Leveraging human sociability_final
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Examines issues of engagement and adoption surrounding "digital workplace" intranet
![Leveraging Human Sociability Using Tools of Engagement Brian R. Bawden National Director, Knowledge Management Bennett Jones LLP | Toronto, Canada [email_address] © 2011 Brian Bawden and Bennett Jones LLP](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/leveraginghumansociabilityfinal-120301133113-phpapp02/85/Leveraging-human-sociability_final-1-320.jpg)
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Leveraging human sociability_final
- 1. Leveraging Human Sociability Using Tools of Engagement Brian R. Bawden National Director, Knowledge Management Bennett Jones LLP | Toronto, Canada [email_address] © 2011 Brian Bawden and Bennett Jones LLP
- 20. Knowledge Bank
- 21. Knowledge Bank
- 23. BenNet Books
- 25. Blog-by-Email
- 27. BenNet GPS
- 28. BenNet GPS
- 30. My Knowledge Bank Favourites
- 34. PeopleFinder
- 36. PeopleFinder
- 38. PeopleFinder
- 39. Pedigree, Curators & Comments
Editor's Notes
- Not huge by US or UK standards, Bennett Jones is nevertheless big enough to experience the typical large-law-firm issues.
- With the addition of offices in the Middle East and China, we are now also dealing with multiple-language-of-business issues.
- Yes, it's SharePoint. I know it doesn't look like SharePoint (but it doesn't have to).
- The line item for U/X ( u ser e x perience, sometimes referred to as "look-and-feel") is the one that usually gets scratched out of the budget. I'm here to tell you that the 15% spent on U/X is what will enable you to realize the value of the other 85%.
- We'll get the bragging over with. Let's just say it helps a lot to win some awards. These particular awards were worldwide, open competitions (i.e., not limited to law firms) and we're pretty pleased about them. Although they bear a different year, we won them only 10 weeks apart!
- Time and attention are the drivers of user behaviour.
- Trust and confidence are required for both contribution and consumption activities.
- How do we "pay" contributors?
- What should we do, going forward, to attract both contributors and consumers?
- Will KM ever move up in the list of priorities?
- This comment from one of our senior partners just says it all. Our users are fully occupied, and there are already important things they are not doing, so how do we persuade them to allocate time to KM activities?
- At the heart of BenNet is Knowledge Bank, a system of repositories for legal documents, research materials, clauses and other resources, all selected by our own subject matter experts, and classified by type, transaction, area of law, jurisdiction and other parameters. In our view, Knowledge Bank is a mission critical worktool that targets the most significant roles within the Firm—including the formulation and delivery of legal advice and legal documents to our clients.
- We borrowed our approach to our knowledge repositories from e-commerce (in fact, our on-line inspirations were the Apple store and the Nike store). So, just as a shopper might go to the Nike Store and successively choose "women's shoes", "for basketball", "in pink", in order to zero in on one or two models of shoes, our lawyers now go to the Knowledge Bank to zero in on the desired Precedents by choosing a Document Type, a Transaction Type, or an Area of Law, to generate an initial set of results. Like the Nike Store, the initial result set may be further filtered (choosing from as many as eight different filters), and we also allow the result set to be full-text searched.
- Our classification taxonomies are extensive (at last count, there are more than 600 different Document Types and other taxonomies are almost as large). As most of our users are impatient, we have provided autofill search boxes that appear at the top of each category, as an alternative to perusing the detailed hierarchy trees, and to significantly speed up the process. The user simply begins to type in the box and all of the possibilities that match what he or she is typing will appear in an AJAX box. Continuing to type makes the list shorter and the user simply selects his or her choice from the list.
- We thought it important to get people to an initial set of results, and then allow them to apply additional filters or search for specific text within the results. In this instance, our user started with <Agreement/Undertaking> as a very broad document type (yielding literally thousands of results), but quickly reduced it to 24 by applying one more filter. We find that people typically get to 10 or fewer results with two or three clicks, whereupon they turn their attention to the &quot;thumbnails&quot;. We designed the thumbnail to provide sufficient information to allow the user to choose the most relevant documents, without being compelled to read them all. As you may have noticed, we religiously follow a naming convention, which helps users a great deal.
