"It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?"
Agree
or disagree, but there’s no doubt a key capability of a law firm’s KM
initiative—assuming
you actually want your attorneys to use it—is some capability for
finding the apposite expert who can help. I’ve called this the
"Ask Sally" moment, as in, "Ask Sally; she’ll know."
Within a law firm, a simple exercise in "Social Network Analysis" (SNA)
can map who really is talking with who, and the results often surprise
a firm, for better and worse. A very common experience, for example,
is to find a few very highly connected individuals appearing as hubs
of knowledge exchange: The problem is that many of those networkers
extraordinaire are actually bottlenecks, suffering overload, as the sheer
volume of incoming (and they’re usually incoming) requests for assistance
impairs their ability to get their own work done with a modicum of productivity. Unless
you try SNA, you may never know.
I’ve discussed SNA before,
but now CIO magazine has nice story including
a sidebar about
how Orrick is playing with it. Can you say, "timely?:"
"[T]he corporate world has been waking up to the uses for
this once arcane social science. Some of the interest stems from disappointment
with efforts to build knowledge management databases that were largely
ignored by employees. “We’re seeing that companies want to have a picture
of who the key knowledge brokers are in their organization,” says [Prof.
Rob Cross, of UVA’s McIntire business school]. “The
rise of blogs, online support sites and social networking sites—such
as Friendster and LinkedIn—have also helped raise SNA’s profile.”
I’ve been reading Prof. Cross’s 2004 book, The
Hidden Power of Social Networks, as he seems to be the go-to
guy for SNA. Look
for a review in the near future.
