For the average worker, it might seem like a dream come true. However, I suspect that some information technology folks consider it a nightmare. What’s the issue? The advent of the consumerization of IT; something Scott Finnie calls “CoIT.” Dion Hinchcliffe describes the elements of  CoIT in the following way:

1) businesses taking more local control for IT, 2) workers using their own preferred computing devices and apps, and … 3) manageable processes for rapid uptake of enterprise apps, mashups, and devices matched with IT support processes that scale to match.

While this may not seem an ideal scenario for the traditional IT department, it most likely is within the limits of what can be tolerated.  However, what happens when the business gets “carried away” and starts driving IT initiatives? Here’s Dion Hinchcliffe’s explanation:

The overall trend towards ad hoc adoption of personal and cloud technology at work seems to be inexorable. More and more IT is moving out from under the CIOs budget, just over 30% by some estimates. Perhaps most disruptive of all, however, is the sudden appearance of extremely stiff competition for IT services. While the move to self-service IT in general has been a steady trend for a decade — and which is starting to be called CoIT — it’s the outright diversion of business budgets directly to external IT providers, whether they are the newer SaaS vendors and app developers or the more traditional IT consulting firms and VARs. In short, the business likes the selection and service it’s getting elsewhere, and routing around IT in many cases. [emphasis added]

Suddenly, we have a situation in which the IT department no longer is in complete control and may well have trouble imposing a locked down computing environment.  Now, if you’re working in the financial or legal services industries, consider what happens when you couple the move to CoIT and external IT providers with growing incursions by hackers. According to a recent report in Bloomberg News, there’s been disturbing hacker activity directed towards law firms lately:

Over a few months beginning in September 2010, the hackers rifled one secure computer network after the next, eventually hitting seven different law firms as well as Canada’s Finance Ministry and theTreasury Board, according to Daniel Tobok, president of Toronto-based Digital Wyzdom. His cyber security company was hired by the law firms to assist in the probe.

[...]

`As financial institutions in New York City and the world become stronger, a hacker can hit a law firm and it’s a much, much easier quarry,’ said Mary Galligan, head of the cyber division in the New York City office of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Galligan’s unit convened a meeting with the top 200 law firms in New York City last November to deal with the rising number of law firm intrusions. Over snacks in a large meeting room, the FBI issued a warning to the lawyers: Hackers see attorneys as a back door to the valuable data of their corporate clients.

To be honest, I don’t envy law firm IT directors.  They are faced with the difficult task of imposing stringent security measures even as they watch their internal clients scurry out the door, exercising their right to choose their own IT tools and chasing self-service IT as a means to get out from under the control of their organization’s IT department.  While security concerns have often trumped other considerations in the past, it will be interesting to see if the newly emboldened  IT consumers will insist on using their preferred devices and self-service IT despite heightened security concerns.

It’s a nightmare scenario, coming to an IT department near you — soon.

[Photo Credit: Terry Freedman]

Dig deeply enough and you’ll find that every knowledge management or IT professional has a story about a deployment gone bad.  If you push them hard enough, they might even confess that they were partially responsible for the unsatisfactory results.  Of course, the less than honest will blame the vendor or, more often than not, the end-user.  But, at the end of the day, shouldn’t adoption by the end-user be the whole point of your project?

If you don’t believe me, consider the Kindle.  It wasn’t the first eReader and perhaps wasn’t technologically the best.  However, it has been a commanding presence in the world of eReaders, even in the face of competition from acknowledged technology stars such as Sony.  According to Adrian Slywotzky, Amazon beat Sony not on the strength of its technology or design but rather on the strength of its vision. Unlike Sony, Amazon envisioned and delivered a complete package.  Where Sony offered decent technology to deliver a tiny collection of books. Amazon took that technology and found a way to deliver an enormous collection of books wirelessly.  Slywotzky refers to this complete vision and package as the “behind-the-screen elements that make up a product’s backstory” and build consumer demand. In The Real Secret of Kindle’s Success, Slywotzky writes:

Look at the Kindle, and you don’t see the wireless connection, the relationships between Amazon and the publishers, the vast online bookstore, or the personalized book recommendations. But all these backstory elements dramatically enhance the e-reader experience, making Kindle magnetic in a way the [Sony] Librie never was. The first production run of Kindles sold out within five-and-a-half hours.

