Ernest Svenson: Knowledge Management

Thoughts on Radio and KM - The LitiGator writes:

"We noted recently that modifying Radio (or any logging tool) from its native one-way communication to true dialogue or multi-user communication would require some arcane knowledge of the tools and some work -- finagling with referrer logs and the news aggregator....Today Ernie the Attorney talks about the use of Radio as an information sharing tool, which is another way of talking about using it for two-way or multi-user communication. (If one is just interested in one-to-many or broadcast communication, all one needs is the home page.) But he chooses to focus on the page rankings, which does no more than tell us how many people are reading which pages. The fact that the number one page is safersex.org probably tells us a lot."

I'm going to post this response on my KM category page. I'm sure that the LitiGator guys won't see it there. It's like a Zen riddle. My answer to their post is a "non-answer." It may be arrogance, but my view is that if you subscribe to this feed then you are likely to have enough understanding of Radio to validly criticize what I'm saying. I'm sure it deserves criticism, but not based on the ranking a particular site. Sheesh! These newbies!

Blogs in business - Blogroots devotes a whole chapter to Using Blogs in Business. via McGee's Musings.

Simple-minded knowledge management -

it ain't easy to get and order knowledge. Motivation is the key. Just ask KM pioneer Tomás de Torquemada, the first to combine the rack, thumbscrews, foot roasting and suffocation to get subjects to talk. You'd better have formal authority, claim KM regulars. They are wrong. Weblogs are critical to knowledge management success because people own their own knowledge.

It's also why they'll fight an uphill battle in most organizations; they don't fit in with anyone's power agenda. Simple and elegant doesn't help someone advance their organizational agenda. It also makes it more difficult to justify lots of technology consulting help.

Implementing k-logs can benefit from outside help. But the help needs to focus on nurturing the development of new work practices and voice. It must be oriented toward organizational behavior not technology features.

The entry costs are minimal. Where k-logs are likely to face the greatest risk is in the transition from new toy to routine practice. There will be a hump that individual k-loggers and organizations will need to get over. That is what will take energy and attention from whoever chooses to champion the idea in the organization. [parsed from postings by a klog apart & McGee's Musings]

The most successful virus spreads with a simple but pervasive set of conditions. Hegel said something like "the history of man is the history of God becoming aware of his own existence." I think the political history of mankind is the history of power becoming decentralized as information becomes more difficult to control.

Radio Wishlist - Far be it from me to wish for anything more from Radio. Okay, I admit I'm overindulged and spoiled. Nevertheless, here is what I wish for. I would like it if Radio came with a default "category" called "Radio Questions." And as we all know, this implies a separate XML feed for that channel. Then the folks at Userland (and the phalanx of developers who lurk in Radio Userland) could subscribe to that channel for some of the more intrepid users (i.e. "rick") and respond on a publicly available channel. Thus you would have an XML channel with the latest hot tips and fixes for current Radio problems. So, it would be sort of like an online demonstration of what a corporation could use Radio for: i.e. a robust, and inexpensive KM solution. It sounds cool, but (as the guy in the commercial says), is it implementable?

Radio: A Personal KM Tool - So will TechnoLawyer acknowledge that?

"rick" writes: "As a follow-up to the last post about personal KM challenges, I thought I'd share this e-mail I wrote to the TechnoLawyer list several weeks ago. (It still hasn't been distributed to the list for some reason, so at least now it has a home.) Might help some out there who are reading these blogs but not using the software understand why some of us are so excited by the possibilities. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Rick wonders why the TechnoLawyer discussion group has not posted his email. My guess is that whoever controls the Technolawyer group is not likely to want to publish Rick's glowing endorsement of a knowledge management tool that would render the E-mail-based TechnoLawer discussion group meaningless.