- All that is needed to create a BenNet Book is a list of the resources to be linked and a table of contents to enable those resources to be organized in an appropriate sequence. By publishing them on BenNet, we share these Books with our colleagues in all offices, who are then able not only to use them in client matters, but to make contributions and suggest improvements, with the result that BenNet Books become an effective means to capture and disseminate the collective knowledge, experience and best practices of the Firm as a whole.
- BenNet Books have captured a great deal of interest among our constituents. We now have more than 40 books published, and a similar number in various stages of preparation. Interestingly, it has prompted people to submit batches of precedents, rather than one at a time.
- Initially we thought that, as an alternative to Outlook, blogging ought to remain quite separate, with the link between the two being the blog alert, sent using Outlook. As it turned out, we made it too much of an interruption, or too many steps, for people to blog, and an initial surge of blog postings petered out. So we reversed ourselves, and embraced Outlook as a lead-pipe simple means of blogging (and commenting).
- We gave each of the blogs on BenNet its own email address, so users can now blog simply by sending an email to the blog or blogs of their choice. Comments can also be posted by email. The software is smart enough to know that the sender of the email is the author, and it proceeds to make the subject line into the title of the blog posting, inserting the body of the email as the blog posting or comment (stripping out signatures, warnings and any other extraneous material), and posting a copy of any attachment to the email.
- This feature is very important. It makes the structure of the intranet visible on demand, and provides one-click navigation. It also serves to &quot;teach&quot; people where things are. Thanks to Norsk Hydro (www.hydro.com/en) whose Snake Menu inspired us to create BenNet GPS!
- Click on the BenNet GPS button to activate the menu, and it will immediately extend itself to show you where you are (note that, when it is showing you where you are, the connector lines are in boldface).
- Without leaving the AJAX box, you can hover over the relevant headings, starting from the left, to identify where you want to go (in this screenshot, apparently your screen is providing the only illumination in your office), and when you've found it, simply click to go there. Our mantra is CLICK-HOVER-CLICK. Click on the button to activate the GPS, hover to navigate to a destination, and click to confirm your selection.
- Each user has a My Stuff page where they can keep links or bookmarks to Knowledge Bank resources they like and/or think they may use again. Each Practice Group also has a Knowledge Bank Favourites section on its home page which allows the group to identify Knowledge Bank resources that best suit their area of law and make them readily accessible to their members. Knowledge Bank Favourites is the group equivalent of My Stuff.
- Both individuals, with their My Stuff pages, and Practice Groups, with their Knowledge Bank Favourites, can create as many folders as they like (this user has created 8 folders), and name those folders as they see fit, to organize their selections. When individuals add documents to their My Stuff pages, or Practice Groups add documents to their Knowledge Bank Favourites, their names are automatically displayed in conjunction with that Precedent or other resource, as a form of peer endorsement of the value of the specific resource.
- Trust issues affect both contributors and consumers of knowledge.
- PeopleFinder is the most-used feature in BenNet, by a wide margin. Our goal has been to make other offices feel as close as another floor in the same building.
- This individual has declared her availability to take on more work, her extensive language skills, and the organizations of which she is a member. She is able to change all three in real time (if this screenshot had been taken on her machine when she was logged in, you would see little &quot;edit&quot; buttons – it is up to her if she allows her assistant access to those buttons). You may be interested to know that work availability, which applies to associates, students and paralegals, defaults back to green every Monday morning.
- Partners use PeopleFinder to staff client matters. And to find out if we have anyone qualified to practice in Texas (two, by the way). Our administrative folks routinely use PeopleFinder when making sure everyone has renewed their license to practice law in various jurisdictions. Our marketing folks use it to make sure they invite all our McGill grads to a client event for McGill Alumni. Here we have the only Ukrainian-speaking Associate in the Toronto office who has time available to take on additional work.
- We used picklists for professional memberships and language skills. We started with 66 organizations on the PM picklist and that has doubled in a year, by user request. You might also be interested to know that we negotiated the language of the work availability categories with our then-current crop of articling students (law school grads who must do a year's apprenticeship). Why? People won't use a work availability system properly if they're not comfortable with the descriptions associated with the categories.
