The future for Legal KIM: An Outside/In perspective

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Paul Corney

I’ve long admired the work of Martin White on Information Governance, Intranets and Search and as Chairman of the Online Conference that used to be a must attend event at Olympia in December. I fondly recall a Hilton Hotel, Heathrow T4 meeting at the end of the 90’s between the two of us and Gerry McGovern in which we hammered out the components of an Intranet checklist. And the horror at finding the parking bill was nearly as expensive as a tank of petrol.

We go back a long way, have worked on a number of assignments together and I once gave the Keynote Speech for Intranet Focus at the inaugural Russian Intranet Forum in Moscow where David Gurteen ran his first Russian Knowledge Cafe.

Martin and I meet regularly. It’s one of the nicer aspects of working in alliance that you get to share ideas (within the bounds of confidentiality) with people you choose rather than those an organisation chooses for you. In the Summer we met a couple of times to review experiences in Legal Knowledge & Information Management. I’d just given the Keynote speech at KM Legal and written a blog post while Martin was in the midst of a new assignment writing a digital workplace strategy for a prominent law firm.

Legal is changing, is KIM ready?

Martin too had noticed changes in the way law firms were working. As we compared notes we became aware that some of the knowledge management, information management and project management approaches that we had been using for many years might be unfamiliar to law firms. We decided to validate our conclusions by talking to some of our contacts in law firms and among the comments we noted were:

“We are great at capturing, not so great at sharing, especially when it comes to knowledge about clients”
“Too many people think that writing a project plan is all that is needed to make a success of Legal Project Management”

A couple of hours on 4 key topics

We have decided to set up a meeting at which we could share some of our experience with senior knowledge and information managers working in law firms. Our Breakfast Breakout will take place in the Benjamin Franklin room at the Royal Society of Arts on 9 December. Starting at 9.00am (but with breakfast at 8.30am) we will be covering (amongst other topics)

Knowledge Loss & Knowledge Gain,
Legal Project Management,
Getting the best from firm/client virtual teams
Stakeholder Engagement and Management

We will be talking about Knowledge Chameleons, the “Balloon on a Phone” and WTGTGQ – When They Go They Go Quickly. There will also be a chance to benchmark your own situation, though the Chatham House Rule will apply throughout the meeting. With just ten working days to Christmas we’ll provide a relaxed setting, no PowerPoint presentations, a good breakfast and an opportunity to support the PlanZheros charity instead of paying for a ticket. You will be able to be back at your desks by 11.00. The room will be set out cabaret-style and we’ll be moving everyone around after the mid-way break to foster networking.

How to register

Registration details will be posted here, on Twitter @pauljcorney and @intranetfocus in the next few weeks.

Donations to a charity

It being Christmas we decided instead of asking attendees to contribute to the cost of the event we’d invite them to make a donation to the Plan Zheroes charity I am a founding Trustee of. So much is happening on that front and the next three months are critical, we need all the help we can get to launch our new web/mobile presence.

How to become smarter: turning knowledge into an asset

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Paul Corney

Last week my 86 year old mother fell over an uneven paving slab on her way back from the library. The swelling and bruising came out immediately and fortunately her wrist which took the impact of the fall wasn’t broken.

She was badly shaken up by the event and took to her bed as a result.

Living in a location where a good number of the 100k residents are past retirement age according to a 2013 article Seaside town first place in country with average age of more than 70 and with many suffering impaired vision I decided to report the incident in the hope that the pavement might be fixed qucikly.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover a facility built on a Google Maps platform for reporting damaged pavements on the local government website (in 8 languages) and a twitter feed for instant access. So far so good.

The automatic response to my filing (and picture) was likewise encouraging and included the phrase ‘we will investigate’ along with a reference so I could track the progress.

