How do you know that?: May 2002

Dave points to this great article on RSS Aggregators.

Ebay Battle

More dealing with Ebay customer support today. Incredible! They refuse to acknowledge that people work there, so you talk to someone then they disappear. They promise to call back/email then they disappear. I think they recruit from the same talent pool as Spinal Tap drummers. The survivors seem to be trained in pointing the caller to a form and instructing them to send an email. ARRRGHHH

This get's it right, a thoughtful chapter from the Internet for Assholes.

RSS Is here!

Finally! Blogger Pro implemented an RSS Interface - here's the link

OK - so it wasn't Cyberdocs, entirely. Cyberdocs needed another firewall port opened up (what? Document things like that - naaahhh!). Anyway it's working.

Cyberdocs is on my list. I'm back in the office working on the configuration of this beast on our extranet. It's a simple enough product - but when you combine it with the other technologies involved (MS Application Center, RSA Ace Agent and a few other goodies) it gets down right finicky about when it wants to work. We've got an end of month deadline and the higher ups want it working by tomorrow. So here I am.

Coming down here I was actually surprised how many people were on the street in the Wall Street area at 10:30 at night - it's usually dead down here. What do they know that I don't?

They're finishing up the recovery effort on the WTC today. There are helicopters buzzing overhead getting shots for the television coverage. Today a moment of silence at the stock exchange, a service, and a few other ceremonies. Incredibly sad.

On Sunday this past week, the NYTimes ran a photo of the trade centers on fire with people hanging out of the windows. This image was enough to make me skip a breadth, Andrea physically gasped and was hyperventilating for several minutes.

Joy has a great take on the six degree of Kevin Bacon game and how it relates to CRM. Yes! When you think about it, it makes sense.

Sometimes you just have to gut it out through a problem. I just spent two days trying to resolve a server configuration issue. The key to the problem had to to do with permissions for a key file were being set incorrectly by MS Application Center when the server cluster replicated. Yechhh.

Amusing... MS Death Star Project.

A fable about XML found by Sam Ruby. Cute stuff, and pretty true.

This is so cool! NYC Bloggers map has all my NYC kindred by subway stop! Wow - acknowledging the carbon based world!

Ahhh Memorial Day. Spring is finally here, we have the city to ourselves. A perfect day to stay in and write code. I've got a small project going with Captain Jack and Lou (links to follow). We're doing it all with ASP.NET and VB.NET. Today I wrote code to allow for browser based updates to most of the site content. The deal is that Jack would be able to update his availability and copy from the boat (cellular modem). It's a great learning project. Lou's going to lay in the design. I'm writing the components and database stuff.

KM - Story Telling

KM Thanks Jim for the link to the KM World Article re Story Telling in the KM architecture. The article seems to promote including story telling in the KM architecture, although not necessarily by attempting to capture in some kind of technology - although the example of motion pictures was given as effective means of communication. Computers tend to be inadequate for the task. I tend to agree. In our case, the context and forum for storytelling has existed for approximately 100 years. It's called the weekly partner lunch, or the monthly practice group meeting. Both of these are face to face affairs where food is shared with your peers - like it or not. Stories are told, talks are given and knowledge is generated. We are so cutting edge!

KM - Come Out Swinging

Come Out Swinging! Joy you don't waste any time do you? YES culture is huge. I agree that changing the behavior of our people would be like trying to change the movement of a battleship by getting in the water an kicking real hard. But I do think there are a couple things we can do to start the movement with CRM in particular:

Exposing Client Mailing lists: If we make list management integral to a lawyer's desktop contact management, we can emphasize that contact accuracy is an easily accessible day-to-day thing - rather than submitting a paper form to a black hole internal organization

News feeds: If a direct result of sharing contacts is a automatic news aggregation services - there's a direct and useable benefit to taking part.

Efficiency: If taking part in a centralized CRM initiative means that some contact info is automatically filled in - it'll be less of a chore to keep contact info up to date

None of these things are going to change the coarse of the battle-ship all at once. Hell, there are quite a few lawyers that still don't use the pc for anything except stock quotes!
The hypothesis is that if there is an immediate benefit and minimal cost (time & effort) the initiative has a chance. Rick has laid out quite a few examples of this.

