The Many Faces of Mike McBride

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2009-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

Just out Shooting!

2009-07-08T18:32:00.000-04:00

With last weekend being a three day weekend, and both of us just needing a break away from everything, we took off for Lexington, KY. Taking photos was part of the plan, but not the main focus. It was much more important to spend time with my wife, "running away" together for a couple of days more than anything.

Given that, our plans didn't really involve making sure we always were at the best place at the best time for shooting great photos, but even if you're not out shooting at the "golden hour" there are still a number of opportunities to take photos, and do some experimentation. Some of the experimental shots I took worked out just as I imagined it might, others not at all. The important thing was just to take some shots, explore the area of the country and have some new experiences. In that regard, mission accomplished!

All the photos from the trip are over on Flickr. Check 'em out!

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2009-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

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2009-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

There's an App For, what?

2009-07-06T20:59:00.000-04:00

So, given the way the new iPhone 3g S release brought in a couple of features I had always thought were lacking in the iPhone (copy/paste chiefly), and happened to coincide with both my birthday this weekend and our AT&T cell phone contract being up for renewal, and upgraded equipments, I couldn't help but assume that getting an iPhone was simply fate!

So, today my iPhone was delivered. It's been activated, and I've downloaded a couple of apps that I already knew I'd be grabbing, like Evernote, Tweetdeck, Google Mobile App, Facebook and Tripit.

What else should I be downloading? What free apps do I need to try out, what pay apps do you find were well worth the price? All suggestions welcome!

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2009-07-05T00:00:00-07:00

Moving/Syncing iTunes Libraries

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2009-07-04T00:00:00-07:00

Unless You Try New Things, You Lose

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2009-07-03T00:00:00-07:00

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2009-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

Managing E-Discovery Costs Part II: Document Retention Policies and Information Management

Fourth Rule of Knowledge Workers - Blocking is Somewhat Pointless

2009-07-01T22:26:00.000-04:00

It's been a little while since I wrote anything in this series, Part 3 was way back on June 21st, which just goes to show how time can really get away fro you! So, here's the next topic for discussion, why blocking social networking sites may just be pointless.

First, let's examine the reasons, as I see them, that many management and IT types give for blocking.

1. It's not productive, it leads to people wasting time instead of working.
2. It's dangerous, employees might leak confidential information or just say something that makes us look bad.
3. We're worried about virus and malware exploits coming from social networks, or bandwidth being unavailable for other uses.

Of these, I can see maybe half a real reason to not allow social networking sites, but even that reason is somewhat disingenuous in many cases. Let's take them one at a time.

1. People have been wasting time long before the internet, in more ways than I could possible recite in a blog post. Some people waste just a few minutes at work each day, but always manage to get their work done as needed, and some don't. If you really think the people who work for you who are not getting their work done suddenly will because they can't use Twitter, you are obviously too naive to work in management. Go do something else. Besides, as I like to say, if you have employees not doing their job, why on earth are you talking to the IT Department about that instead of HR? You have a personnel issue, not a technical one.

2. Yup, they might do something or say something they shouldn't online, just like they might do the same thing every time they pick up a phone, send an email, chat at lunch in a crowded restaurant, talk about work to friends at the ball game, etc. You have policies covering confidential information and employee conduct, those still apply in the online world, it's not any different. Instead of blocking, just remind them of existing policy, and that they apply on Facebook too.

Also, if you're blocking because you don't want employees sharing confidential information, what do you do when they go home? They're probably already using social networks, and probably have 1, 2, maybe 15 profiles, all done on their own time with their own internet access, and you have to go home to see what they might be saying. That makes no sense.

Besides, if you're going with reasons 1 and/or 2 as to why you block social networking sites, any employee with an iPhone or any other sort of mobile phone with internet access gets around you in a heartbeat. So much for being protected from the evils of social networks!

