The Recapitulation Theory and The Lifecycle of Legal Knowledge Management

I attended a meeting of legal knowledge management professionals earlier this week.  By tradition, the speakers (except consultants) are anonymous.

The first topic was "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," a concept from biology also known as "Recapitulation Theory" that refers to the parallel between the embryonic development of organisms (specifically mammals) and evolution. 

The speaker has started knowledge management systems four times.   He addressed the bumpy "curve" of interest, excitement, and profile that naturally occurs when knowledge management programs progress.

First the law firm recognizes that they have a problem.  They see that they'll need to talk to people and develop something.  You slay the sacred cows, enlist the aid of people previously concerned with knowledge management, and then conceive of a grand plan.  After a lot of hard work, an "immortal" result is achieved, and people are astonished.  Most were unaware that the work was going on.

From here the slope of interest and ability to make remarkable changes is downward.  People suggest changes that may or may not be useful or easy to accomplish.  The amazing achievement becomes "background", expected, and credit or recognition slacks off. It's a hard slog to regain the level of immortality again.

Has the field of legal knowledge management followed the same curve?

For instance, enterprise search in legal was a moment of immortality, "god's gift to legal knowledge management."  The next hoped-for trick was the "best practice," which is not a simple add-on but an entirely different approach.  Does KM seeking to solve "everything" lead to KM risking becoming nothing?  Ideas like social media and document assembly may have a low probability of success and clearly require much more work and structure than the earlier successes.  KM staff are helping with project management, financial analysis, task-based process management, and so forth, but legal kmers not necessarily the best people to do that.

So how can legal KM practitioners get back to the moment of immortality?  Switch jobs?  Repeat the process at organizations that haven't navigated the curve?  It's up to us.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Canadian Diplomacy and A Sense of Purpose

Deb Lavoy of OpenText spoke elequently about enteprise purpose. 

The ideal company no longer runs like a "well-oiled machine" but is a mesh of minds producing and learning.  They can predict failure of enterprise application deployment based solely on whether the group has a strong sense of purpose.
Among people with purpose "Their common cores are aligned to a magnetic north. Personal politics takes a back seat."
The very handsome Tyler Knowlton of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canada told a great story about helping the G20.
One year ago--he was in Toronto working on G20 meeting, his team in charge of electronic / social communications.  Working with the G20 is challenging. The subject matter is complex. G20 has a rotating presidency. Each host / president starts from scratch. The lack of a central repository was frustrating. 

The central delegate was sick of dealing with long email chains, lists, versions, and so forth.  The delegate wanted to apply some of the thinking of Tyler's team to the problem.
He said that if they could come up with it in one month, and it worked, he'd pitch it to the other delegates. They had to switch gears to get tied into the G20 institution.
Email was just the pain point that got the delegate thinking. What they really needed was a system for multilateral negotations, communicating and collaborating.

Three things changed.
First, his team became much more ambitious. They felt that they were feeding into the "big picture." The more work they got, the bigger their contribution.

Second, they became confident and critical.

Third, they became very creative. They had artists, political strategists, web developers. He's learned that parameters foster creativity. Forced thinking about what they had to do, quickly.
They developed something relevant, but also exciting (I wish he had talked more about what they actually rolled out).
They dealt with Korea, and are now talking to France, and are alreading talking to Mexico. The other G20 office was disbanded, but their work is continuing to contribute to the G20 effort.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Bert Sandie of EAI

Bert Sandie of games maker Electronic Arts, Inc. talked about how to create a culture of collaboration at your enterprise. 
What drives people to collaborate?

People who are really good at collaborating do a lot of things that motivate them.  They want to learn AND be social, for instance.  Motivators for collaboration includes a desire to problem solve, altruism, learning, competition, recognition, and more.  Make sure they get an email back to them and their manager about contribution.

At workshops they get to have a good time, but they have to come back and share what they learned.

Are you hiring enough new people? Are you hiring people who are willing to share?

Create physical environments that enhance collaboration.

• White boards
• People sitting down
• People sit in a "pod"
• People move / change offices often
• If you're more than 35 feet away, you might as well be in a different building.