Interesting questions: What are the cultural factors that inhibit sharing of institutional knowledge? How do they develop? How do they change?

I got tired of the old template.... Thus the change.

Now taking bets.

Business 2.0 Article on 8 technologies that will change the world mostly centered on the next step - blurring the line between wetware and hardware. Nutritious thinking.

Hello Blogger

Now this is annoying... I can't edit my template in blogger. When I use the menu option - the window where the code should be is empty. Hello! Is anyone there - is anybody else experiencing this problem?

I'm simultaneously reading The Cluetrain Manifesto and living it. Let me explain. Andrea and I have been raging over the purchase of a treadmill. Icon Fitness manufactures and markets both ProForm and Reebok product lines. You know the story - same product, different labels, customer support people who won't acknowledge that the products are the same. It was obnoxious.

Productivity

I feel like I should share a secret to productivity.

This is the Jura Impresse E75 espresso machine. Andrea did extensive research and found this baby. It's worth its weight in gold. Press the button and it grinds beans and delivers oustanding espresso or coffee. Most days it's the only thing keeping me vertical.

It's 'fleet week' here in NYC. Walking past the NY Stock Exchange on the way to work, I saw the Marine Corp brass band standing at-ease on Broad Street as bomb sniffing dogs went through their bags and instruments. It makes one think.

km Rick has been building on the thread re. KM and associate attrition. He's got a great point regarding mitigating the cost of attrition by effectively capturing data/information/knowledge with technology solution.

Rick points out that many associates leave because they're not getting the opportunity to learn enough from the senior people. This is an important point that I missed earlier. Associate retention is an important business driver that we have to manage, forgetting the importance of career development is a mistake.

A thought, the UK firms are doing quite a bit more in the legal KM space - are any of them blogging? I'd enjoy their input on this topic.

The Onion breaks the latest from Vatican City "Pope Forgives Molested Children"... It was only a matter of time.

From scripting news yesterday:
Thomas Friedman: "Let's make a deal: We won't criticize the administration for not anticipating 9/11 if it won't terrorize the country by now predicting every possible nightmare scenario." YES! I can't agree enough! It just sucks the way this cycle is continuing Friedman is spot on. We have to live.

Is that light at the end of the tunnel a train? Yes I'm finally finishing up the configuration of the extranet servers. I get to do everything here! I know have hands on experience with win2k Network Load Balancing, SSL Site configuration in IIS, RSA securid configuration and MS Application Center. Not only did design the house - I installed the plumbing!

Sometimes I get whiplash - I've had my head in server configuration since 6:30 and then I had a meeting with OneSource. I'm signing on for their early adopter program for the new soap version of applink. Currently I use them to gather news in xml format via a url based interface - kind of clunky, but functional. The soap product looks great for a few reasons:

I can input multiple key id's to return news on many companies in one transaction

I can gather executive name and contact info via a soap call

I think they mentioned a push mechanism for news as well

Every once in a while a vendor meeting is worthwhile!

I have to say, I'm kind of jealous of the radio/userland community. There seems to be alot of really cool development going on there. It's quite here in blogger land - maybe too quite.

Do I hear a form vs content debate from anyone?

Day two of server configuration hell. Network Load Balancing is configured, content replication is configured. We have to wait for a re-tread of the SSL certificate from verisign -should arrive some time tonight. Tomorrow AM I'll reinstall RSA Agent and continue testing.

Had a drink with PJ tonight after work. He's just back to NYC after the pilot season. He had a rough time in LA and then an equally rough time on his re-entry (girl friend issues).

Thanks Denise and Ernie for the comments on the "We make lawyers" piece from a few days ago. It's great to get the other side of the coin. As Ernie observes my perspective is clearly from the technology/management seat. I always try to put the problems I see purely business terms. Sometimes that gets me funny looks, but I revel in that.

I imagine it's very frustrating to spend 5-7 years somewhere building up a set of tools and having to leave it behind when you go. Not an easy job. I happen to think that the tangible things like documents and databases, while valuable, pale in comparison to the knowledge gained from working with peers and senior people over a period of time. You can't capture that in a system.

I'm in IIS /App Center configuration hell today. Well it's not really hell - just typical server configuration stuff. I ended up uncoupling the cluster on the extranet servers and re-building the cluster. Things seem to be working better now.

