I’ve been working for a bank recently, and the change has been refreshing.  Not least, because it’s the first time I’ve worked in Canary Wharf (as opposed to “the city”).  The slightly longer commute actually saves me having to go to the gym as I can run home along the Regent’s Canal.

This recent exposure to life outside law firms has provided a stark contrast as to how things get done, which got me thinking.  My experience and the experience of friends who work in law firms indicates that projects and plans take a long time to execute.  Simply getting a project up and running can take months.

By way of comparison, my current project has only been on the books for a short time.  Internal bureaucracy is squashed, decisions are taken and progress is made on a daily basis.  The bank has well over 100,000 employees, easily more than the combined sum of the employees of the top 10 UK law firms.

Is that lack of agility a problem?  I’d love to say it is and predict impending doom.  The fact is I don’t know.  Whether legal partnerships will ever compete with a corporate-style firm for complex legal work seems unlikely to me, regardless of regulatory changes.

What I do know is that it’s remarkably more satisfying to work in an environment where one’s own brain is the bottleneck as opposed to the inner machinations of one’s firm, and that means it will continue to be challenging for firms to keep the high-performers within their back-office.

I’ve resisted adopting Windows Vista since it launched.  Not because I hate Microsoft (in my view they have the best development tools, period) and not because of bad press.

It’s more a case that I have no need.  Windows XP works great.  A Vistal OS would require additional memory, CPU power for any perceived benefits.

A pretty interface isn’t worth the system slowdown.  Not for me anyways.

I’m currently on a job where I’m using a laptop running Vista.  Worried about performance I pared back many of the visual settings.  Result?  Looks pretty much exactly like WinXP, but with one big downside… it doesn’t work like XP.

Case in point.  Windows explorer is now much more complicated to use.  I can’t figure it out.  Same goes for the Control Panel.

It’s not that the interface is inheritly unusable.  It’s that I have prior experience using similar tools.  As such, I have expectations about how things will work.  When those expectations aren’t met, I get grumpy.

It’s a lesson I’ve been on the sharp end of in the past.  You can’t simply design a system for perfection.  The prior experience of users (technical or otherwise) needs to be considered, no matter how dysfunctional it seems to the system designers.  The same goes for Office 2007.  The ribbon is a good idea, but I’m too used to Office 2003 for it to be effective for me.

If I struggle with these issues, what hope is there for a busy lawyer?  My guess is slim to none.

I’m going to be presenting at a one-day conference in London on November 12.  The focus of the conference is on the capture & retention of knowledge.  My bit will be on extracting & capturing knowledge found in social software tools.

Among the other speakers, there’s a host of interesting sessions:

• Tim Castorina - Competition PSL at Linklaters.  Tim will be speaking on fostering a knowledge sharing culture.  Tim is a great guy, and comes from one of the most active KM groups at Linklaters.
• Doug Cornelius - Real Estate Lawyer & KM Lawyer at Goodwin Procter LLP.  Doug is the author of KMSpace and a sometime commentor on this blog.  Doug will be speaking on the specifics of web2.0 tools and how to use them effectively.
• Sarah Cameron - Legal Director & PSL for Pinsent Masons.  Sarah will be discussing how to conduct successful post-project reviews, and to turn that knowledge into solutions for new clients.
• Mark Collins - Head of Knowledge for Nabarro.  Perhaps one of the most interesting (for me) sessions, Mark will be examine quality-control processes (knowledge indexing & cleaning), and consider the value of indexing in the face of recent advances in search technologies.
• Aideen Hanley - KM Director at BCM Hanby Wallace.  Aideen’s going to lead a session where the group looks at capturing knowledge from inbound and outbound lawyers.
• Elizabeth Thompson - Associate Director & Head of Real Estate KM.  The last session of the day will take a look at how KM will be affected during the present economic downturn.

The sessions ones by Mark and Aideen are particularly interesting to me, and I’m really looking forward to meeting Doug, a fellow web2.0 enthusiast.

In terms of my presentation.  I’d love to hear from law firm people about their experiences with social software and turning that into usable knowledge.

If you’d like to register, email events@ark-group.com.

Hope to see you there.

The always brilliant David Maister has just released a podcast called “The Trouble With Lawyers“.

Listen to it!

‘Nuff said

This post is more a request for comment than anything.

I have been sceptical about incentive programs in KM for some time.  The research I’ve read about performance-based incentives tend to be stongly negative.  That said, theory is great… in theory.

If anybody has any experience of using incentives to inspire KM, please send me an email or leave a comment. I’d like to incorporate that experience into a post I’m writing on the subject., especially lawyer-specific aspects.

I thought I might post a follow-on to my prior post on the role of trust and how it affects wiki adoption.

