How do you know that?: February 2003

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Time reporting

My good friend Cecil has turned me on to Journyx looks like a good product. It's a thick client bad boy. I'm still trying for the fully web based service with my ProjectTime application. It's always good to check out the neighbors.

Respect

Well Dave's the guy. Blogging comes to Harvard. I've been reading Dave for a couple years now. I think he's absolutely amazing and inspiring. Something to aspire to.

Blogging's teeth are clearly embedded in the meaty thigh of society, and I don't see it letting go any time soon.

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Music

Ok, I have to write about this. It's bothering me too much. I watched most of the Grammy's the other night. I have one question? When did the world start liking easy listening music so much? I'm sure Norah Jones is a very nice person. But I don't see anything remarkably talented or innovative in what she does. I have half a dozen friends with more charisma and talent then she's ever shown.

My theory is that the record exec's and marketeers decided that she was the flavor of the moment. ecchhhh.

The telling moment of the night is when they brought in an exec to tell the audience how healthy the music industry is. It was strangely reminiscent of certain politicians getting on camera and telling everyone how well the economy is doing.

Saturday, February 22, 2003

It was only a matter of time..

God is blogging.

KM Radar

Keep an eye out for InfoPath. This has potential to reduce the depth of the info mine shafts we are all developing. Message to the developer: Learn xslt and xpath cold.

Friday, February 21, 2003

Must See TV

Penn & Teller's Bullshit on Showtime. awesome!

I'm sooo certifiable

passed Exam 70-310 Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework today. Oh was that fun.

KM

Note to self... Always be aware of one of the key problems of knowledge mapping. By knowledge mapping I mean - where do you go in the organization when you have a question about the topic.

This came up when discussing CRM. A colleague mentioned that he'd like to add a drop down list of types of expertise and allow a user to select some. Great idea but... A) how likely is it that a lawyer will describe his expertise accurately? B) If we do that, we have to take into account that it's an individual describing his/her own abilities rather than a more objective source.

How do we build/expose a real organizational knowledge map at BigLaw

Pole all the partnership with the question of 'who do you go to to get an answer about x?' Where x is an area of expertise. This seems like a reasonable approach, but most of the lawyers here are of the opinion that they already know what everybody else knows, so they don't need to do this again. Still, the exercise would probably be revealing.

Infer knowledge base on time recorded for matter types with certain characteristics. I can retrieve the amount of experience a lawyer has on M&A deals that were for parties in Germany in the Telecommunications industry by running a few simple queries. It's a start and it requires no input from the lawyers. It has some drawbacks, but it's low hanging fruit.

I'd imagine that three variations of the knowledge maps would evolve from these three approaches. A long term goal would be to define and overlay each of them.

New Fatfinger

FatFinger just got fatter! Go Geoff, Go. Sounds like some cool new stuff.

Sunday, February 16, 2003

We're back

We took a few days off in the country. We learned a few things... We don't do to well in the great white North. First of all, there are two vital things lacking... connectivity & Starbucks coffee. Yes addiction is a terrible thing.

Friday, February 07, 2003

We're under attack ...

by CNN again today.

Man v Machine

Kasparov vs Deep Junior Today!

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Time tracking

Plowing ahead in the webification of BigLaw. Today we solidified our plans to move to a web based interface for lawyer time entry. The app we're using is a bit clunky... but it'll do for now. In any case it's one step further from the crushing maintenance costs of metaframe and the hell of thick client maintenance.

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

Automated the toe stubbing process

A coder was baffled why his application would continually stop working in our clustered staging environment. After much navel gazing we discovered that the programmer had placed the dlls for the application in a directory that MS Application Center was replicating. Doh!

Saturday, February 01, 2003

The other guys

Just noticed that guru.com has a free consulting time and billing application like my pet project time application. Nice, app. Gee, let's see what we can borrow.

How do you know that?