Now let’s come back to those failed deployments.  Did you have all the critical backstory elements in place? Did you have a complete vision, a comprehensive package? Did you offer something that would have a magnetic attraction for the end-user? In other words, was your deployment planned and executed from the perspective of the end-user?   Did you figure out what the end-user really wanted?  Amazon certainly did.  To its credit, Amazon realized that we weren’t really interested in buying eReaders.  Rather, we were interested in reading.  So Amazon gave us an unrivaled opportunity to read and then supported that with adequate technology.

But here’s the kicker:  through Kindle, Amazon made it so easy for people to think about purchasing and reading eBooks that many of us have stopped buying eReaders altogether and simply read eBooks on our smartphones, tablets and computers.**  And how do we buy and read books now?  Via a free Kindle app that lets Amazon focus on its original business of selling books.  However, now it has the added advantage of lower costs since there is no need to store physical inventory.

So in exchange for its complete vision and backstory elements, Amazon has happy customers and a booming business in eBooks.  How does your deployment compare?

__________________________________

** If you have an Apple device, you should note the new App Store restrictions on purchasing books from Amazon. (Here’s a work around or do as Amazon suggests and bookmark amazon.com/kindlestore on your iPhone. For the  iPad, consider the Kindle Cloud Reader.)

[Photo Credit: K. Todd Storch]

Greta Garbo would have hated Google+.  To be honest, she probably would have hated Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace as well.  However, after spending just a short while on Google+, I can see that it would really have given her hives.

For those of you who actually have been on vacation these last few days or away from a computer enjoying the summer weather, Google+ may not ring a bell. So here’s a quick overview of what it is and how it works:

First via Google’s vaseline-coated soft-focus lens:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI

Now, here’s a pithier review from CNETTV:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiqDr7CFmZQ

With Google+, you have the ease of Facebook- or Twitter-style sharing with the power of Google behind it.  Google+ gives you lots of opportunities to share content and then have an extended conversation regarding that content.  You can choose to share certain content with some folks but not others via the “Circles” organization scheme and Google+ Settings.  Once you’ve found good content, you can endorse or recommend it using the +1 Button. Further, because there don’t appear to be size restrictions, you won’t have to develop that special Twitter skill of compressing your pearls of wisdom into bursts of 140 characters or less. Best of all, you have the power of Google search to find interesting people (via their Google Profiles) and interesting content. If that isn’t enough, Google gives you the ability to video chat with a number of friends (called “Hangouts“) and have a private conversation with a select group of friends (called “Huddle“).  If there are particular topics that interest you,  try the Google+ “Sparks” function to find other aficionados.  Add to all of this the ability to instantly upload photos and videos, and you may begin to find fewer reasons to go to other social media platforms.

Now, back to Greta Garbo.  The film buffs among my readers will remember that she was notoriously reclusive.  She just wanted to be “let alone.” To someone of her disposition, Google+  would be tremendously troubling.  By providing so many useful functions in a single place, it offers a seemingly efficient means to contribute and consume content about family, friends, acquaintances and…celebrities. All in one place.  It’s powerful and it’s something with which Ms. Garbo never had to contend.

In fairness, Google has done a pretty good job of designing the user interface. As a result, it invites you in and tempts you to do almost too many things in one place. In theory, a dedicated Google+ user would no longer need Twitter, FB, Flickr or Skype, to name a few. That user could simply live in Google+.  And, once Google+ moves out of Beta testing and into the general population, you may discover that enough of your family, friends and acquaintances are on Google+ that you don’t need to go elsewhere to interact with them.

If Google+ provides a reasonable substitute for other social media channels, it could easily become my primary dashboard for online communications. One concern I have is that I liked the simplicity of having specific channels for particular types of communications (e.g., an RSS reader for sharing feeds, Twitter for general news, FB for personal updates, blogs for think pieces, FriendFeed for extended conversations with friendly geeks, etc.). Once everything is consolidated on a single platform, I fear that my social interactions (and this tool) may require a great deal more management on my part.

On top of all of this, it is as if Google is seducing users into bringing all of their social interactions onto a Google platform.  It makes me feel a bit like Little Red Riding Hood facing the Big Bad Wolf.  How on earth do we avoid getting eaten? Now Google knows with even greater clarity what we know, who we know and how we behave. It’s an advertiser’s dream. To be fair, Google has tried to address some of these concerns via its terms of service.  We’re told that Google has been paying attention to the infamous missteps of the FB team when it comes to privacy. Nonetheless, it’s hard to ignore the sheer power and scope of coverage of Google.  In light of that, giving them even more of my life seems to be a step that should not be taken lightly.