I enjoy the discussions that appear in the TechnoLawyer (that's where I learned about Roboforms), but I increasingly dread getting the emails. I'm hooked on the News Aggregator where I can read and re-route information quickly. I can even post items to my blog purely to archive them for my own later consumption. I wish everyone who gets the TechnoLawyer newsletter would get a Radio weblog. That would eliminate the centralized distribution (and the editorial control), which I think would be a good thing, but I can see where the editors of the newsletter would not.

Software Gumbo - Or why some stuff (Like KM software) might be hard to sell to law firms

I'm a power computer user - I know that software is hard to make - And I know that it is even harder to make software that has to work with other software.

Lawyers have to use multiple software - that's cool - sort of - but one day a KM guy shows up and says "you need some new software"- a sale is iffy - it's hard to get lawyers to adapt to new stuff - there's moat around the Castle.

Another moat around the Castle is the IT guys - A/K/A the "unsung heros" - I mean that! - they have to untangle the spaghetti that is inherent in making one piece of software talk to another.

Example - Word Processing program (i.e. Word Pefect) has to talk to Document Management Program (Imanage). Upgrade of one (say Imanage is required to fix new problem that users experience (i.e. can't reliably find indexed document using search for words in document). Upgrade takes place. Now another problem crops up. Lots of conversations with tech support. - now we have to upgrade the word processing program to new version - but when you do that you need to upgrade the operating system....and on and on - this is no fun for anyone - especially the IT guys who have to listen to lawyers complain, and they can't really explain the problem in terms the lawyers (who know they are smart) can understand.

What does this mean to guys selling KM? The lawyers don't understand it (why do I need this today? I didn't need it yesterday). The IT guys are wary of adding another program that not only interacts with existing systems, especially one whose whole function is to "interact". So who is going to attend the meeting wearing the "We love KM software" T-Shirt?

Maybe it's just me - a lawyer interested in technology in a Louisiana firm with >40 lawyers and 3 offices. Does that sound familiar to the guys at BigLaw? Stay tuned. I'm sure someone will transmit a response....

Well Educated Lawyer seeks understanding of cryptography

In a casual conversation with a very smart lawyer in my office he mentioned that he refused to use credit cards for transactions over the Internet. I thought he was joking, but he wasn't. He told me that he was very concerned that the information would be captured and put to ill-use by hackers. I explained to him that a protocol called SSL had been developed and even explained how encryption works (I also offered to loan him Steven Levy's book "Crypto" which tells the story of how cryptography was developed for use by private individuals). He remained skeptical.

This is a guy that has a high IQ, did exceptionally well in law school, and worked at a large New York lawfirm. He is the sort of person who doesn't watch TV, but reads scholarly tomes for pleasure. Yet, he has a sort of "boogie man" concept of the internet. He may be an exception, but it is an interesting phenomenon nevertheless. I guess he is the embodiement of Arthur C. Clark's statement that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Using RSS feeds for pinpointed legal topics

"rory" writes: "Many lawyers are already using the category function of the RSS spec, which is built-in to Radio, to create specific topical legal feeds. (e.g. Rick has law, accounting, CRM etc.; Ernie has copyright, KM, etc.; and I provide public information about WV Supreme Court cases in recent, civil, criminal, and family categories, as well as feeds about legal information standards, access to court records, and court webcasting. via [Rory Perry's Radio Weblog]

It takes two to tango. Court can provide separate category feeds (case types, and also "official court information"). And lawyers can create categories for areas of practice or interest. I'm creating a new category for "class actions" and I'm sure I'll create others. It's easy to do, and fun for the whole family....

Knowledge Management - The Osbournes are My Inspiration

I've been thinking about "mcgee"'s Knowledge Management postings a lot. It's hard to keep up with them because they raise so many issues. I'd like to contribute to the information stream, but I'm not sure how. But, taking a cue from the new MTV hit show The Osbournes (about Ozzie, the burned out Black Sabbath lead singer, and his pedestrian home life), I've decided to have my own knowledge worker channel. It will be about an attorney in New Orleans at a 40 lawyer firm that is trying to have his firm implement and use technology. I don't know if it will help Jim by providing him raw material from the field (so to speak) but it will help me to ventilate my frustrations.