I wondered whether in the light of mother’s predicament what the process is for making a claim – she wasn’t going to, that’s not the way her generation are wired! On the face of it everything seems well managed (except the walkway) This paragraph (also from ESCC’s website) stood out:

Thinking of making a claim

Please consider the following points before you submit a claim. Making a claim can be a lengthy process and may not result in a pay-out. Any compensation is paid from public money so we will always be robust in our investigation of claims. The decision on liability will be based on the facts of each case and the law. Because of the legal defence available, on average, 70% of claims are unsuccessful.

The last sentence (my underlining) is instructive and made me ponder whether the use of the technology is for offensive or defensive purpose? Have we become such a litigious society that every corporate body feels compelled to get their retaliation in first and use social media as a broadcast and defensive mechanism not a collaborative platform?

I digress. Let’s be charitable and assume good intentions and applaud this as an example of good knowledge capture and retention. What we don’t as yet know is whether this will become a good example of how knowledge can be put to good effect and improve a process (or in this case fix something that isn’t working).

The concept of Knowledge Capture & Retention seems to be much in demand: I will have run 3 Masterclasses on the subject this year alone (next London event 18th November). And having just completed a 7th visit in 12 months with Ron Young of Knowledge Associates to an industrial/engineering client in the Middle East where small changes in processes can have a material impact on performance I know how important it is to have a process that turns what you have collected into valuable Knowledge that changes the way you work or the new product development processes you follow. If not you have a set of ‘lessons identified not lessons learned’.

So what’s the secret?

When Knowledge becomes an asset

Most organisations go down the Knowledge Capture route – they create buckets (increasingly in SharePoint) to store what they have captured to make sure that the best knowledge is available when a bid, a presentation or a decision is to be made. And that’s fine as far as it goes. Rarely do organisations add on the Knowledge Harvesting step. Here’s what that entails (drawn from Knowledge Associates’ 9 Step KM Process that acknowledges and builds on the original BP model of learning before, during & after):

Conduct a learning or After Action Review
At the end of that process ask the question does what we have discovered have the power to change/improve the way we (and those associated with us) work?
If the answer is yes then you have what is known as a Knowledge Nomination and these should be considered at a separate gathering.
Now convene, if you don’t have one as part of a Community of Practice, virtually or in person, a group of Subject Matter Experts with expertise on the process or way of working. Ask them to consider whether the Knowledge Nomination will improve our process and should be adopted.
If they agree then change the process. If they don’t then make sure you have captured the Knowledge Nomination and the reason for its rejection.

I have always believed that the purpose of Knowledge Management is to help organisations make better decisions and work more effectively. The simple steps I’ve outlined above should help in acheiving those objectives.

I wait now with interest to see the outcome of the saga of the loose paving slab. Will the outcome merely be a repaired section of pavement or will the team think about how this was caused and put in place measures to stop it happening next time?

On Portugal’s recovery: ‘Don’t compare us to Greece’

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Paul Corney

The Portuguese media has been awash with stories about attempts to renegotiate the terms of the bailout negotiated by the government with the international community (The Troika). After the Irish Finance Minister went public saying Portugal should honour its obligations as they had and not ‘do a Greece’ a senior politician from Lisbon came back with the above retort. It’s a sore subject; the Portuguese are a proud people with a history of meeting their obligations yet during 2 weeks talking to people in Porto, Lisbon and Faro I’ve come to realize just how precarious the recovery is.

Food, drink and the cost of living

Eating out is a national pastime; lunches are taken seriously and out of the office. Today an average 2 course meal for 2 with wine in Lisboa will set diners back €35-40. Sounds good? Compare that with the average weekly wage of €200 and then consider that Portugal now ‘enjoys’ some of the highest priced utilities in Europe (among top 5) and you get some idea of the shift in habits that is occurring.

The imposition of a 23% tax on eating out, on wine and even on golf have all taken their toll. Its no wonder there is a campaign for a minimum monthly wage of €600 and a reversal of the pension decrease the ruling party introduced when the austerity budget was introduced. For a great breakdown of the cost of living and interesting commentary see here: Cost of Living in Portugal

Wages and disposable income

In Portugal, people earn $24 384 per year on average, less than the OECD average of $34 466. Not everyone earns that amount however. Whereas the top 20% of the population earn $30 578 per year, the bottom 20% live on $13 056 per year.