Don’t get me wrong.  Google+ is definitely the sandbox to play right now — especially if you are even slightly geeky.  It’s the new toy in town and it’s fun. That said, some folks liked Google Wave and others were enthusiastic about Google Buzz. Check in with me later to see if I’ve succumbed or whether my inner Greta Garbo leads me to walk away.

A Notice to Lexis and Westlaw:  You would be well-advised to read this post since it proposes a better model for your products.  (As for the royalty checks you’ll owe me, let’s talk…)

For a few brief months early in my legal career, I was a litigation associate.  As such, the main focus of my days was legal research. Being a diligent sort of person, I’d spend hours tracking down one case after another and yet, despite my conscientious approach, I could never entirely dispel the nagging feeling that somewhere out there was the one case that could blow my research out of the water.  Surely, I’m not the only lawyer who has confronted this.

The cause for this anxiety was the knowledge that my search results were only as good as my search technique.  And I was honest enough with myself to know that I wasn’t nearly as expert at searching as, for example, a research librarian.  However, in those days, it really wasn’t the done thing to have a research librarian do your research for you. So I soldiered on and tried to refine my search methodology.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that the current approach to legal research is fundamentally flawed.  Lexis and and Westlaw have created these enormous databases of case law that cannot be completely mastered unless you have world class research skills. In fact, what they’ve created is a frustrating game of “find the needle in the haystack.”  The problem is that the people who need the cases aren’t always the best equipped at finding the cases, and the people who are expert at finding cases aren’t the best equipped to analyze and use them. Further, most law firms don’t promote lawyers on the strength of their research skills. Rather, they promote lawyers on the strength of their analytical, advising, negotiating, writing and business-winning abilities.

It would be better if Lexis and Westlaw aligned themselves with their customers’ need to improve analytical capabilities.  Here’s the new model I propose:  instead of forcing lawyers to come up with appropriate search queries, Lexis and Westlaw should ask lawyers questions to elicit information about the case at hand.  In other words, the role of the lawyer searching for precedent would be to analyze their own case and strategy and provide that information to Lexis and Westlaw: what are the pertinent facts of the case, what jurisdiction, what procedural approaches is the lawyer considering.  Then, Lexis and Westlaw would deliver to you links to groups of cases that match your facts within your jurisdiction.  You could then review them to see how closely aligned they are to your situation.  Ideally, this approach would reveal the array of ways in which lawyers before you had handled this fact pattern in your jurisdiction and would highlight opportunities for following precedent or striving for innovation.  Better still, this should reduce (if not eliminate) the nagging worry that you’ve missed a case.

What’s different about this approach? Success depends on a lawyer’s ability to understand that facts and context of the case at hand, not that lawyer’s ability to construct the perfect search query.  It would no longer be a hit-or-miss proposition depending on your skill at constructing boolean or natural word search queries. (Of course, it would also depend on Lexis and Westlaw profiling and organizing their cases differently, or adopting search technology that is more sophisticated than simple word searching.) The result is that both lawyers, on the one hand, and Lexis and Westlaw, on the other hand, start focusing on their strengths.  Lawyers build their analytical muscles and the online research companies get better at organizing and delivering comprehensive results to you.

Now imagine a law firm in difficult economic times considering whether to drop one online research provider in favor of another. What if one provider were to offer these comprehensive (and more appropriate) search results? Would there be any contest?

In this blog post I’ve provided information on my innovation to Lexis and Westlaw (and any other online legal research provider interested in conquering this lucrative business).   I wonder which one will be hungry enough to adopt this proposal?

[Photo Credit: Garry Willmore.  I'd highly recommend that you click on the photo above to read Garry Willmore's commentary on this photo.  It's priceless!]

If there is one theme that emerges from my many conversations with lawyers, it is their weariness with the seeming inability of legal IT vendors to produce applications that work in an intuitive, simple and effective way.  In fact, lawyers often seem resigned to struggling constantly with software that forces them to adapt to it, rather than fitting seamlessly into the way lawyers work.  Although it might seem that some vendors have gotten away with murder by over-promising while under-delivering, I suspect that this is a temporary situation.

