How do you know that?: June 2002

This is too wierd. I wonder if it's him?

.net server

MS appears to be shifting course with their development/server architecture with .net server.. This press release disguised as a news article has them saying all the right things. I actually agree with the statements that they've erred on the side of usability vs security.

I also believe that short of visiting every IIS installation and telling the admin how to lock it down - the perception of poor security is going to live on for a long time. Simply put, there are many, many unqualified system administrators running IIS as a web server.

Let them talk

I caught the tail end of an e-mail thread yesterday. A department head was requesting permission to hire a consultant for a few months to 'fix some MS Access databases'. The thread went back and forth between the Executive Director and the CIO before it was tossed over to me to contact the department head in order to determine what the requirement was. Thanks guys!

I dropped in on the instigator. He expressed concern that IS was trying to impose it's standards and restrictions on his department that would make it impossible to respond quickly enough to information requests. He explained how his need was for a technical analyst who could respond without having to define a requirement. This person needed to be able to make iterative modifications i real time. (I didn't bring up the point that this is exactly why his last analyst quit on him.)

The funny thing was that as he kept talking he was able to articulate a few projects where this was not the case. He did have a clear understanding of a few sets of requirements - I just had to let him talk.

I can now write these down and get his agreement on 'WHAT' he's trying to accomplish. At that point we can address the issue of 'WHY' in order to determine if the expense is justified.

KM Questions

Joy hits a true note here. The fatal flaw she's pointing out is that there's no payback for filling out the damn questionnaire. It's a core KM issue. Do we use the carrot or the stick to get compliance? Or do we simply try and get in the way so that progress slows unless info is collected?

Big week. I've scheduled a series of meetings with partners this week to try and take their pulse regarding a centralized CRM. One-on-one I think I'll get a better gauge on how bad the information siloing resistance will be. More news as it happens.

In another front, I'm revisiting the our precedent searching library. My development environment got clobbered (re-purposed) during the last few months - so I'm rebuilding.

"Oh, and by the way - re-build the external web site in the disaster recovery site by Friday.... " Life shouldn't be boring ( I keep saying that )

I was doing some work with vb.net and asp.net today. I couldn't find a good example of how to bind data returned in a data set to an asp.net calendar control. I think my requirement is pretty simple: Return a set of busy dates. 'Select' the dates on the calendar if busy.

If a user clicks on a busy date, show the details of the appointment on the form.

It'd make a nice little tutorial... If someone else wrote it.

Gurteen!

I noticed today I'm linked on David Gurteen's blogroll. I've visited his sight frequently in the past and always found it a useful resource. Thanks David!

Jane, stop this crazy thing!

Had a meeting of the internet steering committee today. I was amused.

One partner railed on about how our web site looked out of date and reflected an attitude of 'old fashioned' technology. At one point he was going on about how great it would be to be able to type 'litigation and telecommunications and California' and have the site return all the entries meeting those criteria. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the site can do that now. In meetings like this it's usually better to do more listening than talking.

After two hours of telling everyone how awful the site was threw a 'But you're doing a great job!' to us. I laughed very hard.

Another partner was a little more measured in his approach. He stated that our site should be the best in the industry. He said we should be thinking about what was going to be the cutting edge five years from now. He shot down the current management's 'lets see what the other law firms are doing' mentality. I loved this!

If it's not obvious, I hate our web site.

The main problem is that nobody on this committee is willing to commit to a strategy for the site. Why are we creating a web site? Who are we trying to reach and what are we trying to tell them?

I could go through my theories - but that would be pouring fuel on the fire. Here's an open Cluetrain question: Why do you visit a law firm's web site?

Seems that we're not the only ones dealing with Fraud Bay. By the way, our fiasco seems to have been resolved. They removed the feedback that dealt with fraud situation. I fear that the victims are still having to deal with Paypal, but we seem to be OK... for now.