The legal profession is, theoretically populated almost exclusively by knowledge workers. So what's the plot question? Here are a fw possibilities. Will law firms figure out how to use technology to help themselves? If so, how will they figure it out? And why can't they figure it out sooner? What sort of office politics stand in the way?

So I plan to post a fairly raw feed of experience. I don't claim it's representative of the overall legal profession. It represents what I know (I leave it to others to analyze it in a larger context). I will occasionally add some commentary (again probably out of the inability to refrain from trying to make sense of my frustration), but I will mostly try to just put raw information down and let others (if there are any others who might be so inclined) to extract meaning. And with that point having been made, I will admonish that I don't plan to edit my postings much. For better or worse, they will be mostly stream of consciousness.

So, without further adieu, let the show begin...

Communities, Audiences and Scale. Clay Shirky was the moderator at this year's PC Forum, and his article titled Communities, Audiences and Scale provides a very interesting argument about the sustainability of communities. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Rick has some interesting observations on this, and if I weren't so busy I'd crank out a more extended commentary. The question is: will something like the Radio community we have here scale? To the naysayers I would say that you can't predict what will happen here based on previous models (because there are no previous models). Radio is a mult-dimensional thing, and people outside the Radio world (like my friends who come here to see my 'blog site) don't get to see below the surface, where things like the News Aggregator, Referers, and Page Rankings work. I think the community can scale, or maybe scaling means the community becomes segmented in some way....who knows? Let's just keep trying it and see what happens....

Knoweldge management and global brands for law firms.

Anyone interested in the intersection of KM, professional services firm management and branding should read this article from the March issue of Global Counsel magazine. [via tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Law firms and KM: There is hope.

"I originally wrote this article about law firms and KM last month, but a conversation with Ernie last week, today's link to the Global Counsel article, and an e-mail I just got from Buzz prompted me to include another link." [via tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

I have really enjoyed talking to Rick about the infrastructure of the legal system. Whenever I feel really frustrated I think I'll call him. He understands the reason why lawyers have trouble embracing technology better than anybody, although I know that "denise" understands too. Hopefully, things will change sooner rather than later....

What are web services?

Buzz and I were talking about this the other day, and I had to confess that I didn't know what web-services were. He tried to explain it to me. Tonight I saw this link on Jenny's site, and now I think I understand.

Blogging - an economist's view

Yet another article about blogging, this one by an economist. Bottom line? Lower barriers to entering the publishing market will make opportunities. But... The Economist sayeth: It's still all about "trust," and the unwashed masses will not "trust" bloggers. So popular media outlets still have the upper hand. But for how long? What's the tipping point?

Ray Nagin - Mayor-Elect of New Orleans - Knowledge Management

The Times Picayune reports today on Nagin's idea of an Internet based communication system to make City Hall more efficient and responsive. The website will allow people to ask questions that get routed to the appropriate department and receive quick E-mail responses. According to David White, the mayor's transition team co-chairman, the goal is to capture information from the responses and build a knowledge base. The website is not fully implemented, but it can be previewed here and here.

I don't know much about how they plan to implement this, but I would hope they would use K-logging and explore the Userland stuff to see if it could make their task easier. I sent them an E-mail and hopefully they'll follow up.

Structure doesn't just happen ....

I'm definitely not the sort of person who craves structure. In fact, I would say it's the opposite: I prefer flexibility. Yet, I find myself constantly thinking: how can I structure the information in my computer, and on our firm network, better? Take our document management system (please!) for example. I often find myself wondering things like "can we add a new descriptive field that identifies whether a pleading is for federal, as opposed to state, court?" That would help when people are looking for a sample of a certain type of pleading. That's a no-brainer; we should have such a field, and maybe others. Or maybe we have some fields that we don't really need (if we add too many we could get to the point where it isn't worth the trouble of entering the data).