Another essential factor of employment quality is job security. Employees working on temporary contracts are more vulnerable than workers with an open-ended contract. In Portugal, close to 9% of total employees have a contract of 6 months or less, slightly lower than the average of 10% for 30 OECD countries. This figure suggests Portugal has been successful in stabilising working contracts and encouraging open-ended contracts.

Stealth taxes and the road toll debacle

Hiring a car is easy, even if the companies now rival Ryanair in dreaming up additional must have extras, using the road toll system is not. For a start the hire company will try and ‘sell’ use of a tracking device that charges the car for using any autoroute subject to a toll charge. If you refuse their tempting offer then a labyrinthine process awaits when you come to settle your tolls involving numerous trips to the Post Office most of whom are oblivious to their new responsibilities. And the galling thing: it is virtually impossible to turn around and leave the autoroute!

Three days on we still don’t know how much we owe for the first part of the Faro-Lisbon trip and we’ve been out of the country since Saturday!

The black economy

A friend who knows about such matters told me that up to 40% of trade is conducted outside of official channels. Restaurants and indeed the open top bus companies are reluctant to process credit card transactions to avoid tax – many have signs that notify you in advance and those that do not are often ok with you going back to pay later. It’s a situation many travelers will find uncomfortable.

Roll back the frontiers of the state

‘It won’t work if it’s legal’ was one chilling indictment of the authorities’ efforts to promote new ideas. Wading through treacle is how to best describe the insidious intervention of the state in an attempt to seize revenue from whichever source it can.

The most recent example is the edict by which all houses must put white posts up to signify the boundaries of their property. And of course everyone will pay for the privilege of registering his or her ‘new’ boundaries!

Barbarians at the gate

Real estate has bottomed and in Lisbon / the Lisbon coast a slight rise is being fuelled by overseas buyers from China and Russia perhaps prompted by the policy whereby rich individuals can purchase a visa permitting access to the rest of the EU.

This from CNN Money

Portugal has been offering these deals for just over a year. Foreigners receive a residency permit when they invest €500,000 in property. After five years, they can apply for permanent residency, and EU citizenship one year later. Portugal is also trading visas to those who inject capital or create jobs in the country — similar to the U.S. immigrant investor program, which requires a minimum spend of $500,000. Like those on offer in Spain, the Portuguese visas grant access to the Schengen area, which includes the bulk of the EU but not the U.K.

Official figures show more than 330 visas have been issued in the first 12 months of the program, raising €225 million.

And yet

The eternal frustration among the chattering classes I met is that the country’s promotional activities are too low key. Two examples: I had no knowledge at all about the Portuguese Army’s involvement alongside the Allies in Belgium in WW1. In reading an excellent account (balagan timeline) of their involvement I was amused to see this quote: ‘…The Portuguese soldiers hated the British rations…’ and; I was also unaware as were most I spoke to that Foreign Pensioners can reside and collect their retirement pensions in Portugal entirely tax free. Portugal has launched an aggressive measure to attract affluent worldwide pensioners to come and reside in Portugal. The lure is zero tax on such pensions.

In addition to these tax incentives Portugal has:

great food, a great climate, wonderful architecture and superb scenery;
great roads with no one on them;
really talented people with ideas and imagination;
it costs less (17% of disposable income) to keep a roof over your head there than elsewhere in the OECD (21%)

But:

there is a lack of industrial manufacturing;
35% of under 25’s have no job and many are leaving and perhaps most seriously;
there is a cadre of middle managers aged 45-60 who are in entrenched positions across the government and block ideas and the career prospects of others and;
there is a complete lack of trust in the political parties and politicians and a general view that the increased taxation is choking growth.

in summary:

Portugal will pull through, of that I’ve no doubt. There are signs of recovery and despite the national mood (which a good performance by the national team at the World Cup will lift) this period of readjustment was probably needed.

