When the Technology Isn't Being Used - Let's Add More Technology!!

It is nice of LexisNexis to give me a good example of how some IT/KM departments approach the problem of users not using the existing technology. I want to start off by giving a disclaimer that this isn't a critique of the LexisNexis product (as I haven't used it), but rather this is a general critique of trying to fix technology usage problems by adding another layer of technology.

LexisNexis' Visualfiles is the latest project in the law firm IT/KM process of capturing documents (Interwoven), contacts (InterAction) and client matter information (Elite 3E & Internal Practice Management System) from the firm's timekeepers. See if you can read between the lines on this product press release statement:

Once deployed, Visualfiles will be the default application that users will use to open any file or matter, seamlessly feeding information into Elite 3E, InterAction and Interwoven. This will provide users with a single, integrated business environment and allow them to record information efficiently and accurately for the benefit of the entire organisation.

To me, this says this: "Our people aren't using all of the expensive databases that we've bought and supported for the past "xx" years, at a cost of $x million (or in this case £x million). Let's add a new layer of technology that will seamlessly push the information into these systems."

This fits right into the issue that we discussed earlier this week in "Has 'IT' Killed 'KM'".

Many firms have found themselves heavily invested in technology that their attorneys are simply not using. In other words, the existing technology is a failure, but we've invested so much time and so much money that instead of scrapping the technology and admitting failure, we need to put the existing technology on some type of virtual "life support". All of this in order to keep the existing technology alive and somehow hope that this "life support" will bring everything back to life and justify the huge time, money and technology expense we've invested. In some industries this approach is called "throwing good money after bad."

In defense of this approach, it should be noted that what I'm calling "failure" isn't necessarily IT or KM's fault. Most users (read: attorney) of these products refused to "automate" the capturing of data in the initial phases, and didn't want to spend the upfront cost of bring in data stewards to make sure the data was "clean". Therefore, the technology is ready to perform as promised, but the way the users actually use the technology is flawed. To paraphrase one of the oldest programming sayings of "garbage in - garbage out"... in this scenario, you can say "nothing in - nothing out."

Perhaps this latest product of "automatic data collection" developed by LexisNexis will get around the users refusal to actually add their documents, contacts or client related data into these costly systems. However, if history tells us anything, never underestimate the users ability to work around the system. And, in return, never underestimate IT/KM's ability to believe that one more layer of technology will make the existing systems finally work.

KM's View of E2.0 - Savior or Harbinger of Death?

There seems to be a lot of discussion around Knowledge Management (KM) and where it fits within the ever popular Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) world. Seems like the discussion is coming straight out of a Dickins novel: "Knowledge Management in 2009... It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

We took a jab at KM and its IT relationship earlier this week where we noted that E2.0 may be an opportunity to break the efforts of relying too much on technology to create the information you need from your knowledge management program. There have been a couple of good (although a little "pie-in-the-sky") white papers from ILTA and KM World on how E2.0 will fundamentally change the way KM operates. Over at rickmans's posterous, Rick provocatively blogged the question of "Should Knowledge Managers look for a new job?" And, one that isn't specifically KM, but discusses the value of knowledge workers states that we are the new "blue collar workers."

So, there seems to be a line drawn in the sand that E2.0 is either the savior of KM or the Harbinger of Death for KM. And, 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). Not that this is unusual, most change comes from external pressures rather than internal insight, but the stark differences of opinions should be viewed with this in mind.

I did like the reaction that Carl Frappaolo had to the whole KM & E2.0 discussion. In the post "NOW knowledge management is possible - Whaddya Kidding me?" Carl hits upon one of the underlying issues regarding the KM/E2.0 discussion. Do you think this is an "evolution" or a "revolution" in KM? Frappaolo takes on Andy Moore's view that E2.0 is a "revolution" in KM because the E2.0 is a "bottom-up" approach to KM. Frappaolo counters that E2.0 is an "evolution" in the KM process and that KM "is a business practice and ecosystem, that evolves over time."