 Different things work for different people.  You have to try a lot of things, and you have to fail.

Bring together special interest groups, run a workshop for 3 days, build a culture of collaboration around it (sounds like an old-fashioned KM Community of Practice!).  When you know the people personally you can

 

The easiest way to collaborate is face-to-face.

 

Changing behaviors takes "heads, hearts, and hands."  Changing the way people think, feel, and behave.  Right when they walk in the door you can change their behavior. 

 

We need to lead the change in our organizations.  If you aren't the expert (in change), find the people in the company who are.  Start with people, your organization, and your environment. 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Evolution of Enterprise Collaboration (Ross Mayfield of SocialText)

Ross Mayfield is a real pioneer among vendors--his SocialText is one of the best applications that integrates appropriately with SharePoint.  He looked back at the history of enterprise social application evolution and talked about the differences between enterprise and internet adoption of such tools.

He's talking about evolution, not revolution, in enterprise social applications.

Much of the revolution has already happened.  He used to have to explain a wiki.  You can now say with some confidence that there is an established category of enterprise software and that it consistently demonstrate business value in specific use cases.

Ross reviews the history of social application development.  SocialText tried to fit wiki behavior into an application you could install inside the firewall in 2002. 

Microblogging inside the enterprise changed everything.  It was a lot easier to deploy and people took to it very quickly. 

In 2009 the "activity stream" became a dominant approach.

SocialText has tried to adapt web 2.0 tools.  No matter how big your organization is, however, it's smaller than the Web.  It's very different.  If someone does something bad, you can fire them.  Also, the scaling effect is not the same. 

On the web, a core set of contributors is 1%, 9% actively use, 90% don't.  In the enterprise, you have to bake it into the flow of work.  For instance, in company 95% actively use it in the flow of the work. 

Knowledge sharing is a by-product of getting these done in social systems.  You have to accept that it will be imperfect.  It doesn't matter so long as you are getting more of it shared. 

You need to keep doing the security, IT Admininstration, reporting / auditing, and so forth. 

Inside the enteprise, viral adoption generally won't happen. 

SocialText provides a "social layer" where the existing enterprise objects (documents, projects, tasks, enterprise records) become a topic of conversation.

Discovering content through people and people through content is really powerful (agreed!).

In implementing better collaboration, focus less on technology and more on the goal.

Imagine a "Kickstarter" inside your companies that would let you quickly gain budget or backing for internal projects.  There is more and more specialization on the web.  They commonly add a slight amount of structure, organize people around a goal, but not too much. 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Ming Kwan of Nokia

It was good to actually have a woman presenting a keynote at the general session.  There hasn't been good gender balance here (she is one out of six presenters in this first tranche).  Her presentation focused mostly on how employees can obtain actionable information through internal collaboration, and share that through external social channels.  I wish there had been a few more concrete examples.

Nokia want to get the right information into the right hands at the right time.

They also want to make it actionable.  What can employees do with all of that information?

Their principles include transparency across the organization.  Their company works in 120 companies.
Another key principle is accountability, by having people take ownership and recognition.  
Taking action is another principle.  It's not about the volume of interactions, it's the qualtiy.

Return On Investment

Nokia developed a "social marketing KPI" framework.  It starts with awareness, then moves to appreciation, with highest level of engagement is engagement (action, purchasing for instance). 

Having a set KPI framework gains clarity around the business's performance.  Ideally the new information leads to awareness that leads to action. 

Third Ecosystem

Nokia wants to create a "third ecosystem" with Microsoft (beyond those of Apple, and Google, although she didn't say their names).  In order to do that they will need to collaborate effectively with their partners, including agencies and suppliers.

Nokia's "visualizers" helps managers identify what different teams are talking about (I didn't understand the value of having managers somehow be aware of what are no doubt thousands of conversations going on internally).  Nokia's "Socializer" based on Headshift technology include tasking and pinging. 

Nokia has had internal idea crowdsourcing for a while.  They recently opened up crowdsourcing to the public. 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Spontaneous Association and Tom Kelly of Moxie and Tony Martins of Teva Canada

Tom Kelly from Moxie Software is presenting with Tony Martins of Teva Pharmaceuticals (disclosure:  Teva is a client of my law firm's.). 

