Digital White Papers

49 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT They Are Just Like Us…Or Not Although various definitions exist, professional services organizations are aptly described as any profession offering customized, knowledge- based services to clients. Commonalities include timekeeping, a leveraged business model, accreditation and regulation. A 2013 Harvard Business School Note addressing KM in all professional services firms concluded that today's (and tomorrow's) successful KM programs will be based on a clear strategy and have a supporting organizational structure, strong governance, proper incentives, a culture aligned with firm objectives, measurement and feedback. 1 These elements ring true for law firms. However, many professional services firms differ from law firms in at least three ways. » They are much larger organizations (consider that accounting was the Big 8 for many years before becoming the Big 6 in 1989 and the Big 4 in 2002 2 ). » They have been engaged in a fight for market share for much longer. 3 » They exhibit more organizational trust than law firms do. Law firms are unique among professional services organizations in lacking trust; according to professional services management expert David Maister, "lawyers' skepticism about ideology, values and principles tend to inhibit the development of organizational trust." 4 Some would argue these differences between law firms and other professional services manifest most visibly when it comes to enterprise collaboration. Another key difference between law firms and other professional services organizations could be the nature of their knowledge assets. Word-based documents are the traditional knowledge asset codified in law firms. This is not so for all professional services, such as architectural and engineering services that rely more heavily on materials containing calculations, images, designs, specifications and measurements. The nature of an organization's knowledge assets also affects their approach to KM, one example being the use of storytelling to contextualize nonverbal assets. Keep these similarities and differences in mind as we explore the four major lessons. Lesson 1: Not Pretty Does Not Mean Not Valuable In her KA Connect 2015 fireside chat, "Where is Knowledge Management Headed?", 5 Columbia University Information and Knowledge Strategy Program Director Katrina Pugh observes that social media and collaborative platforms are creating a new class of knowledge asset in professional services organizations: "ugly assets." 6 These are the soundbites generated on collaborative platforms, oen as succinct question-answer-conclusion threads. They lack an introduction, provide lile analysis and oen have ambiguous context. But these snippets of conversations increasingly are how knowledge is exchanged today, both socially and within an organization. Early KM programs focused on capturing and codifying knowledge; in law firms, this meant creating the annotated model KM's evolution will require a continuous and careful balancing of codification- collaboration strategies. What Can Legal KM Learn from Other Professional Services Organizations?

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