What leads me to this conclusion? Two growing trends in society:  Instant Gratification and Sloth. If you’re not sure about this, consider Blockbuster.  There was a time when large Blockbuster stores were fixtures in New York City.  In fact, at one point there was one Blockbuster store two blocks east of our home and another two blocks west.  In other words, we didn’t have to go far to find a movie when the mood struck. However, Blockbuster didn’t always have the movie we wanted and too many people I knew spent far too much money in overdue fees.  Enter Netflix.  At first, the choice was walking two blocks to get a movie today or planning ahead by two days to get a movie from Netflix, and thereby escape the risk of transaction fees and overdue fees. Of course, once Netflix started streaming movies, it provided the enticing additional benefit of instant gratification. Suddenly I could act on a whim and see a movie without ever leaving the comfort of my home.  In one fell swoop, Netflix satisfied tendencies to both sloth and instant gratification.  ((Or as I like to think of it, convenience and customer satisfaction.)

As more online vendors cater to the growing trends of sloth and instant gratification, consumers are learning to expect to get a lot quickly online with little effort.  Do you want to book a trip?  It just a few clicks away. What about putting food on your table?  In New York, you can order your food online and need never set foot in a grocery store. So what happens to those traveling, food-ordering consumers when they use their office software in the practice of law? They have to expend a great deal more effort to get far less satisfactory results.  At the end of the day, this means frustration for the user and increasing pressure on law firm IT departments to “fix” the applications so that they work better. This in turn leads to more dissatisfaction with vendors.

If you work in the legal industry and are weary of daily struggles with software, consider the following:  even if your legal IT vendors seem tone deaf, current levels of unhappiness present a wonderful opportunity for new players who are willing to listen carefully to the legal industry and then provide products that deliver excellent results for little effort.  We are seeing this with respect to the various third-party vendors who are providing tools to improve SharePoint. If that isn’t sufficiently encouraging, come to New York City to look for a Blockbuster store.  There aren’t any in my neighborhood any more.  What about yours?

[Photo Credit: Andy Callahan]

It’s Valentine’s Day. Do you remember the pleasure of a new love — the excitement, the giddiness, the joy? So tell me, when was the last time you felt that way about your office technology? To be fair, it’s rare to have an elevated pulse when thinking about over-burdened workhorses, but that’s a shame. Do you take them for granted because they are merely functional or do you undervalue them because they are largely annoying??

What would it take for them to delight you?

These are the questions I’ve been asking myself as I consider the technology workhorses I’ve been using for years. And, they are questions I ask myself when planning new systems. While I’m not suggesting that we should always be defending the Maginot Line, paying attention to lessons learned isn’t about fighting the last battle all over again. Rather, it’s about ensuring that we don’t institutionalize mistakes because “we’ve always done it that way before.”

Most importantly, seeking to delight rather than merely deliver sets you apart from the crowd. And, it creates wonderfully loyal customers. It’s a great strategy for success.

[Photo Credit: Ron Doke]

What’s the future of the legal profession? And what role do technology and knowledge management play in the development of that future? These are the questions I’ve been pondering since I heard that Stephen P. Younger (President of the New York State Bar Association) had formed a Task Force to seize “an historic opportunity to shape the landscape of the legal profession.” The announcement of the Task Force describes an ambitious goal:

A panel of top legal minds comprising a diverse range of legal practitioners, including managing partners, law school deans and general counsel, will study and recommend ways to create a roadmap for the future use of technology in the profession, to improve legal education and training, to establish proper work/life balance for attorneys, and to reform the billing structure in law firms.

If there remains even one Rip Van Winkle lawyer who believes that it is safe to ignore technology, I’d rush them to the nearest litigator for a crash course on eDiscovery. Litigation has been changed in a fundamental way because of technology.  What about non-litigation areas of practices?  Have they undergone a similar change or are they due for a change? And what do these changes indicate about the future role of technology in the practice of law?

Knowledge management’s role is a little less clear cut.  While law firm knowledge management personnel are fond of saying that lawyers have been “doing KM” since the beginning of the profession, I suspect there are many lawyers who haven’t spent enough time thinking about how to embed good knowledge management practices in their legal practice.  Further, I suspect that there are some lawyers who feel that KM is a luxury that only large firms can afford. Against this backdrop, what role can or should KM play?

I’m writing this post in the hope that it will elicit your ideas and thereby enrich the public conversation about this important issues.  What should the technology and KM roadmap look like? What recommendations would you make to the legal profession with respect to its future use of technology and knowledge management?