Finally, number 3. I do actually see some rational thought going on here. Social networks do come with certain types of malware dangers, mostly due to their social nature. It's maybe a bit easier to trust a link from a Facebook friend, for example, and the malware guys seem to be catching on to that. At the same time, though, you have very similar dangers in email, and in many, many other websites. For example, I once witnessed a nice little piece of drive-by malware trying to load on my machine from a banner ad on a Major League Baseball site. Not a site that many people bother blocking, but also not really one that was related to my work. So, while you might eliminate a risk or two by blocking social networks, it won't make you safe by any means. You'd be far, far better off investing your resources in solutions that will help eliminate all risks of malware coming in to the PC, and being passed on to the network, regardless of source. There's always a new source, eventually you end up blocking everything. :)

Also, a note about bandwidth, also something I think there is some reason to be concerned about. Again, blocking social networking might free up some minor bandwidth, but singling out social networks as a source of bandwidth "waste" might also be a bit off base. We've already talked about the fact that there are many professional and career benefits in connecting with people in your industry, online or off. So, if you are blocking it for fear of bandwidth shortages, you'd better make sure social networking is less valuable than every other thing you allow to use bandwidth. That goes double for all you bosses that like to stream some music while you work.

Just saying.

To me you really have two choices. You can block all this social networking junk, and just hope that all of your employees who are using it anyway don't do anything stupid. That's a tad ostrich-like for me, personally. Or, you can engage in social networking right alongside your employees, encouraging them to connect with professional and educational resources, reminding them that the online world is just an extension of the world in which we all live and work, and therefore the same rules apply, and showing them that not only are you the boss, but you're also a real live human being with a real family, hobbies, and maybe even a sense of humor.

Of course, that might come as quite the shock to many of them, so do be careful!

Dublin Irish Festival Gets Social

2009-06-29T21:02:00.001-04:00

Well, yes, technically speaking any festival that gathers thousands of people in the same place on the same weekend is social in nature. But, I'm specifically talking about an interesting use of online social networking.

If you look at the Entertainment Schedule for the Dublin Irish Festival coming up July 31-Aug 2, you'll see the option to not only create your own agenda and either print it or save it so you can access it on a mobile device, but also an option to share it with others. If I were to create one, for example, it would show me hanging around the Celtic Rock stage from 4ish Saturday afternoon on. Since that's not exactly complicated, and I'm lazy, I didn't actually create one, but if you were doing something more complicated and hitting different shows at different stages, I could see where this would be helpful not only to keep your plans straight, but to also let other folks know where to find you.

It appears that they are using a paid service, sched.org, to provide this functionality, and I would think it's a good idea for some events. Certainly multi-stage musical events, but also multi-track conferences like TechShow or ILTA09 would be interesting places to have a similar functionality, if the budget allowed for it. You could let folks know, well ahead of time, which sessions you're planning on attending so they could find you to say hello, speakers could have a small idea of who will actually be in the audience ahead of time, and I could use it to stalk e-discovery experts. ;-)

It's a win-win!

Sedona Commentary on Achieving Quality

2009-06-28T14:27:00.000-04:00

Many of you may have noticed that it's been a bit of a quiet week around here, in terms of me writing anything of substance instead of pointing out some other stuff. I can explain. I have been writing a whole bunch of things, just not here. In fact, I finished a three-part series on the recent Sedona Conference Commentary on Achieving Quality in E-Discovery over on the firm's e-discovery blog.

You can read it over there, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Obviously, by the time I yanked all of those words out of my brain, there hasn't been much left for my own blogs, but hopefully a little R&R over the holiday weekend next week will put me back in the right frame of mind. Not that I don't have a couple of things planned for this week as well, but I'm struggling with the words for those too!

In the mean time, go check out the series, and read the Sedona Commentary itself, it's very interesting reading.

LegalTech West Coast Coverage

2009-06-25T22:07:00.003-04:00

I have to admit, I've been so busy the past few days that I haven't spent nearly any time paying attention to tweets and blog posts coming out of Legal Tech West Coast the past couple of days.

Luckily, it looks like the Posse List is doing a good job of putting together the highlights. Their day-one highlights from the e-discovery side of things seem like there's some interesting presentations being done, though also think much of it is not new to anyone who's been paying attention. On the other hand, maybe some of the folks who show up to things like this conference haven't been. Either way, it's good stuff that everyone working in the legal field needs to hear, and think about!

It's a Small World

2009-06-24T21:52:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend some time with a small group of folks from my office explaining and demonstrating social networking tools. As part of the demonstration, I went live to my Twitter and Facebook profiles, which was actually a little nerve-wracking. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, some of whom don't always come across as very professional in their interactions. :)

As it turns out though, there wasn't much that the folks I follow were saying that was worth worrying about, but it was interesting when I had the screen up and the following conversation took place:

Coworker: "You know that person?"
Me: "I know him online, don't think we've ever met, but we travel in some of the same Columbus area tech circles"
Coworker: "I was at his wedding"
Me: " You know him much better than I do then." :)

That made me think, one, it's obviously a small world, but also, isn't that the power of networking, whether offline or online? You never know who you're going to connect with, and you never know who they're already connected to!

