can you imagine a lawyer calling up to demand satisfaction via a smiley?

Executive summary: This is a post about making things difficult for people and why it hurts you.  Conclusion: don’t do it!

Having spent the better part of ten years listening to the same group of artists I’ve recently turned to last.fm in the hope of finding new musicians and new types of music to listen to.  Essentially last.fm looks at the music you listen to by looking at your collection, then recommends new songs / artists.  As you listen you tell it which songs you love/hate and the site adjusts your play-list accordingly.

Last night, last.fm experienced bad Internet mojo and wouldn’t play any music.  Being a fickle consumer I hopped over to their competitor iMeem only to experience bad mojo of a different kind: a sign-up process.

Registering for a new website comes at a well known cost: spam; as a consequence I don’t hand out my email willy nilly, you need to earn the right to send me useless emails.  More so, I want to try something before spending time on a sign-up process.  Since I wanted a quick fix, I gave up and headed over to soma.fm an Internet radio site which lacks the bells and whistles of these new fangled sites, but starts playing music as soon as you pick a station you want.

My whole thought process took under a second, there wasn’t any consideration of registering, it was instant “fuhgetaboutit“.

Now, as KM types we’re iMeem, we offer a service.  I know it’s nice to think that we’re “business partners”, but that’s simply not the case.  Ask yourself if your pizza delivery guy is your “business partner”?  No, he gives service, you receive it.

So, as service delivery types, we should know that our clients have a low threshold for things that get in the way, they just want the good stuff.  That means we need to make it as easy as possible for them to use the tools we give them, especially if they’ve yet to adopt a new concept / way of working.  Examples of barriers to consider:

• Lack of interest from senior leaders
• Difficult systems / poor user interface
• Poor comms materials (too wordy, not wordy enough, confused messages)
• Poor data
• Slow systems performance
• etc.

The list can go on and on. If you’re trying to get people to change their behaviour, it’s important to get these barriers out of the way (hint: new systems require people to change, even if the change is minor).  If you don’t, it’s often very easy for people to continue as before (usually doing nothing is easier).  It’s the same reason why a single-minded focus on “creating a culture of knowledge sharing” is futile.  With all the will in the world, wanting to share knowledge is simply not sufficient if there are things in the way.

Barriers are an important aspect of change according to John Kotter, though they’re not the only one.  To learn more about them and other aspects of change, I highly recommend picking up Heart of Change or Leading Change, both excellent books.

I’m a messy desk kinda guy.  I know generally where things are, but not specifically.  While at Linklaters, one of the Knowledge Managers invited a number of us to a summer party at her house.  Unbelievably she has properly catalogued her book & dvd collection using some magical archiving system (i.e. alphabetically).  I’m fairly certain each book has both a label on the spine and a record in a library catalog running off her computer.  I genuinely cannot fathom being that organised.

Still, there comes a time, when every messy desk needs to be cleaned, despite the suspicious correlation with the start of large projects.  The worst part of cleaning is not the organising or filing which is usually quite easy, if not a little tedious.  The difficult part comes when I have to throw something away, which is agonising.  Two weeks ago I was forced to abandon a variety of clothes I no longer wore (suits jackets absent the trousers, ugly t-shirts I never wore, shorts that haven’t fit me in years).  It was painful, and I only took my junk down the road to OxFam under threat from Mrs. Knowledgethoughts.

So, I was delighted to see Netvibes provide an approach which is both sensible and sensitive to my pack-rat ways.  It’s also suitable for mothballing knowledge at law-firms.

For those unfamiliar with Netvibes, it is a supercharged RSS reader.  I highly recommend you check it out.  I start every day with an apple (of the edible and not ipod variety) and a glass of OJ before collapsing bleary eyed in front of my computer to read my Netvibes feeds.  Unfortunately, Netvibes makes it very easy to collect RSS feeds and as a consequence I have loads of stuff coming in every day that I never ever read.

Recognising this, Netvibes have launched a shiny new toy which tells you which feeds belong in the bin.   Included are feed that have:

• never been read;
• have not been updated in 30 days;
• have not been updated in 6 months; or
• have not been updated in the last year.