Habits are changing, as an illustration the biggest growth market appears to be in building and running residential homes for the elderly something that surprised me.

‘Nothing has changed and yet everything is different’: 10 observations from a special event at CILIP

Image

Yesterday I was at a special invitation summit to discuss the future direction of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals. CILIP is undergoing a fairly dramatic repositioning under new CEO Annie Mauger and this was the first of a couple of attempts to broaden the debate with a wider constituency.

It was well organised (and run) by Martin White and Sandra Ward, two people whose names are synonymous with the words ‘Information’ and ‘management’, and whose best efforts had persuaded many thought leaders in the Information Management space to attend. Attendees were asked not to tweet and to follow The Chatham House Rule that states:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed’

So (as a member of Chatham House and compelled to comply) here are my observations aided by a couple of pictures and slides published with the speakers permission.

10 observations:

‘Nothing has changed and yet everything is different’. Jean-Paul Sartre’s quote is apposite: 20 years on since my colleagues and I at Saudi International Bank were creating a one screen view of what we knew about a client (the forerunner of an intranet / CRM system) I suggest that despite all the gismos (technical advances) senior executives are still looking for reliable trustworthy information/intelligence – the synopsis they can trust, from people they trust. And don’t want to do self searching to find it. At the closing a wonderful story was told about a senior executive who has a team that provide abridged briefing notes and expected outcomes (in his native language) for every meeting.

People are still the important navigational hub and their knowledge networks vital. When they go their knowledge (and their networks) go with them. HM Government Knowledge & Information Strategy will make clear the importance of people and the public as the client and it will recognise that ‘who we know’ is as important as ‘what we know’ hence the investment in a Knowledge Harvesting Toolkit for KIM professionals (and training on Knowledge Capture & Retention).

We want measurements! Stories that amplify events and justification for Information and Knowledge team activity are hugely important but must be accompanied by statistics and measures which accounts in part for the increased call in the Public Sector for inventories of information and knowledge assets. In a world of data half a page of stats supported by a story is more powerful than two pages of prose.

We want certification! East, North and South of Istanbul there is a huge demand for education and certification. Competency management is king and certificates from accredited organisations a way of enhancing career prospects. West of Istanbul people (especially the young) are just happy to be in a job and employers are increasingly demanding new entrants to be more self aware.

Apps are the future, websites are the past: Perhaps driven by a healthy scepticism of advertising and brochure ware websites dynamic content is key. This is presenting a challenge to the information industry who need to be more proactive in saying ‘read this and here’s why’. Ask yourself when did you last go to a corporate website and believe what it said – buying decisions are being driven by recommendations of people (and organisations) YOU trust. And Apps are making the process smoother as mobile replaces pc’s and tablets, laptops.

Fear is driving (in)action / lack of collaboration: the financial services industry has taken a bashing and the regulators are all over them extolling the virtues of a change in culture and trying to audit whether they have. Chinese Walls are getting higher so no Yammer or Jive to cross fertilise ideas and clients and silos will get more pronounced. In the Public Sector the rise of the SIRO (Senior Information RIsk Officer) as a board member suggests a greater and more visible role is emerging where risk aversion becomes a major driver of decisions.

Organisations are becoming hermetically sealed bubbles virtually impenetrable to anyone who is not of the same size. It used to be accepted doctrine that ‘no one got fired for hiring IBM’, now the same applies with big consultancy firms. A vivid illustration was given: despite agreeing the scope of work with the client, being the best qualified and most experienced, formal sign off was not forthcoming for this internationally renowned consultant because ‘he is not …’ (three letters)!

Modular competency acquisition the way forward/ Facilitation key: Many of the speakers and delegates commented on the need to be good at getting others to work well and be opportunistic. A role where the KIM professional, briefs, analyses and introduces, new processes, systems and ways of working. The idea of a modular incremental approach to competency development was lauded, perhaps in conjunction with business schools and Universities. As was the new CILIP Professional Knowledge and Skills Base, that the UK Government’s Head of KIM has been a strong supporter of.

