Tag: blogs

Who Knows What?

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A nice piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal on knowledge management: Who Knows What? Finding in-house experts isn’t easy. But most companies make it harder than it should be. The article, by  Dorit Nevo, Izak Benbasat and Yair Wand, explores the expertise location benefits of enterprise 2.0.

The authors describe the use of blogs, wikis, social networking and tagging as ways to collect and expose expertise with an enterprise”

“Every big company has in-house experts. So why don’t they use them more?

In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don’t even know they exist.

Talk about a waste! Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate. Which is why so-called expertise-locator systems have become a hot topic in corporate IT.

To date, most such systems are centrally managed efforts, and that’s a problem. The typical setup identifies and catalogs experts in a searchable directory or database that includes descriptions of the experts’ knowledge and experience, and sometimes links to samples of their work, such as research reports.

But there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts.

Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts’ “softer” qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn’t easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries.

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.”

Missing from the online story link are some additional resources listed in the paper for further reading in the MIT Sloan Management Review (they sponsored the Business Insight section).

  • Six Myths About Informal Networks— and How to Overcome Them
    By Rob Cross, Nitin Nohria and Andrew Parker (Spring 2002)
    Informal groups of employees do much of the important work in companies today. To help those networks reach their potential, executives must understand how they function.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4337
  • Improving Capabilities Through Industry Peer Networks
    By Stoyan V. Sgourev and Ezra W. Zuckerman (Winter 2006)
    By sharing insights and perspectives with a group of noncompeting peers from other regions, managers can stay abreast of industry trends and combat complacency.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47210
  • Defining the Social Network of a Strategic Alliance
    By Michael D. Hutt, Edwin R. Stafford, Beth A. Walker and Peter H. Reingen (Winter 2000)
    Paying attention to personal relationships accelerates learning and increases the effectiveness of alliances.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4124
  • Creating Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks
    By David Wheeler, Kevin McKague, Jane Thomson, Rachel Davies, Jacqueline Medalye and Marina Prada (Fall 2005)
    In developing countries, examples of successful sustainable enterprise often involve informal networks that include businesses, nonprofit organizations and communities.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47109
  • Are You Networked for Successful Innovation?
    By Polly Rizova (Spring 2006)
    To manage research-and-development projects, companies need to ensure that informal social networks are reinforced—and not thwarted—by formal organizational structures.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47310

(I’m not sure why they left out Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration by Andrew P. McAfee, Spring 2006)

Another resource is this video of Jennifer Merritt from the Wall street Journal interviewing Dorit Nevo from the Schulich School of Business at York University.

Social Networking for the Legal Profession

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I just finished reading Social Networking for the Legal Profession by Penny Edwards and Lee Bryant. They were nice enough to send me a copy.

Penny and Lee used a few quotes from me, referred to some of my writings and used some of my social networking activity as examples. That poor judgment aside, the book is otherwise a great report on how legal professionals can take advantage of online networking tools.

The book contains practical examples and strategies. They explore the use of the tools externally as part of your marketing and business development efforts. They also explore the use of them internally for operations, communication, and knowledge management 2.0. They present a good road map with lots of options for an organization to chose among.

They start with the basics and run through a survey of the social networking sites most useful to lawyers: LinkedIn, Avvo, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Legal OnRamp, Martindale-Hubbell Connected, JD Supra and many others.

It is not all kumbaya. The report takes into account the risks and challenges you must overcome to make implementation a success. They spend significant time talking about the culture challenges. They also explore the security, privacy and compliance issues.

Penny and Lee point out the paradigm shift with these tools. Unlike previous generations of collaboration tools, these 2.0 tools target individual benefits rather than the benefits to the organization as a whole. They focus on what’s in it for the individual. The benefits to the larger organization are a by-product. There is less emphasis on standardization and centralization.

The focus on standardization and the collective benefits was what knowledge management got wrong. The big central databases of knowledge management were useful to the organization as a whole, but provided little benefit to the individual contributor. They did not want awards or financial compensation (not that more money wouldn’t hurt), but wanted a way to help organize their own stuff in a way that was useful to them.

Unlike past generations of software, most of the innovation is coming from the consumer space. Free tools on the web are far ahead of enterprise systems. IT departments are constantly being asked why its so easy to search on Google or publish on the web, but so much harder to do so inside the law firm. If you want to know how these tools can help you inside your organization, you need to try them outside your organization.

There is a great chapter on the benefits of networking tools used inside the organization and how to achieve great benefits.

The book is expensive. The Ark Group gave it a cover price of £245. It is a great book and worth the price. If you are interested, I was given the details of a discount offer, taking $115 off the price, making it $285 plus $10 shipping. The details are on the US publicity flyer for Social Networking for the Legal Profession (.pdf).

You can read more from Penny, Lee and others at Headshift on the Headshift blog.

I thought I would also share links to some of my material that Penny and Lee cite in the book:

Social Media and Your Compliance Program

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Bill Piwonka, Amanda Mayhew and Rodica Buzescu from EthicsPoint gave a webinar on social media and compliance. These are my notes:

The presentation started with a user poll on the approach to social media at the attendees’ organizations:

  • 27% block all social media sites
  • 42% block a few social media sites
  • only 29% allow all social media sites

In a second question, I was surprised to see that 37% of the attendees said they were using some form of Web 2.0 in their ethics program. That seemed like a big number to me.