One of the most valuable lessons one learns when working with lawyers is to be your own biggest critic, especially when it comes to presenting an idea. I believe this comes from knowing that if you don’t break down your arguments, consider them from many angles and adjust them accordingly; other lawyers will tear your ideas to shreds.

Personally I find that approach leads one to be overly conservative when it comes to sharing thoughts. I prefer to throw ideas against the wall, see what sticks and adjust them over time given feedback & discussion. I much prefer a hypothesise, test, measure, adjust & repeat approach as the idea improves with each iteration.

Regardless, this blog doesn’t invite quite the level of debate capable of refining my idea, so I’ve had to do it myself.

First off, my representation of risk being flat was incomplete and requires amendment. Traditionally there are several different approaches to managing risk, some of which can change the level of risk:

• Reduction (methods which reduce the severity of the risk >> risk decreases)
• Avoidance (not engaging in the activity which carries risk >> risk remains flat)
• Retention (accepting the risk, a viable strategy where the costs of reducing the risk are greater than if something went wrong >> risk remains flat)
• Transference (transfer the cost of the risk to another party). This is irrelevant for this discussion.

Of course risk can also increase over time depending on the circumstances. My earlier model ignored changes in the level of risk.

So the trust-threshold model should consider risk & trust curves as capable of changing over time. The model below is not prescriptive; but demonstrates an example of how risk & trust might interact when a system update is deployed.

So, with the model updated, let’s look at some objections to the model.

Objection #1 > the value of wikis is self-evident; lawyers who know enough about wikis will use them. Trust thresholds have nothing to do with it.

While I have met very few lawyers willing to use wikis from first viewing, those lawyers do exist, and trust thresholds apply to them. The lawyers in question just started with a level of trust higher than the level of risk. Errors introduced into the system or uncovered during the course of everyday use could impact trust in a negative way.

The key here is that trust is not constant and is affected by the lawyers’ environment. Imagine a negative story about wikis in The Lawyer. Trust might well drop (as some unmanaged risk comes to light) followed by usage.

Objection #2 > this has nothing to do with trust, wikis are just a bad idea

Wikis being a “bad idea” is a purely emotive comment. My example of using wikis to track practice-group utilisation demonstrates their utility. One their utility is demonstrable; people need to decide whether they’re the most effective tools available.

I have seen several firms with gaps in their systems infrastructure where the read-write nature of wikis delivers a tool capable of supporting business needs. At any one time most IT departments will have more projects than they can delivery. In these circumstances wikis can deliver immediate value while a long-term solution is put in place.

An inexpensive, flexible tool capable of delivering value across the firm is not what I’d call a “bad idea”.

Objection #3 > no level of trust will get me using wikis at work.

Hey, I never said wikis were the right tool for everything. It’s entirely reasonable not to use a wiki if you believe the alternatives are better. Wikis would be a poor alternative to a proper practice management system.

Objection #4 > Your graph ignores cost-benefit analysis (feedback from Papa Richards)

Not really, for the same reasons as above. The Cost-benefit question is answered beforehand (like when your firm buys the technology). Risk might enter into the equation at that point, but that’s institutional risk.

I’d love to hear the thoughts of others on this.

A while ago Richard Dennison of BT wrote about the finding the balance between using publicly available web2.0 tools or deploying them internally.  He specifically looked at twitter and blogging.

As Richard puts it:

The question is, do we need an internal version of Twitter or can we just use the real thing … as indeed my team currently is?

Richard also goes on to say that his internal blog has only two posts.

Now, Mr. Dennisson isn’t advocating using external tools to the exclusion of others, but is struggling to find the balance.  If you build an internal facebook, will people use it or will they continue to use the real thing?  For the record, I would put money on the latter.

For law firms, the balance shifts strikingly towards the “internal” as several factors weigh in:

• client confidentiality
• law firms’ conservative view of technology
• IT departments’ mistrust of web2.0 tools

One way to tackle the issue is to consider what you’re trying to achieve before looking at a specific tool.  I believe a scenario-driven approach will make the answer more clear.  Rather than asking “do I need a blog” or “do I need an internal Facebook”, look at how you want people to work.

At that stage tools can be assessed and risks can be analysed in context.

A good rule of thumb is that if you are asking yourself whether to adopt tool X and you haven’t thought about what you want people to do, you should take a step back.

I would bet good money that you don’t fancy featuring in the leading story on RollOnFriday, unlike this unfortunate applicant who “hugged” a recruiter using facebook.

While I hate to waggle my finger at anybody for experimenting with technology, social networks can hurt you if you’re not careful.  They can hurt your reputation, your career and the reputation of your employers.

Manager Tools, one of the few podcasts I listen to.  This week, they get strategic about managing your online reputation.  Their cast is worth a listen, and firms would to well to provide this sort of guidance to their employees about social networks.  You can either download their cast via iTunes or just listen on their web page.