KIM is here to stay: It was a common theme – KM especially is back (even if there is still ambiguity over what it is – especially in the North West). This from John Quinn is lovely, a quote from a report in 1894 on the Department for Education’s use of knowledge:

…failing to record the knowledge it obtains for future use and unable to obtain information as to what is being done elsewhere either at home or abroad…’

To finish, a quote, from award winning Clive Holtham celebrating 25 years as one of the few to hold a Professor of Information Management title, ‘technology brings no competitive advantage’ – its an essential underpinning (my addition). Here’s Clive and his Intelligent Exploiter Framework – note the importance of ‘Mindset’.

And finally

Check out Full Fact a non profit making group that specialises in independent fact checking. Despite a bit of a spat with UK Column a year back it has become a must go to site to check the veracitiy of ‘facts’ and ‘stats’ that appear in the media and emanate from the mouths of our politicians. Will Moy’s BBC Question Time piece ‘Will you point out when panellists are lying?’ is worth a read and his stories given a hearing.

My chairman’s presentation looking at a decade of KMUK: the importance of managing for serendipity

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Paul Corney

It took me a while to think about what I was going to say to the first full house KMUK has enjoyed for many years as I detect a palpable sense of excitement among the organisers.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been at Social Business events in Lisbon and London and came away feeling that the phenomenal adoption of collaborative social technologies and the clever use of Big Data has the propensity to fuel the resurgence of Knowledge Management.

We live in a world now where: Philips have the ability to log when any light bulb is being switched on and where; testimonials and consumer recommendations (on sites such as Trip Advisor) are the most trusted form of advertising & marketing; the art of sales is about a long tail engagement (consumers publicly telling family and friends what they’ve done and bought); and in effect, performance improvements come from making the invisible visible. All of these characteristics are likely to be found in a knowledge driven organisation.

Its reaffirmed in my mind: the importance of personal contact and facilitation; a need to be clear about why this critical knowledge ‘stuff’ is being captured and harvested; the importance of the right environment (and culture); and the idea of focusing on Ambassadors / Champions especially in global organisations.

the address

Good morning and welcome to the 10^th anniversary event of KMUK. I said in the event flyer that I thought there was a stellar speaker line up with MAKE winners and some of the most influential thought leaders in the Knowledge Management space.

Over the next two days you are also going to have the opportunity of spending time with your peers as well as engaging directly with the speakers in the breaks and at the speaker clinics. And for the first time at KMUK the opening Keynote will have two carefully selected respondents.

It promises to be an interesting and stimulating two days: a number of the speakers will be using KMUK as the launch event for ideas, techniques and groundbreaking partnerships.

There is a twitter hash tag KMUK and Ark will be consolidating all of the tweets into a Storify record of the event.

Back to 2003

It being the 10th anniversary, I want to take you back a decade to the last KM Europe held in the UK at Alexandra Palace in 2003. Many people wrote blog posts about the keynote speech. I’ve selected a few quotes:

…much of our current knowledge management practice is being locked into content management,
…we are all engaged in a constant process of sense-making, where we try to find the best available explanation for something based on previous experience rather than the perfect logical solution. This is why he favours “narrative management” and story-telling as more appropriate vehicles for knowledge sharing than replicating best practice
Conventional Knowledge Management has been too concerned with codifying explicit knowledge to aid replication, and with using categorisation (where we construct data around a framework), rather than exploration (where we construct frameworks around the data).
innovation springs from emergence in complex systems, which means that we should be “managing for serendipity” by creating the conditions for creative innovation to emerge.

Again it’s worth returning to what was said back in 2003

Too many people focus on managing knowledge rather than managing the channels through which knowledge flows. Just connecting or linking people can be a major knowledge management activity.
… new tools now allow us to telescope five to six years of social networking down to five or six weeks, albeit with less density. Such programmes aim to create linkages where no linkage currently exists and are particularly useful during re-organisations and activities such as merger and acquisition.
Attempts to engineer a network through design and allocation of staff to groups generally fail as they create artificial relationships that are not sustainable. Self selecting social network stimulation replicates, but in a shorted timescale, a natural process.

