KM and the country...

Two summers ago I was up on the mountain in this picture drinking water directly from the rock it originates from. In winter it looks like it does on this picture I took last week and getting up there would be a question of serious equipment or willpower.

I decided to come back to the countryside as it is a good way to avoid the busy New Year celebrations in Vienna, where around a million people are expected to roam the streets, drinking and behaving badly.

Here, everything is peaceful, no artificial sounds or lights. Only my neck hurts, from looking at the stars for too long :-)

Have you ever tried explaining to a farmer what knowledge management is? I tried this with the neighbours here because they insisted several times on wanting to know what I do and they now think I am a madman locked up in an office during daytime with no tangible positive contribution to society. Nice.

The neighbour's last job related question was: "So, once you have captured all that knowledge, can you then replace trained lawyers with high-school drop-outs?" I guess he got the point that KM also means deskilling. Call centres have shown us the way how to deskill people and thinking about it, I am actually quite impressed that the process is already that far advanced with lawyers.

And, one final note on the countryside: I dont know where I heard this first, but I just love this one: "You can take a boy out of the country but you can never take the country out of a boy."

Thank you for your interest in my thesis

Before Joy London blogged about my thesis I was able to respond all emailed requests for my thesis individually, now I work with a list. Thanks Joy :-)

If you havent received my response with the document attached as yet, it is either because your mailbox rejected it as a too large attachment (sorry I had to reinstall my computer and cant find my Acrobat CD) or because I messed it up (please email me again). I will buy some empty CDs when I am back in Vienna and send you my thesis if I saw it rejected this time and if you have included your address.

Anyways, thank you, I was overwhelmed by this and I enjoy that... I put a lot of effort into my thesis and it makes the whole idea worthwile when people actually ask for it. I am glad I was too stupid to make it a smaller file and upload it as otherwise I would not have had this experience. Thank you!

Austria is just so beautiful in winter...

Call it Christmas, a Pagan tradition or simply tradition, it remains a great reason for seeing a lot of familiy members and spend quality time with them in places far away from busy cities...

Impact of Knowledge Management on Law Firm Performance

Anyone who is interested in my PhD thesis titled "Impact of Knowledge Management on Law Firm Performance - An Investigation of Causality across Cultures" is most welcome to drop me an email and I shall email it to you in pdf format (it is still a 7 MB document, which is why blogger and my webspace refuse it as a single upload)...

There are quite a few things I think that could be of value for anyone in the legal KM environment, who ever had questions along the lines of:

1. Is KM really worth it or should we simply introduce a few pieces of software?
2. How can KM drive fee income?
3. Which features or services labelled KM have an influence on fee income?
4. How can knowledge sharing be incentivized across different regions and levels of tenure?

With my thesis I walked a thin line between a high level performance view and not omitting relevant context and detail. I think it very clearly explains the value contribution of KM in law firms and how this can be steered.

Comments of any nature are most welcome. Here is the abstract for starters:

It is a management truism that you cannot manage what you cannot measure.

To manage knowledge effectively organisations need to understand how to measure their knowledge management performance against organisational goals.

The case study organisation has developed a balanced scorecard, which is used to monitor key drivers for performance within the remit of the knowledge management function, thereby aiming to improve the delivery of value adding services.

The set of cause and effect relationships at the heart of the scorecard - referred to as the success map – is at the core of this research, which aims to investigate if the link between managing knowledge and financial performance really exists and – if it does – how it can be influenced.

By means of analytical methods including regression, correlation and semi-structured interviews the existence of this link is supported by evidence and the success map updated to reflect the relationships among key performance drivers that were positively identified as relevant. The outcome is a model for managing knowledge that can be applied to professional service firms or comparable organisations that are highly dependant on knowledge.

In relation to this model, cultural variations were investigated and found to significantly influence the relevant performance drivers in several regions and countries across the case study organisation. Ignoring these cultural variations was found to carry the risk to base action on deceitful insights.

In addition to this, the analysis of the survey also gave a clear indication of how to
foster knowledge sharing among lawyers of different nationality and levels of seniority.