Scanning your old feeds is simple and the process is painless, and feels risk free as its based on clear data.  By tracking knowledge use within your firm you could offer a similar service to your lawyers, helping to keep your knowledge system clear unused content.  Now, I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to suggest you ship your old knowledge to OxFam, but perhaps keeping it from poluting the remainder of your knowledge system will help connect lawyers with the content they need more easily and keep the Hawaiian shirts and lime green socks of your knowledge repository away from your clients.

In my last post, I talked about Susan Boyle and how her talent stayed hidden for years until it was found by accident on Britain’s Got Talent.  The parallel with KM is the need for PSLs and KM staffers to help make knowledge visible and accessible to people.  As Mary Abraham rightly commented, it would be better if there were ways of knowledge being discoverable without 3rd party intervention.

Important firm knowledge should bubble up to the surface and be easy for people to find.

Traditionally the databases or search engines were relied upon to provide this functionality, and they will continue to do so.  However, these systems each have limitations which are important to consider.  Knowledge databases suffer from scale with firms having more content to catalog than their KM staff can handle while enterprise search can be challenging in terms of finding relevant results despite advances in faceted search.

These approaches remain valid, but there are other important sources of metadata which are often left untapped.  Not only can these sources feed into search, but they  can be very useful in other ways.  One approach is using what Headshift calls attention metadata. Here’s what Headshift’s Lee Bryant says about attention metadata:

“A longer term benefit of business social networking is the rich data about how people invest their attention, which can be used to drive better recommendations and more personalised services in future. A good example of this is the way Newsgator produces recommendations of popular or relevant news feeds you might want to consume, based on what your colleagues are reading.”

Specifically, attention metadata can pull together content that is:

• highly used by anybody other than the content owner
• recently updated
• highly favourited / bookmarked / tagged
• highly rated (i.e. using stars, thumbs up/thumbs down, etc.)

In order to encourage use of favourites, tagging & content ratings (ala YouTube), there needs to be a benefit for the person viewing the page.  By helping people get back to content they find useful, there is a clear, personal benefit to using these tools.

Taking this in aggregate and by mixing it with traditional metadata (user, practice, industry or client) can help content to bubble up in front of unsuspecting lawyers. Why is this useful?  Well, it helps to raise awareness of what is going on, and what people are using.  PSLs, Lawyers and Partners alike can get a sense for the resources being used without having to delve through complex usage reports.

I like to think of it like a lava lamp.  Attention metadata will heat up your knowledge goo rise to the surface, cooling down over time and then sinking back down until the next time it heats up.

The story of Susan Boyle is one of untapped talent.

If you are fortunate enough to avoid popular (read garbage) television, then you won’t have come across Susan Boyle.  Susan was a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, who amazed the judges and the audience by performing “I dreamed a dream” from Les Misérables impeccably.  It’s gone the rounds on YouTube, and celebrities are writing about her on Twitter (gag).

Susan is 48; she didn’t just wake up with her talent; she’s had it for years.  Where was she?

Living in the family home, a four-bedroom council house, with her ten-year-old cat, Pebbles.

Susan’s probably already had her 15 minutes, but she may land a paid gig of some sort.  She’s hardly going to replace Beyonce, but it’s a little sad that her talent has stayed hidden, unnoticed and unused.

The same can happen to knowledge, except unlike Susan, expertise cannot market itself.  In law firms, PSLs and KM staff are the publicists and casting directors for expertise.  Without them, knowledge becomes inaccessible and can go unnoticed, sometimes forever.

What a waste.

In a recent post I mentioned reading “A Brief History of Time” by Steven Hawking, a geek-read if ever there was one.  At one stage I had a moment of clarity relating to KM (such a dork). The implication deliberate effort is needed to organise knowledge generated by social software tools.  This moment of clarity has to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Huh?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, often referred to as the Law of Increased Entropy states:

With any change of energy from one form to another there is a loss of useful energy

In other words, disorder is a natural state state of affairs in the universe.  Lets consider a very simple example.  Take a small clay bowl.  On it’s own, the clay will not self-form into a bowl, it requires a degree of intervention which requires energy and produces some waste (clay & water everywhere).  Left over time, the bowl will fade back into to dust or perhaps be smashed to bits by a curious toddler or careless father (applies to both my father and my father-in-law).  It may take some time, but it will happen.  Disorder is inevitable, order is not self-sustaining.  We do not see clay bowls forming spontaneously.