Third Rule of Knowledge Workers: It's your Career!

2009-06-21T22:31:00.000-04:00

Last week, in the second rule, I talked about how, when management is pushing for you to account for every minute of those 40 hours a week, it's tempting to give them exactly that, and nothing more. The third rule could also be called, why you shouldn't do that!

No matter what your employer does, and the end of the day, it's your career, not theirs. There may have been a day, though I kind of doubt it, when you could work somewhere and expect that they would give you whatever training you need, or look out for new opportunities for you, and make the right connections for you, but if you're waiting around for management to do that for you now, you're going to be severely disappointed!

Don't wait for your boss to come tell you when you can go to training, who you should be mentored by, or what opportunities might be available to you. Use whatever tools you have at your disposal to do it for yourself! Get connected to people in your field whenever possible, sign up for free webinars, follow them on twitter, go to local events whenever possible, get involved on LinkedIn, get involved with the people you already know, find out who they know, ask about people who might be able to help you, etc. Heck, read some books for that matter!

Yes, it's true that you'll be spending some of your non-work time working on your career. Boo freakin hoo! It's your career, if you can't be bothered to spend some time working on it, and getting the career you want, and deserve, then you'll end up with the career your employer wants you to have. What they want you to have is completely based on what benefits them, not your plans. (Though a good employer will try and consider both what benefits them, and what will keep you there, not all employers are that good. Most, I would guess, are not.)

A good knowledge worker doesn't check out at 5PM and quit working on bettering themselves and their career. They know that learning and networking are valuable enough tools for their career that they'll make time for it, even if their boss doesn't recognize it as "work".

My First Attempt at Streaming

2009-06-19T23:09:00.000-04:00

So when @wyliemac asked last night if anyone had a webcam to stream the Ignite Columbus 3 presentations tonight, I said I did, and would be glad to help out, thinking I could pop my Macbook up there and use the built in webcam, if that's all we could come up with.

As I considered it last night, and through this morning, I decided on a different track. I borrowed a video camera from work (I'm the one who normally uses it, and in fact I'll be using it Monday morning, so it's not like it's missing from work or anything.). It's an old Panasonic that normally records to tape, but which has a firewire connector. Running the firewire through to my Macbook Pro at lunch today and then going out to Ustream and creating an account allowed me to fire on the video camera, and send the video out to the web. My test worked perfectly, so that's the gear I packed up to go to Ignite tonight.

Once on site, it was just a matter of finding good spot to capture the presentations from, a power source, and getting connected to the OSU wireless. Ran into a bit of a problem with Safari crashing, but discovered that as long as I had the Ustream set to DV Audio, it would crash when I tried to connect, but if I had it set to another audio source when it connected and switched it to DV audio, it worked fine. Go figure! Anyway, it took me about 5 minutes to figure that out, and that was really the last hiccup I had. I think, for a first effort, it turned out rather well, but you can see for yourself at the Ustream archive.

Even if you don't really care about my adventures in live streaming, the presentations were pretty darn good and are worth your while as well!

One Good Example of Tracking Productivity Hurting

2009-06-19T17:33:00.002-04:00

When I read the post What if the Apple Store billed by the hour, I thought to myself, not only is this a good example of the problem with billable hour requirements, but to a lesser extent it's also a good example of how tracking employees every second and using that to measure productivity can be detrimental, the stuff I talked about earlier this week.

Jay describes his experience of going to the Apple store to get a new screen protector for his iPhone, having one sales guy notice that he was picking up the incorrect protector, then take him to someone who could check him out, who happened to know that someone else in the store was very good at getting those little buggers placed down on the screen correctly, who did, in fact get his placed down much better than he probably could have. He then goes on to describe how, if these folks had billable hour requirements, they never would have spent that much time helping him on such a small purchase.

The same could be said for people working in a tight "productivity" environment. Even if you would give them credit for all the time spent helping a customer as part of their "productivity", I can't help but wonder if, for example, anyone would know about the last person's skill with screen protectors. Doesn't knowing other teams members skills and applying that to the work at hand require your team to interact with one another socially? They have to know one another, they have to be available to help out a coworker on a project that might not be theirs, and they have to pay attention to the customer, which means listening, instead of hurrying up the transaction in order to speed along to the next transaction in the interest of keeping the numbers up! I've worked in places where it would have been all too easy for the first person to move along to the next customer when Jay said he didn't need help, letting him walk out with the incorrect part, and it would have been all too easy for the second to check him out and move on, never thinking about the fact that he might need help getting that protector placed properly. Maybe the effort didn't show in their sales or productivity reports, (After all it took 3 of them to sell a lousy screen protector!) but they served the customer well. Wouldn't you rather have employees capable of that instead of employees who can make reports look good?

