Thought leader

By Duncan Ogilvy, knowledge management partner, Mills & Reeve

Every organisation has a culture, whether articulated or not. It is at the heart of any business. Perhaps it can best be described as the behavioural norms that prevail in the organisation. If you are involved in knowledge management (KM) it is worth the effort of understanding the underlying culture in your firm in order to maximise the effectiveness of KM investment.

There are two ways of looking at the relevance of a firm’s culture to KM:

Unless the underlying culture is conducive to knowledge sharing you don’t get off first base;
Tailoring KM effort to suit a firm’s culture will work better than a one-size-fits-all approach.

I shall consider each in turn.

Much is said and written about the need for a knowledge-sharing culture without really getting down to the nitty gritty. What does it mean, and if you haven’t got it, can it be created?

Traditionally, many lawyers worked individually, seeking to maintain the impression that each job was uniquely crafted, relying on their own brilliance alone. That doesn’t wash with increasingly savvy clients, who know how to drive value for money and do not expect to pay for a wheel to be reinvented, nor to pay for a more senior lawyer to do the work than is appropriate. All pretty logical and uncontroversial, but how widely is that understood, and how is it monitored and reinforced? What behaviour does the firm, in practice, reward? For example, if individual chargeable time, or even worse, individual billing is in fact the dominant measure of performance, your KM initiative may be doomed.

Of course behaviour can be changed. What you can’t do is expect a KM initiative in isolation to change the way a firm works. If the success of your KM project depends on significant behavioural change, the project needs to be thought through with those in charge. KM can be a great driver for change, but only when collaborative and cross-functional team working is encouraged from top to bottom.

One size certainly does not fit all. What sort of practice are you? Is your strength in high-value, complex cases or in consistent high-volume, low-value matters? Are your clients sophisticated large corporates and institutions, demanding access to the firm’s knowledge as a value-added service and expecting a client team to work seamlessly for them, or are they individuals? Is the firm one in which effort should go primarily into KM systems, or would those resources be better deployed facilitating discussion between lawyers face to face? I suspect too much emphasis goes into systems in firms that value face-to-face contact. They might derive value from client relationship management, or assist in putting lawyers in touch with the right expert, with social software such as wikis and blogs, but might not benefit from endless codification of past work.

So although culture may be hard to define and is rarely articulated in an organisation, it is there and sensitive recognition of what makes the organisation tick will inform enlightened KM investment.