Bill started off with a brief discussion of his view of web 2.0 and social media. He also highlighted some of the approaches and tools used by EthicsPoint. He moved on to the need of companies to monitor their brand. It easy for customers, employees and competitors to craft your brand for you (and not in the way you want). You need to know what is being said and be prepared to respond when necessary.

On the call, 11% of the attendees did not use any social media platform, 11% used one, and 40% used 2 or three. The rest (like me) used more.

Why should compliance care about Social Media? It is here to stay. Generation Y and the Millennials grew up an learned in the world of social media. They enter business organizations and are cut off from the tools they used to learn and communicate.

Rodica took over and shared her perspective. She is new to EthicsPoint. When she started, she was cut off from her networks since they blocked Facebook, instant messaging and many other social media tools.

Amanda took over and gave her perspective as the general counsel and privacy officer at EthicsPoint. She pointed out that younger workers may not have been in the business environment long enough to realize that there are limits on what you can say outside the organization and inside the organization. EthicsPoint focuses on privacy and protection of their clients information. They have a tight policy on social media to protect that information.

Bill stepped up and pointed out that you cannot ignore social media. Even if you block access, employees can easily access them from a mobile device or home. Blocking is not an effective policy. You need to let your employees know what they can and cannot do. You need a policy. Bill used Intel’s Social Media Guidelines as an example.

Bill also pointed out that even if the company does not want to engage in social media, they need to monitor what is being said about your company in social media. You also want to make sure that someone else does not use your brand on social media platforms.

Amanda came back to emphasize a few points. It is important to make it clear what is confidential and what is not public. Another point was to be respectful, realizing that your mother, friends and boss may ready what you say. Anonymity is also a hot button for her.

What can you do? How can compliance professionals use Social Media?

Create a Facebook group for your compliance team. Allow people to see who you are and develop a relationship and trust.

Use YouTube to host and distribute training videos. Why buy expensive video hosting servers and software when YouTube will do it for free.

Best Buy uses a blog to make ethics a completely transparent dialogue.  Best Buy’s Chief Ethics Officer blogs on actual ethics and incidents at Best Buy. Of course, she does not use real names and disguises identifying information.

Use web 2.0 for professional development by joining online communities focused on ethics and compliance issues. EthicsPoint has user forums focused on its product.

In the Q&A there was a lot of discussion about how much to monitor and how much to limit. “Ignorance is not bliss.”

Another issue that came up in Q&A is who to friend on Facebook and who to make connections with on LinkedIn. In particular in the educational environment it is very tricky to friend or not friend. There is a similar dynamic in the workplace.

What about productivity? Does Facebook turn you into a slacker? Does blogging make you less useful? Bill turned this around and gave example of how he uses these tools as part of his job. (It was an impressive list.)

How do you develop your own policy? EthicsPoint started with Intel’s Social Media Guidelines as their model.  (You can also take a look at one of my models: Blogging / Social Internet Policy.)

(In the interest of disclosure some of the material was borrowed from my presentation on Social Media at the Boston EthicsPoint Regional User Forum in Boston. Bill also noted this in the presentation)

Enterprise 2.0 at Goodwin Procter

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Can law firms jump on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon? Lawyers are generally seen as conservative users of technology, preferring to use a quill and inkwell over a web-based publishing platform. David Hobbie shares some of the successes he has encountered in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 at Goodwin Procter (.pdf – page 13) in the June 2009 issue of KM Pro Journal (.pdf)

Goodwin Procter was one of the early adopters of collaboration and knowledge sharing tools and has begun adopting the internal use of blogs and wikis as tools. This is a great article, summarizing some of the theory behind Enterprise 2.0, comparing it to knowledge management, and giving practical uses of these tools in a legal environment.

“More knowledge has been captured and stored because communications have been opened up to more authors and have been moved out of email “silo” and into public spaces. More knowledge transfer has occurred because the Enterprise 2.o tools are built to communicate, whether through alerts of new information, easy browseability through user-created structure, or through better search.”

I had the pleasure of working with David at Goodwin Procter during the initial deployment of the tools. I am happy to see that they continue to grow and succeed. You can read more from David at his blog: Caselines.

Blogs for Investor Relations

thompson-logo1Louis Thompson, Jr. has an article in Compliance Week on using blogs for investor relations. Blogs: If Used Properly, an Investor-Friendly Tool (subscription required).

Louis focuses on the Dell Shares blog used as an investor relations tool by Dell, Inc. and the GE Reports blog used by General Electric. Since this is a blog, I was interested to see what he had to say about them.

Many of the issues and concerns that Louis brings up are not about blogs but some of the functionality of blogs. After all, a blog is just a publishing platform. It is how you use that generates value or creates problems.

All of the SEC rules about company’s distributing material information applies to blog as they do to any other company communication.

The big benefit of a blog is that it will send out a notification when there is new information. This saves me from having to come back to check for information or cramming my email inbox.  For an investor relations professional, this saves you a step of writing message and then sending an email. The blog compresses those two steps into one.

