KM Space

InnovAction Awards Deadline

2008-05-17T07:30:00.002-04:00

The June 2nd entry deadline for the 2008 InnovAction Awards for ingenuity in law practice management is coming up fast. There is still time to submit an entry. (But you will have to compete with The Firm's entry.) Take a moment to review the InnovAction web site and submit an application for you ingenuity in law practice management.

For more information:

Book Review - The Toothpick

2008-05-17T00:02:00.003-04:00

I just finished reading The Toothpick: Technology and Culture by Henry Petroski. Here is the New York Times Book Review that caught my attention to the book: Consider the Toothpick.

It was a good read, not as good at Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World or Salt: A World History, but it was good. This was one of the author's reasons for writing the book:

"For whatever reason, the usually forgotten toothpick came to my mind one day when I was searching for an engagingly simple device that would serve to illustrate some basic principles of engineering and design and that at the same time would help reveal the inevitable interrelationships between technology and culture."

There was some fascinating history and information. According to the book, in the mid-1980's toothpicks were in 97 percent of American homes and that Americans consumed over million toothpicks each day.

Up next is The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd. Here is the review from the New York Times that caught my attention.

An Attorney's Perspective on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0

2008-05-16T23:45:00.002-04:00

My presentation at the Spring Conference at the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians was An Attorney's Perspective on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. The slide-deck is embedded below. (I warn you that it is mostly images)

A central theme was my C's of 2.0:

Contribution
Communication
Collaboration
Connection
Community

I emphasized that we are still at the early adoption stage of most of these tools and ways of working. Do not panic. You are not being left behind. . . Yet.

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Part 2 of Library 2.0 Presentation at the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians

2008-05-16T12:51:00.001-04:00

I am on the agenda to speak at the Spring Conference for Minnesota Association of Law Librarians. The first of the conference speakers in Shane Nackerud, Web Services Coordinator for the University of Minnesota.

These are my notes on the second part of Shane's presentation on Library 2.0:

How have libraries reacted to the 2.0 movement? Let's look at how other industries have changed: Music industry, travel agencies, book stores, and newspapers are all trying to adjust to the increasing flow if information through the internet. Libraries are also being impacted. The number of visitors to libraries is decreasing. The number of reference requests has dropped dramatically and circulation statistics are down.

A lot of the impact is an impact from the internet. Libraries should compare the search of their catalogs to the Google search.

Libraries 2.0 = [book's stuff + people + radical trust] x participation

Get in the flow. Attention is scarce and resources are abundant. Get into the spaces where the users are. Trying stuff out is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.

Shane has built a plug into Amazon so that it shows that a book is in the U Minn library in the Amazon list. Shane is pushing RSS feeds out to users, including a users circulation. He has building widgets that users can plug into iGoogle and other widget compatible sites.

Libraries are pushing some photos out as a hosting site to display their photograph collection. Another was using flickr to publish book reviews.

He demonstrated McMaster University Library's Web team collection of links they share. MIT reference libraries are pulling delicious tags into their own website.

Shane showed the University of Alberta's Facebook application and Penn State University Libraries Search. They both tie into the library catalogs. Each had less than a 5 active users a day.

Shane pushed out a GreaseMonkey script that plugs into Amazon. If the book is in his catalog, that shows up in his search results. The script came out of the University of Seattle.

Shane started the UThink site that hosts the blogs at the University of Minnesota, the biggest blog collection at an educational institution.

In us new catalog, he returns results based on relevancy. There are also facets to filter the results to refine the result set. The catalog gives the users the ability to add tags to books and items. It seems like the knowledge management issues with enterprise search carry over to libraries. (The audience was very interested in this topic.)

Shane has done some great things with trying to integrate library information into the users workflow and sharing data, rather than keeping the information in a walled environment. At the end he encouraged the audience to play.

Library 2.0 Presentation at the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians

2008-05-16T10:45:00.001-04:00

Speaking Engagements

2008-05-13T08:34:00.004-04:00

I am currently working on an article entitled Wiki While You Work that will be included as part of the ILTA White Paper on Knowledge Management.

Then, I am off to Minnesota to speak to the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians:An Attorney's Perspective on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
The growing use and acceptance of these tools in the legal industry is changing the ways lawyers practice, communicate, capture information and FIND information. We’ll get the perspective of an experienced lawyer and Knowledge Management practitioner when Doug Cornelius shows us how he uses these tools in everyday practice.