- We also used a picklist for language skills. With language skills, we did a fair bit of homework on the picklist, which led to something memorable. Knowing that we had several people in the firm from Nigeria, we made sure to add the principal Nigerian languages (thanks Wikipedia). Shortly after launch, I got a call from one of our Nigerian lawyers, who was genuinely touched that he found Igbo and Hausa on the list. We made a friend that day and it cost us nothing ! We eventually topped out at 42 languages declared.
- We decided that, when someone clicks on a document title, that we would take them to a More Info page, rather than open the document directly. Why? So they can learn more about the proper use of the document (including comments by other users), the &quot;pedigree&quot; of the document (who authored it, who submitted it, who likes it, who if anyone is keeping it up to date), be apprised of any warnings or caveats, and see a list of related resources. If someone thinks they will use this precedent again, this is where they can &quot;Add to My Stuff&quot;. With the Curator program, we can give specific people edit rights to specific documents, to keep them current. Anyone can post a comment on any document and when someone does post a comment, an alert is sent to the KM team and the curator, whose job it becomes to take any necessary remedial action. You may also be interested to know that we allow people to post comments on a name-withheld basis (visible only to administrators)
- In some ways, this is the &quot;Holy Grail&quot; of knowledge sharing. We can look at the &quot;children&quot; of a precedent that have been created over, say, the past year, and discover that there are ten. If, in nine of the ten, the users have added a &quot;Force Majeure&quot; clause to the precedent, it's a pretty clear message that we should amend the precedent by adding a &quot;Force Majeure&quot; clause.
- This system will find all &quot;generations&quot; of offspring – children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on.
- We relentlessly point out to younger lawyers that, if they &quot;openly and notoriously&quot; establish themselves as having expertise in a topic they are interested in, they will in fact attract work in that area from the internal marketplace!
- If you build it, they will come? Doesn't work.
- If you display metrics (e.g., leader boards and merit badges) on your intranet, it is in effect a form of reporting to management, but it may also have the benefit of triggering people's competitive instincts.
- We intend to introduce merit badges (e.g., &quot;Precedent Contributor 2011&quot;) and display them in the individual PeopleFinder Profiles.
- We coined the acronym JITR to reflect the fact that lawyers will give you time to show them how to use something, and they will pay attention, when they need to use it . So we make JITR training a drop-everything priority. We also learned that lawyers cannot make time for traditional training (a situation that is unlikely to change) so we came up with Six Minute Training – one topic, delivered individually and ideally in person – get in, get out, and let them get back to their work. When we can't visit in person, we get them on the phone, proxy on to their desktop using remote access software and walk them through the process. We have also started making three-minute mini-videos (using Camtasia) which we keep in, you guessed it, BenTube. We also embed links to the mini-videos on pages where they're relevant.
- Have a look at Peter Morville's book (see Reading List, at the end) if you want some valuable insights into &quot;search&quot;.
- Just when you've made something idiot-proof, they build a better idiot.
- What lawyers really want in an intranet: a BIG RED BUTTON, right up front, that says GET ME WHAT I WANT, and the button is PSYCHIC!
- Then of course, the risk management folks get into the act, and demand that the psychic button also be a SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT. (Deep sigh!)
- All of these are worthwhile reads. Look in particular at Adrian Ott's &quot;Time-ographics Framework&quot; (page 24 in her book) which illustrates how people allocate time and attention in terms of four quadrants, based on Value, Convenience, Motivation and Habit. Apply those principles to the contribution and consumption activities of KM and see what you come up with! &quot;Total Engagement&quot; will change your ideas about games and gamers, and how business might benefit from incorporating game concepts into business processes. &quot;Your Brain at Work&quot; will help you understand why pushback against perfectly logical innovation is sometimes so fierce. Morville's book is a must. &quot;The Knowing-Doing Gap&quot; explains why people don't adopt change, even though they admit the new way is better. &quot;The Servant Leader&quot; will put your role in a new perspective and Denning's book is a refreshing guide to the importance of delighting clients.