An interesting thing about ebay. They removed the default ssl connection for their 'my ebay' login. Why the hell did they do that? All you hackers out there - help yourself!

KM in Australia

New neighbors in the bloggerhood! It seems as though James is wrestling with many of the same creatures we are. Welcome.

Chipping away at the glacier

Well I put it out there...
Yesterday I was able two bat .500. The application exception was being caused by the webtrends aggregation process. One of my people has opened a ticket with the vendor to get it resolved.
I finally appeased the CIO with a plausible yet simple story to that will get his support for backing the CRM pilot. Essentially it addresses the disconnect between external organization contacts that are stored in the centralized client mailing list vs the same information stored multiple times in MS Exchange (Outlook), personal phonebooks, business cards on credenzas, and in peoples heads. This is a simplification of an hour discussion. But the ideas discussed hear in the last couple months were invaluable.

An illustration of the environment. Earlier in the day I asked the partner in charge of technology a personal favor. I was looking for a decent financial advisor/broker. He went on to tell me that he really favors this one guy from Merril Lynch. He then proceeded to rifle through a stack of business cards on his credenza and hand one to me. This is the way it is.

And the thing I have to remember is that this works. So, to add something to the process - it has to be unobtrusive and offer a tremendous benefit. If you hit the glacier with an ice pick in the correct spot, a huge chunk will fall off!

Today

I want to get closure on the introduction of our new intranet portal. I've been beating this thing up for months. It's time to fish or cut bait.

Identify why I'm getting an 'application excption' from one of my web servers.

Build on the 'Customer' document sent to my yesterday from our CIO - incorporate EIS, Qnaire etc.

Completely surprise myself by learning something new.

Marvin the martian school of office politics.

Remember Marvin? I often explain office politics in terms of this particular cartoon. Marvin had his ray gun. When he has his ray gun - he's all powerful, he may not be good at using it. But it makes him feel powerful. If you somehow take his ray gun away he's reduced to a quivering mess, bawling his eyes out.

When working with people, you have to remember that everyone has their own ray gun, it might be a set of responsibilities, an application they developed or some other thing that you may think they have no right possessing. Try and recognize a ray gun when you see it.

How come?

We just watched an episode of 'Leave it to Beaver'. How come nobody ever says 'Are you sore at me?'

Hack?

Our CIO emailed from home on Saturday asking if our external web site had been hacked. He pointed to a page that offered remote access, indicating that the the words 'Remote Access' were highlighted as a hyperlink to an advertisement for remote access software. I had him do a view source, cut and paste the code and send so I could review the page. Nothing was wrong, and there was no hyperlink where he indicated he was seeing one. He then sent me a screen print. The hyperlink he was showing me was in a different color. I asked him if he had downloaded any java applets that may 'enhance his browser experience'. No response for some hours and finally an all clear. hmmmm.

Warblog?

What the hell is it with the labelers? The NY Times is trying to distill a trend out of the blogging world. I don't know if you can do that. It is what it is. Stop congratulating yourself for 'figuring out' that Pollack painting.

KM on KM?

At least weeks meeting of Legal KM Managers an interesting side comment caught my interest. One of the group mentioned that she had passed on the survey presented in the last meeting to a few partners at her firm. The lawyers pretty much through it back at her saying 'we don't care what KM managers are doing about KM, what do the lawyers think?' Very astute.

Surveying the knowledge worker was discussed further. Several people had done surveys of lawyers in their firms, some formal, some not. The point was made that it was important not to label it KM or else the entire survey would be distracted trying to define what KM is.

Look's like Blogspot is down. Hmmm...

How do you know

Met up with Lou and Denise in carbon based format tonight. Lou brought up the fact that their was this particular kind of fish that the whole western world had declared extinct. And a few years ago some fishermen in Madagascar hauled one up in their nets.

My thought is that their's probably some island off Madagascar where some 'uncivilized' people have a child who's complaining 'not asadfadf fish again - we had that last night'. And you know some western biologist would be going nuts!

