Feature

posted 2 Jun 2003 in Volume 6 Issue 2

A brief history of Pathfinder – AS&K’s new enterprise portal

Appleby Spurling & Kempe (AS&K) recently launched its Pathfinder portal. Christopher Maiden, Pathfinder’s project manager, offers some insights into the often-neglected soft side of its development.

The pull of the portal

When Pathfinder – AS&K’s enterprise portal – was launched in late 2002, one enthusiastic secretary eloquently expressed the general reaction to its arrival: “I use the portal like a lost tourist uses a foreign-language dictionary. It contains everything I need to know or it can tell me where to find it.”

When a portal even appeals to such technology-weary and otherwise sceptical support staff, then you know you must have got something right. To reach this point, AS&K did some long, hard thinking and widespread internal consulting before embarking on a portal. This is the story of that journey.

Well before portals became fashionable, the need for one at AS&K emerged from the recognition that a centralised web-enabled tool could integrate and simplify access to disparate information sources, using a familiar interface and a single sign-on.

If only we knew what we know now

The problem was not lack of information. It was the inability to access what was already there on a “just-in-time” basis, without having to waste time and interrupt work rhythms to get to it.

At its simplest, a portal is just a single-entry point to a vast array of information resources, arranged conveniently and meaningfully for ease of access. Fundamentally, it must provide a 360-degree view of the essentials needed to get your job done and make doing that job easier.

Portals broadly resemble a dashboard, with various navigation panels, a sitemap and search facility to help you find what you want, perhaps with the ability to personalise content.

Although company and commercial portals can get much fancier, those essentials are at the core. Commercial portals come in two varieties: vertical (tightly focused on specialised content, like the recipe and leisure-based Epicurious) or horizontal (covering a diverse range of topics, like Yahoo).

A successful portal like Pathfinder depends on many factors, including decisions about content and the language used to arrange it (the classification scheme or taxonomy); how well presented and usable the interface is (the information architecture); and intangible cultural issues such as people’s preferred work habits and how they interact with others when solving problems (the workplace).

Building a good portal – one that is actually used – cannot, therefore, be reduced to an oversimplified formula of ten easy, sound-bite-sized steps. One size does not fit all. Design twice, build once is very good counsel, which any “me too” organisations ignore at their peril. You reap what you sow.

Why a portal?

In common with many organisations, AS&K faced a familiar bundle of workplace challenges:

Information overload
One of the most persistent problems faced by any organisation in the 21^st
century. It has been aptly compared to “sipping at a water cannon”;
Integration
Workplaces are riddled with disparate applications that do not talk to each other. Each has to be interrogated separately with different passwords and protocols, just to get to some small piece of essential information buried inside;
Information
Unfound information and time wasted looking for it is expensive. Estimates from various studies reveal that employees spend between 20-30 per cent of their time just looking for information from multiple locations or reinventing the wheel. That’s between 8-12 hours squandered per week. For larger organisations, this represents astronomical losses each year, the highest figures hovering around $31.5bn;
Interruption
Attention deficit disorder afflicts already complex workplaces. Between six and ten interruptions an hour is not unusual as people, technologies and information compete for attention and fragment our concentration. Pinpointing what gets people’s attention and how to manage its scarcity is a good business discipline and can provide clues to opportunities for new services or interventions;
Finding needles in haystacks
A powerful search engine (think Google or Teoma) is an indispensable tool for fishing out the relevant from the potentially useful. It is a familiar technology that has become another “killer app” for today’s internet-democratised workforce. Uncovering valuable material that might not otherwise be discovered can increase serendipity, and results can be refined with additional filters. A portal without a search engine is like a body without a heart;
Knowledge loss or deficiency
Reducing “time to competency” for new hires and loss of expertise through retirement or turnover affects any organisation’s ability to compete, sustain itself or contain costs. Capturing and baking expertise into people’s routine workflow is part of the solution. A portal may help, assuming comfort levels with the supporting technologies, such as discussion groups or weblogs;
Who knows what?
Signposting and connectivity tools help people know who to talk to and how to locate the experts or gurus in their organisational networks. How can they get an answer to their question quickly, not just a document? Sometimes, your next-door neighbour will know the answer to your question and you may not even know that you are that close to the answer. Incorporating a skills directory in a portal can help, perhaps linked to a discussion group for exchanging practice know-how;
Where does it hurt?
Locating “pain” in the company can offer clues to potential new support services. Listening to “war stories” about problems identifies the attention-getting hotspots (for example, a growing compliance burden, increased concern about risk management or emergent cross-disciplinary or hybrid practice areas, which are, by definition, usually more knowledge intensive). Knowledge gaps and deficiencies, or similar types of knowledge needed by different groups, can then be mapped, and solutions delivered through a portal.

