Digital White Papers

53 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT way. "Ove Arup's Key Speech" 22 is required reading for each person who joins Arup and is a guide to the firm's cultural identity. » Marketing storytelling explains the experiences around projects. These stories include nuances such as strategies behind choices made during the design process. While marketing storytelling is primarily utilized for the proposal process, it also is used internally as a cultural tool –– project stories are told firmwide via the intranet as they occur. » The third and fourth are lessons learned and best practices. These stories seem similar to what legal KM might call maer profiling and aer-action reviews. However, members of the KM department gather the information iteratively during a project's course, rather than at the end. Each phase of a project has an associated checklist of information the KM department collects. Given the labor-intensive work required to gather and maintain the story-building information, top projects are selected for tracking at maer opening. Firm management and marketing identify top projects based on the firm's strategic goals. Administrative personnel rotate in to help collect information, interview team members and ghostwrite project summaries. In part, storytelling might play such a prominent role in AEC KM programs because of the nature of the industries' codified knowledge. Much of what they do is expressed in design –– plans, surveys and images –– rather than words. However, while not termed "storytelling," adding a knowledge layer to projects is an important part of KM in consulting firms, according to Dr. Trussler. Post-project summaries provide an overlay of insights to project documentation that is essential to identifying and navigating the value and relevance of past project experience to new projects or issues. Lesson 4: Engage and Educate Users by Design With advances in data mining and analysis, professional services firms are building increasingly sophisticated internal reporting platforms. Tools like Tableau make assessing and presenting data to users much easier. But reporting dashboards depicting graphs and metrics are of no use to end users who struggle to interpret them. When Doris Pulsifer of global architecture and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP described her firm's implementation of aractive Tableau-powered dashboards that track project metrics, I asked her if users needed training to understand what they would see. The answer was yes, users needed to be educated, but not through formal training. Rather, explanations embedded into the design and architecture of the dashboards proved sufficient. The well-designed dashboard delivers just-in-time knowledge to users and functions as a learning tool for newer project managers. What Can Legal KM Learn from Other Professional Services Organizations?

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