Then, I am off to Georgia to be part of a panel with Andrew McAfee at the Interwoven Legal I.T. Leadership Summit:Serving Multiple Generations: Role of Web 2.0 and Strategies for I.T.
Today's workforce includes three or four generations of professionals, each with different motivations, expectations, and ways of learning, thinking, and working especially the newest generation. How do these younger associates work? What tools and processes do they prefer to use over the course of a day, and why? How do blogs, wikis, and social networking applications like Facebook apply to business in general and to legal in particular? Which aspects of Web 2.0 will have enduring value and be transformative, and which are likely to fade away? Do they really offer new potential for user-driven applications that do not require I.T. intervention or for engaging clients in new ways? What are the risk management implications? Is it possible to maintain standards and achieve economies of scale while servicing every part of the generational spectrum? An industry expert followed by moderated discussion helps attendees understand and debate how to develop I.T. strategies that straddle multiple generations and explores the reality and potential of Web 2.0 for the legal industry.

Contact Networks - Enterprise Relationship Management

2008-05-08T09:16:00.004-04:00

We had Rich Rifkin and some of his colleagues in from Contact Networks to see what their product can do. I was left very impressed.

They call their product Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) and distinguish it from Client Relationship Management (CRM) products. I have posted about my dissatisfaction with CRM systems: CRM in Law Firms, Is CRM Worth It? The Pros and Cons of Client Relationship Management. The problem is that they do not add much value to the lawyer so there is little incentive for them to add and maintain the information in the CRM system.

Contact Networks mines information from email traffic, address books, calendar, the CRM system and other available data sources. In particular, it matches an email domain to database of companies. So it knows that an email to someone@gs.com, is an email to someone at Goldman Sachs. Using that email address they match the contact information to the CRM system or the contacts to flush out the name, title and other information.

They crunch all of the contact information, the frequency of email communication, and some other information to determine the strength of the relationship between someone inside the firm and an external contact.

Contact Networks provides a simple, "Google-ish" interface to search for who inside the firm knows a particular person outside the firm or who inside the firm has contacts at a particular company. That is a question that passes through my email system dozens of times a day. InterAction was set up to try to answer the question. But InterAction relies on attorneys adding contact information and dealing with its kludgey interface. Contact Networks also goes farther than showing Who Knows Who to showing How Well Who Knows Who.

When seeing the relationship, it displays what data is part of the relationship: emails, contact card, InterAction entry, etc. This exposes some interesting information. A large amount of email traffic goes out to people that are not in your address book. Looking back at my recent traffic, I agree that the proposition is completely true. I am just as lazy and time-pressured as anyone else. I often will just hit reply all and not bother adding the contacts into my address book. Rich threw out a number of 70% of email traffic recipients not being a person's address book. A benefit of Contact Networks is that it can match the email address and email traffic from one person to someone else's contact card or InterAction information for that person. I may just be hitting reply all. But if my junior associate has entered that person's contact information, Contact Networks will match the contact information to the email address.

Contact Networks also has a compilation of Standard Industry Codes for the companies so you can associate the contact with an industry. The you can search for contacts in a particular industry and see who in the firm knows the person and how well they know the person.

Contact Networks is not trying to position itself as an alternative to InterAction or CRM, but as a complement. Contact Networks is able to pull in lots more information than InterAction can get on its own. Bu Contact Networks does not have the management and control features of InterAction to track information and catalog it.

Obviously, Contact Networks focused on alleviating concerns of privacy. First, they do not look at the contents of the email. They just grab the address, date and frequency of email contact. You can also allow users to opt-out, you can allow users to apply a private label to exclude the contact information and you can limit who has access to the ERM information.

The great thing about Contact Networks is that it requires no user input. It harvest everything from existing inputs in other processes and systems. It has a simple user interface, so training is a few minutes or a simple email instruction.

Tom Baldwin has been telling me to bring in Contact Networks for months. I am glad I finally did.

Matthew Parsons & Associates - On Knowledge Management Strategy

2008-05-06T20:57:00.003-04:00

Neil Richards has joined Matthew Parsons to start Matthew Parsons & Associates. To kick it off they have put together their views on how knowledge management and knowledge management strategy is evolving in law firms: Open for Business.

The post is an excellent primer on the basics of knowledge management.

It starts with people and leaders
A changing landscape requires strategic reassessment
Strategic elements
- Strategic intent
- Firm culture
- Client access and services
Implementation elements
- Practice planning and support
- Technology platforms and systems
- Audit and process

Congratulations to Neil and Matthew on their new endeavor.

Lawyers and Twitter

2008-05-06T07:59:00.002-04:00

I am user of Twitter.

