Joining it all up

Kate Simpson on exploiting information and knowledge to improve business performance.

Capitalising on your unique information and knowledge is one of the remaining untapped opportunities left for firms to remain competitive in the current economic climate. Understanding how your knowledge can be used as a critical asset to improve business performance relies on confidence in the underlying data and may require a new information culture at your firm. Those that kick off with this focus on information really can deliver the long-term benefits in search, automated personalisation and more powerful business intelligence.

There is always a broad range of demands made of our firm’s information and knowledge investments, but at a basic level the business has these three needs in common:

1. Information retrieval – making the information and knowledge captured and codified in our systems findable (and re-findable).

Fundamentally, there seems little point spending a lot of time producing the very best client document, piece of know-how or research for a pitch presentation if it ends up only ever being used just the once or read by just one other person. The real value of the knowledge captured must be that it can be found and re-used again; that it can continue to add value to the firm and its clients long after it has been produced.

2. Automated push – being presented with the information we need at exactly the time we need it.

Search technologies to date have primarily focused on the ‘pull mechanism’ that enables lawyers to go out and find the information in the context of an explicit need. The ‘push mechanism’ enables the information and knowledge to be presented to the lawyer in the context of their work. This might be in the form of personalising each lawyer’s intranet homepage so that the know-how, current awareness, industry and firm news is displayed in the context of the matter they are working on, or by delivering relevant and related know-how within the specific document they are drafting.

3. Aggregation – bringing information and data together in a structured way that moves beyond the traditional financial reporting to see new trends and opportunities.

We need to be able to slice-and-dice our data and information across more of our systems to see the possibilities for new markets and the provision of new legal services. In its simplest form, we need to know how many clients we have worked for in a particular jurisdiction and sector for a pitch or legal directory listing. But increasingly we need to bring similar matter types together to build more strategic and client-focused packages of legal solutions. We need to start seeing the similarities between what we think are lots of bespoke and customised types of work being done across the firm and turn them into discrete billable components that can be handled by the right people to deliver more efficient fee structures and higher quality work for the client.

These three drivers are behind some of the most expensive investments firms are making in information solutions: enterprise search, business intelligence, content management systems and new ways of presenting that information, on new platforms, with the latest new tools and within intranets and portals.

So why is there a feeling that some of these investments aren’t quite delivering on their promises? Or that things are not quite as good as we think they could be? Or that other firms seem to have had more success with their systems?

The problems we are having now are fundamentally with the information and the way we describe that information (the metadata), not necessarily just with the systems or technology we’ve recently purchased. Tools, by themselves, deliver little real value.

The underlying firm-wide schema or centralised vocabulary of terms used to label and describe your most valuable asset – the firm’s collective knowledge – requires some closer attention.

Good search and browse experiences for information and knowledge retrieval demands reliable (and light-weight) taxonomies in the form of facets and filters. Your information needs to be tagged with these useful labels to help describe, find and contextualise a piece of content and connect it with related documents for a more successful search journey.

Personalising and automating the delivery of content requires your systems to understand who you are and what you are interested in and then connect that understanding with your information and knowledge documents. This is best done using a mixture of the agreed terms that are used by all your systems, along with some of the more social networking and creativity tools that can bubble up the most relevant content – based on the hidden connections between people and their information and knowledge.

Connecting similar and related data and information to look for different and previously unseen relationships and patterns within your content requires the use of standard, re-usable and accurate labels.

The following steps outline the broad scope for creating that centralised schema of terms and labels within the firm (usually as part of a strategic information or knowledge architecture initiative).

1. Quality and value
Not every e-mail and document needs to be sharable or re-findable. Understand where to focus the information improvement efforts to ensure that the most business-critical content is retrieved, automatically pushed to the right people, and aggregated for profitable horizon scanning.

2. Structure
Look at the full lifecycle of documents, clients and matters to make sure only the most essential of metadata is being captured and that there is a clear and beneficial business or staff need behind it (the three outlined above are a good start).

While the standard lists of ‘practice group’, ‘legal subject’, ‘document type’ (and so on) are all very well to support knowledge findability, it is necessary to map in more of the contextual business development, people-focused and financial lists to create a true information architecture that will support the firm’s wider investments in information systems.

3. Labels (metadata and taxonomies)
Focusing on the classifications that you use to describe your people, your content and your firm:

Coverage – have you got the right coverage for your classifications? A simple lack of mandatory fields when profiling matters and documents can be the real obstacle for re-findability and reliable reporting;
Consistency – are you using the same labels in your classification of content across systems? Inconsistency in your labelling, or mapping ineffectively to hide the differences across multiple information systems, means you will always see a slightly incomplete and unreliable picture of your firm and its information and knowledge;
Accuracy – how accurate are the labels that you are using? Are they up to date and still relevant to the firm and its practices? And are they being accurately applied to the content itself? Keeping information relevant, accurate and pivotal to your firm requires ongoing governance and management by everyone involved.

Many of our firms have what look like technology problems, but that are really about the underlying information. And since those information problems tend to affect multiple systems across the business, it’s worth taking a holistic approach to address them. By fully exploiting your information through a strategic knowledge architecture initiative that creates more effective information findability, sharing and re-use you can deliver improvements that can benefit where you are now as well as where you want to be.

Kate Simpson is director at knowledge architecture consultancy Tangledom. She can be contacted at tangled@tangledom.com