Feeds That I Am Enjoying

As Jack Vinson put me on his list of blogs he is enjoying reading of late and Luiz Suarez put me on his list of 20 knowledge management blogs he is enjoying, I thought I would put together my own list.

I found that most of my favorite KM blogs are already on their lists. Also, as I was putting together my list I can across a post on a newspaper that recommending bookmarking. The article thought that you should go back to your favorite blogs and read them. Clearly people do not understand the power of blogs is that they push the information out to you. So I thought I would focus more on feeds rather than the sites.

Me. I have perpetual searches for references for my name and this blog. Technorati offers an RSS feed for new references as does the Google blog search. I always recommend to people that they have searches set up to see what people are saying about them.

Elusa. The blog by Luis Suarez. Back when I first started this blog, Luis gave me a pass to the Enteprise 2.0 conference in Boston. That energized me about enterprise 2.0 and how it will affect knowledge management. It was also my first experience live blogging from a conference.

Knowledge Jolt with Jack. Jack introduced me to the concept of "flogging": Forced blogging. He made each student in his knowledge management class set up and post to a blog. It seems like the best way to understand Web 2.0/social media and its possibilities within the enterprise is to hold your nose and jump in. Jack pushed his class in.

Wiki for my Team. I could not impose flogging on my knowledge management group, but I did instigate a "fwiki": forced wiki. We use a private wiki provided by PBWiki (easy as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich). The feed does a great job of showing what has been added and deleted. This wiki has turned into a great tool to capture and communicate what the team is doing.

Facebook. The Facebook platform offers RSS feeds status updates from your friends and notifications. I do not have to go to the Facebook website to see what my friends are doing.

Real Lawyers Have Blogs. Kevin O'Keefe is an evangelist for lawyers using blogs to present their ideas and their expertise into the marketplace. He also pointed out the news story telling people to bookmark their blogs to you can return often. He was horrified.

Strategic Legal Technology. Ron Friedmann was the first person I knew who had his own website and wrote a blog.

REI Outlet's Deal of the Day. I used to be an avid outdoors adventurer B.C. (Before Child) and a big shopper at REI. REI now offers the marked down item of the day notification through RSS. I have not seen many e-commerce sites using RSS to notify its customers. I bet we may see more of this in the near future.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Gregg Easterbrook's weekly column on football. (For those of you outside the U.S., that is North American football, with enormous men wearing helmets and pads.) There are not many sportswriter who are a contributing editor for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Monthly. This is the only feed on this list that comes out in a partial feed. His column is lengthy enough that I generally print it out to read. I am finding that most commercial feeds are pushed out in a partial feed, trying to direct you onto the company's website, presumably to read the ads splashed about. I used to read the Freakonomics blog posts all the time. Since they migrated over to the NY Times and the partial feed, I read the stories much less often.

SharePoint as a Social Network Tool

Microsoft won the battle to invest in Facebook. According to the New York Times, They agreed to pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the company . That places the value of Facebook at $15 billion.

Microsoft's SharePoint Products and Technologies Team has been working up their own take on SharePoint as a social network tool. According to the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog, Eric Charran (Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services), Dino Dato-on (SharePoint Ranger), and Greg Lang (Program Manager for Microsoft Enterprise Services Communities Tools and Infrastructure) have written a soon to be published white paper that addresses the importance of social networking in an organization and how to properly implement SharePoint's MOSS 2007 as a social networking solution.

There is an except on the website: Enabling and managing social networks (for business use) with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

One of the reasons I have been using Facebook is to see what pieces of its functionalities would add value inside the enterprise. We have a great photobook application, but it gives an incomplete and relatively static snapshot of information about the person. It should be relatively easy to pull in additional information about the person, like what matters they have worked on.

I wonder if we should be developing our own custom application or leveraging the tools that come with SharePoint. The My Sites functionality in SharePoint looks like it could be a useful platform for pulling in more information about the people inside the firm.

I assume that Microsoft is already working on an enterprise Facebook. It just seems like an obvious tool for them to develop. My guess is that SharePoint will give them the platform to do it.

Social Space and Social Networks inside the Law Firm

Bruce McEwen posted a story on the value of creating more interaction among the lawyers in a law firm: Social Networks and Partners' Desks. Bruce looks to the old concept of partners sharing a desk and the proliferation of shared space at technology firms.

I looked back to one of my old posts on Microsoft using workspace design to increase collaboration. One of my goals of knowledge management is to increase the sharing of knowledge and experience. I believe attorneys like talking with each other and value a colleague's view on a problem.

Too many law firms have partners holed up in corner offices, cut off from the flow of people and interactions happening outside their door. Even worse are the law firms with attorneys working behind closed doors for most of the day. Sure we attorneys need some quiet time to review documents. But rarely does that mean I should spend the whole day holed up in my office.

One drawback to electronic legal research is that the law firm's library is no longer a place you are likely to run into a colleague. If you do, they are probably seeking a quiet place to be left alone.

What can be done?