For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, you can think of it as a combination of blogging and instant messaging. Each post or tweet is limited to 140 characters so you can send tweets by text message. Like most social media, it is cheap (free and currently free of advertising) and very easy to use (there are only a few buttons).

Steve Matthews wrote a great post on an intro to Lawyer Marketing with Twitter. Kevin O'Keefe followed that up with his own perspective and success stories in Lawyer Marketing with Twitter Has Arrived.

Like both Steve and Kevin, I've had a few Twitter moments and find it useful to engage people through this communications platform. In this era of new ways to communicate beyond email, Twitter is a great avenue to communicate and share information.

Rather than duplicating what Steve and Kevin said about Twitter (you should go read both stories), I have two additional features that I like about Twitter.

First, it is very compatible with other platforms. The flow of tweets is available through RSS. For example, Twitter ties into Facebook and updates my Facebook status. I have a Twitter widget on this blog showing my most recent tweets. I also have a Twitter widget running on my intranet page.

Second, tweets are indexed and returned by internet searches. All of that good stuff in my tweets, gets returned in a Google search, just like posts on this blog. You are sharing beyond the Twitter universe.

To learn more about Twitter there is a great video from Common Craft, Twitter Explained. Once you join Twitter, feel free to follow me on Twitter: @dougcornelius.

Book Review - Backyard Giants

2008-05-04T07:50:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever. It is a quirky subject, but very well written by Susan Warren (who is also the deputy bureau chief for Wall Street Journal in Dallas).

The book followers a group of growers in Rhode Island in their pursuit to grow enormous pumpkins to win pumpkin growing contests, to break the world record and to reach the 1500 pound benchmark.

[They] belong to a special breed of gardeners that compete to grow the largest flowers, fruits and vegetables they possibly can. At the end of every season, special events are held where the botanical marvels are weighed and measured and prizes handed out. Thus, the world has been gifted with its first 269-pound watermelon, a 124-pound cabbage, a 24-pound tomato and a carrot nearly 17 feet long. It is pumpkins, thought, that have taken center stage. No other vegetable or fruit grows that big, that fast.

This was a great story and was very enjoyable to read. Yes, it is on a quirky topic. But the story of hard work and sacrifice is as true for these competitors as it is for any others.

Next on my list is The Toothpick: Technology and Culture by Henry Petroski. Here is the New York Times Book Review that caught my attention to the book: Consider the Toothpick.

Corporate Knowledge Management in a Web 2.0 World

2008-05-02T14:02:00.001-04:00

I watched a webinar sponsored by GoLightly on Corporate Knowledge Management in a Web 2.0 World. The presenters were Abby Shaw, Web Channel Management, Fireman's Fund Insurance Company and Christopher Dworin, Vice President of Business Development, GoLightly, Inc.

Abby started off with her take on what is Web 2.0. She included the usual suspects of blogs, wikis, user comments, discussions, ratings and rankings, community contact tools, file sharing, federated search and mashups. She pointed out that this is not the right way to present Web2.0. Her take is creating an efficient, resourceful and engaged communities of interest.

How has Web2.0 changed knowledge management?

Facilitate, don't manage. You have been willing to let go. Remove control.
Higher value knowledge is smaller, flatter and broader in scope. Small chunks of information.
Reduces overhead. The capture, catalog and distribution of KM can be part of ordinary work activities

Some participants were concerned about review prior to publishing. She had her lawyers look at it. Her lawyers said that they are protected from liability as long as they reviewed content regularly and remove the offending content.

Abby focused on the importance of social networks outside the hierarchy of a firm's structure. This recognition of social networks was especially important during a merger. It was key to keep those social and communications channel open. She also emphasized that employee profiles should be opened up for employees to add content. HR could not effectively add enough information.

Abby laid out some hard benefits:

improved work quality and cycle time
- improve employee access to employee expertise
- improve usefulness of public (intranet content)
- speed time from question to answer
employee engagement and retention
- informal knowledge transfer is cheaper and more effective than formal training
- recognize key players in informal knowledge-sharing networks
- much more effective than handing out company swag
-Picture on the front page of the intranet was one of best rewards in a poll of employees (more so than cash).
corporate compliance
- Automate governance and document business process
- if information is more available outside the company then they will go there instead of your internal sources
- better to have employees using an internal social network and keep the information inside the firewall, rather than all of that information and communication happening outside

Knowledge is power; but the sharing of knowledge is even more powerful. Knowledge hoarders just end up out of the loop.

How do you validate the information if you are not reviewing information before it is published? People are using inaccurate information already: outside sources, email notes that are now outdated, etc. It is easier to monitor and address bad information if it is in a public space.