I also discovered that Cyberdocs doesn't like to play well with RSA's securid software for the web server. Cyberdocs will just not authenticate while RSA is locking down the server - most peculiar. We'll have to work around this one. But we have to get it to work.

Met with Matt Turk of Triplehop technologies this afternoon. Way cool technology that combines advanced searching with content aggregation and dynamic thesauri. This is a real possibility for here.

Lest we forget where we came from... Whenever you talk to people in technology of a certain age you get to a point in the conversation where people wax poetic about those nasty early days of the first pc's. This site reminded me of the limitations we delt with back then. Fun stuff.

Via McGee & Tracy Reeder, here's more fodder for the KM ROI cannons. This is all very familiar...

Checked out Jason's blog. Very cool.

"Book mark this site, before you forget!", I just heard that play on Andrea's speakers as she browsed to another shopping site. Yechhh. There must be somebody somewhere who believes marketing like this (including pop unders etc.) is a good thing. I'd like to see the numbers.

KM We do two things here at BigLaw: We provide services to clients and we make lawyers. The first thing is pretty obvious, but the second one is kind of squirrely, nobody really wants to talk about it. But the process of scouring the law schools for candidates, interviewing, hiring, evaluating and eventually bestowing partnerships is really quite interesting. It's like creating a skilled artisan such as a silversmith or blacksmith.

First and second year associates are given considerable responsibility as soon as they join the firm. In the past, the partners would be asked to write a review about each associate they came in contact with. Twice yearly there would be a meeting to discuss the associate's progress. Culminating in a few new partners being created each year. It was all very human.

As the firm grew this process began to show signs of becoming inadequate. For a couple reasons: There were too many associates for the partners and it was getting difficult for the partners to give good feedback. Also, the feedback mechanism was never really tailored to give good specific feedback (at the matter level), so there was no real quantitative way of identifying who should be discussing who's performance.

In response to these issues, we put in place an application that automatically solicits lawyers to evaluate associates only when they work on the same matter (and a few other business rules that ensure that persons of appropriate experience are evaluating only those more junior). The initial feedback has been positive, with the occasional protest (mostly because people don't like filling in evaluations).

The meetings still occur twice a year in carbon format. The evaluations are discussed face to face. Thinking back to Snowden's discussion of last week - this is very appropriate. The evaluation reports serve as catalysts for discussion where the partner's experiences are shared and the group can make informed decisions about the future of the associate. This is a case where the instincts of the firm in general are to move away from statistics (the evaluation form are mostly text response) and focus on qualitative knowledge transfer.

Following the meeting partners meet individually with the associates and give them feedback on their progress. The completed evaluations and group discussion are used as a basis for the reviewer, but not shared with the associate. Notes from the meeting stored along with the evaluation results.

The systems we built were intended take an existing process and let it scale as the firm grew. Along the way it added a little more granularity to the data.

From a KM perspective - the associates gather tremendous amount of knowledge working with senior lawyers on day to day activities. The evaluation/review process is a means by which the partnership determine's who will offer the most in the long run. The economics of billing potential/salery determin how many will make partner.

The obvious thing is that alot of knowledge walks out the door with a departing associate. A lot yes, but the economics of the system have determined that the value of that intellectual capital is less than the cost of keeping the person on.

All of this is an observation. I'm sure it's all taken for granted in the legal community. I'm interested to hear what the blawg circle has to say.

Use the services Luke.... I'm getting really lazy. I tripped across BlogRolling a little while ago. At the cost of an additional promotional link - this makes link adding/editing a trivial pursuit (yes even easier than editing the template). Plus it adds the ability to visually tag links that have been recently updated. And it's free. Nice!

Long chat with Geoff in MN this morning. He's a brilliant technologist in need of a company smart enough to hire him. He's recently developed a way cool palm application for expense tracking - the hook is that you don't need to use the stylus to use it - the UI is that well designed.

I'm trying to get him to blog - he's got a lot of really interesting things to say.

Aside from that, I'm working on the intranet Bulletin Board application . Yesterday afternoon's meeting hit home that it really needs to be pretty localized. So the application will grab the users NT identity - go to the data warehouse (through the Com+ component layer) and find out what office the user is supposed to be in - then it will filter posts so that only the appropriate ones show up. Also, when a user/moderator adds/approves a post it will be dependent on office - so a moderator in Hong Kong won't be pinged whenever a post in Paris is added etc... Not terribly interesting. But you have to take baby steps.

