Feature

posted 3 Sep 2007 in Volume 1 Issue 6

Wiki’s law

In 2006, KM Legal’s sister magazine Inside Knowledge, published a case study on social software at Allen & Overy LLP. In this two-part article, we provide both an overview of that first piece, as well as an update on the firm’s progress in the past year.

By Ruth Ward. Allen & Overy LLP

Allen & Overy LLP is an international legal practice with offices in 19 countries on three continents, 4,800 staff and 450 partners. The firm was founded in 1930 and today advises governments, banks, major corporates and institutions operating around the world. But notwithstanding its tremendous growth in recent years, Allen & Overy still retains the feel of a smaller, more intimate partnership, with a strong collegiate culture and reputation for innovation – as recognised in a recent Financial Times’ ‘Innovative Lawyers’ report.

The allure of social media1 for Allen & Overy was superficially clear. But initially we were not too sure what we needed or, indeed, whether something so cutting edge would really fit in among our lawyers. This article therefore documents the journey we took from those tentative steps when we first floated the idea, to the global roll-out that is going on today.

Social media and professional services
Allen & Overy, like other professional-service firms, realises that it is a knowledge-centric organisation in which its greatest knowledge assets are its people. However, the traditional legal KM model has focused more on documents – acquiring and storing them – rather than on people, putting them together and leveraging their know-how. It is this shortcoming that Allen & Overy’s KM strategy was devised to address.

However, our lawyers – our primary knowledge assets – are not necessarily the people you would naturally choose for an experiment in informal collaboration and knowledge sharing. Indeed, lawyers everywhere are often regarded as conservative and, sometimes, a little technophobic. We therefore prepared the ground carefully.

To begin with, we sought outside expertise to see how others had approached, implemented and benefited from social-software technology. In particular, we profited greatly from the knowledge of Euan Semple, who had enjoyed great success at the BBC, establishing informal online groups and networks.

However, we did not want to simply roll out the same model that Semple had deployed at the BBC. That would have been counter-productive – lawyers and programme makers are very different people with very different attitudes and needs.

We therefore returned to Allen & Overy from our trip to the BBC’s headquarters not with a blueprint that we could simply re-use but, instead, a clear view of what might work and what would not within our community of relatively conservative legal experts.

We realised that we needed to focus our initial projects on groups where there would be a high chance of early adoption. This would help us to create home-grown success stories that we could use to build awareness and interest elsewhere within Allen & Overy, driving a bandwagon that could help to support a wider roll-out later. We were certainly not planning a ‘big bang’.

Tech support
Fortunately, the IT department at Allen & Overy shared our enthusiasm for trialling social software and agreed that it would be valuable to deploy outside consultants in our initial trials to ensure that the implementation was as finely tuned to end-user needs as possible.

So we turned to Lee Bryant of new-media consultancy Headshift, who we had heard speak at a conference back in 2004 and who seemed to us to have the right mix of expertise, enthusiasm and realism to help us take our project forwards.

We were not too sure whether we should implement blogs2 or wikis3 – Bryant advised us to implement a combination of the two. He also helped us to run our initial user workshops, making sure that they did not turn into time-wasting talking shops – and was fully involved in the development of the technical platform.

We focused on three streams of potential wiki and blog use in our initial experimental phase:

Internal work communities that had an ongoing need to communicate and collaborate;
Project teams creating and sharing knowledge – for example, on a new area of law;
General office-based internal communications via online newsletters.

We wanted to keep the initial stages focused and fast, so we selected just three groups in the firm, with leaders that we knew would be the most enthusiastic recruiting the other participants. We also ensured that the groups remained rigidly focused on the task in hand so as to minimise time-wasting and to expedite the process.

Our three pilot groups comprised a sub-group of our global know-how KM community made up of 20 volunteers who trialled the know-how group site, environmental lawyers who needed to build their knowledge about new European Union directives and our Amsterdam office newsletter team.

We realised from this process that our lawyers were likely to take to the idea more fully than we had initially expected. We also realised that it would not have to be an either/or choice between blogs and wikis. With the right software, implemented correctly, we could do both. Bryant also helped to draw up the development plan based on the output from the groups.

