Digital White Papers

51 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT What Can Legal KM Learn from Other Professional Services Organizations? problems with trust, a key indicator repeatedly cited for success with collaborative initiatives is trust. 11 Large accounting and consulting firms seem to have cracked the nut of enterprise collaboration. PricewaterhouseCoopers has Spark, 12 KPMG has the Hub 13 and Accenture aggregates a variety of knowledge sharing platforms with the Stream, a company-wide collaboration vehicle integrated with some of its business applications. 14 Other examples abound. Overall, professional services organizations rank building collaboration platforms and communities of practice as a high priority. The annual APQC surveys of KM priorities for constituent organizations, largely comprising professional services firms, found that "enabling sharing and collaboration within and across teams" was the top priority for 2015 (87 percent of participants) and 2014. By contrast, the results of a similar survey of large law firm KM professionals revealed that collaboration was not among the top three priorities of law firm KM in either 2014 or 2015, although it rose to the number two spot in 2016 as an aspirational goal. 15 Research describes the financial benefits of collaboration, particularly across practice areas, to be unambiguous. 16 Even so, moving the conversation from email and shared document repositories has proven difficult due to, among other factors, a lack of trust and immediate financial (or other) advantage to the individual, 17 failure to capitalize on existing employee networks 18 or the continued use of email as the default means of communication. 19 If those whom others wish to converse with are not on the new channel, no one will use it. For this reason, high-level visible commitment from leadership is important, according to Gordon Vala-Webb, Principal at Building Smarter Organizations. When a leader writes, "This is my last email –– from now on you must communicate with me on [XYZ]," it forces a simultaneous change of channel by the entire team. Another example of changing the channel is when a team leader designates the channel as the platform for regular team meetings. Rather than spend an hour on a monthly conference call listening to everyone's reports, team members could post updates to the group in real time, and the most critical posts could be discussed on the monthly call. This way, the conversation begins before the call even starts, leaving meetings for solving problems and making decisions. To succeed, the team leader must enforce this behavior. Another success factor is that the channel must serve a real business purpose. An illustration cited by Dr. Simon Trussler, Engagement Director and KM Specialist at iKnow, is a collaborative platform used by a global petrochemical company for operations teams to ask and answer technical questions. Responding to a real-time need 5 Takeaways We Can Apply to Legal KM Storytelling that reinforces shared principles and values helps build trust. Trust is a strong success indicator for collaboration. Collaboration platforms beget valuable ugly knowledge assets. Ugly knowledge assets accelerate process improvement. Process improvement can be propelled by visually engaging tools that educate by design.

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