The second benefit is the interactivity. You can hear back from your investors. This is a new area and probably a little scary. You can hear criticism. You can hear compliments. For most people it is hard to take the criticism. (Personally I have come to dread silence over criticism. At least with criticism you know someone is paying attention. I find this better than being ignored.)

Certainly, you want to get some good legal advice in crafting the disclaimers and for dealing with comments on a blog. As Bruce Carton and I discussed in our Webinar on 2.0 for Securities and Compliance Professionals, blogs are just communications tools. You shouldn’t put anything in a blog that you would not put in an email or a story published on the front page of the newspaper.

Disclaimer: According to his biography, Louis is a partner with Beacon Advisors, Inc. That company is not affiliated with my employer.

Compliance Building Is Now Mobile

To those of you who use mobile devices, I have installed a plugin that makes it easier to read Compliance Building on your mobile device.  It looks great on my iPhone. At some point in the future I will add a little more pizzazz to the color scheme and maybe an image. It also renders quickly on my blackberry. In each case, it shows just the last few blog post headlines and the main navigation pages.

Thanks to Stewart Mader for pointing out the MobilePress plugin for the WordPress blogging platform: Future Changes in 2009: Part 4: iPhone & Mobile Versions.

Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0

At the recent LegalTech conference, Lee Bryant and May Abraham presented on Web 2.0 tool inside law firms (a/k/a Enterprise 2.0).

Lee shares his thoughts on his Headshift blog:  Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0:

In the session, we tried to get across just how easy it is to find meaningful use cases for the use of social tools inside a law firm, and the great potential for cost and time savings they present. We touched on a few Headshift cases studies including Allen and Overy, who have been using social tools for informal knowledge sharing successfully for over three years, and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, whose wiki spaces have replaced an old intranet with increasing levels of traffic and participation. But we also looked at a classic DIY ‘mashup’ approach within the Australian firm Mallesons, who have built some fantastic applications using combinations of open source and other tools.

Mary shares her thoughts on her Above and Beyond KM blog: Tales From LegalTech: Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About Web 2.0:

One of the reasons I agreed to participate in this session was that I’ve begun to experience the benefits of social media in my knowledge management work and could see the great potential for its use more generally in a legal practice.  There are so many things lawyers do that require the participation of others — planning and organizing throughout a matter’s life cycle, discussions with clients and other lawyers, negotiations with counter-parties, drafting legal documents, closings, post-closing compliance and clean-up, etc.   What would happen if we could use Web 2.0 tools to shift these activities out of the current paradigm of  expensive face-to-face meetings,  ineffective conference calls held while all participants are multitasking, and asynchronous e-mail exchanges?  What would change?

There are many great uses for blogs, wikis and other 2.0 tools inside the firewall of your organization (even if it is not a law firm). These 2.0 tools are very useful from a compliance perspective.

They can be useful in drafting policies. A working group can use the wiki to collaborate in creating the initial draft of a policy. You can publish a draft policy in  a blog post and let the broader audience use the blog comment feature to provide input about the policy.

These 2.0 tools generally have great search features. They should make it easier for the people in your organization to find the relevant policy. Since you can embed links in the policies, you can link to other relevant policies. It also will enable a hub and spoke approach to policies, allowing you to cross-reference policies instead of repeating similar items in multiple policies.

Most of the concerns about web 2.0 (anonymity, nasty comments, etc.) go away when the audience is your coworkers. They are also easier to deploy and easier to use that traditional technology tools.

Mary is long-time friend from my days in knowledge management. I met Lee at the 2008 Enterprise 2. o Conference. (You can see my live blogging of Enterprise 2.0 on my old KM Space blog.) Both Mary and Lee have great insights about how these tools can help your organization.

FINRA’s Guide to the Internet

FINRA has published a Guide to the Internet for Registered Representatives. It paints a difficult picture for registered representatives wanting to use Web 2.0 tools.

FINRA breaks internet activity into five main group for purposes or regulatory requirements:

  • Publicly available Web sites (including banner advertisements, blogs and bulletin boards) are considered advertisements.
  • An email or instant message sent to 25 or more prospective retail customers is considered sales literature.
  • An email or instant message is considered correspondence if it is sent to i) a single customer (prospective or existing) ii) to an unlimited number of existing retail customers and/or less than 25 prospective retail customers (firm-wide) within a 30 day period.
  • Password-protected Web sites are considered sales literature.
  • Chat room discussions are considered public appearances.

I am not sure all of this is a particularly useful grouping since many of the characteristics are shared across the groups. For instance how does a chat room differ from comments on a blog. How does an RSS feed differ from an email to 25 or more prospective customers? But FINRA does acknowledge that “a member firm’s obligations to supervise electronic communications are based on the content and audience of the message, rather than the electronic form of the communication.”  [FINRA Regulatory Notice 07-59 (.pdf) on the Supervision of Electronic Communication. ]

Given that many of the Web 2.0 tools are communications with the public, you should look at FINRA Rule 2210 Communications with the Public. The rules are major impediment to the use of Web 2.0