Sometimes we look up and see there are patterns we recognize in the clouds. The web, once a truly disorganized and obscure cloud of content exhibiting varying degrees of useful/uselessness has slowly begun to change shape and become structured. Web 2.0 has given rise to a dimension long missing and sorely needed, the usefulness of web content.
However there are limitations inherent in the tagging of content as the users of the web have many worldviews, content tagging is really relative or contextual to the user, how is it useful without the context?
Do you care to see how someone in a far away place with a different culture and language has tagged a piece of content versus someone in your block?
For consumption purposes we tend to cleave as bird of a feather, hence the social tagging that has become so popular now allows us to identify our own small islands of conformity and comfort.
Or does it. There is yet really no way to identify the context of anyone tagging content unless you have first required them to become a member of some kind of group.
Are they in my zip code or not..? Do they speak my language natively, do they have the same goals, politics and religion, how much does this matter.
We are at an interesting point here.
To make web 2.0 (to me this is simply the web that allows everyone to have some say) even more useful we will start needing to know a bit more about all those individuals that make up the wise crowd.
Effectively this will give us the means to start to classify the crowd into ever more specific groups. This happens today on some scale when Google and Yahoo make assumptions about users in order to send the most appropriate ad content their way but of course a standardized system available to all flys in the face of the anonymity of the web.
Is there a single data point that could be shared to help better understand who said what, who tagged what and who wants what..? In the USA the use of Zip code might be a good start but what about elsewhere..?
Inside the enterprise similar challenges have become one of the headaches of deploying global portals when we try and standardize personal data across groups of people whose localities have confidentiality guidelines that differ. Try publishing the home address of a German partner on the intranet and see how far you get.
I will be very interested to see how this develops given how fast the web 2.0 has pushed us forwards.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
Actionable Information and the Law
We were treated to an in house session from Oz Benamram this week in the form of a demonstration plus Q&A on the KM work he has been leading over at Morrison and Foerster, AKA MoFo.
Oz, the Director of KM, has been a leading light in the Legal KM world (on this side of the ocean at least) based on the success of the monolithic approach he and his team have taken to the question of KM at a law firm or, more specifically, the search for "Actionable Information".
The end product: "Answerbase"; is a one-stop shop for everything you might wish to know about documents, people (internal and external) and matters plus a great deal more. The integration of various repositories as contextual variables and faceted search parameters uing web 2.0 techniques (XML Mashups etc) has been neatly done and done without the usual clutter that an overly rich data store usually produces.
You can see some simple elements of Answerbase in the demo linked above but I should warn you that version is now substantially behind the times based on what we saw this week. Included in the new product is the integration of further time and billing data, email contents and contact info from address books...somewhat astonishing stuff to have available for general access.
Some key elements to the strategy he has followed stood out for me:
1) Ask for forgiveness, not permission: curious about he negotiated a search of attorney's emails and contact data to enrich the Answerbase result set I asked him how it was done.
He explained that the approach was simply to get top level support, do very careful due diligence with respect to conflicts and confidentiality and then simply move ahead and show the finished result before asking for general permission. This way it was left for those objecting to find reasons not to do it when the obvious value was so high...so far this approach seems to have worked very well at MoFo.
In the example we saw, the mining of contact data had led to the development of both internal and external people searching, something I have not seen so nicely integrated anywhere else.
2) Confidentiality vs Access: at a law firm, matters are reviewed by the conflicts and ethics committee before they are even accepted. If there is a conflict and it can be managed, the appropriate conflict walls (AKA Chinese Walls) are built into the applications that will handle the matter and all the attorneys are notified and from there on it is business as usual.
It is worth noting that the majority of a big Firm's matters are not in conflict and most all work product is available TO ALL PRACTICES. This is very different to our own situation where access is kept highly restricted until seniority levels are sufficient.
Also notable here is the (not entirely explicit) fact that the entire work product of the Firm, some millions of documents, are located in the DMS and these are the work product being searched by Answerbase.
3) Partnership: Oz has partnered with a vendor in a highly synergistic and beneficial relationship that has propelled MoFo and the Vendor right to the forefront of the Legal KM / Product offering world in a way that no one else has in the legal world been able to emulate. He made the comment that early on an interview with the CIO of Bain had revealed that while they had a truly outstanding home grown system, they were in two minds as to whether the cost of the investment was really worth it given how much work went into it for just one customer.
Between legal services (many many Firms competing) and business consulting (a much smaller pool) there are probably a handful of parameters that make this equation shift, depending on your business perspective but in the case of MoFo the benefit of not having invested in the actual development seems clear. Oz has a team of three, none of whom are developers and they have delivered a world class product to the Firm that provides a compelling business advantage.
It will be very interesting to revisit Answerbase in another six months and see what new elements have been integrated.
Oz, the Director of KM, has been a leading light in the Legal KM world (on this side of the ocean at least) based on the success of the monolithic approach he and his team have taken to the question of KM at a law firm or, more specifically, the search for "Actionable Information".
The end product: "Answerbase"; is a one-stop shop for everything you might wish to know about documents, people (internal and external) and matters plus a great deal more. The integration of various repositories as contextual variables and faceted search parameters uing web 2.0 techniques (XML Mashups etc) has been neatly done and done without the usual clutter that an overly rich data store usually produces.
You can see some simple elements of Answerbase in the demo linked above but I should warn you that version is now substantially behind the times based on what we saw this week. Included in the new product is the integration of further time and billing data, email contents and contact info from address books...somewhat astonishing stuff to have available for general access.
Some key elements to the strategy he has followed stood out for me:
1) Ask for forgiveness, not permission: curious about he negotiated a search of attorney's emails and contact data to enrich the Answerbase result set I asked him how it was done.
He explained that the approach was simply to get top level support, do very careful due diligence with respect to conflicts and confidentiality and then simply move ahead and show the finished result before asking for general permission. This way it was left for those objecting to find reasons not to do it when the obvious value was so high...so far this approach seems to have worked very well at MoFo.
In the example we saw, the mining of contact data had led to the development of both internal and external people searching, something I have not seen so nicely integrated anywhere else.
2) Confidentiality vs Access: at a law firm, matters are reviewed by the conflicts and ethics committee before they are even accepted. If there is a conflict and it can be managed, the appropriate conflict walls (AKA Chinese Walls) are built into the applications that will handle the matter and all the attorneys are notified and from there on it is business as usual.
It is worth noting that the majority of a big Firm's matters are not in conflict and most all work product is available TO ALL PRACTICES. This is very different to our own situation where access is kept highly restricted until seniority levels are sufficient.
Also notable here is the (not entirely explicit) fact that the entire work product of the Firm, some millions of documents, are located in the DMS and these are the work product being searched by Answerbase.
3) Partnership: Oz has partnered with a vendor in a highly synergistic and beneficial relationship that has propelled MoFo and the Vendor right to the forefront of the Legal KM / Product offering world in a way that no one else has in the legal world been able to emulate. He made the comment that early on an interview with the CIO of Bain had revealed that while they had a truly outstanding home grown system, they were in two minds as to whether the cost of the investment was really worth it given how much work went into it for just one customer.
Between legal services (many many Firms competing) and business consulting (a much smaller pool) there are probably a handful of parameters that make this equation shift, depending on your business perspective but in the case of MoFo the benefit of not having invested in the actual development seems clear. Oz has a team of three, none of whom are developers and they have delivered a world class product to the Firm that provides a compelling business advantage.
It will be very interesting to revisit Answerbase in another six months and see what new elements have been integrated.
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