KM

John Robb is on to something!
Communications efficiency.
Time spent.

20 phone calls: A day (including voice mail tag).

200 e-mails: 3-4 hours (relevant e-mails only, including inefficient repetitive replies due to a lack of viewable archiving).

50 weblogs with 10 posts a day (500 entries): 20 minutes to scan. 20 minutes to post responses.

Finding information.

Phone calls: Limited to voice mail inbox. No record of previous conversations. Limited to personal interactions.

E-mail: Limited to personal e-mail only. No public archive. Most e-mail tools have horribly slow search features.

Weblogs (K-Logs): Internet search (Google on the Web or Intranet) extremely fast. Leverages the contributions of the entire corporation.

Departing employees.

Phone calls: Lost.

E-mail: Lost.

Weblogs: Archived for posterity.

I think what we are developing here is an efficiency hierarchy of communication. For sharing knowledge with a large group of constantly shifting individuals; weblogs win hands down. For introductions (invitations to further interaction) and ongoing interactions with specific individuals, e-mail works great. For immediate resolution of a complicated situation, use the phone

This is so cool - it feeds right into the bloggerhood's thread about knowledge retention....

Dreaming

I got a letter from Captain Jack today, he included some images for the web site. Some are great - others need retouching.

Jack's telling me that the crewed charter business is in the dumps down in St. Thomas. It's an interesting situation, a handful of yacht brokers wield a great deal of power over the independent captains down there. It's kind of like agents and movie stars. When you're doing well - the agent is your friend. When you're struggling they can be a hindrance. If you cross them - they can sink you. Yechhh..

Jack has cluetrain potential. Lou and I are doing a web site for the Dreamwalker and a few other boats down in the USVI, this will probably cause the brokers a few palpitations, but probably not much. More news as it happens.

MS Announcement

Microsoft headlined their developer site yesterday with an announcement for Federated Security, the article was somewhat light on content. It seems as though marketing felt a need to let everyone know that their is a strategy in place for dealing with authentication and identity issues that arise when developing web services.

They refer to the MS Passport as a consumer product that will be compliant with the new WS-security standard by 2003. Good. I like passport for the most part. I have had a problem with it's seeming inability to handle multiple identities on a single machine - but maybe I'm the only one trying to do that.

Bushology

Jacob Weisberg has diligently flagged another Bushism

"I'd rather have them sacrificing on behalf of our nation than, you know, endless hours of testimony on congressional hill."—National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Md., June 4, 2002

Yes of course!

KM Wars

Jim McGee has some great ideas building on Ernie's. I feel to opposing camps gathering on each side of muddy battlefield.

On one side are those that believe that improvements in corporate KM absolutely require behavioral changes on the part of the participants. This army is trying to gather up all of the riches of the kingdom and put them into centrally located coffers. It has also passed laws that require each of the citizen to go to the counting house on Tuesday afternoon and drop off their coins with a clerk who will record them.

On the other side are those that believe that there are a lot of battles to be won without changing their Tuesday habits. This army has the support of the citizens. Word of mouth got out on the street that the other army was going to attack, so they all got together and said 'hell no!'. This army got many volunteers - it even had spies in the other army!

Denise pointed out this great application for generating corporate bullshit.. As if we don't get enough of it without help.

Shine on Rage Boy!

World Cup

Oh My!

What is this world coming to? US wins vs. Portugal! Truly un-believable.

Civic demonstrations as KM?

Walking home past city hall yesterday, I past a demonstration by the teachers union. A few thousand people milled about the streets in white tea shirts with some slogan or another on them. The event was pretty much over, but people were not leaving quickly. They were standing in small groups talking among themselves, occasionally one speaker would grab the attention of the whole group. Earlier speakers had stood on the back of a flat-bed truck and spewed to the entire group about the evils of Bloomberg's education policy.