Structuring information. To me that's an important issue, and deserves thought. And so I would think that other people who do what I do (i.e. lawyers, or people in the legal profession) would also be pondering this sort of stuff. I'm sure some people do, but not too many around where I operate.

I wonder also about why the structure inherent in the digital world is often treated differently than it is in the physical world. For example, I notice that many people who are very organized and fastidious in the three-dimensional world (i.e. the world of objects upon which coffee can be spilled) are completely disorganized in the virtual world of software and other digital information. Many of those people have trouble accepting the idea that they should apply their real-world regimen to the virtual world. It's like they view computers as something that they can't control, and so they don't even try. Or sometimes I get the feeling that they think that computers inherently create structure and so they don't have any responsibility to add to the organizational scheme.

Or maybe some people can adapt to and accept structure in a virtual world that aren't as willing to accept it in the real world? I think that's true for me. It may be true of others. I noticed that Jim McGee said something similar about being less organized in the three-dimensional world than he is in the digital world. Oh well, I'm sure there is some underlying significance to all of this, even though I don't know what exactly it is. But I do know one thing: structure doesn't just happen. People have to produce it...even in the digital world of computers.

It makes too much sense to actually work. Doctors, prescriptions, and technology?

An Internet-based system being introduced will allow doctors to send prescriptions directly to a pharmacy's computer from a hand-held or desk-top computer, wireless telephone or text pager. By Milt Freudenheim. [New York Times: Technology]

More Pith....

"Truth proceedeth more readily from error than from confusion."

--Sir Francis Bacon

Speaking of NetGens, Classrooms Need Upgrades, Too - From Jenny

"Schools have made progress integrating computers and PDAs into the classroom, yet one design firm believes that more drastic changes are needed, so they created a prototype of what a future classroom may look like....

The three-part technology system consists of an interactive PDA called the GooBall, a backpack and a removable flexible LCD screen for each student. Students can sit, stand or lie down when using the devices, and are not confined to desks.... [Wired News] via [The Shifted Librarian]

I definitely think that we need to re-examine how schools could use technology. Everything gets focused on computers, but PDA's and E-Books should be considered too. My son goes to an all-boys high school where most of the kids carry two backpacks (they look like Paratroopers with big reserve chutes on their chest and the main chute on the back). The damn things weigh at least 30 pounds. Does anyone not realize that you can scan 5 boxes of paper and all that will fit on one CD-Rom? If you capture the information as text the capacity is even greater. I'm sure an E-book would hold all of theinformation that my son and three of his colleagues are carting around, and do so in a searchable, and electronically highlightable (and bookmarkable) form. Plus, many E-Books have built in dictionaries so that if someone is reading and they don't know the definition of the word they can access it immediately. The cost of distributing the books would probablybe so much lower that the student could buy all of the books and get the reader free. I mean this is a no-brainer. Is any school out there working on this? Why not?

Google - Useful for Phone Numbers

Okay, I'm sure everyone knows this and I'm just really behind the curve. I just found out that if you want to lookup a phone number with Google you just type in the person's name and the two letter state abbreviation (e.g. "Ernest Svenson LA") and it will pull up their name and phone number. Amazing!!!! It doesn't work for more common names, but when you're looking for Swedes in Louisiana it works fine. [Read more Google Features]

A Simple Story - The Monkees in the Cage

This is a simple story that I believe has made its rounds in Internet email. It contains a profound truth. It's about researchers who studied monkees. They put five monkees in a cage and hung a bunch of bananas from the ceiling, which would be too high for the monkees except there was a chair in the cage. Naturally, the monkees quickly figured out that they could position the chair under the cage and get to the bananas.

But when they did. The "researchers" hosed down the monkees with a high pressure hose. And not just the monkees that were trying to reach the bananas, but all of the monkees in the cage. After the monkees had been conditioned not to go for the bananas, they replaced one of the monkees with a new monkee. When he would try to get to the bananas the other "veterans" of the hose-down would beat him until he gave up. At intervals the researchers would replace a monkee. Eventually, all of the monkees were replaced and none of the replacement monkees would try for the bananas, even though none of them had been hosed down.