How do you deal with personal opinions? - Opinions are knowledge. You need to stop bad behavior. Abby's example: are you worried about employees in your lobby pushing each other around.

Chris took over to talk about the GoLightly products and their upcoming webinars.

It gives you everything you need to get your online community up and running. Includes: Community Home Page (easy to update), Searchable Member Directory, Unlimited Groups, Unlimited Email Lists, Resource Library, Forums/Bulletin Boards, Unlimited Blogs, Unlimited Wikis, and Training. And all of this with your Branding!

Knowledge Management in a Fragmented World

2008-05-01T07:23:00.002-04:00

Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge started a new column in KM World magazine. Borrowing from Dave Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, he calls it Everything is Fragmented.

"I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the "chunked" material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems."

Since I started following the Enterprise 2.0 movement, I have shifted my philosophy of knowledge management. I fall pretty close to Dave's position.

"It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction."

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are still useful. But, as Dave Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, everyone has a different view on what the structure should be. Whatever taxonomy I create or a group decides upon, it will only be meaningful to some of the people some of the time. As the taxonomy gets more and more complex, the less useful it will be.

On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.

The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.

If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.

We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.

That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo's social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.

Social Networks - Claim Your Name

2008-05-01T07:03:00.001-04:00

Dan Schawbel put together a compelling piece on signing up for social networks to claim your name or suffer. Wearing my real estate lawyer hat, it is all about three things: location, location, location.

Joining social networks does not cost you anything other than a few minutes to register and add your information. You may find it interesting. Even if you do not find it interesting today, you may find it interesting in the near future.

Claim you name on these social network sites. Even if you do not use them actively, you can generally point a lot of information at them from other collections.

Even if you have a fairly unique name like my name, there are still others out there with the same name. When I first became Doug 2.0 and started my online presence, "Doug Cornelius" was mostly about the Yuba College basketball coach. Since then, the top 20 search results in Google for Doug Cornelius all point to me. (At least as of this morning for my search).

Facebook for Lawyers - Legal OnRamp

2008-04-30T07:12:00.004-04:00

The Bar Talk piece in the May 2008 edition of The American Lawyer is focused on Legal OnRamp. To toot my own horn, Brian Baxter, the author of the piece threw in a few quotes from me:

"Social networking costs are minimal-it's not like sponsoring a table at an awards dinner or printing brochures-so your return on investment is astronomic," says Douglas Cornelius, a senior real estate associate with Goodwin Procter in Boston. Cornelius says he favors Legal OnRamp over other business networking sites like LinkedIn and LawLink because it's interactive and offers access to potential clients through its in-house contacts. Cornelius's one gripe with the site so far is that it has too many Silicon Valley types.

The second half of my gripe (which did not make it into the story) was that there were few real estate and real estate investment management in-house contacts in Legal OnRamp. After all that is my client base.

As I have written about Metcalfe's Law before, the power of a social network tool or communications tool is increased as more people use the tool. If my client base and peers are not using the tool, it is a less effective tool.

But wearing my knowledge management/enterprise 2.0 hat, Legal OnRamp is a tremendous tool. Even if your clients are not the "Silicon Valley types."

Since the time of my interview by Brian Baxter, I have seen more and more real estate counsel come into Legal OnRamp. It is becoming more and more useful to me. I would bet that it will become more and more useful to my clients and potential clients.

Can Google Answer Your Question?

2008-04-28T09:06:00.006-04:00

One of the challenges of knowledge management is comparing the ability to find information inside the firm, against the ability to find information outside the firm.

Google, in its quest to organize all of our knowledge, has set the bar very high for us trying to organize all of our knowledge inside the firm.

One of the most common requests I get is: "Make it a Google-like search." Obviously the information inside the firm is not organized in the highly linked and interconnected way of webpages that makes Google so successful.

But one of the keys in producing content and publishing content is how it comes back in a search for information. It is key in knowledge management to sit down like a regular person at the firm and try to the find the content you just produced. People are not willing to sit down and create a complex query or fill in a lot of fields to get an answer. They want to fill a few words into a simple search box and get results.

One of the new features of SharePoint is the ability of individual list items to be returned in search results. The SharePoint list function allows you to organize information in a structured way. For example, collecting a list of precedent acquisition agreements and noting specific characteristics. You can go into the list and filter for a particular set of results. Or, if the list is structured properly, you can just use the simple SharePoint search to return the individual items on the list.

There are questions that cannot be answered by Google and there are answers that cannot be answered by your intra-firm search. But we need to make sure that more and more questions can be answered.