NY Update They finally removed the NJ hedge rows from our block on West Broadway today! Following 9/11 all our utility cables had to be run above ground - so they built these wooden covers over the wires and put these massive concrete barriers next to them to prevent anybody from coming near the high voltage lines.

Every day there's some improvement.This photo is taken on our corner looking South toward 'the site'. More photos from February are here.

KM Got an email from our Onesource representative today. They are among the services we use for client news. They want to come in next week to discuss their new SOAP offerings. We have a group within the firm that maintains the linking of OneSource ID to internal client identifier This makes it very easy to include client news in a variety of applications. One source exposed an xml interface into their 'applink' program about a year ago - it's been working quite well - I hope they don't mess things up.

What they're missing right now is the ability to grab company information (not just news) via their xml feed. This would be an outstanding adendum to the client management piece.

In response to a comment made at yesterday's internet steering committee (yes I know -arrrgghh). By far the top use of the site is the lawyer search function. It accounts for 25% of all hits. Next is the 'News'( (10%). Perhaps this is where we should spend a little time.

I came in late, but listened to our marketing director try and make a correlation between new matters and hits to the web site. Lame - and a particularly astute partner pointed that out right away. The message should be "Yes, clients look at the site".

Update on the Extranet: We've got the servers up and running at the disaster recovery site, there are a few issues remaining: including the re-installation of the rsa agent on one of the server. But at this point users can log in, access all intranet resources as well as the web version of docs open (cyberdocs). We still have to lock down the servers somewhat. But it's a quantum leap forward from having to use a thick client to access office resources.

Rick comes through! Killer input in today's piece re. the ROI on CRM. Difficult stuff. How's this: I'm thinking of placing some bets:

We'll be able to directly correlate the acquisition of one new client to the use of a system within one year.

We'll be able to collect at least ten anecdotes where a lawyer has discovered an unknown relationship with a client that has resulted in better service to the client.

Our client memo application will receive fewer returned emails.

Our number of pitches will increase (staff remaining constant)

All of this makes sense - it's also apparent that this is very murky water. As Rick says it's FRUSTRATING!

Thanks for the links Ernie.

SO MUCH TO LEARN, SO LITTLE BANDWIDTH! Another fountain to drink at. I just discovered Jim McGee's Musings great stuff!

Hey... Didn't somebody at the InfoToday conference make the observation that most of the efforts to collect 'expert' opinion in some sort of database ended up with something like 30% compliance (at best), and didn't that person go on to say that often the people that had the time to enter info only had time to enter info because they were under utilized - usually because they were not the top people. gulp! Am I a loser because I'm blogging?

David Snowden gave the keynote this morning at the Info Today conference. Excellent talk. He had a couple of very interesting points:

"I always know more than I can say, and I almost always write less than I say." Think about it - this goes to the core of KM and why so many initiatives fail. The idea that we're going to try manage our intellectual capital by writing it down, building a database or gleaning it from existing writing, is doomed to fail. Most of the key information exists in and can only be transferred in meat space.

In acknowledging the first point, KM is circling back to its roots in decision support.

An interesting point about human sight. The eye only distinguishes with great accuracy a very tiny spot at any given time. Many spots are sampled and the brain uses pattern recognition to put the image together. The same with decision support, information is sampled and the decision is reached, a subtlety though was the tendency of humans to lock on to the first likely match and not give the appropriate attention to following possibilities.

He also talked re naming a project something that's not translatable to English, freeing him up to place the desired meaning on the project title without baggage.

His discussion of 'complicated' vs. 'complex' was particularly useful. Systems where the various parts and relationships are stable and knowable can be described as complicated - a Boeing 707 is complicated - but the information necessary to take it apart and put it back together again can be written down, stored and transferred through such a mechanism. Complex, is a better word to describe human problems - agents change with context, there are many moving parts.... You can't take the system apart and put it back together again because the rules/relationships are constantly changing.

Great example of where lack of context may be dangerous. Snowden, as a tourist, thought it would be very logical and time saving to get off the 1/9 train at 125th street and walk the several blocks to the Metro North station late one night. His map didn't give him the context that every New Yorker knows - you just don't do that.