That was in the early summer of 2005. One of the advantages of social software is that it does not take too long to get something up and running. By September of the same year, we had put together a prototype that was sufficiently robust to put before our three groups, including site templates that would enable staff to launch their own blogs and wikis without the intervention of Allen & Overy’s IT department.

A little know-how
The finished product combined two main applications, Confluence (for the wiki) and Moveable Type (for the blog), combined to present users with a single, unified interface. Two demonstrably different products, or having to log off from one to log in to another, would have been a turn-off for users.

The system combines the following components: group blog, e-mail alerter, wiki, categorisation, news aggregator, really simple syndication (RSS) and trackback.

For any IT project, let alone a KM project, it can often be a challenge to persuade staff of the potential benefits from using it – especially if it means a change to the way people work.

We have found that the best way to market a new project and to help people understand the opportunities a new initiative provides is to avoid buzzwords and to focus instead on the user experience.

So I would like you to imagine for a moment that you have just joined Allen & Overy’s know-how staff community, while I take you on a tour of our know-how group site, which was the first site we launched. Know-how is the internal KM community at Allen & Overy and mostly comprised of professional support lawyers.

We know that almost everyone at Allen & Overy spends much of their day logged in to their e-mail client, Microsoft Outlook, and so an e-mail alerter was considered of primary importance. People posting information can specify that group members should be alerted immediately, or they can wait for the aggregated daily alert at lunch time, which also contains a précis of the posts and entries.

Links in the e-mail take you straight to the relevant post on the blog or wiki. Each ‘site’ – such as the know-how site – is only open to its members. However, we also have a restricted ‘public’ view of most of our sites, which just includes recent posts. This is really useful to me as the administrator of the know-how group site because if you post an issue or question that needs to be dealt with by someone outside the community, I can simply send them a link to the public blog so they can post a reply.

When you log in to the site itself, you will see recent posts on the group blog and can navigate to a more focused view by selecting one of the categories that I have set. On top of that, you can view content in terms of one of the ‘themes’ that someone has tagged their post with or by using the date archive or search function.

To participate in a discussion, simply click on the icon on the home page and fill in the form. Images, links and other items of supporting documentation – from our document-management system, for example – can easily be added to the post. This is essential to ensure that we do not duplicate reference and supporting documentation in our document-management system.

You can also tag your post with one of the categories I provide as the administrator of the site and you can also set your own themes – basically tags that categorise documents according to their content. As well as using themes to navigate to particular content areas, there is also a themes page that highlights activity on the site by showing which are the most popular themes.

This site is for you – to ask questions, and share knowledge and information about recent joiners, events, work projects and best practice.

There is also a wiki area that we initially called Group Space. Here, staff can find regularly updated information about training programmes and recommended reading. There is also information about Allen & Overy’s knowledge strategy and staff are invited to share details about their own business plans and priorities, and to see what others are planning. The wiki is also a useful tool for carrying out consultations and compiling reports when we need input from across the community.

The roll-out is ongoing. We started work on the project in early summer 2005, including the workshops, and by early autumn we had our pilot sites up and running. We are conducting the roll-out on a step-by-step basis, one group at a time, and by July/August 2006, had about ten per cent of Allen & Overy staff hooked up.

Power to the people
What people really love about the know-how group site and our other sites is their ease of use. These tools speak powerfully to anyone who has an interest in publishing or sharing information, but who finds the formal internal communications and publishing platforms too difficult and time consuming. The vast majority of staff lack the time and are insufficiently techie to build something themselves – or to even want to.

Our know-how group blog has replaced the various e-mail interest groups and ad hoc e-mails sent out with news of new joiners and upcoming events that we used to have, significantly reducing the amount of time the central knowledge team has to spend raising awareness, training and co-ordinating activities. Staff have fewer e-mails to wade through every day, too…

As soon as our first sites went live we realised the potential value of using blogs and wikis across the organisation.