Photo by snakeplisken.

Book Review

2008-04-26T14:23:00.003-04:00

I just finished reading The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde. Mr. Fforde is a literary jokester, spoofing both nursery rhymes and mystery fiction protocol, including anagrams, secret twins, and the butler who did it. I first started reading some of Fforde's books a few years ago with The Eyre Affair, followed by the other Thursday Next books.

The Big Over Easy centers around the murder of Humpty Dumpty. At first it looks like the alcoholic Dumpty just fell off the wall. Then it looks like he might have been pushed or shot. Fforde moves through the world of nursery rhymes and mystery cliches.

This book was not as good as The Eyre Affair. Bur it did make for good reading on the train. I was a science major, so I probably miss many of the literary references in his stories.

Up next on my reading list is Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever.

CRM in Law Firms

2008-04-25T08:05:00.003-04:00

Andrew K. Burger has a story in CRM Buyer: CRM in Law Firms: The Jury's Still Out. Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch pointed out this story in her post: Law Firms Still Not Relating to Client Relations Management Software.

The Firm uses Interaction as its CRM. I find Interaction to be much better in theory than practice. I think everyone agrees at a firm level that the sharing of contact information and relationships across the firm is a terrific goal and adds tremendous value to the firm. In my experience, attorneys are willing to share contact and relationship information with members of the firm. Yes, they are cautious how it is used and want some some credit for the relationship. But that position is true for all knowledge sharing.

As Carolyn points out:

[T]he larger barrier to integration of CRM is institutional: Most lawyers simply aren't willing to take the time (or sacrifice the billable hours) to input critical data. Then, when CRM fails due to lack of lawyer commitment, lawyers blame the software and subsequently grow even more resistant to CRM efforts.

Knowledge sharing is a marketplace. If I am going to take time to contribute something, I expect to get something back in return. Increasing the knowledge resources of the firm is not enough. I previously wrote about this in Personal Knowledge Management and the Knowledge Market. A lawyer is more likely to use a new tool if it provides more functionality to them then an existing tool. Why should I enter information into a clunky public space instead of a persona space where I can organize the information in the way that makes sense to me.

I want the CRM system to make it easier for me to do my job. Contributing contact and relationship information into a public repository creates little or no marginal value to me. All of that information is already sitting in my email contacts, in my head and other local places. The current CRM system does very little to help me manage that information. I would spend much more time using Interaction if it provided much more functionality to me as an individual. All of its extra function is derived from collecting information from others, not in providing function to the individual.

Unfortunately, CRM systems only provide a small margin of additional benefit to the individual lawyer. That margin is too small to motivate lawyers to change behaviors or to learn the new tool.

This scenario is true of lots of first generation knowledge management tools. They put the emphasis on the benefit of sharing knowledge across the firm. They did not focus on making it easier for the individual to manage their own knowledge or the knowledge of a small group.

Perhaps there is some future hope for Interaction and CRM for law firms. The article in CRM Buyer has this quote:

"The foundation for incorporating Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis, blogs and other social networking tools, into InterAction are likewise already in place, and LexisNexis is moving in that direction, according to [Tracey Blackburn, LexisNexis product marketing manager]."

For now, InterAction does not even have a field for linking to a person's LinkedIn profile. That is a place where people are updating information about themselves and who they know. If InterAction could combine external information about people, with our internal information and give me a better way to organize and manage my contacts, that would make it useful for me.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - The Obstacles

2008-04-24T21:03:00.003-04:00

One of the obstacles to implementing Enterprise RSS is getting the firm to agree that enterprise RSS is a good investment.

RSS is still not a well known technology. People are more likely to keep going back the webpage instead of subscribing to the RSS feed. Relying on people to keep coming back to the blog or wiki to find changes will make the tools less effective and less likely to spread within the firm.

RSS producing tools are less effective without Enterprise RSS. If you have to rely on the people to sign up for RSS feeds themselves, they are less likely to do so.

Of course if you don't have many RSS producing tools inside the firm, then enterprise RSS would not seem to be a good investment for the firm.

So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Which comes first, the enterprise blog or the enterprise RSS?

The other challenge to enterprise RSS is the broad group of skills needed to chose a vendor and implement. You need desktop applications to test the integration with the email client or the standalone RSS feedreader. You need the network guys to integrate the enterprise RSS server. You need the web developers to integrate enterprise RSS with the RSS producing tools. You need the telecommunications people to integrate the RSS feedreaders on mobile devices. You need the librarian and researchers to help find, organize and disseminate external RSS feeds. You need people using internal RSS producing tools. Fortunately, the enterprise RSS platforms are relatively inexpensive. It is the allocation of firm resources that is a bigger investment.