Organic systems only work when the individual parts are not allowed to perform optimally.

Received five phone calls between 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM because a legacy application was acting up. It's on the block for replacement. This is one of the real incentive to do good work. If you write bad software you don't sleep.

KM A few broad impressions from the InfoToday conference:

Not one occurrence of the word Blog!

Regarding ROI on KM: David Gilmore of Tacit gave an interesting talk that basically made the point that the factors involved with quantifying ROI are so diffuse and there are so many risks involved that the discussion is irrelevent. He argued that what we should do when asked for ROI is turn the question into how a KM initiative can directly effect one of the core businesses. I agree with this, hell it's what we were doing when we used to call much of this Information Management.

KM should be invisible! Gilmour as well as a few others supported this directly or indirectly.

In general I wasn't blown away. perhaps the format had something to do with it. Sessions were only forty five minutes which tended to force the speaker to cover broad topics very quickly instead of getting into much detail. Most of my conference going experience has been on the pure technology session. These tend to be very detail oriented and usually much longer. Personal preference.

Tech stuff They seemed to have resolved the firewall configuration for the extranet - most of it anyway. go team!

This is getting wierd! I love it. Rick did a piece today that brings to the forefront the fact that Big Law is in fact a prospect for his firm. Yes, it is so. This blog is unedited, and pretty raw. It'll stay that way too. So what we've got is a game of open faced poker. As Rick points out, he's getting a first hand account of my issues - and I'm getting an inside look at his ideas as well. Could this be KM for the better of all? Should be an interesting experiment.

Off to the Info Today KM Conference... Hopefully I'll have some interesting material for an entry later today.

Met with several partners this pm regarding plans for extranet offerings. Several months ago I'd scoped out an extranet for one of our larger clients. Pretty simple really, share team lawyer contact info, shared documents, public memos, full text searching on all docs. Also lawyers need a mechanism to easily post docs to the site in order to share pretty much real time. Bread and butter extranet stuff.

Everybody added their two cents and we circled back to where we started.

I have to assist the CIO in costing out the estimates I did four months ago. It then goes throug a few committees and we'll get to buy/build it.

The Summers are here, The Summers are here! Fifty eight in this batch, another fifty or so coming in a week or two. It's a wonderful thing when applications scale correctly and this kind of physical influx doesn't really have any impact.

KM Quantifying ROI on CRM.
We have a legacy system that is used to maintain a 'Client Mailing' list for memos to clients. This list is independent from billing and email systems making it by definition a target. The current process is for the partner in charge of client to submit address and email info to a central department that maintains these lists. The contact info gets out of date because it exhists on a island. The access to the information is outside of the daily use of the the lawyer - out of site out of mind.

A CRM solution that centralized the data would force the inaccuracies to the surface. If a contact's email address changes, the owner of the contact would know the first time he/she tries to email. The correction would happen immediately. The lever we're looking for here would be "If you keep your regular outlook contacts up to date and correct during the normal course of your work, the centralized list will also be kept up to date." So the up front work has to be practically invisible... This is all well travelled ground - I'm just restating for myself.

The bonus ROI = salary of centralized list management group + value of clients getting requested memos + value of lawyer being able to check contact's list membership etc.

More to follow

GREAT piece by R. Klau in Practical Law. Rick really gets it.

I think it's interesting that he tagged the basic problem re the American Firms - the 'Cult of the Chargeable Hour'. This is a very real thing. I even like the imagery:

Twelve suited lawyers late at night around a bonfire, wearing war paint and carrying spears and brief cases. The drums pound as the senior partners reviews three or four quaking associates tied to trees near by. They all cringe as the white haired senior partner reviews a leather bound portfolio containing last month's billable hours. He looks up and points a finger the unlucky sacrifice. Swiftly two M&A thugs grab the associate and toss him screaming into the fire! The drums continue and bottles of twelve year old scotch are opened.

Have I mentioned here we're selling the loft?

The space is fantastic, fireplace, 15ft ceilings, top of the line un-used kitchen. But we don't need all the space and we need a change. We're looking a little further up town.

Just checked out Rick Klau's weblog tins. Outstanding stuff. He addresses many KM issues. I noticed right away that he works for Interface software. Interface makes a great product, but in our case they oversold and misrepresented the costs involved with implementing their products.

