Doug Cornelius .com

CIO.com announced the winners of their 2008 CIO 100 Awards honoring 100 companies that are creating new business value by innovating with technology.

Two law firms made the list:

Goodwin Procter for Matter Pages

Goodwin Procter deployed Matter Pages to manage matter-related information for more than 850 attorneys working in eight different locations. Matter Pages uses Microsoft SharePoint to provides a single access point to all matter-related information, along with a wiki that attorneys can use to discuss their work and exchange information. Among its benefits, the system enables attorneys to pull together information for clients with a click, when before it used to take hours.

Shook, Hardy & Bacon for CityLink:

The law firm redesigned its corporate portal, CityLink, to support an integrated, collaborative work environment. The portal provides tools, including shared calendars, RSS newsfeeds, blogs and wikis, along with links to internal websites and client-oriented extranets. CityLink uses Microsoft’s SharePoint to integrate a variety of corporate data repositories ranging from human resources and accounting information to client records and litigation support databases.

Five of the winners labeled their project’s type as knowledge management:

• IBM for its Enterprise Tagging Service
• MediSend International for its Global Education Center
• Modine Manufacturing for its enterprise search tool
• Shook, Hardy & Bacon for CityLink
• Vanguard Group for tis Digital Communication Initiative

(I am not sure why the Goodwin Procter project was not labeled as knowledge management.)

As reported in The Lawyer . com, the Eversheds has grabbed a big chunk of legal work from Tyco. It sounds like the key to getting the work was putting an electronic approval process in place. Using their Global Account Management System (GAMS), which requires the lawyer at Eversheds to fill out a quick form in GAMS before starting a new project for Tyco. Then, the general counsel signs-off on the work before the lawyer starts work.

It looks like integrating the law firm’s technology and integrating the law firm’s business process with the client’s technology and business process can get work for law firms. Sounds like a great case for law firm knowledge management.

While I was watching the New England Patriots steamroll over the Pittsburgh Steelers yesterday, there was a flurry and a twitter of posts, comments and twits about whether enterprise software should be “sexy.”

It all started with Robert Scoble of Scobleizer wondering why Enterprise software isn’t sexy.

Stephen Collins of acidlabs thinks Enterprise apps *can* and *should* be sexy.

Ross Mayfield thinks Enterprise Social Software doesn’t get you laid, it gets you promoted.

With a newborn in my house, sexy to me a two hour nap. So I certainly don’t find any software sexy. I want my software to be:

• reliable
• easy on the eyes
• useful
• personable.

I heard a short presentation on knowledge management on Thursday night:

“Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections.

And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake.”

Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin

I was surprised at the lack of “live bloggers” at ILTA. It is a technology conference so I expected to see some interesting ways people were keeping notes and tracking information. Lisa Kellar Gianakos was toting around a tablet PC. But otherwise, I saw very few people using computers. Mostly, I saw people scratching some simple notes in the back of the conference book.

I first started live blogging at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in June. I was (still am) new to blogging. But I thought a blog would be an excellent way to keep notes from the conference. Just before going to that conference I came across some notes I had taken from another conference I attended. There was some good stuff in those notes, but they were just sitting in a pile. I could not retrieve the notes, leverage the notes for other use or leverage my attendance at the conference.

With my notes in a blog, I can use the blog search to quickly retrieve them, use labels to add some organization and incorporate them into the stream of thoughts embodied in this blog.

In addition to my use of the notes, the blog makes them readily available to my colleagues in the knowledge management group at the firm (and shows my director that I was not just off having a good time).

I think it is important to stop the blogging shortly after each session. I do not want blogging to take the place of person-to-person interaction at a conference. As the session ends, I will generally do a quick spellcheck and a quick skim for obvious errors. If it is decent enough, I just hit publish and let it go with whatever typos, grammatical errors or formatting problems I missed. If it is in really bad shape, I will wait to edit the post during a later, quiet time. For me the key is to capture the information, more than polishing them for prime-time.

During a session, I will look surgically attached to my computer. But the end result is much more useful. Isn’t that what technology is all about?

WSJ.com (soon to be part of Murdoch’s empire) had a story on the troubles of married couples sharing technology: ‘Til Tech Do Us Part. (Subscription?)

The story highlighted the problems created with a shared music library, recording on Tivo, joint email accounts, NetFlix, Amazon.com recommendations, and joint blogs. A jogger is jarred by having his wife’s music popping up while he is running (I guess he never heard of a playlist). I was the most surprised at the joint email accounts. Google, Yahoo and Hotmail have offered free email accounts for years. There is no need for a joint email account.

I think most of the problems in the story are easily solvable, but it does raise the issue of the impact of personalization. It is great having your experience customized to you, but some services need to better distinguish when something is for you and when it is for someone else. Amazon.com is the best example. I am not sure why gifts for others impact the recommendations for me.

The bigger challenge in my family is not parsing joint accounts but combining multiple accounts. My wife has her own email accounts, online calendar and contacts. Some of that information needs to be shared with me.

We seem to have solved the calendar issue, by using Google calendars and giving each other access. On my Google calendar account, I can pull up her Google calendar and see her information alongside my information.

Email is not really a problem, because it is easy enough to forward a received message or cc each other on outgoing message.

Contacts is our biggest problem. For example, she has the phone numbers for the babysitters in her contact list. I have not figured out how to solve this problem.

ABA is now selling iPods, in your choice of colors and pre-loaded with ABA CLE programs: ABA-CLE Podcasts and Preloaded iPods.

When I initially bought my iPod I ripped my CD collection and bought a few albums from iTunes. Over the last year I have used my iPod mostly for listening to podcasts. It is great way to take in news and information while commuting. My Monday morning ritual is listening to Wait Wait . . . Dont’ Tell Me during the walk to the train, the train ride and walk to the office. Of course that means I am the crazy guy giggling to himself on the train or walking down the streets of Boston.

I would be happy to listen to CLE programs or internal training programs on my iPod. Or watch, if I get a video iPod some day.

Mark Chandler is the SVP and General Counsel of Cisco Systems and on Januray 25, 2007 in San Diego, CA he gave a luncheon speech at the Northwestern School of Law’s 34th Annual Securities Regulation Institute.

Transcript of Speech

“…the greatest vulnerability of the legal industry today is a failure to make information more accessible to clients, to drive models based on value and efficiency.”