It is fun to follow the arguments back and forth. My opinion (and I know that you all value my opinion) is that the KM process is "evolutionary" and can adapt to new ideas such as E2.0 brings to the table. However, those pushing how E2.0 is the savior of KM are being a little to Pollyannish about how it will "revolutionize" the KM industry by putting the power in the hands of those creating the knowledge.

On the other hand, those running KM departments are at a tipping point (or at least approaching the Fulcrum) of how E2.0 will be integrated into the current KM process. From what I've seen on the KM Management side, there isn't a lot of rallying around the E2.0 flag. Vendors need to take note of this fact.

The reality of the situation is that E2.0 is coming, and its coming fast. KM managers better be preparing for its arrival and not wait until it has become a de facto process in the firm.

Open Source in Law Firms - Unimaginable or Brilliant?

I know, you don't expect to see "open source" and "law firms" in the same sentence unless it is discussing how a law firm is trying to find a way for its clients to claim copyright on something they built upon an open source product. But that's not what we're talking about here. I really wanted to discuss the idea of "how" a law firm could actually introduce open source products into the technology structure of a firm without the anxiety that generally comes along with such a plan.

A few days ago, an academic techie forwarded me an article on how some universities were going to replace their very expensive accounting software with an open source product called Kuali. I read the article in my typical fashion where I'm thinking "wow, what an opportunity" followed quickly by "guess this would never happen in a big law firm environment." But then I read the part of the article that discussed how these universities were collaborating on this effort and would be basically sharing the pain of the implementation of the software. Now, there's a novel concept!

I'm going to toss out any "antitrust" arguments for the moment and pitch the idea that law firm IT departments, along with the "powers-that-be" in the firm's management could team up with their counterparts in other peer firms to work as a consortium in implementing large scale open source projects. Anyone that has worked in the so-called "BigLaw" sector knows that this is an industry that chases each others tails when it comes to technology. Many of us, when pitching a new product here this quote: "What other firms are also using this product?"

The accounting project that the academic institutions are collaborating is a perfect example of bringing in open source software into the institution. This product is something that is a "behind the scenes" product - in that it is used by the administrative staff rather than by the entire institution. So, this would be a much better test project than replacing Microsoft Office Suite with one of the open source alternatives.

So, the next time you have lunch with one of your peers from another firm, float the idea of collaborating on a open source project between your firms. See if you can get a few more firms on board as well. Test something small (for God's sakes don't start off with the accounting overhaul I mentioned above!!) Perhaps something like collaborating on creating an Enterprise 2.0 project , such as the 'Unity' Enterprise 2.0 Project that Lockheed created using open source products, and figuring out a way to manage the project in a way that all of the firms collaborating learn from one another, and share the pain and triumph of deploying a new product without the huge expense of working with one of the major vendors. If you can team up with other firms, then you've already got an answer when a partner asks "what other firms are doing this."

Social Networking: It's All About Relationships

Today, it was proved to me, once again, that social media works.

About nine months ago, Greg--my co-conspirator and co-blogger in crime--started following me on Twitter. Then he met a bunch of folks online and he passed on my Twitter handle to a bunch of his friends.

So I started following Greg's friends that followed me.

Then one of my new Twitter friends found me on Facebook. We started interacting; we were swapping Greenie plants, acres of virtual farmland, virtual law gifts and other goofie stuff. Just dinking around.

I didn't really know who she was.

Then Greg and Toby recommended me for a speaking engagement at an all-day conference. Coincidentally, my new Twitter/Facebook friend was also speaking. I was excited to finally meet her.

And meet we did. I found out that she worked at the same law firm I did--hard to know everyone in a firm with 3,000 employees. We arranged to have lunch later that week. A fascinating person, we continued to meet for lunch regularly and are now friends. She has been over to my house, we have swapped books and, today, I attended her going-away party.