While these are all familiar challenges for organisations, a portal alone will not solve them. Portals do not operate in a vacuum but in the tricky and often unpredictable terrain of human affairs.

Into the wild

This is the realm of resistance to change, adjustment to new work habits, and compromises. It is where the real work gets done and not within the artificial constraints of formal organisational charts and official hierarchies.

So portals must take account of unwritten rules of engagement in the workplace: transactions involve conversational exchanges, reciprocity, group loyalties and psychological deals between people.

The trust, mutual understanding and shared values that underpin these exchanges is now recognised as social capital, it is the currency used to get things done. The management and completion of a project involves a lot of trading on social capital.

Similarly, if you have fundamental communication problems in your organisation, such as territoriality or poor, unrewarded or undercompensated knowledge-sharing practices, a portal will not resolve them and might even make them worse. This is not about the technology. It is primarily about the habitat and adjusting, or even accommodating, human behaviour.

AS&K recognised and tackled all these issues before taking on a portal. To do otherwise would have been lethally premature. Within the typical structure of a law-firm partnership, this more holistic approach inevitably took longer. It did not guarantee untroubled progress but it generally made for a much smoother implementation with less resistance.

Countdown to launch

After lengthy prior consultation with stakeholders throughout the firm, the clear endorsement of the firm’s senior management was given through its Strategic IT Review Committee. The chief executive approved a project team, with complementary expertise and a budget. With the appointment of an IT consultant/system designer, work began on Pathfinder’s planning and design.

The project team comprised a partner, IT consultant/system designer, senior practice managers and representatives from fee-earner and secretarial communities. Other expertise was brought in, when needed, on system security, intellectual-property issues, usability and suitable metrics to gauge projected benefits.

This was a versatile team that communicated openly and collaborated systematically – another reason for Pathfinder’s success.

Pilot testing was undertaken in the crucible of the live workplace, with a diverse test group of representative employees and fee earners, whose range of comfort levels with technology varied widely. This ensured that the finished product was fully robust before it was rolled out to everyone, and that the portal’s design and content fitted the people, rather than the other way around.

After some brainstorming and canvassing of views, a portal name was agreed, ensuring strong branding while helping to stimulate some pre-launch buzz in the firm.

A self-help guide, drafted in “frequently asked questions” style, was tested by volunteers in preparation for the launch training programme, which was publicised through carefully sequenced announcements.

A portal by the people for the people

When Pathfinder phase one was launched, it embodied all the self-service resources requested during the consultative stage.

There are quick links to an array of frequently used resources such as case law and legislation from Bermuda and other jurisdictions. Links also lead to daily newspapers, the library catalogue, engagement and compliance documentation, official Bermuda websites, reliable business information, translation tools, and high-value, internally-annotated know-how.

A grab bag of key marketing collateral materials is positioned prominently, with attorneys who are preparing for a business trip in mind, and perhaps in a hurry. For support staff and department managers, important administrative forms are conveniently clustered together in another location.

Fast, simplified access to time entry, work-in-progress and accounts-receivable information is available for fee-earners. Eye-catching pie charts make their rapid assimilation much easier for the busy and distracted.

In this way, Pathfinder is “sticky” – it encourages loyalty, revisiting and further use by enabling people to discover other goodies in passing, even though they were initially attracted to it by something else.

One corporate attorney observed that: “There are so many things we have to do and carry in our heads. I now click on the attorneys’ neighbourhood page and all I need is there, at my fingertips. I no longer waste time learning complicated multiple systems. It’s an excellent one-stop shop for me.”

The search engine has also proved popular, especially with people who previously struggled with their document hunting. One fee earner said: “I now use it all the time and can find whatever I want quickly, even when the client is on the phone. Previously, it took forever.”

Secretarial staff are another happy customer segment. They are able to access a wide range of forms, fee-related and other financial information integral to their work. They love their “neighbourhood” page on Pathfinder because they helped design it; for them it is an effective tool when supporting their fee earners.

Another secretary spoke up with high praise indeed: “In a world of so many poorly designed computer products, Pathfinder is refreshingly different – it actually helps us.”