New e-Discovery Blog with some Good Advice

2009-06-18T23:25:00.002-04:00

Gabe Acevedo pointed me to a brand new blog on Twitter earlier today, e-Discovery 101, and even though there's only one post up, it really hit home with me. Their 5 easy steps to becoming an in-house electronic discovery guru matches up pretty well with some of what I've been thinking as I transition in to being the Litigation Support Manager over the next couple of months. Especially the idea of getting out of your desk/office and letting people know what you can offer them, and most importantly, listening to their past experiences and expectations. I'm just starting that process and already I'm seeing some real benefit in talking to people and seeing where some small changes might be beneficial. Hopefully, that will continue as time allows me to get out!

Friendfeed's Over-Inflated Sense of Self

2009-06-18T12:44:00.000-04:00

Now that Friendfeed has decided to report the number of people who follow you on their service as "subscribers" when it polls an RSS feed, how over-inflated are your subscriber numbers?

A couple of folks in the comments there have already pointed out the obvious, being subscribed to someone on Friendfeed, and maybe seeing just the headline of a blog post included in my feed, does not an RSS subscriber make. In fact, as I've pointed out many times, while I'm happy to pull all my various stuff on to Friendfeed and make it available in one place as a convenience to you, I really don't like the fact that my full text RSS feed gets reduced to a lousy headline there. I think that makes Friendfeed a crappy way to interact with RSS feeds. Given the fact that traffic from Friendfeed to my blogs is basically non-existent, I assume that the folks on Friendfeed who want to read my blog are subscribed to it elsehwere for the full feed, and now being counted again as subscribers, for no good reason. On top of that, since Friendfeed is lumping everyone together, both of my blogs, and I assume the blog I occasionally write technology posts for, are getting the same subscriber counts, when it's obvious to anyone who looks through my subscribers that very few of them would have any interest in reading both blogs.

In fact the subscriber numbers for my Child Abuse Survivor blog, which draws very few tech-savvy readers likely to use RSS, went up close to 300% today. I highly doubt any of the 153 Friendfeed-reported subscribers even know it's included there, let alone read it!

Don't get me wrong, I've always taken subscriber counts with a grain of salt. Just because Bloglines reports a number doesn't mean all of those people even still use Bloglines, or log in and read anything, for example, but I could at least figure the actual number of folks reading was some percentage of what was reported, and be pretty accurate. Now, that percentage got a lot lower, and I'm not sure subscriber counts mean anything at all.

I can either ignore the increase in subscriber counts, or pull my blog feeds out of Friendfeed so they don't get polled any more. Given the paucity of traffic or comments from my Friendfeed stream, I'm tempted to do the latter. However, that would go against my theory of pulling the blog posts to any number of different services (Twitter, Facebook, RSS, etc.) so that you, the reader, can follow along wherever you already hang out. So, I'll just ignore the increased subscriber counts. They are truly meaningless.

Tweetdeck Updates

2009-06-17T22:10:00.003-04:00

Tweetdeck pushed out an update today, in concert with the release of Tweetdeck for the iPhone. The reason for the desktop update is to add the sync feature that the iPhone version offered.

So, now that Tweetdeck is offering cloud based sync, that post about moving Tweetdeck settings is about pointless. They solved that problem!

They've also added the ability to be logged in to multiple Twitter accounts. Both are very, very welcome additions. Now if they can just get customizable column widths, I might actually have everything I want from the application, at least until I find something else to complain about. :)

Work-Proof your Facebook Profile

2009-06-16T20:59:00.001-04:00

There are some good recommendations in this article about privacy settings you can use to keep your less than professional friends from messing up your more professional appearance in this article. For myself, a few of them go a little too far, and might raise the suspicion that you have something to hide to those who would have such limited access to your profile, but then again, I don't tend to have hundreds of contacts who would do the sorts of things I would want to hide from view in such a public space. You might. :)

Personally, since I know I'm dealing with a smaller group of people, and people I generally trust, I depend more on the ability to remove things others add to my Wall, or photos they might tag of me. It's relatively easy for me to keep up with, there's not a lot. If I were a younger person with lots of college friends, for example, I might take more of the advice in the article. Still, it's good to be aware of what privacy steps you can take, if you feel the need to!