She's moving on to a new job as a law professor and legal librarian.

But thanks to social media, we will stay in touch: Twitter, Facebook and now e-mail are all available to me.

She and I have achieved the inner circle of friendship.

Who knows where the future shall bring us?

Has ‘IT’ Killed ‘KM’?

I’ve commented in the past about how I think that Knowledge Management (KM) has become so overwhelmed with technology products that the individuals in KM have become ‘tech support’ rather than knowledge managers. Yesterday, I read two different articles that reinforced my conception of what I think is a major flaw in the idea of “Knowledge Management” within law firms.

Michael Maoz of Gartner brought up the issue of why ‘IT lacked the prowess to perceive or advise on the unfolding crisis’ of the financial meltdown. When I was reading this, I kept replacing “IT” with “KM” (as I think what Maoz was talking about fit more of the KM model in the law firm setting.) Questions Maoz raised such as:

• Where has all of our [KM] investment in data mining, analytics, forecasting, and measurement gotten us?
• And how, exactly, did [KM] track, identify, perceive, illustrate, communicate, or work to prevent rotten loans and false premises about future growth and profit and shaky forecasts?

These questions show the flaw in how we are looking at KM. Knowledge Management isn’t a software or database issue! These questions seem to take on the idea that by putting your contacts in a database, storing your documents in a central repository, and slapping a search interface on all of these databases is “Knowledge Management”. We seem to think that if we have enough technology it will magically transform into some quasi-artificial intelligence.

The second article I read was one of the Penny Edwards’ articles on Social Networking for the Legal Profession. Edwards mentions that the approach we take to capturing “knowledge” is a hold over of the 1990’s IT ‘centralized’, or as she put it in her book “Industrial Technology.” Edwards states it best when she writes that our KM tools are ineffective because:

many of the large, centralised, top-down implementations in firms have focused on enforcing information and management processes. It's no wonder that many of these specialist applications are underused - with their different interfaces and rules for user interactions that require people to spend time figuring out how to use them, compiling information to be approved for inclusion, and then trying to find the information once it has made it into the system. They are not user-friendly, and they don't reflect the workings of a network where people turn to people to get what they need.

As I’ve said before, the original concept of KM was to “leverage our internal experience and expertise to help us face future challenges”. Knowledge Management was originally an idea that came forth in the library field as a way to catalog internal information in a similar way we where cataloging external information. However, because it would be nearly impossible for a librarian to catalog every piece of internal information, KM slowly moved over to the IT structure by attempting to make the creator of the information (that would be the attorney who wrote the document or made the contact) also be the “cataloger” of the information. Processes were created through the use of technology that were supposed to assist them in identifying the correct classification. In my opinion, this type of self-cataloging and attempt at creating a ultra-structured system creates a process that is:

1. difficult to use;
2. doesn’t fit the way that lawyers conduct their day-to-day work;
3. gives a false sense of believing that the knowledge has been captured and can be easily recovered;
4. leads to user frustration and “work around” methods; and
5. results in expensive, underutilized software resources.

Lee Bryant mentions that applying 20^th Century ideas of centralizing and applying the industrial model of mass production is the wrong approach for how we capture and apply knowledge in the 21^st Century. Both Bryant and Edwards think that the answer to pulling KM out of the 20^th Century structure is to get away from the centralization method and begin re-learning the way that lawyers conduct their business. They identify that the source of lawyers’ “ideas, knowledge, leads, business opportunities, support, trust and co-operation” are developed through their social interactions. The suggestion is that KM should stop trying to be a highly structured method of gathering knowledge (Industrial Knowledge Gathering or ‘KM 1.0’), and identify ways that social networking (Social Knowledge Gathering or ‘KM 2.0’) can be leveraged to influence the uptake of ideas and trends.

Alternative Fees - "How To" Tech

All this talk about alternative billing and alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) might lead one to believe there are numerous tools on the market for managing these.