So, we immediately embarked on an informal consultation with different departments and support functions across the firm. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive: people immediately ‘got it’ and could see how they could valuably make use of these sites for their own teams and projects.

This was a relief, of course, but we were surprised at the level of understanding and buy-in from senior partners and support staff. We think that this, in part, was due to the fact that many of them have children who use Wikipedia and perhaps blog, and our sites give them an opportunity to tell their children they blog too.

It is an old chestnut that senior-level buy-in is always an important factor behind the success of KM and IT projects. Fortunately, Allen & Overy’s global managing partner, David Morley, was exceptionally supportive as we sought buy-in to move from our initial experiments to broader firm-wide deployment, as it supports his strategic aims of improving our internal communications and breaking down the internal organisational silos across Allen & Overy to help us respond quickly and effectively to our clients’ needs.

With the support of David and others we were able to quickly move beyond our three initial test sites to a second phase of pilot sites for groups in our corporate legal department and our marketing, IT, and library-services teams.

PART TWO: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
Transforming KM in a global law firm
Part one of this case study detailed Allen & Overy’s initial experience of developing and using social tools, such as blogs and wikis.

A year on, this second part looks at Allen & Overy’s continuing work and experience, and our roadmap for the future. It also offers some practical tips for people starting out or still just thinking about using social software. Because it is clear to me – from the conferences and conversations I have contributed to over the last year – that a lot of businesses and organisations are yet to seize the challenge of social software and therefore reap its many knowledge-management (KM) benefits. In the professional-service sector particularly, we have sought to share our ideas and experience with our clients and colleagues at other law firms and businesses. But although many people who come to see us are visibly excited and enthusiastic at what we have achieved, and can see straight away how social software may help them, we are not aware of much immediate take up. To us, it seems such an obvious fit – people-focused software for a people-centric business. What can be holding legal and other firms back?

First, let’s recap on our own project and what’s been happening recently.

Two years on from the start of our initial experimentation with just three social-software sites, we now have around 50 sites (all based on our initial experimental site template) supporting internal and client communities around the Allen & Overy globe. Different legal, support and project teams develop and use the tools on the sites – a group blog and wiki, categorisation and social tagging, and shared newsfeeds and bookmarks – in different ways to meet their own particular needs – and their success is as visible as their use is varied. Table one provides a snapshot of some of our different types of site and usage. In just two years, social software has moved from small-scale experimentation to become an accepted part of our systems infrastructure, used by a quarter of our staff and with strong management understanding and support for future development.

What’s not happening? The problems of using social software in a business setting
So, why are many businesses and organisations still struggling to get started with social software? What are the problems with social software and how can firms overcome those difficulties?

I don’t believe it is a money problem (perhaps uniquely for technology-based initiatives?). It can’t be the cost of getting started because blog and wiki tools are freely available on the internet – and social software lends itself to the type of small, easily managed and funded ‘organic’ development approach we have taken to date at Allen & Overy.

Problem 1: The complicated jargon
But if it is not a case of too much money, it may well be a case of too much jargon. Although the legal profession in particular is meant to be full of ‘legalese’ and Latin, the buzzwords of social software and other Web 2.0 developments have put people off. The key thing for us initially was to get some sites up and running so we could show and explain the different tools actually working in an Allen & Overy setting. The terminology has therefore not really mattered – people internally tend to refer to our sites as wikis, though of course they are not just wikis, and a key participant in one of our most active sites asked me the other day what was the difference between a blog and a wiki!

Things are changing though as the terminology moves into the mainstream. For example, when we developed our initial sites two years ago, we used the term ‘Group Space’ instead of ‘wiki’ for the tab accessing the wiki section of our sites because we thought it would hamper user acceptance of the sites. Now people are comfortable with the term wiki, even if they may still not be quite sure how a wiki works!

Problem 2 – the internet horror stories
Second, media coverage across all sectors has focused almost entirely on internet horror stories – from the reputational perils of vanity publishing to the threat of legal liability – and this has given blogs particularly a bad name. I spoke at a legal Web 2.0 conference recently and there was a big focus on risks and risk-management techniques such as employee blogging policies, etc. If this is how social software is first mentioned in a business context, it may be very hard to get management support to start even a small experiment.