The profound truth of this story is obvious, and I think it is equally obvious that the story is more than just a story about monkees.

Instant Messaging - The New New Thing

My earlier post on Instant Messaging brought this comment, which is from a good friend of mine, and I'm sure represents a normal state of affairs these days-

"Over the last two years IM has become the preferred means of communication for kids (jr. high schoolers, that is). My 7th grader gets on the computer and begins communicating with his "group" as soon as he gets in from school. He's certainly no computer geek but this continues late into the night. It's a very large and diverse group, both male and female. Their lingo is quite fascinating. If he's got a question he finds the answer at the computer. As far as he's concerned, the home telephone and study groups at the library have become obsolete... "

I wonder if we adults really understand the IM phenomenon? The Yahoo article that I read gave an example of an Asian girl whose parents strictly controlled her social life (screening phone calls from boys etc). The girl used IM and was able to have a social life that was fairly normal (perhaps even more normal than we might imagine if the above comments reflect the norm--which I'm sure they do). The thing that keeps surfacing about IM is the fact that it creates "presence" and a sense of immediate contact that other web applications (i.e. E-mail) do not have. I underlined one part of her comment that suggests that IM is used by kids for useful things like "online study groups." It is the "useful" part of IM that intrigues me (I think that we adults tend to think that it is frivolous...which is of course what people thought about the telephone when it was first deployed). So how will IM be useful?

I have used IM in a limited way at work, but I can see how it allows for a different form of communication. It is a hard thing to grasp, which Steven Vore recognizes in this interesting post.

He suggests that IM is helpful in his work where people that he has to collaborate with are in different offices in different cities. The need to share ideas in real time among groups is the strength of IM. [Link] No doubt synchronous collabortive tools are going to have increasing importance, and this is not just because of the fear of travel in the wake of 9/11. Finding new ways to work together for certain projects (where the cost, in money and time, of travel) is increasingly necessary. To me the IM phenomenon is something worth thinking about....

Instant Messaging

Reading an article today in Yahoo magazine about IM and its place in the arsenal of communication tools. Synchronous, and full of "presence," it does something that no other web application does: it keeps people close. I haven't used IM a lot, but so far I have noticed that it is another way of communicating that has value. Apparently some companies (including even a few small law firms) are using it to replace the intercom. Instead of noisly paging people you simply use IM. I think it would be a great tool at conferences to ask questions in an unobtrusive manner.

My Wireless Heaven - Return to Paradise

My linksys wireless network is a great thing. I installed it about a month ago when my house was finally hooked into to the high-speed cable pipe. Yes, March was a wonderful month. High-speed access and wireless in one fell swoop.

However, there was trouble in paradise because for the past few weeks I noticed the Wireless Access Point kept dropping the connection to various computers (not all at once though). The solution to this problem was that I would have to push the reset button on the back of the WAP and then the connection to the Internet would be restored. But this was a pain in the ass.

I mentioned this to Keith (the computer guy at work) and he, of course, asked the obvious question: "have you upgraded your firmware?" Uh, no. So, I downloaded the firmware and installed it (a 5 minute operation at best) and now, guess what? No problems. I feel like a total idiot! I knew that I should have checked to see if there was a firmware upgrade and installed it if there was. Moral of the story: always check to see if you have the latest patches and software upgrades.

IT Directors are from Mars, Lawyers are from Venus

"In the anthropology of law firms, a few basic divisions stand out. There are those who earn fees (lawyers) and those who don't (staff); and those who understand technology (IT staff and a few lawyers) and those who don't, even though they must use it (most lawyers). "

This is a great article, and not surprisingly the discussion takes place in the offices of Bartlitt, Beck -- a firm that "gets it" both as to using technology and finding alternative fee arrangements (and a firm where I had the pleasure of shooting a few hoops on their indoor basketball court). [Law.com article]