Personally, I think enterprise RSS is a great investment.

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is drawing to a close here in Boston.

From Networking to Net Work

2008-04-24T14:59:00.007-04:00

I watched/listened to a webinar by Patti Anklam as part of the Community 2.0 Conference. Patti is the author of Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World.

Patti started by thinking about whether there are sets of network properties. If so can we apply a taxonomy to them. All networks share certain properties. You can draw them and you can count the connections and map the connections. Patti pointed out that networks are not Facebook or LinkedIn. We have always had networks. Facebook and LinkedIn start exposing the network in a very visible way.

Every network has a purpose. Patti proposed five major group of purposes:

mission - aid and support
business - create economic gain
idea - generate and collaborate in the developing ideas
learning - communities of practice
personal - nurture emotional relationships

Patti demonstrated a few different network structures. The visual representation of a social network can often show how the communication and therefore the decision-making in the enterprise do not follow the hierarchical organizational chart. It can also show that the departure or retirement of person who may not be a key person in the organizational chart, but is a central person in the network.

For leaders, your management can be re-thought if you think about the network you are leading. For the most, part law firms are networks.

Network intentionally - create more connections, fill in gaps in the network, make it more collaborative and cooperative
Practice network stewardship - you need to pay attention to change triggers, watch the network evolve
Embrace and leverage technology - get the technology aligned with the network, enterprise 2.0 is aligned with a mesh network structure
Create a capacity for net work - encourage outreach, encourage on-boarding and incorporation into the existing network within the firm
Learn to use the network lens - map the idea network and see if there are artificial boundaries

Going from networking to net work, its not how many networks you participate in, its how many people you "connect" with. Think about quality and contribution. Don't think about quantity.

In the spirit of the social network analysis I created a visualization of my Facebook friends and their relationships to each other. On the right side in green are my Facebook friends from The Firm. At the bottom in the blue and purple are my friends in the legal knowledge management and legal technology area. (Most of the Canadians got the purple label. I am not sure how it figured that out). At the left in the pink are my Facebook friends in the knowledge management area, but not in the legal industry.
The chart was generated by the TouchGraph Photos application in Facebook.

Lawyers, Law Students and Facebook

2008-04-24T13:01:00.004-04:00

With the summer associates coming soon, The Firm has been wondering what to do with Facebook. Last summer, the summer associates created their own Facebook group. The Firm's recruiting department was wondering whether to create the Facebook Group for the 2008 group ahead of time.

Of course, I was a big advocate of setting up the Facebook group. That way the summer associates could start connecting with each other before they arrived at The Firm. Also, it would send them the message, that their online personas and activities need to get cleaned-up (if necessary).

They also spent some time researching Facebook to see what other large law firm groups are in Facebook. Here are the results. It starts with the firm name, then lists the groups found with the firm name. Under each group is the target audience of the group, whether it is opened or closed and who created the group.

Arnold & Porter
Arnold & Porter - Summer Klass of Summer 2k7
07 SA Open Student

Baker Botts
Baker Botts (Washington)
STAFF Open STAFF
Baker Botts DC Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (DC) Closed Student

Bingham McCutchen
Bingham McCutchen
STAFF Open STAFF

Cravath
Cravath Summer Associate Class of 2007
07 SA Closed Students

Davis Polk
Davis Polk 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
Davis Polk & Wardwell
STAFF Open STAFF

Debevoise
Debevoise & Plimpton Summer 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
STAFF Open STAFF
Debevoise Summer '07
07 SA (NY) Open Student

Dechert
Dechert Philadelphia Summer Associates '07
07 SA (PA) Closed Students
Dechert LLP London Future Trainees
London Closed UNK
Dechert Trainees
08 London Closed UNK

Gibson Dunn
Gibson Dunn Summer 2008
08 SA (LA) Open UNK
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher (NYC) Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Goodwin Procter
Goodwin Procter
Staff Closed Staff
2007 Goodwin Procter Summer Associates
07 SA (all) Closed Student

Hogan & Hartson
Hogan & Hartson Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (DC) Open Student
Hogan & Hartson NY Summer 2008
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
Hogan & Hartson Summer Associates 2007 - DC
07 SA (DC) Open Student

Heller Ehrman
2007 Heller Ehrman Summer Associates
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Heller Ehrman LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Kirkland & Ellis
Kirkland & Ellis LA - Summer '08
08 SA (LA) Closed Students
Kirkland & Ellis Intake 2009
STAFF Open STAFF