This marries quite with my experience, both with people and with systems.  Want to get people to participate in a fire drill?  Most people will participate, but some will wander off for coffee five minutes beforehand (savvy companies not shut down the lifts fifteen minutes ahead of time) while others will refuse to leave their desks.

We are not perfectly efficient machines.

With this concept applied to knowledge, I would argue that continual revision and organisation is needed or things start to get messy.  Just ask a librarian what would happen if you let ordinary people leave books in random piles, or worse still, have people file books on their own.  Chaos!   Your mother knows about the second law of thermodynamics: your room won’t clean itself.

Social software makes it much easier to gather knowledge, but increases the likelihood that the knowledge is stored in a messy way.  Wikipedia is the perfect example; there are loads of wiki-gardeners focused on making sure the content is properly referenced, well laid out, simple to navigate and full of truthiness.  Their effort is above and beyond the effort of gathering the content.  For enterprises, this is a role that must be explicitly supported and encouraged or it will not happen in the long term.

The same is true of Intranets, where it is becoming commonplace to deploy an software platform (i.e. SharePoint) and let the content-owners have at it.  Localised organisation emerge, but globally the Intranet becomes an uncoordinated mess.  Absent effort to keep it well organised (i.e hiring an Intranet Manager), an Intranet will devolve into a collection of so many outdated, hard to find pages maintained by people who have long since left the firm.

Plan for messy knowledge and the need to tidy it.

Perhaps we should change the title “Librarian” to “Guardians from Entropy”.  It would look much cooler on your LinkedIn profile.

Perhaps not.

In several hours the Easter weekend will be upon us.  Almost everybody knows the basics of Easter:

• Chocolate eggs
• The Easter Bunny
• The high-level story of the death & resurrection of Jesus

Very few will know the entire story of Easter (including the Easter Bunny bit) from memory; for me this is a classic KM scenario: we know the high level details, and, if it’s important to us, we know the low level ones as well.  If it’s not immediately important we know how to find those details.

Why is it that the basics of Easter have been burned into the skull of several billion people yet the details have not?

I feel it’s all about stories.  The story of Easter is pretty simple and is tightly bound with Christmas.  Kids learn the story early on, and, I suspect the reason why we never forget it is because of the strong emotional context (i.e. presents & an Easter egg hunt) when we first heard the story.  Even if we’ve since outgrown the importance of the initial tie-in (I haven’t and will be frantically hunting for eggs this weekend), we remember .

Is this a problem?  I don’t believe so.  So long as you know where to find them, the brain subconsciously retains what is important. If a task is repeated frequently, the brain dedicates more energy to it, and the task is more easily repeated.

While knowing where to find details is very important, stories can play a useful role in helping people remember and share important events.  For a law-firm, collecting and communicating emotive stories can sometimes takes a back-seat to collecting exact, detailed knowledge. Unfortunately those stories can be terribly effective at getting a point across and represent a lost opportunity when nobody collects them.

One firm tells the following story to senior associates:

Last year Frank & Nicole were made up as new corporate partners.  Frank excelled technically.  As an associate Frank worked very long hours, always hit his billing targets and produced top quality legal work.  Nicole was a very good lawyer and fee earner, but had devoted otherwise billable time to build strong relationships within her practice and perhaps, lawyer to lawyer Nicole wasn’t quite the fee earner Frank was.

Several months after being made up, Frank was drowning on a complex matter.  He simply couldn’t keep up.  Lacking a strong network, Frank did all the work himself and couldn’t keep pace with Nicole who had a team to help her out.  As a consequence Frank’s profitability fell while his hours went from difficult to unsustainable.

On the conclusion of the matter the firm’s Senior Partner paid Frank a visit.  Without the Senior Partner having to say push at all, Frank committed to building a stronger network within his practice.

Emotive & relevant, it helps associates understand that there’s more to being a Partner than being a good lawyer.  The details of network building might not be to hand but the lesson is easily understood.

With budgets constrained, story gathering could form the basis of a useful and inexpensive exercise for PSLs and KM staff on a limited budget while delivering real benefits to lawyers and business services staff.

For help improving your story-telling (and writing) skills try reading  Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath.