Knowledge Management Evolves – Asking Mary Abraham How to Pan for Gold with Knowledge Sharing

27
Jun
2012

Christy Burke

Knowledge Management or “KM” has always been a term that seemed hard to get a handle on, so I decided to talk to Mary Abraham, Counsel in Debevoise & Plimpton LLP’s corporate department, whose primary function is to provide KM support to the firm’s US-law corporate and tax practices.  Mary describes her job as helping to bring the learning of the firm together so no one has to reinvent the wheel.  If two practices within the firm are tackling similar issues, she can help synthesize and share the learning so both practices benefit from each other’s knowledge more efficiently.

Evaluating The KM 1.0 Approach

Historically, the KM professional’s role has centered on compiling massive databases or document collections to make information widely available to the firm.  Originally this was done through paper form files, but has shifted to a variety of shared electronic resources. Mary refers to this approach as “KM 1.0.”

The dilemma with KM 1.0 is that these collections are hard to build and even harder to keep current.  Lawyers have the knowledge that would be valuable for the KM collection, but don’t always have the time to document their knowledge for the collection.  Further, when you extract and standardize knowledge it sometimes becomes so removed from its original context that you run the risk of making it too generic.  This can be a problem because in a sophisticated legal practice, one size rarely fits all.

Mary cites Dave Snowden’s 7 Principles of KM as important considerations for KM professionals because these principles help explain why the KM 1.0 approach is limited.  Two of Snowden’s principles are:

• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
• We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.

So if attempts to extract and document expert knowledge too often result in knowledge resources that are incomplete or out of date, then what next? KM needs to find faster and better ways to get at the real gold that lies in the proverbial law firm riverbeds.

KM 2.0  - Unearthing the Gold with a Better Knowledge-Sharing Approach
Enter KM 2.0 – a new approach that builds on KM 1.0’s strengths but aims to catalyze a rich flow of information within an organization so panning for the gold nuggets of knowledge will be more successful. KM 2.0 focuses more on activity streams rather than archives, conversations and collaboration rather than formal collections. With KM 2.0, the role of the knowledge manager is more of a facilitator rather than an archivist.  The KM 1.0 professional asks, “What things should we store now because they might be helpful to someone someday?”  (Without a crystal ball, that can be a hard question to answer with much certainty.)  By contrast, the KM 2.0 professional asks, “How do we create opportunities and systems that allow the experts to share their knowledge without disrupting the flow of their work?”  New methods of online communication can be coupled with face-to-face communication and leveraged to facilitate knowledge sharing among legal professionals – it’s both an art and a science.

New social technology provides many useful resources to help KM professionals foster communication and collaboration among the knowledge creators within a law firm.  Enterprise search tools, mashups, social intranets and portals, Wikis, blogs and micro-blogs, IM, RSS feeds and activity streams, linking and tagging, telepresence and video are all useful in sharing not only the polished client-facing pearls of wisdom, but also the water cooler conversations, helpful advice from one colleague to another, and individually-developed innovations and intuitions that might not be mentioned in more formal settings, but could lead a colleague to an epiphany.

KM 2.0 is built on the principle of making the network smarter and, thereby, enriching the knowledge of the individuals within that network.  KM 2.0 does this by aggregating and surfacing appropriately individual contributions within a law firm, and then giving each person in the firm access to the benefits of the resulting smarter network.  While one-on-one conversations can be very helpful, they do not scale across a large organization -- only networked systems can.  Given the pace of work, innovation and online communication, professionals must realize that they cannot do everything alone.  Now more than ever, working collaboratively makes sense and KM 2.0 can help. When done right, knowledge flows freely like a river and the gold can then be captured for the benefit of the entire firm and its clients.