I've previously posted on 3 Geeks about how budgets sit at the core of AFAs and on methods for building reasonable budgets. With that concept in mind, a firm needs a tool set for creating, modeling and then monitoring AFA budgets. Creating is something previously discussed. Modeling is playing with the budget; shifting tasks, adjusting leverage and generally driving numbers that will benefit clients and lead to profitable engagements for firms.

Budget monitoring is the long-haul, oar-in-the-water effort of making sure efforts stay on budget and firms remain profitable. As well, these monitoring efforts will create a knowledge base that will enable more effective budget creation and modeling going forward.

So what tools are out there? The short answer: not much. The Lexis owned Redwood Analytics is the the most evolved tool I found. And it's on a reasonable development path. Redwood has been around a while and with a focus on law firm financial analysis, was well-poised to meet the emerging AFA needs. So it's good to see a viable tool on the horizon.

Beyond Redwood, I found vendors willing to build something. This is not encouraging. For all the push for AFAs, a lack of tools will serve as a serious impediment to adoption. A vendor building a one-off custom application is not a good option in my opinion. These leave firms in a dead-end position. The power of a commerically developed tool with ongoing development will go a long way towards driving AFA adoption and success.

On a side / related note, the in-house law department vendors seem to be heading in the same direction as Redwood. I suppose with their more immediate demands for AFAs, legal departments should be driving this development.

I must say I am disappointed at the lack of tools for managing AFAs. In the short-run firms will be doing a lot of AFA management manually. Not the best situation, but one we'll live with for the time being.

Review of Headshift's Penny Edwards' "Social Networking for the Legal Profession"

Although I follow a number of blogs dealing with the topics of law and technology, I would have to admit that one of the best out there is the Headshift Blog. Their byline of "smarter, simpler, social" hits a chord with me and it is one of those types of blogs where you tend to read something that allows you to say "We could do something like that here."

There are a number of highly intelligent, yet approachable people at Headshift, but by far my favorite has got to be Penny Edwards. Penny and I have been "twitter-buddies" since last year and we've shared a number of experiences of how we approach social networking within the law firm. A few months ago, Penny asked if she could interview me for her upcoming Ark Group publication "Social Networking for the Legal Profession" that she co-wrote with Lee Bryant. I was happy that she thought of including me in her research, but in reality, I was really excited about talking with her over the phone and seeing if she was really as smart as she seemed via our Twitter conversations. (She is, and more!)

FYI -- The Ark Group Report can be purchased (with a special discounted price through these Headshift blog links:

• UK Discount Voucher.pdf
• US Discount Voucher.pdf
• Australia Discount Voucher.pdf

Penny has since followed up her report with a series of blog posts that explain the process that she and Lee took to "look at ways in which legal professionals are exploiting social networking for business." They looked at the internal and external forces that were creating conditions to encourage law firms to "rethink the way legal practices operate and emerge as more effective businesses." Where some firms are looking at cutting back on costs while others are seeking new ways to exploit the challenges in order to find new approaches to how they conduct business.

Penny followed up with stating the fact that when law firms and lawyers talk about 'social' what they are really saying is 'business'. Whether it be "relationship building", "individual branding", "expertise and knowledge proliferation", "developing legal expertise", or "building a guild-like community", lawyers that use social networking successfully have an understanding of what they are accomplishing.

Penny's latest edition of the "Social Networking for the Legal Profession" discusses the way it is creating new ways of working. In my opinion, social networking processes can create some of the things that Knowledge Management professions have been wanting for over a decade now. I'm worried though that the process is developing in an ad hoc way and is not being recognized by many in the KM profession.

I highly recommend that you read Penny Edwards' blog posts on "Social Networking for the Legal Profession", and if your budget can afford it, to buy the Ark Group report. Penny and her cohorts over at Headshift are thought leaders not just on social networking, but also on understanding the shifting environment that is facing all of us in the legal profession. I'm happy that they are willing to share some of that expertise via the Headshift blog.