We marked a major milestone in the life of our family by having dinner at an extraordinary restaurant this evening. The restaurant was Blue Hill at Stone Barns. This restaurant is exceptional in many ways: it’s located in Pocantico Hills, in the beautifully renovated old barns of the Rockefeller estate outside New York City; it acquires many of its delicious ingredients from the organic farm on the estate; and it is blessed with a truly gifted chef and staff.

Now, you might reasonably expect a memorable meal in a restaurant like this, and you would be right. However, it was the menu that made this restaurant unusual. What was so special about the menu? There is no menu. Every night is culinary improvisation. Instead of a menu, the restaurant provides you with a list of some of the fantastic ingredients available in the kitchen and then asks you if you have any food allergies or aversions.  Once you’ve provided the necessary information, the chef tailor makes a menu for you based on the best available ingredients.  Your only decision concerns the number of courses you’d like in your meal. That’s it.

Having given the chef our minimal requirements, we sat back and enjoyed the meal as it unfolded.  Every dish was a work of art, every mouthful a revelation. But beyond the food, much of the fun was in watching the delight on the faces of all around as various courses were presented and tasted.  No two tables received the same dinner, but every diner was patently happy.

On the way home from dinner, I found myself wondering what it would be like if we approached law firm technology and law firm knowledge management in the same way as the chef at Blue Hill? What would we need in place in order to offer this level of personalized service?  What would be required to provide a comparable level of user delight? As we move towards user-selected tools and user-defined services, law firm IT and KM departments will be pushed to provide customized work environments and support.  In fact, we may well be approaching the end of a one-size-fits-all approach to law firm IT and KM. If this is so, the challenge will be to stretch beyond the bare minimums to a level of personalized service, care, consideration and user delight comparable to that of Blue Hill. Are you ready?

[Photo Credit: Alexandra Moss]

Yesterday’s announcement about the end of Google Wave saddened me. I was one of the lucky ones who had access to the beta site early last fall. To be honest, it was great to be part of the reconnaissance group. A lot of the initial conversation was pretty basic, along the lines of “Does anyone know how…?” or “Guess what I just discovered?” And, for a while, that was fun. But then we seemed to run out of things to say and activity on most of the Waves I had joined petered out. What became clear was once we were past the gee whiz period of learning how to use the new toy, we needed a better reason to use it.

So I began to search for specific projects that could be enhanced by use of Google Wave.  And, not surprisingly, once I turned my focus to this I saw several projects. One of my favorites was proposed by a colleague who wanted to use a Wave to plan her wedding. I made her promise to tell me how it went because I wanted to blog about it.

I don’t fault Google (too much) for shuttering Wave. After all, they have to allocate their own resources and, by their standards, adoption rates had been disappointing. However, I can’t help thinking the decision was a little premature. Nonetheless, it was Google’s decision to make and it fits with the preferred approach of experimenting widely, but being willing to fail fast.

Closer to home, I was telling a friend today about some cool technology I was trying. He told me that he had looked at it at least five years ago, but the users in his organization had not been ready for it.  As a result, he reluctantly canceled his pilot. Five years later, I’m discovering how much easier it is to win adoption. This is largely because of the improvement of the consumer experience on the internet.  Clearly my friend’s pilot was ahead of its time. Can the same be said for Google Wave? Perhaps in a few years the general public will be ready to do something useful with this technology. At that point, we’ll have to hope that Google or open-source developers will brave another attempt at the Wave.

[Photo Credit: Lovati's Photos]

One of the banes of modern existence is the need to create (and remember) passwords for all the computer programs we use. Because this poses a significant challenge, many folks just use one or two basic passwords. While simplicity is often a virtue in life, this is one area where it pays to be complicated. After all, when you make it easy for yourself, you often make it easy for someone else to guess your password.

So what shouldn’t you use? (Hint: all the password shortcuts you and I have been using.) Here are a few obvious and painfully common nonstarters:

• your name or the name of a family member or pet
• your birth date or the date of an important event
• your address or phone number
• any identification number associated with you (e.g., social security or drivers license)
• any word in the dictionary (regardless of language)
• anything that your friends would know about you (e.g., your favorite sports team)

So what’s left? Here are a couple of quick videos with some good suggestions for creating safe and secure passwords. First is the brand new Common Craft video on creating safe and secure passwords. The second video (posted below) is a collaborative effort by Google and AARP.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOqkGmZ4p-s

[Photo Credit: Mental Masala]