Group items tagged

Andrew McAfee, who initially coined the phrase "Enterprise 2.0", announced his new book, titled "Enterprise 2.0, New Collaborative Tools for your Organization's Toughest Challenges". The first chapter of the book can be downloaded here (registration required.) However, the book itself will only be available in December

Mark Gerow has more than 20 years of experience in IT, professional services, and software product development, and has provided consulting to hundreds of companies throughout the San Francisco Bay area and Northern California. He currently works for Fenwick & West, LLP, where he is responsible for defining and implementing the firm’s intranet and extranet strategies using SharePoint technologies.

Creating Client Extranets with SharePoint 2003 is a guide for creating client-facing extranets using SharePoint 2003. This book serves as a how-to for building full-featured extranets using SharePoint 2003 and .NET technologies.

With the high levels of innovation and complexity in banking products, our client wanted to ensure that people involved in the negotiation and implementation of associated transactions could stay abreast of change and be better connected with relevant expertise and information.  In that context, we have been working in a consultancy capacity with members of pilot groups from distinct operational areas and communities, to identify key processes/business needs to be supported by well-positioned social tools.

Implementing social tools that fit the use cases

Our recommended solution combined, amongst other things, a wiki, shared blogs, book-marking, tagging and personalised pages.

Like many organisations, law firms have an odd relationship with information.

And because they know it's important they are loathe to delete anything (just in case)...

Multiple repositories and systems, multiple offices and locations, multiple content processes and procedures leads to an excess of information and knowledge - all of it potentially valuable, but much of it virtually impossible to actually find at the time a lawyer or information professional needs it.

I think that Knowledge Management (KM) has become so overwhelmed with technology products that the individuals in KM have become ‘tech support’ rather than knowledge managers. Yesterday, I read two different articles that reinforced my conception of what I think is a major flaw in the idea of “Knowledge Management” within law firms.

Penny Edwards’ articles on Social Networking for the Legal Profession. Edwards mentions that the approach we take to capturing “knowledge” is a hold over of the 1990’s IT ‘centralized’, or as she put it in her book “Industrial Technology.”

In my opinion, this type of self-cataloging and attempt at creating a ultra-structured system creates a process that is: difficult to use; doesn’t fit the way that lawyers conduct their day-to-day work; gives a false sense of believing that the knowledge has been captured and can be easily recovered; leads to user frustration and “work around” methods; and results in expensive, underutilized software resources.

Susskind, the man who brought us 'The Future of Law', has kept his readers frothing at the mouth with the release of a new book 'The End of Lawyer? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services'.

"What we're seeing courtesy of this dreadful economy is an acceleration of what many of us have anticipated in legal services. And that is the introduction of all manner of efficiencies, largely due to the impact of information technology."

And his take on social networking has appealed to his legal blogging elite. "I believe that some version of social networking will come to dominate the way professional services are delivered and will transform legal services," he said.