Pool Secretaries. Instead of the 1 to 2, 1 to 3 (or greater) assignment have two secretaries servicing six attorneys. You get the workload spread out with the secretaries collaborating and sharing information. You get double the number of attorneys moving into the same space to pick up work, drop off work and get their mail. To do this you would need to standardize some procedures and workflow, such as time-keeping.

Better Coffee Stations. Most attorneys live on coffee. Starbucks seems to attract people getting work done at their tables. Put a table in the kitchen and make it a better place to mingle and run into each other.

Announce Results. Most law firms gather lots of information when new matters are opened, but do little at the end of the matter or after a significant action. Law firms should encourage attorneys notifying others in their practice group that something happened. Post that information in one of those better coffee stations.

Information Kiosks. Instead of putting all the legal research books in the library, use some interior wall space to spread periodicals, lighter reading and commonly used materials along interior walls. Put it out in the open for people to run into and then to run into each other. You can make space for someone to walk by and ask "what are you reading?" I walked through the real estate section of our library and was amazed to see some of the material there. I just don't get to the library that often.

Walk around your law firm and see what could be used to get people to run into each other and communicate.

The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search

After looking at my post on the Vivisimo Social Search, I thought back to how it relates to each of the four types of search. For those of you who missed my post from a few months ago on types of search, my studies show there to be four types of search: fetch, recall, precedent and research.

With the fetch, you have exact identifying information. For instance, with a document in the document management system you have the document number, or you have a filename and path, or a URL. Obviously, an enterprise search engine adds little to this type of document search. The social search would allow you or others to annotate that item. For instance, the law has changed and a provision in the document does not work anymore.

With the recall search, you have some distinct information about the nature of the item. You remember a matter it was associated with, who created it, when it was created, etc. With this type of search you typically get back several or many items and you need to sort through the results to find the item you were looking for. The social search may help with this sorting. For instance, if an item were tagged as the final document. Or just the opposite, the item was tagged as being an interim or discarded draft.

The research is the type of search that an enterprise search was built for. You want to find information on a topic and you may have no idea if the enterprise has any information on that topic. Information could be stored in a variety of sources/databases. The social enterprise search should pull back information that others found useful, more so than just an enterprise search. If I am looking for information on "poison pills" it would be great if the search pulled back intranet pages on the subject, documents on poison pills and personnel with experience with poison pills. It would be even better if those search results were improved with tags and annotations from others: "useful summary memo", "helped me get poison pill approved by the board", "the courts overturned this poison pill", etc.

The enterprise social search also gives you a tool to allow for or improve your search for a precedent. With a precedent search, the information that makes the item relevant is generally not in the text of the document. For instance, if I were looking for a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida that is buyer favorable. The words "Florida" "retail shopping center" and "buyer favorable" may not appear in the document and if they do they may only appear once or twice. To enable this kind of search you need to harness the document collection to another database of information. The social search gives you another option. You can just add an annotation to the document that it is a "buyer favorable agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida."

Some skeptics of the social search will point out that you can already accomplish some of the same results. For instance, if you have a comments field in your document management system, you could use that comment field for annotations. The problem is that the comment field is anonymous and therefore the annotation is anonymous. I do not know if I wrote it, someone smarter than me wrote it or someone less competent wrote it.

I think Vivisimo's new search tool offers a lot of promise to improve all of the types of searching and better harness the knowledge of an enterprise.

Weather and Your Intranet

I have generally frowned on the weather display on intranet pages. But I saw this and found it interesting. This SharePoint webpart from Bamboo Solutions could display the weather for all or our offices in one place, side by side.







Comparing the weather is much more interesting, than just seeing your weather information. In LA it is always going to be sunny and 80 degrees. But that becomes much more interesting when it is displayed next to the weather in Boston (especially on a murky day)

Thanks to the SharePoint Product Group for publicizing this on the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog.

Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration

I sat in on this webinar sponsored by KM World. I was knocked over by the demonstration of Vivisimo's new Velocity 6.0 search tool.

Lynda Moulton from the Gilbane Group started off the presentation.

Clustering and federating searches is a great tool from an enterprise search tool. It comes from the machine trying to put the documents into context and groups that the machine thinks makes sense. Adding the human factor can add more value than what the machine can do. A person's annotations or tags can create more value than the machine.

One of the goals of using a social search is that it elevates discoveries into teaching moments. By sharing with the crowd what they found and they can put it into context and wrap more information around it. That way you can find it again and others can find it and reuse it.

You are more likely to go to someone in your network for help and expertise. That same behavior should carry over to tagging. You are more likely to rely on the tagging and notes from people you know and trust.

Social search can have enlightened self-interest by getting something back when you give something yourself.

Lynda recommends looking for early adopters by looking for groups that have serious information gathering needs. Start small.




This was big softball for Vivisimo to show how the new release of their product.

Next up was Rebecca Thompson from Vivisimo to showcase the release of their new Velocity 6.0 tool. She labeled as Enterprise Search 2.0.

First thing is the ability to vote on whether the item in the search result is useful. It displays the percentage of people that voted up and down. This in turn is fed back into the relevancy algorithm of the search engine. The next step is adding a rating. You can give up to five stars. It also displays the average rating and the number of votes. Administrators can get reports on the rating and use this highlight useful items and bury bad ones.

