Last week, Senture, LLC staff sponsored, exhibited, and attended KM Showcase 2020 co-presented by KM Institute and Enterprise Knowledge. The Showcase provided an excellent opportunity to meet and engage with KM experts and fully embrace the Learn, Collaborate, and Apply concepts that were evident in conversations in the Exhibit Hall, in speaker presentations from the KM Experts and KM in Practice tracks, and in the plenary sessions.

Fueled by coffee, tea, soda, generous lunches, and afternoon snacks, we shared our own KM work with others, including a successful project with USDA, and absorbed what others shared with us. Many speakers validated our KM thoughts, theories, models, and methodologies. Exhibitors demonstrated new-to-us tools that we can apply to future KM projects. Attendees kindly shared their KM stories—successes and failures—and we grew our KM network considerably in those two days through LinkedIn connections and the exchange of contact information. There was even talk about collaborating on future presentations.

Having spent the last week reflecting on what we learned, we realized that there was a takeaway from every conversation, every presentation, every plenary, and that those takeaways were immediately applicable our ongoing KM work. We’re sharing a few of these takeaways here:

People. Personalization was a hot topic at the Showcase and Jeffrey MacIntyre and Colin Eagan talked about a personalization gap and how to think about the detractors that we might face within our organizations labeled as critic, skeptic, pundit, pragmatist, and box checker. Being able to identify an internal audience in this way is meaningful because it allows us to personalize our message (see how that works?) to move our KM work forward. If we understand that someone is a box checker, we know that there might be some additional work necessary to help that person understand that KM is rarely a one-and-done project. Or that the work is simply over once the technology is up and running.

Process. We heard a collective message about making KM processes easy and even transparent and invisible so that those processes just become the agency way of doing things. Agreed!

Culture. Jen Jensen shared a powerful story about USAA culture and what it means to her. She also gave us an idea for our meetings at Senture, LLC. She said each USAA meeting starts with the Mission and then a story is shared—called a Mission Moment—where a meeting attendee shares an example of an action that embodies the Mission. What a wonderful way to actively promote organizational culture through continued reference to the Mission and shared stories.

Laura Greenlee and Julie Man from Bridgeable shared a KM case study that exemplified how to align KM implementation with an organization’s culture using service design principles. In Bridgeable’s case study, quirky engagement matched the culture. We loved Julie’s beginning rendition of Knowledge Paradise. Who says KM can’t be fun?  

Content. Nestled in the shared content by presenters were some really great phrases that we enjoyed:

• Perfect is the enemy of good.
• Invest in search.
• When you’re building search from scratch, it’s a tough beast.
• Seek professional help (regarding change management).
• Address the burning platform (go vanilla, no custom builds).
• Organizations are managing the wrong stuff (4/5 documents outdated).        

Technology. Thank you to the presenters who used audience polling tools to maintain a high level of engagement. Doug Kalish used Poll Everywhere and we also saw Slido.com in use (was that you, Joe Hilger?). These are effective ways to engage audience, and we appreciated them. We also appreciated the simple, yet effective approach taken by Mary Little and Kristin McNally with the paper handouts at each table that were meant to spark discussion for their in-session activity. It’s unfortunate that the activity was disrupted by the hotel fire alarm. (If you’re reading this, we’re all safe and were able to re-enter the hotel after a few minutes.) It is always refreshing to hear others share our philosophy that talk about technology should come last in KM and this message resonated with us during Zach Wahl's keynote.

Thank you to those who stopped by to talk about Senture, LLC’s KM work. Thank you to the presenters for sharing amazing content, lessons learned, and ideas to move us forward. Thank you to KM Institute and Enterprise Knowledge for an insightful two days of learning and collaborating. We’re already applying all the good stuff we heard.

We’re happy to talk KM anytime!

Check out highlights from the KM Showcase 2019.

Save the date - March 4-5, 2020 - for the next Showcase!  The 2-day event will be held at the Westin Arlington Gateway. 

You won't want to miss it!

Creativity and Innovation for KM Programs

The second in a series of videos about knowledge management, creativity, and innovation. In this episode, Stephanie Barnes (www.realisation-of-potential.com) and John Girard (www.johngirard.net) discuss knowledge management and why collective intelligence is worthy of note.

Law firms, like other professional services, are constantly looking to improve our knowledge-management strategies, i.e., to share and reuse valuable work product and leverage institutional knowledge. When properly executed, these programs translate into efficiency, higher quality work, happier clients, and more engaged employees.

"The Knowledge team took an incredibly complex backend product—one that searches a content-management system, matter-profiling system, client database, HR database and lawyer bios—and made the experience feel simple."

White & Case, a global law firm with 41 offices in 29 countries, set out to do exactly this in 2014 when it decided to invest in its intranet as a key knowledge tool for the firm. It took more than two years of research, design and development but the Knowledge team produced an award-winning product that supports 5,000 lawyers and staff and gives White & Case a platform to continue innovating.

There were several factors critical to success.