This thesis provides the empirical evidence for a link between knowledge management and organisational performance.

People are not "nice" enough for social tagging...

A very comprehensive article on the pros and cons of folksonomies can be found on InfoTangle. Ellyssa Kroski concludes that resistance is futile to the wisdom of crowds, even though there are several issues with folksonomies, such as no synonym control, lack of precision and hierarchy as well as lack of recall. The one I consider the most serious issue is Ellyssa's final point on folksonomies being susceptible to “gaming”:

"Gaming is similar to spamming and involves an unethical user who propagates links, or in this case, tags in order to corrupt a system. The Blocklevel blog raises a valid point that “malicious users can purposely pollute the “Tag Sphere” by tagging every bit of content with every possible tag – effectively spamming the system. This is definitely a possibility with user-based tagging systems. Although popularized by invoking a spirit of cooperation among users, folksonomies are vulnerable as there are always those who don’t play nice with others."

Those who don't play nice with others are what I consider the biggest issue and Wikipedia is where I experienced this myself. The lesson I learned there is that users with plenty of time on hands eventually end up having most authority, no matter what the quality of their entries or deletions is. If you have the time and will to simply delete anything anyone else puts on a page you consider "yours", it is difficult to counter that. So, as bad as this sounds, I am very pleased to read that Wikipedia has finally had a high profile problem that might eventually lead to improved rules and regulations making destructive behaviour more difficult. Have a look at this article titled "There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility'" to find out more about how Wikipedia countered the danger of a potential libel suit.

Oversimplifying this I think it comes down to the same old story: People are just not nice enough to fulfill the promises of concepts based on the prerequisite of people being nice. Take Communism, the Christian Bible or any other concept that did a lot of harm even though it had the best of intentions. Why should people suddenly be nice online if they have never been nice enough offline in the first place?

Anyways, I hope that Wikipedia and other pioneers of social tagging will find ways to deal with these sorts of issues. I am always impressed how quickly things become controversial on social tagging based websites. As a picture says more than 1000 words, I think flickr.com still has the most elegant way of sorting out controversies - the "most interesting" function. Try most interesting George Bush pictures on flickr.com for starters to find out more about the political mood on flickr.com...

The great divide on KM

One more sign on the KM divide between the US and Europe: Martin Dugage quotes Richard McDermott who plans to open an office in London "because he expects business around communities of practice to grow more in Europe than in the US". Impressions from my personal KM network suggest this for KM in general. While jobs are axed in the US and KM departments are shrinking, the complete opposite happens in the UK: New roles are being created and KM is becoming a natural way of doing business for law firms. Even relatively small firms can now be seen to recruit KM staff or send their staff to KM conferences and seminars.

In the same posting quoted above there is more interesting stuff by Richard McDermott:

I guess that the human mind sets the limits of the connectivity we can afford. It is physically impossible to know more than a few thousand people, and it looks like we cannot have ongoing relationships with more than 150 people (Dunbar's number) at any given time of our lives. So I guess that we all need to be very selective in the way we choose our connections, and review regularly our social network to adapt it to our activities of the moment. In a business setting, it is probably advisable to keep connections alive with people who are themselves well connected to other communities we don't know too well.

Dunbar's number reminded me that I need to find out who borrowed the book "The Tipping Point" off me as I had borrowed it from someone else and was recently told to return it...

From this year's Malcolm Gladwell book "Blink" the one thing that really stuck with me was the Implicit Association Test, something I strongly recommend anyone to try, especially those among you who consider themselves above the rest in their level of self control and ability to deal politically correct with any given situation... From the test website:

Psychologists understand that people may not say what's on their minds either because they are unwilling or because they are unable to do so.

Got hooked on flickr.com

This cold winter weekend I stayed in ... and got hooked on flickr.com
I uploaded more than 50 photos I made during 2005 and I browsed through so many fine pics of other people. Initially, on this blog I tried to put up some of my pictures, but the entire procedure of changing the size, uploading, linking etc. just became too annoying. Flickr.com solved this for me very nicely.