Latham & Watkins
Latham & Watkins New York Summer Associates 2007
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Latham & Watkins Trainees-to-be
London Closed Student
Latham & Watkins LLP
STAFF Open STAFF
Latham & Watkins 2007
London Closed UNK

Paul Hastings
Paul Hastings Summer '08
08 SA Open Student
Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP
STAFF Open STAFF

Paul Weiss
Paul Weiss 2007 NY Summer Associates
07 SA NY Open Student
Paul Weiss 2008 NY Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Open UNK
Paul, Weiss Summer Associates 2008*
08 SA (NY) Open Student

Proskauer
Proskauer Rose Summer 2008
08 SA Open UNK
Proskauer Produces Results: Summer '06
06 SA Open Student

Ropes & Gray
Ropes & Gray, Summer Associates 2008
08 SA (Boston) Open Student
Ropes & Gray NYC 2008
08 SA (NY) Open Student
Ropes & Gray NYC Summers
07 SA (NY) Open Student

Sidley
Sidley Chicago 07
07 SA (Chicago) Closed Student
The Sidley Squad
Interns Closed Student

Simpson Thatcher
Simpson Thacher 2007 Summer Associates
07 SA (ALL) Open UNK
Simpson Thacher 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA (NY) Open Student

Skadden
Skadden NY Summer '07
07 SA (NY) Closed Student
Skadden Alumni STAFF
ALUMS Open STAFF
Skadden, LA - Summer Associates 2007
07 SA (LA) Closed Student
Skadden DC - Summer 2007
07 SA (DC) Open Student
Skadden Summer Students 07
07 SA (ALL) Open Student
Skadden HK Summer '07
07 SA (HK) Open Student
Skadden LA Summer 08
08 SA (LA) Open Student
Skadden Trainees 2008
STAFF Closed STAFF
Incoming Skadden LA Attorneys
STAFF Closed Student

Sullivan and Cromwell
Sullivan & Cromwell's 2008 Summer Associates
08 SA Open UNK
Sullivan & Cromwell
STAFF Open STAFF

Weil Gotshal
Weil Gotshal Summer 08
08 SA (NY) Closed Student
2007 Weil Gotshal Summer Associates
07 SA (NY) Open Student
2006 Weil Gotshal Summer Associates
06 SA (NY) Open Student
Weil, Gotshal & Manges
STAFF Closed STAFF

Wilmerhale
WilmerHale Boston Summers, 2007
07 SA (Boston) Closed Students

Thanks the Recruiting Department at The Firm for doing this research.

Above and Beyond KM

2008-04-24T08:02:00.003-04:00

My buddy Mary Abraham started a blog: Above and Beyond KM, a discussion of knowledge management that goes above and beyond technology. Mary has often been a rudder keeping our knowledge management groups focused on knowledge management and not on the technology.

Mary and I were recently sparring over whether lawyers are good at sharing knowledge. Being at a big law firm, I see lots of sharing. Senior lawyers must share with the junior lawyers on their team if they want the junior lawyers to get anything done. I see lots of requests for information in emails. (Unfortunately, I rarely see the responses. More on that below.)

Sharing happens in the law firm at several levels: between a junior lawyer and their mentor, among peers, within a matter team, within a client team, within a practice, and across the firm. I believe the most effective sharing is the sharing among smaller groups. So, I see much more sharing within the matter team than within a client team. It is just human nature and the nature of sharing.

But, I am firm believer that we are missing some technology tools to make sharing easier and more effective. We need better tools for the small groups to share their information within the group, but also allow the entire firm to access that sharing.

Unfortunately, the default way of sharing in a law firm is by email. I long lost count of the requests to better capture email to share the knowledge and information in the email. The problem is not sharing the email; the problem is the email itself. It is just not a good way to share.

That is why I am so excited about Enterprise 2.0 tools. They combine the communication power of email with the sharing and finding powers of the web. In particular, blogs and wikis make it very easy to share information and do so in a way that it seems very close and focused on what the smaller group is doing. But, all of that information in the blog or wiki is easily findable and useable by others in the firm who are not part of the smaller group.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - Making Enterprise Communications More Effective

2008-04-24T07:19:00.002-04:00

One of the enticing features of Enterprise RSS is the ability to make enterprise communication more effective. Ten years ago, enterprise communication happened face-to-face, by phone and paper memos. Now, email is the default way of communicating within the enterprise.