Thursday last I had an exhausting discussion with the manager who's I've saddled with the task of identify and implementing a CRM solution here at 'Big Law' . We've found a product with all the features that meet our requirements. It's priced attractively and it is written with technologies that will play nicely all our other applications. Yes we know what we want - but the CIO is really making us work to prove the value of the initiative before we move forward. He's very strict that way. With good reason, it's expensive software and the potential cultural obsticals are formidable.

The big question I kept hammering home is "How can we quantify a ROI on this software/initiaitve?" There's lots of anecdotal evidence. But how can we quantify it? I'm looking for ideas here! The cost saving angle is usually not enough to sway the CIO. Reason being, even if we were to knock out two or three jobs/servers whatever, it's nothing compared to the potential revenue of one of our lawyers. So how do we draw a straight law from putting the software and processes in place to increased billing?

I'm in a questionning mood tonight. Tomorrow some answers?

Thanks Denise for the link. For those of you linking over - I tend to go off topic from KM quite a bit. But my editor is really easy on me. (search for KM or Knowledge if you like.)

I've been a plumber most of the day (fixing the jacuzzi), so more pithy content will have to wait.

Caught the link to Denise Howell's piece re Blogging & the Law. Good overview of many of the issues.

Fun day! I had to wait around all day while they configured the communications infrastructure at our new disaster recovery site. During that time I've been unable to continue work on the extranet project (an integral part of our DR plan). So I got to write some code! Oh happy day.

I wrote two components that will eventually sit in the middle of our intranet portal. One leverages the outlook inbox, and the second pulls in the calendar. I know, I know, all the uber geeks who read this will say "big deal". But here at 'Big Law' it's the little triumphs that can make a day.

Richard Harter and John D. McElroy of MerrillCorp pitched their DataSite product today. In the M&A world it's kind of a standard thing for an acquisition target to make appropriate documents available to possible bidders in a 'Data Room' situation. Basically the target puts a whole bunch of documents in a room and schedules bidders to visit and decide which documents they need. The bidder then requests copies and these are created.

The Merril product does a nice job of scanning the documents and putting them into a secure web site with various search capabilities. An interesting observation made by one of our Partners was that the target may not necessarily want to have these documents be so easily searchable. It may be a good thing that the bidder needs to manually sift through many thousands of pages. Interesting case against technology.

Interesting Blog at Trial.com. A bit more focused then mine. Interesting because it seems to have much more of a lawyer audience focus.

Had the request to re-write 'Big Law's' web site without flash. I'd actually love to do it. The issue here is that we have to watch the requests coming in. Because then we end up with overload which is kind of where I am now.

Interesting thing going on in the HR department. The new partner in charge of recruiting has been looking at a few vendors that create systems for recruiting management. He seems particularly enamored with one solution and slightly interested in this second one.

The problem is that he hasn't really articulated the need for the system. He's talking about spending 100K on something of marginal use. I'd get slaughtered for suggesting such a thing. So here's a few possible requirements:

Track Applicant details

Track Applicant Contacts

Report Applicants by School

Report Applicants by Region

Schedule Interview

Send reminders for interviews

Allow applicant to apply on-line

Allow administrator to determin school gpa minimums

Respond with automatic responses based on acceptance rules

Capture interviewing lawyer comments

Track offer/acceptance instances

Allow applicant data to be ported to internal systems

etc.

The vendors wooing us are cvMail and Octago.
Of the two, Octago appears to be meet all of the requirements stated above, where cvMail tends to be heavier on the on-line application piece for the law student. Octago appears to be very good software, but they're a little scary because they only have 8 people (supplemented by programming staff in India). cvMail on the other hand looks good - but they're located in australia. So if they're small that could be a problem.

I just read about the bombing in Pakistan. Are we going to become accustomed to this? Is it possible that a year ago I wouldn't have given this a third thought? Today the sounds and smells of terrorism are a reality to me. I feel this news now, where before I never did. I wish we lived in a world where we didn't have the opportunity to feel this.

