Doug Cornelius .com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Enterprise RSS Day of Action Website
• Attensa’s Enterprise RSS Product
• NewsGator’s Enteprise RSS Product
• Other Posts on The Enterprise RSS Day of Action
• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast – james dellow – enterprise rss action day
• NewsGator’s collection of webinars on Enterprise RSS

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

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

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

Kathleen Gilroy, CEO
Swift Media Networks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even though residential property prices are dropping like rocks around most of the country, commercial properties are still holding their value.

The press release on the S&P/GRA Commercial Real Estate Index shows that prices are up from a year ago.

The National composite reported annual price appreciation of 7.0%, versus January of 2007, up from the +6.7% reported in December’s data, but still significantly below from this cycle’s peak of +14.5%, reported in June of 2006. . . The Northeast had the highest return over the month and has the highest annual return over the past 12 months. Each of the regions reported lower monthly returns in January December/November returns.

The raw data for the Index Values is in this Excel spreadsheet.

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is April 24.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To learn more about Enterprise RSS:

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

There is a great article by Roger Lowenstein appearing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine: Triple-A Failure. It runs through the process for converting mortgage loans into mortgage securities.

In one example, the author is taken through the rating and structure process for a pool of 2,393 mortgages with a face value of $430 million. All of the loans were sub-prime loans originated in the early spring of 2006 by a non-bank lender. Seventy-five percent of the loans were adjustable-rate.

What I found it staggering was that 43 percent of the loan were no-doc loans. The borrowers did not provide written verification of their income. No-doc loans were originally intended as an alternative loan for small business owners (especially cash businesses) where it is difficult to put together the paperwork for showing their income. But when you here no-doc loans, you should think mortgage fraud.

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

What Blogging Brings to Business

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

Come join us at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Mostly to toot my own horn, there is a piece by Andrew Conry-Murray in Information Week: Holy Web 2.0 Herding Nightmare. I am not a big fan of the title; it makes Web 2.0 sound scary. I am fond of the subtitle: Do today’s new collaboration tools make it harder for IT to wrangle corporate information, or easier? YES.

“Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They’re easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. . . . Departments and business units can provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds–and never make a single call to IT.”

If you read the story, you will pick up a few quotes from me. If you do not want to read the story, here are my quotes:

Doug Cornelius, a lawyer at [The Firm], relies on PBwiki, a popular provider of online collaboration tools, for a variety of projects. As a member of the law firm’s knowledge management department, Cornelius uses the wiki to manage meetings and agendas and to plan conferences. “It’s tremendous for capturing information,” he says. “Instead of a string of e-mails, you just go in and edit the wiki.”

While the firm also uses SharePoint as an intranet platform, Cornelius wanted to experiment with other options. “We didn’t need anyone from IT to do anything. Training and setup took 30 seconds,” he says. After a year of use, the wiki has more than 100 pages and gets several edits every day. Other departments in the firm are also using the PBwiki service.

“It’s a classic story of enterprise 2.0,” says [The Firm]‘s Cornelius. “We’re up and running with PBwiki in 30 seconds, and SharePoint is taking a year.”

I have been a sporadic user of Twitter. I was first drawn into using it when I noticed that Twitter is easily setup to change your status in Facebook.

Twitter continues to intrigue me. I have exchanged some great tweets over the past few weeks. The synchronous nature of Twitter often throws me off. I jump into a twitter and see that something interesting happened hours ago and the participants have since signed off. But I have had some Twitter Moments. (A phrase I attributed to Ray Sims.)

I like the lightweight and easily digestible aspect of Twitter. One new thing I heard about from Luis Suarez is the ability to create a TweetCloud. It creates a tag cloud based on the words you use in Twitter. This is my TweetCloud:

I am not sure if it is useful, but I find it very interesting. Sometimes “interesting” is enough.

If you sign up for Twitter, I am @dougcornelius

One of the quirky Massachusetts holidays is Patriot’s Day. It is a state-wide holiday to celebrate the Battles of Lexington and Concord. (For those of you who forget high school history, that was the “shot heard ’round the world” to start the American Revolutionary War.)

Patriot’s Day is also the day of the Boston Marathon. For the past fifteen years I have lived in a few different places, but all within a mile of the marathon route. Today was a beautiful day and I was able to get a few photos:

UPDATE: Doug’s Boston Marathon Photo Album on Picasa