Digital White Papers

50 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT documents, brief banks and maer profiles that still form the foundation of many law firm KM programs. But today's mobility and collaborative platforms have largely supplanted the hard-copy research memoranda, and Ms. Pugh suggests that effective professional services organizations are likewise disassembling legacy structured knowledge banks in favor of capturing the knowledge exchanged in conversations, which primarily occurs in short wrien question-and-answer threads. How does one make these soundbites useful? Louis Richardson, IBM Worldwide Storyteller & Enthusiast re: Social Business & Smarter Work, is quoted as saying: "We need to shi from the idea of looking at content in the container model, that is 'Where do we put the content, how do we store it, and how do we manage it?' We need to begin approaching the issue from a people-centric viewpoint. We need to ask, 'Who are the individuals who created the content, what did they create, and how did they work together?'" 7 Does the rise of the ugly knowledge asset mean the decline of knowledge codification (the practice of formalizing knowledge into forms, templates and best practices organized and classified so they can be retrieved and reused)? No, according to the authors of the Harvard Business Review note on KM in professional services organizations; however, they caution that the current phase of KM's evolution "will require a continuous and careful balancing of codification-collaboration strategies." Like Ms. Pugh, they observe that "[m]any professional services firms are evolving their codification and collaboration strategies, now enhanced by social collaboration tools, and re-evaluating the processes, tools, incentives and the culture needed to support the enterprise social web 2.0 technologies." 8 Ms. Pugh describes this changing ratio of codification and collaboration in terms of disruption and growth. The faster the change (disruption), the greater the emphasis on conversations and collaboration will be. If processes are stable and growth is the primary condition, an emphasis on codification should be greater to quickly ramp up new employees with access to essential knowledge banks. Lawyers and law firms might have an innate distaste for and suspicion of "ugly" work product and authority. But if we sweep away the soundbites emerging from collaborative conversations in favor of more formalized resources, we could cripple the organization's ability to evolve and respond quickly to changing circumstances. If we are to manage ugly knowledge, we need to know where these informal conversations are taking place and capture them. For law firms still using email and shared drives to collaborate, this begs the question: What can firms learn from other professional services organizations about how to build and nurture enterprise collaborative platforms and communities of practice? Lesson 2: Collaborative Platforms Are Difficult, but Not Impossible, To Build As with any other business strategy, successful collaboration initiatives align people, processes and technology with project goals, which commonly are to improve internal processes and increase efficiency. 9 There must be hundreds of books 10 and thousands of articles that address how organizations can benefit from collaboration and foster collaborative behavior. It is interesting that given law firms' notorious What Can Legal KM Learn from Other Professional Services Organizations? If those whom others wish to converse with are not on the new channel, no one will use it.

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