Leveraging Information Over The Matter Life-Cycle Presentation at ILTA '08

I'll be presenting on August 25th (about a week--yow!) at the International Legal Technology Association's conference in Grapevine, Texas (near Dallas) in a presentation formally titled "Beyond Matter-Centrity--Full Matter Life Cycle Management." Less formally, it's called "
Matter Intelligence:Leveraging Information Over The Matter Life-Cycle."

The focus will be on how information about matters is gathered, collected, and leveraged by the attorneys and professional staff at my firm.

While August 24th has a full day of interesting KM presentations, technically I will be on the "Information Management" track.

I look forward to seeing some of you there.

My Boston KM Forum Presentation on Enterprise Tagging

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Right before I left on a week's vacation, split between a chamber music camp called "Heaven" and Cape Cod, I presented to the Boston KM Forum, which has a blog as well as its Web 1.0 website, on tagging inside the enterprise. My slides are also available there.

If you want to jump directly to other blogger's reactions, please see Sadie Van Buren's post and discussion about tagging as part of search activity and Suzanne Minassian's concise summary.

My main purpose was not to discuss how to implement tagging in the enterprise (my firm hasn't, so I can't), but rather to identify what I think are current business needs that could be met by tagging, some of the ways that enterprise tagging is different from tagging on the web, and to identify some of what I am looking for in tagging software.

I tied tagging to Prof. Andrew McAfee's SLATES paradigm of Enterprise 2.0, by which in my opinion any social software package needs to be assessed. SLATES=Search, Links, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, and Signals; for more information, read the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. In that paper McAfee focuses on tagging on the Web and the way that it enables people to assign their own context to web sites, which can then be shared with others. Looking back at the paper it is striking that McAfee focused on how intranet and internet sites might be tagged and leveraged inside the enterprise, but did not extend the concept of tagging to more typical inside-the-firewall content such as documents, matters, people, or tasks.

Tagging will help law firms provide context and enhance findability with respect to the large number of similar documents generated by legal work. By having tags linked to actual identified people (unlike Delicious) tagging should help us identify internal experts, either through their work being tagged or through their own tagging activity. My hope is that it may also enhance our ability to find out about new work, for instance, through having an internal RSS feed on a particular tag that would signal, for instance, when a new brief about civil rights was filed or finished.

Another driver of enterprise tagging may be employee engagement. One theme of the Enterprise 2.0 conference is that employees just entering the workforce, members of the "Millenial" and "Y" generations, enter the workforce with a great deal of enthusiasm but can get disillusioned by the difficulty of making measurable contributions inside a large and beureaucratic organization. Tagging, along with other social collaborative activities, may be a way to enhance engagement and derive value from these employees, in a fashion similar to that they may already be familiar with on the web.

That is not to say that tagging inside the firewall will be the same as it is on the web. Tagging must to adapt to the enterprise.

Professional service firms of all kinds have to be able to have ethical "walls" for all their content at the individual, matter, and client level. Such "walls" can prohibit a particular person from viewing a set of content, or can prohibit all but a very small set of people from viewing the content. That is, a tag might itself reveal the existence of a confidential client or matter, or show to someone who shouldn't know that a particular event has happened on a matter.

Ideally, enterprise tags will extend to more than "just" web sites. I would like to see tags (in descending order of importance) on 1) our document management system 2) the other document repositories in the firm 3) people 4) intranet pages and other content 5) matters and 6) tasks and projects. Ideally, external web sites would also be taggable.

While tagging people is third on the list, I believe that attribution of tags to people, either through their own activity or through others, will be a huge benefit to large professional services organizations. That's because finding the friendly experts is particularly important for us. One major difference of enterprise tagging is that there is no expectation of privacy within an organization as to one's activities; accordingly, authorship of a tag should definitely be exposed.

Some firms may experiment with somehow giving tags different weights depending on the seniorty or institutional position of the tagger. I'm not sure that's a good idea, but I would like to see some way to expose who made the tag, and exposing the role of the tagger could be quite beneficial. In evaluating work product, a first year associate's tag should not be accorded as much weight as the junior partner's tag in the mind of the person viewing the tag, but reflecting that in a system poses many obvious problems.

I also spoke about some features that should enhance enterprise adoption of tagging.
As with any new technology, providing help and guidance at the time that users need it will be key. Ideally there will be training features built right in, as you see on Amazon, ranging from a "What's this?" link, to a very basic description of tagging built in to the feature, to automatic feedback on a user's tags. This last might be something like "This is the 149th item you've tagged with the word "document". Do you want to try another word?"

There was an interesting discussion afterwards about the timing of tagging. Again, this is not an issue that I have addressed directly. The users I work for apply some metadata to the documents at the time they save them (principally a matter number and a document type), and we do our best to leverage that matter number to apply other metadata to the documents. Tagging could be applied to some extent at the time a document is saved, but typically our users don't want to actually have to think at that point as they need to print, file, or send it. It may be better to have tagging applied by other users at the time they search for and view the document, person, or other content. That would be a better approach where search is federated across many different content sources as it would be difficult to have "native" tagging in many different legacy systems.