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly first spoke in somewhat repetitive fashion about how he thought businesses should approach implementing social software. 

The most exciting companies to work at were the one where people are engaged.  The speed at which things are moving has changed in tennis and football just as in our businesses.

Three key elements of any social platform are simple design (simplicity), knowledge, and thought leadership. 

Knowledge is the key part of what we are trying to accomplish.  Knowledge is about sharing what different people know to accomplish a given goal. 

How do you design software for how people work?  People work in groups, on projects.  It must have an interative process to bring innovative ways for people to work.  It should not bankrupt company. 

We do need to integrate into existing systems.  Like Facebook and Twitter, you can add something simple that will let people connect. 

We can change from ""push" model of major enteprise software changes every 18 months to doing something simple (he keeps saying that!). 

Tony Martins

Tony Martins runs the supply chain for Teva Canada.  He started exploring social business in 2005, with Wikinomics. 

The key ingredient is "spontaneous association."  Human beings have an amazing ability to combine their skills to resolve problems.  We are born that way, and can do it as long as we are allowed to.

Teva has used this in the organization. 

There are many changes in regulations, consumer behavior, and the world around the company.  The challenges they are confronting are not what they expected would happen.  For instance, managers at Teva were spending more than half of their time addressing unexpected events. 

A small group of people can come up with solutions much faster than a traditional command-and-control approach where problems are kicked up the organizational chart. 

Provide environments where people can bring their skills together quickly.  Spontaneous association has to happen somewhere.  Over time, Teva found that virtual collaboration spaces (based on Moxie Software) worked well. 

What happened in those spaces was becoming aware of those problems, and leaving it up to the people involved to address.

His most recent experience with business value of this approach was that between January and April of this year (2011), manufacturing cycle time was reduced 40% and reduced face-to-face meetings by 50%. 

He'll be presenting in a workshop later today (with Sameer Patel). 

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Day 2: Chris Morace of Jive Software

My continued notes below--errors are below.

Chris is looking awfully corporate for a rep from a company with such hip-looking logos and video promos.  This was a very interesting and well-paced presentation, however.

Enterprises are facing waves of disruption from changes in social, cloud, and other new technologies.  We're all being asked to be more innovative, be more agine. 

IT groups are increasingly feeling like more and more of their time is being spent maintaining antiquated enterprsie systems, and not enough times supporting business needs and innovations. 

One conference attendee noted that he could talk to his children by video call from his hotel room, but couldn't get conferencing systems to work at most work meetings.

70% of employees are using unsanctioned cloud applications.

Social is "hot."  There's social in Project Management, CRM, etc. etc.  None of it integrates together.  It creates new silos.  IT professionals are going to be asked to address this system.

The app market is an example of the future of enterprise technology.  Apps are easy to create, quite frictionless.  It's pretty easy.  Software is more of an impulse buy instead of a major decision.  Each channel comes with millions of potential users and a distribution network.  Apps are also integrated with the social graph. 

Chris says we're moving to the "consumerprise" model.  We used to have to explain why social apps were different from email etc.  Now people get it because they are participating in their personal life. 

To thrive in this area, you have to add value to the business AND protect it. 

New models of consumption are critical.  Need to be able to "pay as you go," very simply, so the app just "shows up."  Less lockin for enterprise software.  Vendors earn the right to have us use their product.  We should be able to install an app with the click of a button. 

The amount of time it should take to integrate a new system into the HR/ERM/ etc. enterprise system should be no more time than it takes to fill out a Help Desk ticket.  It should also integrate with the internal social tools.

We also need easy ways to say that an app is OK or not.  Maybe there need to restrict server location, internal or exterrnal storage, etc. 

The policies of companies around personal mobile devices has changed.  He thinks that companies will change their policies around new applications as well. 

The seminal moment in the consumerprise was when Facebook opened up its platform. 

There will only be a handful of winners.  Christian Finn would call this a "nice dream." 

Jive has a platform that can do much of this already.  Hundreds of apps can work together.  Jive will be the first to have an app market.  This is a way we can get around the adoption challenges.  We can really change the way people do business.