McKinsey on Knowledge Management

A theme of this blog is that the "default" approach to issues in law firm management should be that much can be learned from the enormous literature on corporate management.  In other words, barring unusual circumstances unique to the profession (which always includes the sui generis cultural identity of a law firm), the dynamics of law firm management are not utterly distinct from the dynamics of a like-sized corporation in a high-end service business.  So when an outfit like McKinsey writes about knowledge management for companies, it's presumably worth a read to see what light it shines on KM for law firms.

Characteristically—and I believe, correctly—McKinsey approaches the challenge of KM with a market-driven mindset.  That is, treat the exchange of knowledge within a firm as a marketplace, albeit one with idiosyncratic features, and use what we know about the power of markets to drive KM.  Specifically:

• The "supply" of knowledge comes from smart people providing their distinctive expertise.
• Those people, in turn, must be recognized for their contributions above and beyond their passive peers.
• And they must get credit (their intellectual property must be respected); nothing is more demoralizing to a junior person than to see a senior take credit for their ideas.
• Senior management must get conspicuously behind the creation and upkeep of the KM marketplace.

At the KC Forum I blogged here recently, a fascinating side "conversation" was on how UK and US firms approach KM differently: Essentially, UK firms are people-intensive (having dedicated lawyers draft model documents, e.g.) and US firms are technology-intensive (search, taxonomies, and meta-tagging, e.g.).   Which side does McKinsey come down on?  Both.  They call for a small team (two dozen people for a "large investment bank") to fulfill roles such as editor, "knowledge domain owner," and quality assurance, while at the same time confirming the virtue of effective and targeted technology (for example, deeming it a meaningful success to reduce the number of searches required to find a pertinent document from 5 to 1.2).

But isn't there a chicken and egg problem with launching any KM marketplace?  To wit, what user will go to a KM repository that has little content and what supplier will write for a repository that has no users?  Interestingly, if McKinsey knows whereof they speak, it takes as few as 700—1,000 documents to achieve critical mass.  Has your firm got, say, that many briefs lying around?

Yeah, I thought so.