Pathfinder was not an imposed solution looking for a problem. It was driven and developed by those who were ultimately going to be its beneficiaries. That was, and remains, a key determinant of its success. The frequent use of Pathfinder’s feedback button – for new ideas, suggestions or complaints – attests to its daily usefulness and dynamic nature. Frequent improvements are made and phases two and three of its development will tackle the more ambitious requirements as funds permit.

A usable interface

A centralised visual space is at the heart of Pathfinder. It provides a single, branded focal point to which employees now come for much of their recommended daily information intake.

Navigation panels and “you are here” trails help people to get their bearings because they need to feel they are in familiar terrain when they work. Pathfinder clusters their information by community or topic, cross-referenced where necessary to other domains of knowledge, into which they may need to step briefly.

Categorising content like this is known as applying a taxonomy (or classification scheme) and the politics of trying to get a consensus on one can be quite a challenge. Our general rule was to keep it simple and familiar. Terms were used that reflected the everyday usage of the very people who would be expected to use them to search for information on or via the portal.

In balancing flexibility with consistency, Pathfinder’s arrangement combined in-house preferred usage with internationally recognised legal terms. Design was also simpler because it borrowed terms already used for categorising matters in the firm.

Learning and earning

Pathfinder has strengthened AS&K’s capacity for learning and rapid knowledge transfer. By incorporating directory tools for locating in-house experts and their key documents quickly, rookies can accelerate their learning with more focus and depth.

Volatile “yellow page” type information is available, such as daily announcements that would otherwise congest e-mail applications; policy and procedural changes; worldwide weather and holidays, time zones, currency converters and dialling codes; breaking news feeds; and investment information from reputable sources.

Client intelligence and their touch points with the firm are also being built into Pathfinder, although this is at an early stage of development. In time, this information can be mixed and matched with other client-preference data and made available through Pathfinder to support expert teams that straddle more than one practice area.

Pathfinder is part of a coherent attempt to contain or reduce the information overload problem and reduce distractions. Busy practitioners can concentrate on essential fee-earning activities such as developing new practice knowledge or recombining it.

Pathfinder’s natural habitat

Although Pathfinder was deliberately structured around identifiable practice communities to support their preferred modes of working, it is recognised as only one tool to which people may resort when doing their job and making sense of their environment.

Peer advice, informal intelligence and interpretive know-how can be gleaned or “tested” from other sources, such as water-cooler or kitchen chat, telephone conversations, informal mentoring down the hall, or through formal apprenticeship-style programmes. In other words, from their natural habitat or neighbourhood telegraph.

This natural habitat is the interpretive context for Pathfinder’s content because knowledge is always situational or context dependent. Different peer communities are the stewards and validators of actionable knowledge for their situations or area of expertise – they know best what they know or need and how to interpret and apply the answers they find or exchange. They share differing sets of values, information needs, specialist vocabularies, and they select their preferred tools from those available when problem solving or information gathering.

Pathfinder blends into this workplace biodiversity, rather than disrupting it. It is not imposed as a straitjacket regardless of the complexity of a context or people’s other information-gathering preferences.

Organisations as ecologies

Pathfinder is thus part of a diverse, wider ecology, a web of interconnected and mutually interdependent expertise. Increasingly, businesses will be seen in this way, recognising the delicate balance of interrelationships. The interaction within and dialogue between various practice communities represents a series of value networks, which are the pulse of innovation. A portal’s actionable content is fed and sustained by these networks.

We lose out on this richness if we slice and dice an organisation to death. Employees often operate in disconnected, territorial fragments or hierarchies, whose members may not even talk to each other. Cross-selling to clients becomes more difficult and routine but important knowledge transfer, needed just to get the job done, is hampered.

Extending Pathfinder’s reach

The key question underlying Pathfinder’s development was whether it would make doing our jobs easier. Initial reaction through both formal and informal channels reveals a resounding “yes” from most users.

Inevitably, there are still diehards who remain stubbornly disinterested or reluctant to use it, despite its value and simplicity. People have their own reasons for their choices, so in the interests of biodiversity and the wider ecology of the firm, we live and let live. Sometimes, an information emergency can trigger a resort to Pathfinder, and a consequent epiphany.

Pathfinder will continue to be developed in phases two and three, and its design and content shaped around the working lives of its users. Extending its reach will remain a goal and a challenge for the project team, who will endeavour to best what has already been accomplished.

Chris Maiden is Pathfinder’s project manager at AS&K. He can be contacted at: cmaiden@ask.bm.