Part 1 and Part 2

Now, that being said, I have yet to follow their advice to the letter, but I’m thinking about it.

I was on my morning run this morning, with my brain in la-la land, oddly thinking about Doug Cornelius’ Wiki While you Work article, when I had a brainwave (well I thought it was a brainwave) about what it would take for lawyers to use social software.

“Trust thresholds! It’s not just about trust; it’s also about risk of each task. You need to earn enough trust to overcome the risk. Therefore, wiki use is dependant on how much a user trusts the content.”

Those weren’t the exact words, but close enough. I almost stopped running, and would have but I had a long way to go and once you stop its murder to get started again. I kept running and diverted my brain onto more simple topics like “why do people throw shopping trolleys in the canal?”

What had popped into my brain was the idea that when using a wiki to execute a task which involves risk, the trustworthiness of the wiki needs to exceed the risk of it being wrong.

First, a story.

My first experience of social software & lawyers was unsuccessful. I was looking to put in place a Wikipedia-style resource for my firm, and met with substantial resistance, and downright refusal to use it. Lawyers being lawyers a number of risks were listed. NOT IN MY PRACTICE! Case closed.

Later I found some practices were using the wiki, but for purposes I had not intended. For example, one practice used the wiki to share information about work allocation. Junior lawyers would edit the wiki page indicating how much time they had spare, and the type of work they wanted.

Until today, I didn’t fully understand why, and I hope the following picture helps to illustrate my point.

The “trust threshold” is the point where risk & trust meet.

My initial proposal was that lawyers use the wiki to execute client work. Trust was low while risk was high. No dice.

However, using the wiki to find more work, the risk was low, and trust was “high enough” to have passed the trust threshold.

A couple more key points:
* The “trust curve” I’ve drawn is not prescriptive. Trust can be lost, and once it falls below the trust threshold, the risk becomes too high.
* Trust curves and the level of perceived risk are unique for each person.
* Usefulness is not a factor that can overcome risk.  It might be enough to get a lawyer to experiment with something less risky, which in turn builds trust.

Ways of increasing trust
I do not think you can change the risk associated with lawyers’ tasks, because cost of failure for a lawyer approaches infinity.

I do think you can increase trust, but it will take time, and some people might never make it.

Some suggestions:
* other lawyers have to use the wiki first (i.e. PSLs)
* the system has to signpost security (i.e. no anonymous users)
* show the lawyers how to recover something that was deleted
* talk to the lawyers about the ways incorrect content can be drafted
* PSL / Partner stamp of approval on a particular page / wiki
* Limit access to a set number of users

So what?

What I draw from this is that:
* Big bang wiki deployments are more likely to fail than not
* You will have to start slowly
* You will have to find something safe
* You may well
* Keep the scope of a wiki low (i.e. single topic, experts only) if you need high levels of trust
* You can measure & aggregate trust & risk by asking people. Probably worth establishing where you are on the scale before you try to wikify your firm.

Credit where credit’s due

Before today, I never read about or heard of trust thresholds. However, in checking Mr. Google, somebody has written about them. In his book Trust in the Balance, Robert Shaw defines the term as the point where trust becomes distrust (I can’t get anything more than an Amazon preview unfortunately).

However, I see no pictures or graphs online, so that baby’s mine! ©

Update: I’ve refined the model a bit in my follow-on post Do trust thresholds exist?

Two days ago I wrote about CMS watch missing a trick on best bets. This evening (blogging on a Friday evening is very very sad), I found an article from Toby Ward of the Intranet Blog which describes my thinking more clearly. In it Toby discusses some of the most beautiful intranets an “jumpwords”

One intranet manager, Kurt (I’ll not divulge his full name nor his organization for the sake of fulfilling his confidentially obligations to his organization) informed me that one of the most popular features on his company’s intranet (a financial services organization of more than 10,000 employees) is a ‘jumpword’ application. A jumpword tool is attached to the search engine and allows people to seek out the best results which are manually coded to a specific keyword search.

One of the areas we have issues on is our navigation and providing more service to the employee on our intranet,” says Kurt. “The jumpword application allows people to enter something like “performance” and it takes them to the performance management site, which is highly popular. It’s a good tool but has festered into over 2000 jumpwords which is a heavy indication that the navigation is not helping people get what they need.

The jumpwords application is written in .NET with a backend SQL database. Employees fill out a request form (attached to the online application) requesting their jumpword and the URL they want it directed to. When a user types in the jumpword it does a lookup of the jumpword file and has logic that redirects them to the site associated URL. If there is no jumpword it brings them to the front search page.

The execution isn’t exactly as I would do it, but close enough for you to get the point. I might even do a mockup at some stage so you could see how it might work.