Lynda Moulton on Social Search

It feels like there has been a tremendous crunch on my time since roughly mid-November. With the holidays approaching I am finally getting around to revving up some posts on this blog again, and clearing out some discussions that I have been saving up for a while.

I attended (in person) Lynda Moulton's talk introducing business motivators for social search , part of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 Boston event in Boston that I posted about earlier. Lynda's talk was quite dense but provided a "knowledge management" take on this collaborative technology; that is, she explained in terms familiar to knowledge practitioners the reasons why social search provides such an advantage over search without social context.

Lynda posted on the session as well.

Why does social search help?

Under the knowledge management concepts of "trust and validation," people will use most and seek to find content (such as a prior brief of a litigation expert) that has been validated by someone they trust. The extent of someone's trust in content is based on the content's expertise, authority, and affiliation as well the seeker's professional and personal relationships with the source or "voucher" of the content.

Seeking the company of others with similar business challenges is an existing, sound KM model for "bringing more to your work." Meeting in a trusting spirit and participating in sharing is known as a great way to get more out of content and your business.

How Does Social Search Help?

There are several different styles or methods of knowledge sharing.

• Informing--reflected by commentary and analysis


• Visualizing--done by dashboards, clustering


• Demonstrating--reflected in clustering and federating


• Expository--done by annotating and tagging

Together these tools play to our inclination to be self-sufficient with our technologies (and these tools work together in a social search enterprise tool). The human touch has much to offer clarity of knowledge. People are willing to engage in knowledge sharing when in fits in their workflow. You have to have early adopters, enthusaistic self-starters, and sharers. Once they demonstrate to others, it becomes contagious. Being able to see how others view a set of content, without having to ask them, is a new way of looking. We expect social search to play a strong role in organizing activities and work, at many levels.

• for communities of practice--organize people
• for domains--organize content repositories
• for content--organize search targets, be they documents, video, web pages, or people's expertise
• for clusters--organize content groupings
• for tags--social tagging has no controlled vocabulary, metatagging is controlled.

Can social search "transform behaviors into business wins"?

Social search has the potential to elevate search discoveries into teaching moments:

• it can leverage lost assets
• it can save others time by placing discoveries in view with notations
• nuggets of information can place content in context.

(This is really important because context is the bane of the legal work product searcher's existence--you need to know what how the document's litigation / deal / transaction context differs from yours in evaluating whether to use a sample or form).

Because of people's demand for trust, who was associated with a document can be just as important as what it is. (to provide an example, the brief on an evidentiary point authored by a partner noted for his learning on the subject is infinitely more valued than the one-off memo of the summer associate).

Leveraging your network can save you time--annotating what you learn as you learn it increases your own understanding and that of others as well.

Clustering has the effect of revealing relevant content no matter how you search for it.

Tagging can prevent the "second fire drill."

Benefits of these social behaviors accrue over time.

Social Search Adapts Content To The Culture Of Organization

Social search moves the content into an organization that members of a common culture understand.

For instance, the pharmaceuticals industry is highly technical, with strong demand for efficiency, and its teams are made up of professionals with advanced degrees (I think Lynda suggested that taggers and annotations in this culture can afford to be quite technical and not intelligible to those without a Ph.D in biology.)

In media, content is multi-media, poorly labeled. Teams are highly collaborative, and need in-depth and accurate fact-finding.

Financial services pushes tens of thousands of products and funds out to its millions of customers. Customers have a wide variety of sophistication. Customers are also trading partners.

Perhaps more collaboration and knowledge sharing in the defense industry would have led to a lower priced toilet seat.

Recommendations For Social Search Projects

Lynda recommended that a social search project needed to start with some questions about an organization's content:

What are our most important knowledge assets?

Could we benefit from collaboration?

Why would content sharing get to better business processes?

Lynda had several recommendations for implementation of any social search.

• Build a map of who works and what content they use (I don't see how this is any kind of prerequisite for implementation of social search. Part of the idea is to let people build thier own maps of the content they use and see how they fit with others' maps).
• Find teams with early adopter attitudes and with serious information gathering challenges;
• Get a vision, a target that will give an edge;
• Get a bunch of wins;
• Communicate the outcomes and plan for the next; and,
• Don't expect technology to solve the problem.

You will need people who understand content and content architecture, especially on teams that might otherwise be skeptical.

Metrics

A woman in the audience asked if metrics for proving success are different with social search? Lynda suggested that the best metrics are stories. Search logs can also be a good source of success proof. You can set up a system where the expectation of how it is supposed to work is conveyed up front.

( I don't find this satisfactory--can't you look at amount of content, ranking, annotations contributed, to develop metrics and establish a return on investment? Another way to establish success would be to conduct pre-and post-rollout surveys of people's satisfaction with their ability to find stuff. The hazard there would be conducting the survey too soon since the value of this type of search would increase dramatically after people had been contributing content for a while).