At Allen & Overy we separate our use of social software for internal and other trusted communities from use on the wider internet, reflecting the different issues and risks. Our initial internal work has certainly informed our broader internet experience but they are created and managed as two different initiatives. We have no specific blogging policies for our internal sites – our normal policies around the appropriate use of communication systems apply just as they do with e-mail – and individual site owners guide and monitor use on their own sites.

There may also be reputational issues around who is blogging, not just what they are saying. In the legal sector, for example, the external business ‘blogosphere’ is not yet seen as sufficiently mainstream, and people have perceived it as being quite limited, inhabited only by legal technology commentators and assorted geeks and enthusiasts. At Allen & Overy, we have no single person blogs – only group blogs with multiple contributors with an equal voice and a common purpose. And we expressly do not have any ‘chatrooms’; our sites are all ‘workspaces’ with pre-defined business objectives.

Problem 3 – the fear of the unknown
Third, it may be hard to decide where a social-software project should start and who should lead it – because the tools are so flexible and potentially of such wide application. I recently led an external workshop for library and information professionals, and a number of the attendees, despite their obvious enthusiasm, said they were reluctant to take the lead in their own businesses either because it was not traditionally in ‘their area’ or because it would need to be a firm-wide project and was not for them to start it. There is a definite risk of different business units all sitting on their hands independently waiting for IT or someone else to take a lead – and IT sitting in the centre thinking no one is interested! At Allen & Overy our central KM team led our project from the outset, and they suggest and facilitate sites for other business areas – combining central experience with local ownership.

The role and attitude of a firm’s internal IT team and existing systems and projects will also always be very important. Our IT department has crucially been onside from day one. But in other businesses there may be conflicting interests in IT or other business units relating to existing systems, staff or processes that cause an obstruction or difficulty. Social software is a potentially disruptive technology. It supports a move to self-service and self-publishing – which may impact on existing knowledge and information management, and business-administration roles and activity. It may also have an impact on people’s use and perception of existing internal systems such as formal corporate intranets, know-how databases and e-mail. In our experience, it is only by beginning to experiment with social software in one’s own business that you can begin to develop a real understanding of the potential system, and business opportunities and challenges.

Problem 4 –the cultural context
Finally, and unsurprisingly, there are cultural considerations – at the firm, group and individual level. You can’t simply plug in a group blog and wiki and expect it to create a team of inclusive managers and collaborative workers! Lawyers, in particular, tend towards cautious and formal communication – and at Allen & Overy we have encouraged groups to ask questions, and share ideas and opinions, and move out of their comfort zone of e-mails and Word drafts. Allen & Overy’s collegiate approach and openness to trial new technology and ways of working, and the enthusiasm of people such as our managing partner David Morley have also had a big cultural impact.

What’s next? Allen & Overy’s social-software roadmap
So what’s next for Allen & Overy? We are, as I mentioned, still using our initial experimental site template and we are just applying an interim upgrade to the user interface and functionality. We worked with our existing site owner community (via a wiki, what else?!) to share feedback, frustrations and ideas. These interim upgrade changes are fairly minor, improving the layout of the e-mail alert for example and the ‘Add discussion form’ on the group blog. We are also just kicking off a major project to integrate social-software tools within our broader intranet and extranet portals based on Sharepoint 2007. This will allow us to make much more use of individual social tools for different business purposes and use RSS extensively to help us manage and consolidate information flows. So, there is lots still on the agenda.

References:

1.Social software allows people to form online communities, connecting people and enabling them to collaborate via computer mediation

2.A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where diary-type entries are made and displayed in reverse chronological order

3.A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove or edit most available content

Ruth Ward is head of knowledge systems and developments at Allen & Overy LLP. She can be contacted at ruth.ward@allenovery.com

Part one of this article is a condensed version of a case study written by Ruth Ward, and first published in Inside Knowledge magazine, vol. 9, iss. 10.