This morning there was the five borough bike tour through NYC. I had to go to the office this morning to grab the floor plan to the loft (we're showing it today). I left the house at 8:30 and there were speakers all up and down Church street blaring some cheezy AM disk jockey who was hosting the start of the race. It was a bit early for such a thing. A neighbor, whom I don't know, had taken it upon herself to walk to the corner and glare at the speakers and hold her hands out in anger as if she was looking literally for someone to complain to. No one was there. I was amused.

Tech garbage: I've been wrestling all morning with the IIS server hosting our extranet. In the final analysis it looks as though RSA Server was causing application center to fail and the combination was making it impossible to install cyberdocs. I uninstalled RSA and reinstalled IIS and AC. Things appear to be working correctly now.

At the same time, I'm getting assistance from Al. He's re-configuring NLB on the production intranet servers. This should allow for a much more stable environment here.

All in all it's taking way to long to do all this, I'd rather be sailing.

For the record: I hate excuses. I wasted an hour of my time on earth listening to someone come up with about half a dozen ways to try and mask his incompetance. This angers me.

On a lighter side - it's a beutiful day outside. and it's friday!

Way cool web site of the day http://www.k10k.net/.

KM Attended a meeting of the NY Knowledge Management Group this afternoon at another Big Law firm. There was guest speaker who presented her analysis of a survey she had done with KM Executives at large law firms that have 'exhibited a committment to KM' in US, UK and Australia.

An observation: Seven years of work in the market research field have made very skepticle of people pawning off statistics and graphics without referencing sample size or other considerations about the source of data. In the case of today's speaker she was drawing conclusions on a sample of 16 firms. This gives us a standard deviation of something like 7 or 8%. Basically, this should be highlighted as dubious at best. Add to that the fact that the people being interviewed had a vested interest in the results of the survey turning out a certain way and you had a pretty ridiculous situation.

Ok, I'll say it - I thought it was an irresponsible presentation.

The best use of this data would have been to highlight a few anecdotes and de-emphasis any attempt at statistical validity.

The take away was the notion that the social portion of KM really needs alot of work here at Big Law. In a very real sense, I need to corral some of the lawyers to begin an effort to review precedent documents in order to improve the quality of that particular database. Doable, and probably appropriate at this point.

KM I got a response from one of my MS Newsgroup postings. It appears to have helped the situation with application server in terms of re-setting the database permissions. I'm still not connecting correctly. I suspect it's due to the firewall settings.

This morning I made a few changes to our intranet portal content - mostly minutia.

Our CIO has been consistantly emailing me since 3:00 AM this morning on various topics. Do I work for a Vampire?

KM Let's call this an exercise in KM. I've been researching this performance object problem with some of my servers. My first stop was the Microsoft Technet site . I started here because most of the time this is the best place for questions regarding server configuration and OS issues. I did identify an article that helped me retrieve many of the performance counters, but it did not allow me to remove the numeric counters that are appearing. so it was a partial error.

I next went to the Experts Exchange this isa forum site that is generally quite good for development issues. Nothing here.

I then went back to the MS Newsgroups. A quick search revealed nothing. I posted a message and received one response that I'd formatted the post incorrectly and nobody would look at that. I asked the individual who posted that for suggestions... More news as it happens.

How does this get me to KM. Well it's clearly a case where I'm a knowledge consumer. My path to an answer has me rounding up the usual suspects and interrigating them first. That's my logical instinct. I'm looking for someone who's had this problem before, that's the first thing. Than I'm looking for how they solved it. It should be pretty simple.

How do you know that?

Friday, May 31, 2002

Ebay Battle

RSS Is here!

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Monday, May 27, 2002

KM - Story Telling

Sunday, May 26, 2002

KM - Come Out Swinging

Now taking bets.

Hello Blogger

Saturday, May 25, 2002

Productivity

Friday, May 24, 2002

Wednesday, May 22, 2002

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Monday, May 20, 2002

Sunday, May 19, 2002

Saturday, May 18, 2002

Friday, May 17, 2002

Thursday, May 16, 2002

Wednesday, May 15, 2002

Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Monday, May 13, 2002

Sunday, May 12, 2002

Saturday, May 11, 2002

Friday, May 10, 2002

Thursday, May 09, 2002

Wednesday, May 08, 2002

Sunday, May 05, 2002

Saturday, May 04, 2002

Friday, May 03, 2002

Thursday, May 02, 2002

Wednesday, May 01, 2002

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