Doug Cornelius .com

Join the G100 CIO Advisory Board as they provide a recap of the G100 CIO event held on Monday, August 25 in conjunction with ILTA ’08.  The focus is “Web 2.0 – What It Means to Law Firms,” including a summary of what Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps shared with the group around the phenomenon of Web 2.0 in general.

Speakers:

• Peter Lesser – Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher + Flom, LLP
• David Rigali – Husch Blackwell Sanders LLP
• Karen Levy – Debevoise + Plimpton LLP
• Peter Attwood – Simmons + Simmons
• Jeff Brandt – Crowell and Moring

My Notes:

G100 is a forum for the CIOs from the 100 biggest law firms in the world. This year, the topic was Web 2.0.  Some of the things they heard were speakers from an Australian law firm, Microsoft and Google.

The panel started off with a definition of Web 2.0, then moved on to Enterprise 2.0. They wonder if there will really be an impact on corporate information systems.

One panelist noted that it changes their way of looking at information and whether it needs to be as structured as it currently is structured inside their firms.

They were surprised to find out that more of the content being added is coming form partners and not junior associates.  (We have the same experience. We are getting much more contribution from partners than associates.)

Two big factors they noticed. One is that the content gets in very quickly. Second, you need very little IT control or input after the initial set up.

It is very cheap to fail with these tools.  There is very little incremental cost for each additional wiki page.

The panel although impressed with web 2.0 are not sold on them. Most of panel was not ready to start adoption of wikis. 

They had the same view on blogs.  One panelist stated that they have a ban on external blogs. But just the same, they had one internal blog that is highly viewed.

The panel moved on to Google apps. They were very impressed with a presentation from Google on Google apps.  They were very impressed with cloud computing and the ability to quickly push out updates to the programs. (I hate to rain on their parade, and Google does not use the term, but Google Docs is a wiki system.) They are intrigued with moving from an integrated desktop to a virtual desktop.

My view. I think the CIOs need to get out more often. They are missing the change that is coming.

My ILTA Schedule

Last week I had a great time talking with Matt Moore of Innotecture and Engineers Without Fears & Stewart Mader, the author of Wikipatterns about all things Enterprise 2.0. Matt recorded the conversation and turned it into a podcast to share:

podcast – enterprise 2.0 – doug cornelius and stewart mader

00:00 – Doug visits the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston
02:45 – Many many vendors – they love E2.0!
04:00 – The CIA & Intellipedia
04:30 – Wachovia Bank
06:15 – Stewart goes Web Content 2008, Enterprise 2.0 in Italy, and 2008 WikiSym
07:45 – Social Network Analysis of Wikipatterns
08:15 – iPhone location-based social networking service and Stewart’s dog’s bladder
09:15 – Wikis cease to be a novelty – beyond Wikipedia
10:30 – CIA again
11:45 – My favourite Clay Shirky quote – are we boring yet?
12:30 – Training as a barrier to adoption – wikis are simple
13:20 – Email is not the zenith
14:45 – Wikis get out of the way
15:15 – Wikis as the iPod box
17:00 – What will happen in 2009?
19:00 – The steady curve rather than the tidal wave
21:00 – Wikis as a natural solution for unstructured information
22:10 – Writing the “wikipatterns” book on a wiki
23:30 – It’s not about shocking people
24:30 – Awe instead
25:00 – The Bush reference I can’t censor
25:15 – Giving and taking
27:45 – Wiki adoption happens at the lunch table
30:45 – The future of traditional blogs inside the enterprise
33:00 – The melting pot of tools
34:00 – The globalisation of everything

If you only have 2 minutes, we started off our discussion of enterprise 2.0 with a discussion about swearing and the social bonding of profanity. Matt posted this discussion as a separate podcast: podcast preview – salty language.

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 9
wiki pages: 313, which is a 50% increase over the past month’s 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we deal with some issues. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

We are still suffering from the wiki’s failure to show the changes to the wiki page as part of the notification. [See Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.]

On June 20,  I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster.

A replay of that webinar is now available on the ILTA website: Connections in Context – Who Mentioned CRM?

Enterprise search has become the standard for helping to make organizations’ information retrieval processes more efficient. Improving user access to data across the enterprise is key.  But effective search can do so much more than just improve existing business processes, it can transform your business network by exposing otherwise hidden expertise, customer relationships and cross-selling opportunities. In this session, Oz Benamram demonstrates how to transform your business development process with enterprise search by automatically sharing relationship connections and context throughout the enterprise and provide the benefits of a contextual, searchable network to your stakeholders to achieve maximum adoption and effectiveness.

I was the moderator of a webinar: Connections in Context – The New Face of CRM sponsored by the Knowledge Management Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association. The speaker was Oz Benamram the Director of Knowledge Management of Morrison & Foerster. The presentation was a retake of the presentation he gave at the Enterprise Search Summit.

Oz has done some great work on finding documents. So I was enthusiastic to see his take on finding people.

My Notes:

The goal of CRM has been to help you find someone and to deliver information about that someone to help you decide if that someone is the “one.” We need to make it easy to find people, whether internal or external, and see our shared experience with this person.

Oz set forth Amazon.com, with all of the related content related to the product. With Facebook, he pointed out the flow of information from Facebook.

There are three keys around people: who, why and what. Who are the People and Contacts. The Why is the client, matter or project. The What are emails and documents. It also important to coordinate those with when and where.

The goal is to make the information findable in a Google-like manner. That is one simple search box that integrates all systems. It also important to filter the results like you do in Amazon or Clusty (powered by Vivisimo).

Oz moved onto a presentation of the contacts module of his AnswerBase system. AnswerBase is powered by Recommind. The tool uses a relationship analysis tool from Contact Networks (in a proof of concept). This tool looks at the email traffic between internal and external people to show the strength of relationship. They also add info from the CRM system, HR databases, document management system, billing system, matter management system and marketing systems.

They had a privacy issue related to harvesting email. They limited it to emails that were put into their email filing system. This allows you to expose the email and alleviated privacy concerns.

Oz moved onto finding contacts in context. This involved some entity extraction. They use West KM to find courts, judges and parties mentioned in the document. (This is very litigation focused.)

Oz moved on to finding internal expertise. They mash together information from the HR system, the documents the attorney has drafted, the information on the attorney’s matters and the attorney’s time entries.

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 8
wiki pages: 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we debated the wiki structure and security models. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

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.

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.

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

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.”