Homepage of the new White & Case intranet

Knowledge Reputation

When taking on a high-risk project, it helps to have a reputation as an innovative department. The Knowledge Department was formed in 2008 to help collect, organize and connect people to the firm’s collective knowledge. By the time the intranet project came about, Knowledge had pioneered expanding a successful professional-support-lawyer function and instituted an enterprise search tool for the firm. Through the success of these programs, the department had built strong relationships with lawyer allies and become known for driving change.

Leadership Buy-In

The old intranet was known for being inflexible and difficult to navigate, which created big challenges but also opportunities. The project was not an intranet upgrade but a complete revitalization. Since this was a priority project, Chairman Hugh Verrier created a partner-led Steering Committee at the outset. This team of 10 partners and business leaders helped define a clear mandate: the new Connect had to win its audience back. It had to be trustworthy, reliable and intuitive—built around the user’s needs.

Broad Engagement

Early on, the Knowledge team realized the project also needed a broad group of colleagues to serve as a sounding board and test group for new ideas. The 400-person Sounding Community, a demographically representative group of White & Case colleagues, was established. At its inception, this community represented 10 percent of the firm and throughout the project answered surveys, gave feedback, and tested the product prior to launch. The project team made a point of following up after an outreach to let the full group know the results, which made for a more powerful engagement.

The Sounding Community used interactive software to conduct usability tests like this. 

By the time the new intranet launched, the Knowledge team had ready ambassadors in most local offices. Each member of the Sounding Community was given a branded mug, to visibly note that they were part of the intranet team. Their involvement made a global project resonate on a local level. 

Quality Product

None of the change-management processes would have made a difference if the new intranet did not deliver. With the strong partnership of the Steering Committee, Sounding Community and Knowledge team, the firm were able to produce a new intranet that was fast, easy to navigate, integrated with key firm systems, and mobile-friendly. It delivered on the Steering Committee’s vision. Shortly after launch, a survey of end users found a 97 percent satisfaction rate, as opposed to 53 percent with the old system.

One of the best innovations from the new intranet was an improved search experience.

The Knowledge team took an incredibly complex backend product—one that searches a content-management system, matter-profiling system, client database, HR database and lawyer bios—and made the experience feel simple.

Whereas the enterprise search had been siloed from the old intranet—and built largely for advanced searchers—on the new intranet the Knowledge team simplified the point of entry into a single search bar for both intranet and enterprise search and kept users within the frame of the intranet when viewing results.

In addition, the team knew from interviews that many users preferred to search for intranet content rather than browse for it. In order to accommodate this, the search bar was built to serve as a navigation tool; after three keystrokes, it fills in the names of colleagues, sites and global tools as recommended results. 

Search bar showing predictive typing, and recommended results for sites and people.

Summary

White & Case was able to successfully bring the firm back to a new intranet, and begin using it as a valuable knowledge-management tool, by prioritizing the project at the highest levels and having a plan for broader engagement across the global platform. Now the challenge is to keep growing the product to help move the firm into a truly digital workspace. 

As a small and growing knowledge management team, we are always looking for ways to engage our people. The FIFA World Cup 2018 presented a perfect opportunity for our us to create an internal campaign at our company, Moorhouse Consulting, modelled on the World Cup. It’s not hard to get swept up in the competitive spirit of the World Cup - even if you’re not a die-hard football fan. This enthusiasm was the wave we wanted to surf.

Our aim was to get people to share knowledge and understand the processes and benefits of knowledge management.

So what did we learn? Here are five things:

Keep it snappy, make it sassy

Aligning our campaign with the football World Cup was a good move. It generated excitement and competition. There was already a high level of enthusiasm about the football: all we had to do was harness it.

It could work with any other major event or cultural phenomenon. This could be another sporting event (the Olympics, Rugby World Cup, Wimbledon), a TV series (Game of Thrones, Love Island), or a contemporary craze (Tinder, anyone?). Linking it to something that people are already enthusiastic about will get you half way there.

Get your top dogs barking

It turned out that those teams who did the best overall had leaders who motivated their team to participate. The method of motivation varied: some offered carrots, others beat their sticks. What mattered was that the leaders were enthusiastic, competitive and wanted their team to win.

Buddy up

Our campaign team included two employees who were already working together on the same client project. This turned out to be an advantage: they could meet face to face, had similar working hours, and the same types of client pressures. If your campaign team members are already working closely together, it makes it much more efficient to get organised and move forward.

No single players

We found that in most teams, there was a star performer (an ‘MVP’, if you like), who scored the most points for the team. If you can get people to share the enthusiasm and improve the volume of participation, that will make your campaign more successful. One way of doing this could be to award bonus points for team work.

Turn the spark into a flame

If nothing else, we learned that our people are a competitive bunch. It only takes a little stoking to get the competitive flame burning. Make the most of it by gamifying your campaign, and offering incentives. There is a little child in all of us, and the prospect of a reward for doing a Good Thing is, of course, too tempting to resist.

In summary, we learned that there are a few fundamental things that can help you drive a successful internal engagement campaign.  Linking your campaign to a non-work phenomenon that gets people excited is a good idea. You can never go wrong with rewards and incentives. And participation from leadership is a major propeller. Keep it simple. Make it fun.