Experience Management - Case Studies in Tackling a Difficult Challenge

A request frequently made of KM or IS professionals in law firms is to implement a way to efficiently track and report the experience of individual attorneys.  Doing this can help both sell work and deliver work.  However, experience management has proven surprisingly difficult.  Just defining the type of work to be tracked can pose a stumbling block, as it can be tough to find the "just right" level of detail between the "too broad" and "too narrow."  This panel explores ways to manage law firm experience through case studies from firms who have made good progress. Each panelist will discuss the business challenge they faced, the tool they built or adapted to address it, the processes they deployed to ensure good tracking and reporting and the results realized.

Speakers:

• Kathrine Cain, Winston & Strawn
• Stan Wasylyk, Michael Farrell Group, Ltd.
• Doug Cornelius, Goodwin Procter LLP
  

My Notes:

Since I am speaking, my notes are sparse.  It looks like David Hobbie of Caselines and LawyerKM are in the audience and hopefully taking notes they will share.

To start the project, a small knowledge audit is in order. You need to assess where the information lives and what information is missing. You also need to figure out who controls the information and who need the information. Then you also need to figure out how the information is being used and how people want to use the information.

Kate spent a fair amount of her time establishing a taxonomy and vocabulary to identify expertise.  To pull this off, they were organizationally agnostic and separate from compensation analysis.

Stan focused on his experience establishing a platform for Foley & Lardner.  There focus was initially on staffing. They wanted a better way to get associates staffed on matters.  They wanted to avoid partners controlling a stable of associates, they wanted to improve associated development.

One problem was that the needed information was held in separate silos, often controlled by different groups in the firm.

They started with an off the shelf product called Maven PSA.

The end result looks very similar in substance and approach to Goodwin Procter's iStaff application that I am speaking about after Stan.

One of the challenges of experience management is identifying expertise.  With most systems that we have seen with self-rating expertise, experts tend to say they don't know anything and those with the least skill tend to say that they are experts at everything. 

Download the session materials.

UPDATE:

• David Hobbie's blog post on the panel from Caselines: Experience Management.
• LawyerKM's blog post on the panel: Experience Management - Case Studies in Tackling a Difficult Challenge
  

My ILTA Schedule

Lifestream - Aggregating Youself

As social media is spreading and as I am using more social media tools, I find that the information about me is being spread across more and more sites. Of course one of of the great things about most "2.0 tools" is that they allow you to easily manipulate the information.

I created a lifestream using Yahoo Pipes:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/dougcornelius/lifestream

Shortly after putting that together I ran into Friend Feed:
http://friendfeed.com/dougcornelius

I am recombining the feeds from several sites into one more comprehensive stream. Anyone who is interested can see a large swath of what I am writing about, what I am doing and what I am thinking about.

Now translate this to a use inside the enterprise. It is possible to pull disparate communication and authorship from a particular person and display that information in one place inside the enterprise. You can combine someone's internal blog, external blog, internal postings, internal tagging, external tagging and other sources and create a dynamic profile of that person. If you then store that "story" as it grows, you are creating a searchable repository of experience, expertise and interest for that person.

Currently, my friendfeed and lifestream are both pulling together information I add from:

• KM Space
• Real Estate Space
• Twitter for dougcornelius
• Shared Items from Doug's Google Reader
  
• Del.icio.us bookmarks for Doug Cornelius

Of course, like any good "2.0" tool, my friendfeed and lifestream each have a separate RSS feed that you can subscribe to or easily publish.

Managing Social Networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Eric Charran published his whitepaper on: Managing social networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The whitepaper points out a few ways that SharePoint can be used to expose more information about a person inside the firm. It does not provide the level of interaction or a flow information as powerful as Facebook.

SharePoint does provide a nice platform for exposing more information about the person by pulling information from multiple systems. In particular, I think the use of the techniques and tools discussed in the whitepaper can be used to exposed internal expertise.

Saying No To Facebook?

Bill Gates, after paying $240 million for a 1.6% interest in Facebook, has decided to stop using the website for his own profile: Bill Gates is off his Facebook. Thomas Wailgum, the Editor of CIO, has adopted the same philosophy: Bill Gates and I Both Say No to Facebook.

Unless you are as famous as Bill Gates, then his alleged abandonment of Facebook should not be a reason for you think less of it. According to the story, Mr. Gates was getting 8,000 friend requests a day. By comparison, my favorite voice on NPR, Carl Kasell has less than 4,000 friends. Bill Gates is getting twice that number each day.

Unless you are a famous celebrity, Facebook is a great way to stay connected with people you know. This power is especially amplified by Facebook's ability to pull information from other sources. For example, the blog posts from this blog, the posts from my Real Estate Space blawg and my shared items from Google Reader all get pushed into my Facebook profile (and then to my friends) without me having to go into Facebook. My status updates largely come from my Twitter updates.

The Facebook platform is a great model for knowledge management, especially for expertise location. It is pulling information from various sources and compiling it in one place. You get a pretty full picture of my background and expertise from my Facebook profile. I find this to be a great model for designing an internal expertise system on our intranet.

Expertise Management

Arjun Thomas, of Gridlock, put together a list of processes for a basic expertise management system in Expertise Management:

• Identify the experts


• Describe the expertise of the expert


• Provide an expert matching mechanism


• Enable users to communicate with the experts


• Provide a feedback mechanism


• Manage the process

The problem I run into is getting the description of the expertise. If you rely on the users to supply their own expertise, you end up mostly with missing information and exaggerations.

Automated systems, like Microsoft's Knowledge Network, seem to work better for the oddball items. The automation has trouble distinguishing among the types of expertise within the organization. It is much easier for me to find some one with information on "arms dealing" than it is to find the best person to talk about "securities litigation."

My ideal expertise system would start with an automated system, that layers in the persons marketing bio, and a manual control on top to enhance and clarify the expertise. I just have not seen a system that does this.