They also give the ability to tag an item in the search result. They allow both a free text and a force vocabulary. They also will auto-suggest tags. The big plus is that this adds concepts and words that do not actually appear in the text of the document. (I gave a search vendor the task of finding a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida where we represented the purchaser. The words "Florida" and "retail shopping center generally would not appear in the document. Even if the word did appear it may only be once or twice in a 25+ page document. The key was tying the matter identification from the document in the document management system to the matter information in our matter tracking system.)

They allow annotations to the search items: free text with no limitation on the size. Like tagging, this allows context that does not appear in the document. It allows others to see what the document is about, without opening it.

They also allow you to saved search items into shared virtual folders, such as around topics.

They also allow searching for experts. They create an employee mashup from different sources. One item is pulling the person's tagging activity.

They also provide dashboards showing top taggers, top tags, etc.

Vivisimo thinks that web 2.0 technologies are setting higher standards for the tools within the enterprise. (I agree. I can set up a blog or a wiki for free on the Internet in 30 seconds. Why can't I do that inside the enterprise.)

I was blown away by the features of this product. I have been following enterprise search for a while as we have been shopping vendors. This product is a quantum leap above anything I have seen.

Wow!!

This seems to fit into the personal knowledge management theme in my post from Friday. You make it easy for the person to characterize their information, but allow this information to be shared across the enterprise.

Maps on SharePoint

I have been a fan of Google Maps and Google Earth for a while. In my real estate practice it is generally very useful to see the building and surrounding land to help identify problems.

One thing I have been thinking about, and working with off and on, is how to represent information from our firms systems and my personal systems on a map.

On the personal side, I set up a Google Map that shows a few of my real estate transactions. I set that up several months ago and it needs some updating. I found it powerful to show a breadth of practice. Personally, I think the map is a more powerful display of information than a list of real estate transactions.

In the firms we set up a few tests of displaying our transaction data on our SharePoint intranet. Many of the problems came from our underlying data source. (We were not good about capturing a property address).

Now, according to the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog, you can incorporate Virtual Earth Maps on SharePoint. I will have to revisit this after we upgrade our SharePoint platform in the next few months.

Wikis and Legal Agreements

With my current fascination with wikis, I wondered if you could use one to draft a legal agreement. No, I thought. That's just crazy.

Well someone is crazier than me. Tractis.com has set up a library of legal agreements, using wikis to draft them. They have also layered on document management and signature tracking.

Like a good crash test dummy, I signed up and used one of their templates to draft a Non-Disclosure Agreement [Free Registration Required]. Feel free to edit my agreement. Interesting exercise, but I do not think I will be drafting agreements this way.

But individual clauses for agreements? That could done with a wiki.

I have a leasing clause library sitting in a folder in my document management system. I have been toying with the idea of putting each clause into a separate wiki page. You could add a description of uses for the clause, issues to watch out for and links to other related clauses.

I should warn you that Tractis is a Spanish company and most of the agreements are in Spanish. Despite several years of people trying to teach me Spanish, I can't do much with it except to point out that my pencil is yellow.

Thanks to Matt Homann for pointing this out.
the [non]billable hour: Web 2.0 Replaces Lawyers Again?

Reading List for Social Networks & Social Media: Implications for Law Firms

Below is the list of resources from the session on Social Networks & Social Media: Implications for Law Firms

• International Network for Social Network Analysis [http://www.insna.org/]
  
  
• NetWIKI [http://netwiki.amath.unc.edu/]
  
  
• NetLab [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/netlab/ABOUT/index.html]


• Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) New York, Cambridge University Press.


• Degenne, A., & Forse, M. 1999. Introducing Social Networks. London: Sage.
  
  
• Barabasi, A.-L. 2002. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.
  
  
• Buchanan, M. 2002. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks. New York: Norton.
  
  
• Monge, P. R., & Contractor, N. S. 2003. Theories of Communication Networks. New York: Oxford University Press.
  
  
• Watts, D. J. 1999. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
  
  
• Watts, D. J. 2003. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton.
  
  
• Rob Cross http://www.robcross.org
  
• The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations
  
• Networks in the Knowledge Economy

Reading List on Leveraging Human Sociability to Facilitate Knowledge Sharing

One take-away from the New York Toronto Forum was this reading list:

Sociability and Story Telling

Stephen Denning
The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations

Laurence Prusak, et al
Storytelling in Organizations: Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management

Social Nature of Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Creation

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
The Social Life of Information


Cass Sunstein
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge


James Surowiecki
The Wisdom of Crowds

Communities of Practice

Hubert Saint-Onge and Debra Wallace
Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage


Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William Snyder
Cultivating Communities of Practice

Social Nature of Learning

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives)

Knowledge Management and Servant Leadership

Robert K. Greenleaf
Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness 25th Anniversary Edition


James A. Autry
The Servant Leader: How to Build a Creative Team, Develop Great Morale, and Improve Bottom-Line Performance