At that event horizontal km software vendors were much in evidence as they had been at all of the previous ones.

Intranets were into their 2^nd wave, people were struggling with enterprise search, decentralized publishing and SharePoint, some 2 years on from its launch, was competing with other document management systems and had yet to achieve the ubiquitous enterprise status it has today wherein in many in senior management say ‘we do km, we have SharePoint!’

Android Inc was being founded and would become the largest mobile operating system inside a decade mirroring the dramatic growth of mobile smart phones.

WordPress too was launched bringing self-publishing to the masses. It has recently been the beneficiary of an exodus from Tumblr following its acquisition by Yahoo – more of them and Marissa Meyer later.

IBM were undertaking a 72 hours ValuesJam, for all employees in a debate about the very nature of the company and what it stood for.
The 2^nd Gurteeen Knowledge Management conference was taking place – its themes: ‘knowledge, networking and communities’. And it was all about conversation. One delegate’s key soundbite: “Knowledge is not something you keep in your head, it’s a behaviour”’
In 2003 the book Knowledge Asset Management was published. It recognized critical knowledge as an asset to be nurtured.
Also that year my colleagues and I at Sparknow were using the traditional techniques of a postcard as a prompt to ask delegates at KM Europe about their work spaces and what the new virtual world would do to the traditional office and ways of working. We collected but never published a number of very insightful comments.

when space matters – looking at workspace

So since in my view workspace (physical and virtual) plays a critical role in all things Knowledge Management we decided to repeat the exercise a decade on and asked the speakers if they’d take first stab at answering the same half a dozen questions.

I’ve collated their responses and contrasted them with some of those we had in 2002/3. The report is available on line along with the conference proceedings. It would be great if you could add to the body of work by filling in your own and putting them up on the wall.

KMUK 2013

Social vs. Knowledge Management

You are going to hear a lot about community, collaboration, culture and change. Also context, champions, conversation and communication. Your challenge over the next two days is to work out when and how to harness the array of social tools and use them in context/ tandem with other initiatives. Here’s a really interesting and recent extract from a Gartner blog post:

Knowledge management is what the company tells me I need to know based on what they think is important.
Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important based on their experience in a way that I can judge for myself

Knowledge should be like water — free flowing and permeating down and across your organization filling the cracks, floating good ideas to the top, lifting everyone in the organization.

Knowledge management, in practice, reflects a hierarchical view of knowledge to match the hierarchical view of the organization. Knowledge may originate anywhere in the organization, but under knowledge management it is channeled and gathered together in a knowledge base (cistern) where it is distributed based on a predefined set of channels, processes and protocols.

Social media looks chaotic in comparison. There is no predefined index, no prequalified knowledge creators, no knowledge managers, ostensibly little to no structure.

Where an organization has a roof, gutters and cistern to capture knowledge, a social media organization has no roof allowing the rain to fall directly into the house collecting in puddles wherever they happen to form. That can be quite messy and organizations abhor a mess.

Last week I was an invited guest at the Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit. A month previously I’d been helping to run a similar event in Lisbon at which social vendors presented their wares to a fictitious company.

Both events threw up so many crossover points with Knowledge Management and I shared a number of the tweets on the #KMUK twitter site. Here are a few sound bites to reflect on as you are thinking about it

Social interaction accounts for 50% of the performance of the team We are now consuming more content generated by each other than generated by media companies

Brands are a natural community of people identifying with each other, with a shared set of belief /Advocates are the ‘tribe’ who need motivation/incentives. – Employees are the most important and need empowering to do so

social helps to drive savings where knowledge management comes in’

The two that stood out for me and reappear as a theme this afternoon

A dead sale is one that’s not shared. People must be incentivized to share.
Who can add value to the data? Data will tend to migrate to where it will be most effective.

Paul J Corney

For KMUK June 2013

knowledge et al

when the journey is as important as the destination

Category Archives: Business Issues (Strategic)