The tagging behind flickr is entirely user created and it is interesting to see some German terms coming through the tag cloud of English language tags. Even the language issue is taken care of naturally, so I decided to mix my tags just as I like.

Have a go and browse around but be careful if your are prone to various types of addictions, this could take over your day very quickly...

How knowledge management can help firms steer clear of trouble

The annual American Lawyer survey is out and the results - while confident and positive - point out some troubles ahead for which I believe knowledge management could be a suitable treatment for:

"Firms complain bitterly that these young lawyers are leaving before the firms can fully recoup their investments in them. They have no one to blame but themselves. The profitability model is built on churn."

KM can bring young lawyers up to speed quicker thereby achieving returns on human capital investments earlier. I agree with Linda Tsang: "There is no point (...) in creating a knowledge management system that is a university for trainees." But it will help those joining fresh from uni understanding house style better and simply allow them seeing law in action.

Bruce MacEwen comments on the notion of the "profitability model is built on churn": "The associates know that as well as you do. They're "infantry fodder," and the partners' munificent compensation intrinsically depends on washing out as many associates as possible, stopping just short of completely and utterly blowing up the potential-partnership-carrot."

"Cutting through all the chatter, what this comes down to is a struggle between firms and associates over who gets to decide when the kids will leave."

KM can make their lives easier, maybe incentivizing the "kids" to stay. And if they dont, at least their knowledge stays with the organisation. Or at least more of their knowledge than there would stay with the organisation without KM.

I know this comes at the danger of repeating myself, but I truly believe KM needs to be seen as much more than just organising information...

The value of attention

I was looking for information on the purchase of FeedDemon by Newsgator (I know this does not make me look like "Mr. Current Affairs" as this happened back in May). Anyways, via Nick Bradbury's blog I stumbled upon the AttentionTrust.org, whose purpose I did not understand from their website but through talking with talis:

...they encapsulate the notion that the record of the things I visit, look at, listen to, buy, or otherwise engage with - the things to which I give my attention - is mine. At present, parts of that information flow or 'click stream' are locked away within the systems of e-Commerce companies, and used by them to deliver the recommendation-style services found on Amazon and similar sites. Other parts of the click stream are stored elsewhere for various purposes, and significant elements of it are simply never stored at all in any coherent fashion.

Little, if any, of it is available to the user in any structured fashion. It is impossible to easily migrate buying habits from one online bookstore into another. It is also not feasible to intelligently combine an individual's library borrowing habits with book purchasing information, or to amalgamate previous travel preferences from travel agent, hotel, airline and car rental company systems.

Yet, AttentionTrust would argue, the content of that click stream belongs (at least in part) to the individual, and it should be for them to make informed decisions as to the ways in which the data are shared and combined by various third parties.

It is further suggested that an individual's attention data has an economic value, and that we might choose to share data with third parties in order to receive more relevant recommendations, discounts on future transactions, and more.

As Ed mentions in our conversation, the potential value of attention data is not only to large commercial organisations that wish to entice us with more targeted services. A free flow of attention data might also facilitate more effective communities of interest, such as those around particular books, authors, pastimes, or academic subjects.

This is certainly an interesting concept. While on the business side this is collected like there is no tomorrow, equipping individuals sounds like a good idea to me.

Last week I spoke to a consultant to the tourism industry, who told me that they have their analysts working on 900 types of user generated data to improve their web services. These 900 entries incude everything from time between clicks to all the usual and unusual data one can think of. She explained to me that within 5 minutes on their website, 30% of the 900 entries are generated from the logfile and once the customer has actually booked a stay or a flight, 95% of the 900 entries are established. The (incedibly large) database is then analysed by statistical means and she claimed this has over six months time raised online bookings by 4% above the adjusted and benchmarked levels of last year. All in all this is a good example what attention is really worth...

The last sentence in the quote above on more effective communities of practice reminded me of the Xpertfinder by Fraunhofer. I was quite fond of the concept when I heard about it a few years ago and I am not sure why it never took off, but maybe the notion of an automated expert identification system based on scanning information flows was too threatening or unclear in terms of data protection laws and employee rights.

In other news: one expression I learned today: Bubble 2.0