How was this KM? Well, it seems as though the experience of attending this rally for these people was a unique and empowering thing. The sense that everyone was there for a common, righteous cause was palpable. Information was being shared person to person and en-masse.

The interesting thing about this is that the experience/intuition end of knowledge was being dramatically effected here, whereas the data/information portion was probably less so. Another factor was the apparent inefficiency of the event. It was a tremendous investment in time and energy to get everyone to that place. Compare that to a technology based disbursement of information (email, chat, blog etc.) .

Got Entertainment

Check the person who lives in that white house in DC

The hits just keep coming...

Now it's the insurance companies... Anybody know this one? Sing along if you know the words! You are limited to X amount of coverage - it's what you get. After that you're out of luck, because that's what your plan says. Want to talk to someone? I can give you an 800 number - it doesn't lead to anyone that will speak in real time. Want to call your regular representative - sure, they have the nerve to tell me we should be "grateful" for the shitty coverage we have. I makes me want to scream!

Clueless

Well, it was kind of sad talking to the manager at Bliss. He was nice enough. He played the "customer service is a different group, what can I do to make this right?" He started to play more of the company line, but he was woefully ignorant of the people he was working for. He didn't know that the founder of the company was three years into a five year contract she agreed to after selling 70% to the big conglomerate. Clueless. Customer service was nowhere - in a service industry that smells bad. He pleasantly refunded our purchase.

Post Cluetrain

Everything is looking a little different now... Is it just coincidence that we've just had this horrendous time dealing with Ebay's customer service people. And now we're having problems with another culprit.

Bliss is a dayspa here in Manhattan, I gave Andrea gift certificates for a full day of pampering as a Christmas gift this year. She called to make an appointment and (after 45 minutes on hold) told her the earliest they could squeeze her in was Late July! On top of that, the scheduled a full day of back to back services with no time for lunch etc. And they would not give her the services in the order she requested. Requests for call-callbacks were ignored. It was horrible.

Bliss tells a nice little story of being started in this woman's apartment and growing to become one of the most chic places in town. What they don't talk about are the factory like attitudes and complete abandonment of personal treatment. Also quietly tucked behind the fairy tail marketing is the fact that the oh so personable founder sold 70% to LVMH for 30 MM last year. LVMH wants to make it 'The Gap' of spas! Lookout.

We're going up there this afternoon to talk with the manager in person (we're tired of their on-hold music). I wonder if any Bliss employees Blog? Are you out there? Stand up and be counted!

This guy is nutty! Scroll all the way down for some great Dubya graphics.

RSS

Downloaded Aggie from Bitworking. Nice stuff! Kid in a candy store syndrom sets in.

Movie

We're listening to one of my favorite movies. Slam came out in 1998. It's an incredible story following an young man in and out of the DC prison system and his awakening to the world of slam poetry. Way powerful stuff. See it.

Cluetrain

I just finished reading The Cluetrain Manifesto. Thanks Denise for the recommendation. The book is intoxicating. I can see where the dialog between Rick and I is a classic example of the open conversations alluded to in the text. I see a lot of truth in the ideas, but the for every good idea I have questions about everything fits together. The last chapter did a good job of saying - yeah their are open issues, questions etc. This is not a nice and neat set of answers. I like that. More thoughts as the crystallize...

Productivity - rebuttal

My sister finally visited the blog... Her email:

Hi Chris,
I am visiting your website for the first time. I read the part about pressing the espresso button and it delivers outstanding coffee, so for kicks I tried it. NOTHING happened. I clicked on the button on your espresso machine image over and over and still nothing. Your not as technically advanced as I thought you would be.

Is it clear why I don't write about my family here?

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!