(h/t to Kevin O'Keefe on Twitter)

Second Rule of Knowledge Workers: The 40 Hour Illusion

2009-06-15T22:45:00.000-04:00

In the first post in this series, we talked about how the line between our professional lives, and our personal lives, have really been forever blurred. Today, I want to expound on that to talk to employers about why it might be less efficient to hold employees to the 40 hour demand.

Now, when I say that, I do not mean you don't expect them to work a 40 hour work week, nor am I advocating any radical change in the work schedule of knowledge workers. There may be a case to be made for that in many industries, but I am not smart enough to make it, and it's not the purpose of this post.

No, what I'm talking about is what I came very close to titling the post, if you have a strict 40 hour enforcement, that may be exactly what you get, 40 hours, and nothing more.

One of the most common complaints about social networking from management types, and from all of those "studies" that purport to tell us how much money we're stealing from our employers when we are online, is that any time not spent "producing" is a loss to the business. What an absolute crock. Yet, I've noticed an increase in the number of salaried workers I know who are clocking in and out electronically. Someone in HR, or further up the chain, got the bright idea that they could keep track of employee's productivity by making them "check-in" at the start of each day, and "check-out" at the end, as if a knowledge worker simply stopped thinking about their work the second they hit that out button.

Let's go with a very simple example from my own life. I use Google Reader currently, and subscribe to about 250 feeds. Most are of the tech and e-discovery variety, but some that are about photography, or the news, even a few sports ones. When I open up Google Reader at work, I don't really make any effort to distinguish between which ones are considered work, and which one's aren't. The same holds true when I open Google Reader at home in the evening, or on weekends. Am I wasting my employers time by reading non-work feeds at work? Probably, but you could also make the case then that I'm giving them free time when I read an article on e-discovery when I'm home.

Now, let's say I'm a typical employee who's being asked to check-in and check-out to track my work time down to the minute each and every day, and let's face it, those of you who work in law firms probably get this more than most, with billable hour requirements and all. When I'm outside the office, and "off the clock", I'm not getting any credit for anything I read at home. I'm not getting any credit for outlining a work article I'm going to write in my head while driving or showering, and I might just start to resent that. Eventually, I'm going to stop doing those things completely. (In a future post I will go in to why you shouldn't, no matter how much you resent it, but let's all agree that the temptation would certainly be there.) Is that any way to motivate good employees? Don't you want people who are willing to read a book or article, listen to a podcast, connect with experts on social networking sites, etc. in an effort to improve themselves, even if they do it on their time? Or do you want to protect your precious 40 hours of work each week and make sure that if they are using social networks, it's only for personal use and not related to their careers at all?

Which brings us to another point about the supposed lost productivity. Is it really lost? Do you have people who are not getting work done, and it just never gets done? Really? Is it more likely that the same people who are getting their work done more efficiently and in less time than others, are the same people who are honing their skills and improving themselves in their off hours? So not only does learning some techniques that increase my productivity by reading some good material at home not get me any work credit, but then I'm also dinged on the other end of the equation as well, by having the audacity to want to read something personal while I'm sitting at my desk with all my work caught up. That's a great way to measure how good someone is at their job, purely by the hours spent doing it. The employees you have who struggle to get anything done, and take twice as long to complete a task, are doing great according to this theory, since they aren't stealing any of your 40 hours with other things, are they? Nope, they give you the full 40 hours of work, and that's all you ever get out of them. Those other folks, the ones who managed to improve themselves? They've moved on to a place that knows how to appreciate people who take their careers seriously.

You won't even miss them, and their time-wasting, until they're gone.

Make the Case for ILTA09 Conference

2009-06-12T18:29:00.000-04:00

I know, times are tough, and budgets have gotten cut all over the place, let alone in the legal industry. That why the folks at ILTA put together a "Make the Case" page that you can present to the management of your law firm as good reasons why the expense of this year's conference (Aug 23-27 in Washington DC) is worth it.

Seriously, I'm speaking at ILTA09 on Social Networking, and the sessions are so good that my own session would have been the 3rd choice of sessions I attended during that time slot. The schedule is that good!

Hoping I'll see some of you there!

