The rise of emergent collaboration

As know-how shifts from knowledge capture to knowledge creation, command and control approaches to KM are on the demise. By David Jabbari, Allen & Overy LLP.

I am sure that, like me, you are sceptical of supposed ‘paradigm shifts’ or ‘revolutions’ in knowledge management (KM). Some of these claimed revolutions – such as the shift from knowledge capture to knowledge creation – have endured. The majority have been proven to be fads.

With that caveat, I do think we may currently be seeing one quite important development in law-firm KM, perhaps more in the nature of an insurrection than a full-blown revolution. It could be labelled as the demise of ‘command and control’ approaches to KM. In more grandiose terms, it is sometimes referred to as the rise of ‘emergent collaboration’, which is linked to so-called ‘Enterprise 2.0’ web technologies.

This trend is closely related to the shift from knowledge capture to knowledge creation. If you see knowledge as an inert ‘thing’ that can be captured, edited and distributed, there is a danger that your KM effort will gravitate to the rather boring, back-office work preoccupied with indexes and IT systems. This will be accompanied by a ritualised nagging of senior fee earners to contribute more knowledge to online systems.

If, however, you see knowledge as a creative and collaborative activity, your interest will be the way in which distinctive insights can be created and deployed to deepen client relationships. You will tend to be more interested in connecting people than in building perfect knowledge repositories.

The command and control approach to law-firm KM focuses on the systems and management structures needed to capture and publish knowledge. In this approach, knowledge is often created in a very centralised way, using techniques such as commissioning, or forming ‘project groups’, and then publishing the output in centralised content stores. The fact that no more than 25 per cent of material stored in databases is ever accessed does not seem to deter people from thinking that placement of material in a central store constitutes a success of some type.

My own revelation about the limits of command and control approaches came a few years ago, while I was attending a KM conference in Seville, Spain ( I have noticed that I invariably have better ideas in Seville than at my desk in London). I was in a seminar on what was then an emerging technology – the wiki – looking at the way wiki software was being

used to develop a (then) new online encylopaedia, Wikipedia. It occurred to me that if we could use this form of collaborative technology to de-centralise the process of content authoring, we might be able to get more lawyer involvement in know-how, particularly in those areas where we did not have professional-support-lawyer teams. Cutting a long story short, Allen & Overy LLP have been experimenting with wikis – and blogs – for over six months now and the results are very encouraging.

For the KM purist attached to the command and control ethos, the idea of unregulated proliferation of content sounds like chaos. However, the success of Wikipedia, in creating one of the world’s leading reference tools, shows how much trust around content can be established even on the internet. We should be confident that even greater levels of trust could be established within law firms. Perhaps we should go further and collaborate between firms to build online, legal equivalents of Wikipedia: such a development would have the legal publishers shaking in their boots as they watch their pricing model go the same way as traditional encyclopaedias.

Just to be absolutely clear, this focus on collaboration, which is greatly facilitated by blogs and wikis, is only one part of a trinity, which shapes our thinking on the development of our know-how systems. That trinity is locate, navigate and collaborate.

Locate
This is all about the importance of enterprise-wide search. Google is a cultural phenomenon, the extent of which is shown in its transition to a verb: to google. I believe that enterprise-wide searching is needed across all know-how and wider documentation. It enables lawyers to quickly assess whether there is any generally relevant know-how relating to a specific issue. It is also important as a means of consolidating access to the vast proliferation of unregulated content types – for example, blogs, wikis and webcasts – without a series of cumbersome portal views. But importantly, I believe that lawyers will only want to perform a Google-style search when they don’t know exactly what it is they are looking for. So, for example, they might want to know if there are any standard documents in this area, or if anyone has done a note on a particular area.

Navigate
Alongside search it is vital to have a direct route to core documents and guidance that lawyers know exist on our system, and to separate it from the non-core material that is found distributed across practice-group intranet pages and so on. When a lawyer knows that a particular document exists the last thing they want is to trawl through a Google-style list of results or a variety of different portals. I often use the analogy of World Cup results: more often than not, you will go to the same trusted sports website where you know you will quickly find that information, rather than using a search engine Of course, it’s a developing picture and search engines are getting better and better at predicting users’ needs, but I’m pretty sure that this division between looking generally to find out what’s there and going directly to critical documents that you know exist is always going to be with us. The good thing about getting your house in order on critical know-how is that you can then live with a high level of ‘fuzziness’ – akin to the internet experience – on your enterprise-wide searching.

To conclude, the mistake that the ‘command and control’ people make is thinking that a perfect navigation system – and they are lovers of perfect navigation systems – displaces the need for a broader, more flexible search. Navigational systems, particularly when they are linked to a matter-centric view, support the more standardised work streams in a law firm. They are vital. But mistakes are often made by: taking know-how commoditisation into areas where it is not appropriate; failing to understand the way that lawyers use search engines to produce personalised syntheses of disparate material (for example, they co-create an ‘answer’ from disparate material – instead of actually finding it); and, lastly, committing to excessive investment in human effort in the maintenance of navigational systems, which is unlikely to meet any defensible return-on-investment criteria. n

David Jabbari is global head of know-how at Allen & Overy LLP. He can be contacted at david.jabbari@allenovery.com