Take a look at your email inbox. If your inbox looks anything like my inbox, it is full of email from the administrative departments transmitting updated policies, events and information. Almost none of these emails are urgent or require me to take any action. So why are they clogging up my inbox, getting in the way of client communication and urgent communication? Are these internal communications reasonably findable anywhere except my inbox? If not, what happens to the person who joins the firm tomorrow?

It would be better if that information was posted to a website so that everyone in the firm could find that information. (And find it the same way and in the same place.) For that posting to be an effective communication to the firm or a subset of the firm, you still need a way to push that information out to the firm or at least make them aware the new information. You can't rely on each individual in the firm setting up their own RSS feedreader and subscribing to the feeds for this information.

That is where Enterprise RSS fits into the picture. Feedreaders are installed at the firm level, making RSS information feeds available to everyone in the firm through a variety of tools. You can view the RSS information feeds in your email program, a dedicated feedreader, the intranet or even your blackberry. With Enterprise RSS, you can also force subscriptions on people. So everyone gets the human resources updates, memos from the managing partner, etc.

Take some time to read about and learn about Enterprise RSS today, the Enterprise RSS Day of Action:

A big thanks to James Dellow of Chieftech for organizing this information about Enterprise RSS and organizing the Enterprise RSS Day of Action.

Developing a Playbook for Your 2.0 Community

2008-04-23T13:06:00.003-04:00

I watched a webinar on 2.0 communities. This was a preview of a presentation scheduled for the Community 2.0 Conference.

Speakers:
Sylvia Marino, Director of Community Operations
Edmunds.com Inc.

Kathleen Gilroy, CEO
Swift Media Networks

The speakers advocate the development and deployment of communities wrapped around user generated content.

Their pitch was to create a playbook for the community development. They set up a wiki on PBwiki to host the playbook: community20bootcamp.pbwiki.com (it was public).

Their first example was ravelry.com, a site for the knitting community. One interesting tactic of this site was to blend in other 2.0 sites. Instead having knitters post the pictures of their knitting on ravelry.com, they post them to flickr. Ravelry.com then uses the flickr API to pull the pictures into ravelry.com.

Their second example was the TheDailyPlate.com, a site for helping you to eat smarter. The site gives you functionality by tracking your eating and activity during the day. Users are contributing information on calories burned during exercise and the nutrition information for food. (I will have to check back to this site if I am ever going to lose by baby weight.)

They shared an interesting story about tags. Apparently one of the most popular tags in flickr is "me." That is the way we think about the pictures and relationships.

The target of the webinar was clearly on public websites. I was hoping to pick up some ideas for creating communities inside the enterprise. I am interested about integrating some internal websites into our intranet to enrich the content. Now, I do have a few more ideas.

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - April 24

2008-04-23T10:05:00.004-04:00

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is April 24.

I consider RSS to be the glue that holds together Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0. Blogs and wikis are great tools. But they are even more powerful when they are pushing content out through RSS feeds. It is much more efficient to have relevant content pushed to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

I previously posted on knowledge as an artifact and a flow. RSS is the flow. Enterprise RSS is the flow for the enterprise.

Of the 2.0 technologies, RSS is the least recognized. Most people recognize blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Tagging like del.icio.us tends to fall down on the list. But most studies I have read put RSS way down at the bottom for recognition and use. Enterprise RSS falls even father down the list.

Enterprise RSS is the key tool that would turn a collection of blogs and wikis into communication tools. To much internal communication happens by email. As a result, your email inbox becomes an information warehouse. That email does no good to the person who starts at the firm the next day. The knowledge is lost to that person.

Lots of internal communication could be better handled by using a blog, wiki or similar tool to host the information. As new information is added, the subscribers get the notification of the change and the content. The big plus is that the content is on a platform that should be easily indexed and retrievable by a search engine.

To really make this work well, you need to force subscriptions on people. That is the keystone to Enterprise RSS.

To learn more about Enterprise RSS:

Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast - james dellow - enterprise rss action day
Enterprise Day of Action Wiki
Attensa an Enterprise RSS vendor
NewsGator an Enterprise RSS vendor

What Blogging Brings to Business

2008-04-22T18:38:00.005-04:00

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I will be sitting on a panel with Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam and Cesar Brea.

What Blogging Brings to Business

Blogs are powerful communication platforms that allow you to capture information you find interesting and to share it with an "audience" who can talk back to you. This panel of five business bloggers with a combined blogging lifetime of 19 years has generated business, communicated the concerns of its customers, experimented, and broken new ground through their blogs. Topics we'll cover include: Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for "fame and fortune", Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam. Come join us to share your experiences and have the chance to speak at length with experienced bloggers.

Come join us at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.