How do you know that?: July 2002

My siblings are insane!

My youngest brother is racing his pets. And my sister's family spends their time torturing them.

Distilled six times for greater purity...

Yes, just when we thought we'd discussed justification for CRM to death, another request for more material to 'sell' the admin committee. Apparently it's not enough that they ask for it, say they want it and are willing to pay for it. They have to beg for it. And I have to tell them why they should be begging for it. My job is sooooo much fun!
an excerpt of the coloring book I'm putting together:

Business Function	Description	Benefits
Firmwide Rolodex	Single place for storing the information about the contacts at our clients that everyone in the firm should know about.	+Unified Client Communication: (eg. We all spell the contact's name correctly, we don't have to continually request fax numbers, mailing addresses, etc.) +Improved Internal Communication: Exposes relationships between S&C and contacts that are currently undocumented. Questions about contacts and relationships that use to depend on office hours can be addressed with the rolodex. +Increased Information Capital: Gather decentralized contact information into a single collaborative store that will survive the immenent departure of many of its contributors. +More accurate contact information: Integration with daily work flow (email, outlook contacts etc.) will ensure that information is current and accurate.

Puner had to be sedated so the vet could trim her nails. She's beautiful - but nasty when pissed off. She's still proud of the fact that she took a chunk out of Dr. Lumley the first time he met her. Both of the cats are fine. We just wanted to make sure.

Dhtml Maaan

More island dreaming between chores today. I added some style sheet elements to make sure the menu on the left side would highlight the working page. I know - MR. Excitement.

Time to take Pig and Pun to the vet.. ... They love that!

Let's burn the library in Constantinople

I'm always amused at the ire people get into about Microsoft. this piece by Cringley shows some restraint - but you can feel his blood pressure rising. I'm amused. Dude, it's just data! Not world domination. There are a lot of great imaginations in this business and they tend to love conspiracy theories. Personally I'm not that interested. Find something that works for you and stick with it. You have to ride a horse. Pick one, treat it well and keep an eye on the other jockeys....

Odds and Ends

Taking the day off today to do some of the things you never get around to. Passport renewal, eye exam, research real estate in the Virgin Islands.. You know, very day stuff.

Find the irony..

I noticed I hadn't put any images up in a while...

I took this on Church street last February. I don't know why it strikes me as so funny that you can learn to play classical violin from a someone who advertises by posting on lamp posts. I love this - do they do it in other cities?

so cool

Hold your cursor over the link's on the left and the last updated date and time will appear. This is a new feature of blogrolling.com. Fun.

Irresponsible development effort.

Call it a guilty pleasure - because I know this is probably out there somewhere....Today I did the following:

Wrote a component that will sit on our web servers and run a scheduled basis to aggregate counts by incoming ip address, page, querystring and date and write counts to a database table.

Created a table of incoming ip address and our internal client number

Wrote a query that reported on the number of page views per day for a given client.

This will allow me to push the add to our lawyer portal a panel that will display the clients they care about and the number of times they hit the web site in the last week/ month etc. Pretty fun.

Observations

Now this is disturbing. My sister is blogging and her first entry has to do with her child's realization that God is dead!. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Funny, you don't blog like a tall person..

Had lunch with Rick and Joy today at a restaurant in Battery Park. As suspected - Rick is wicked smart and a pleasure to speak with. Joy - you too, but I see you everyday....

It was interesting to see how the media translated into the real world. At what point are we the sum of our ideas? How much of us gets poured into these 1's and 0's everyday? It makes one wonder.

Anyone read 'MicroSerfs' - one of the running bits was that the protagonist theorized that if he typed enough random information into his computer it would learn enough to come to life.... hmmmm.

What we have here is a failure to communicate?

Can't get to my remote servers via terminal server this AM. I'm not sure why.

Yesterday I figured out to the replication issue. Adding a /WAIT flag to the script allows the jobs to finish successfully. Cool.

I live to replicate...

This should be easy. MS Application center should be replicating content to our remote site, but I'm getting frequent failures. The only help I found, indicated it was due to the fact that directory structures weren't identical. I find this somewhat difficult to stomach. The product is supposed to do that for you. Anyway, syncing up the directories seems to solve the problem. But it's tedious.

Island time!

Spent some time roughing in the site for Captain Jack over the weekend. Needs much cosmetic work, but the menus are running OK - and the Availability calendar is now linked to the database.

Conflicted

Rick pulls on the thread referenced by Adam from Dave. An observation of lawyers here at biglaw leads me to no conclusion. Some are very savvy. I listened in awe how one lawyer told me how he blew out a motherboard on a pc at home and then replaced it with a 'spare' he had lying around. Yet the same lawyer is the one who has to rifle through a stack of papers to get you a phone number.

We have lawyers who will not have a pc in there office, and we have lawyers who are scary with how well they navigate through the world of technology.

On a whole, the only generality I can offer is that they are very slow to invest in latest in greatest - they want it proven before they'll put significant dollars into an initiative. They tend to know value, and have good business sense. So it may appear as though there is a lag behind the cutting edge, while in fact it's hanging back to see where the real winning technologies are.

Dave's Back!

Welcome back dude! You were missed.

Summer is supposed to be lazy

A quiet day at BigLaw. I indulged myself and caught the World Cup game before I went in. I was shocked at the wide open play. I hadn't seen run-and-gun action like that in a long time (maybe I'm not watching enough soccer these days, but that used to be looked down on).

Today was a milestone of sorts. One of my team showed an enhancement to our main practice information system that integrated data from our meta data gathering application with data from the data warehouse. So for the first time we're integrating transaction level data gathered from questionnaires filled out with lawyers with data from the billing system, time reporting system and external sources. It was pretty cool to see it come together like that. Very powerful... And fast! I'm a proud father.

In other news we worked out a few kinks in the extranet application and made a few steps progress in our redundant site for the external web site. Progress - but nothing earth shaking from my point of view.

... What do you call people who speak one language?...

Americans. I'm so embarrassed. I've warranted a link from paulo, but my Spanish isn't good enough to read what he's writing... hmmm perhaps it's time to try one of those online translators....

News alert!

Managing partners are told that clients are looking at firm web site. Confusion, panic, frantic requests for information ensue! More news as it becomes available....

Huh?

Met with the managing partner for the largest practice area at Big Law yesterday. The topic was CRM, and it was my meeting. I quote "I think, with very few exceptions, every lawyer would want to share every one of their contacts". He didn't seem to think there would be any resistance at all. We'll see.

Dave's not here.

I miss Dave. I hope he's OK.

Maybe he should run an announcement and then a few repeats of old entries (like a rain delay at a Mets game).

Get well soon dude!

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...

How do you know that?

Monday, July 01, 2002

My siblings are insane!

Distilled six times for greater purity...

Saturday, June 29, 2002

Dhtml Maaan

Friday, June 28, 2002

Let's burn the library in Constantinople

Odds and Ends

Thursday, June 27, 2002

Find the irony..

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

so cool

Irresponsible development effort.

Observations

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Funny, you don't blog like a tall person..

What we have here is a failure to communicate?

Monday, June 24, 2002

I live to replicate...

Sunday, June 23, 2002

Island time!

Friday, June 21, 2002

Conflicted

Dave's Back!

Summer is supposed to be lazy

Thursday, June 20, 2002

... What do you call people who speak one language?...

News alert!

Huh?

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Dave's not here.

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

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