Playing nice in the corporate sand box

If I don't piss off a couple people a week I'm not doing my job. I say that frequently, albeit tongue in cheek. Part of doing my job is saying no to a certain number of projects. People don't like to hear no. When I first started at BigLaw, IS said yes all the time, and got in trouble for it. The new CIO has found the way to say no - and be appreciated for it. He's actually quite good at it. (He doesn't know about this blog - so I'm not kissing up).

Recently I've been saying no to the partners wanting to sign on with a legal recruiting ASP. Forget the fact that the vendors he's been wooed by are flawed, he hasn't really thought through why he wants a new system. I brought this point up to him, along with the fact that the low entrance price point "with some extra for enhancements" wasn't really that low after the cost of servers, maintenance, training etc.. He still had that 'new car smell' look in his eye, but I brought in the fact that if we followed up on every little 'only 100K' project that the partnership brought to me, it would be a fairly substantial chunk out of his take-home. That sobered him up like a cold ice tea in the crotch!

A coworker in another department was kind enough to have a chat with me recently regarding some rumblings coming from another department in IT. There's a group of 15 or so who have responsibility for the mainframe billing and peoplesoft systems. These guys do a great job keeping things running, but they don't get a lot of the glamour work. I take data from them on a regular basis - and I don't need them feeling un-important or un-appreciated so I stepped over the boundary and met with their manager today for a preemptive strike.

I told them about our exploration of CRM research and asked for collaboration on the portions that surround the e-mail list management functionality. If any of the software's we are looking at are selected, they'll drastically change the job of at least one mainframe tamer and several clerks. I'm all for efficiency and reduction of bloat in staff. But these are people with good skills that could probably be turned into good web programmers if given the opportunity. So I played the good guy today and suggested that some of the legacy guys may make the perfect support team for the new initiative. I'm an optimist... I'll probably get clobbered for this one.

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!

Chuck, I thought Pongo would appreciate the fact that other pets occasionally have to go through the pseudo punk thing. This is Puner - she suffered this indignity last year after surgery. As you can see on the right, she's back to normal (that's a Bill Gates doll in the foreground).

I've been following the Volvo Ocean Race since they left Australia. This is a really great example of a niche sport being covered well on the web. Sailboat racing doesn't translate well to television.

"Long periods of boredom punctuated with short bursts of sheer terror". Is the best description of sailing in general and could best describe the sport. This site does a great job of getting the points across..

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.

Life shouldn't be boring

I was home for lunch today and I got a call from a young man asking about the camera he purchased from me on ebay. The only problem was that I wasn't selling anything on Ebay. Turns out, somebody had stolen my wife's identity on Ebay and was selling pretty expensive electronics and requesting payment via paypal. He was using a hotmail account as his paypal contact, a giveaway that he was up to no good. I spent the afternoon calling the victim's and paypal to try and resolve the issue. Yechhh....

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.

How do you know that?

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

.net server

Let them talk

KM Questions

Monday, June 17, 2002

Sunday, June 16, 2002

Friday, June 14, 2002

Gurteen!

Thursday, June 13, 2002

Jane, stop this crazy thing!

KM in Australia

Chipping away at the glacier

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Marvin the martian school of office politics.

Monday, June 10, 2002

How come?

Hack?

Sunday, June 09, 2002

Warblog?

KM on KM?

How do you know

Friday, June 07, 2002

KM

Dreaming

MS Announcement

Thursday, June 06, 2002

Bushology

KM Wars

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

World Cup

Civic demonstrations as KM?

Tuesday, June 04, 2002

Got Entertainment

The hits just keep coming...

Monday, June 03, 2002

Clueless

Post Cluetrain

Sunday, June 02, 2002

RSS

Movie

Cluetrain

Saturday, June 01, 2002

Productivity - rebuttal

Friday, May 31, 2002

Ebay Battle

RSS Is here!

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Playing nice in the corporate sand box

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

Thursday, May 23, 2002

Life shouldn't be boring

Wednesday, May 22, 2002

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Monday, May 20, 2002

Sunday, May 19, 2002

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