First Rule of Knowledge Workers: The Professional is Personal

2009-06-11T07:22:00.002-04:00

One common theme I hear from "social media experts" is to make sure and keep your personal business out of the professional image you create for yourself online. Many people have come to interpret that as keeping separate profiles for their personal life and their professional life. This could be a mistake.

Typically the argument goes something like this, "I have a LinkedIn profile for work, but just use Facebook for my friends, I'd never talk about work on Facebook."

Whenever I see someone say this, I often wonder if this person somehow never mentions what he/she does, or shares any stories about their work at friend and family gatherings. Do the people you see on the weekends even know what you do for a living? If, for example, you're a lawyer, and a friend of yours needed a good lawyer, would they even know to approach you? If they did, would you turn down their business, or not make a referral for them because you "don't like to mix my professional life with my personal life".

On the flip side, when a coworker invites you and your spouse out to dinner, or to a cookout, do you refuse, because you don't mix friendship with business? Would you go by yourself, as a "work" outing, but not bring your spouse, or your kids, because these are not "friends".

This seems somewhat ridiculous, but isn't this the real life version of what you're doing with the "split" profiles? So what if you do have one professional social network profile and one personal, when a friend wants to connect with you on LinkedIn, do you refuse? When a coworker wants to friend you on Facebook? What about when a supervisor wants to friend you on Facebook, when you tell her that you can't do that, that Facebook is only your personal profile, is she left to assume that is because you're doing things on Facebook that you don't want your company associated with, things the company would not be happy about?

Over the years, the demand for knowledge workers to be available, and willing, to put in more hours, and be tethered to blackberry's, etc. has grown. On top of that, kids are involved in far more activities that keep their parents on the go constantly, and the amount of social time we have for ourselves has dwindled. Is it any wonder why so many people are getting romantically involved with people they work with, or developing friendships in the workplace? These are the people we see more of than our own families in many cases.

Also, as the business environment has gotten more and more competitive, we've turned to our connections, any connections, to develop business leads, or learn about new job opportunities, etc. No one in their right mind would ignore a business or professional networking lead just because it came from another parent at a Little League game as opposed to our workplace contacts.

Similarly, when you are attending a business networking event, not every conversation is going to be about your business. Sometimes the best customers, or the best sources of assistance in your career, are the people you can talk College Football with, sharing some common ground before getting around to doing business together.

Now, does this mean that you should be sharing every little detail of your personal life with your business contacts? No, I wouldn't advise that. What I would advise is that if there are details of your life that will cause you embarrassment in professional circles, maybe online isn't the place to be sharing them, regardless of how personal or professional you might consider the environment. Both Facebook and LinkedIn are still pretty public, so you want to be careful about what those photos, quizzes, status messages, etc. are saying about you, professionally and personally, because you are still you, at the office, or at the club.

Full disclosure: I met my wife at work. We worked in the same office, right down the hall from each other for all of our dating relationship, engagement, and the first year+ of marriage. Obviously, I have benefited greatly from allowing myself the freedom to mix my work life with my personal life, and may be biased in favor of that.

Rules of Knowledge Workers -Introduction

2009-06-10T22:56:00.005-04:00

There was a time when everyone put in an honest days labor, and earned an honest days wage. In most cases this meant spending the day in the factory, in the fields, or involved in some other physical labor, and it made sense. The longer you could harvest crops, or weld steel, the more physical work you accomplished and the more you should get paid for that work.

As we moved away from that sort of industrial economy an toward a more service economy, however, those same valuations may or may not make very much sense. Sure, these same ideas make perfect sense in a production environment, but for knowledge workers, I'm not sure they do.

In this series of blog posts, I want to look at a number of areas where labor management practices, by refusing to view the resource of labor as having fundamentally changed, are mishandling their employees. At the same time, I want to recognize that individuals, by misreading these sea changes, are mishandling their own careers, waiting for someone to tell them what to do, instead of taking charge for themselves.

As I do this, I do want you to note that I'm hardly an HR or labor expert. Rather, I'm just one guy who happens to work in a knowledge industry, and who has been trying to keep himself on the cutting edge of technology and see where the world is headed. Over the years, it's become clear to me that while things are changing in the work world, not everyone is adapting well.

Also, before we get started in this discussion, many of the examples I will give are composite examples of stories I've experienced or heard from others. Any similarities to people, or employers, is pure coincidence.

As I post different ideas in this series, I will come back and update this post with links, so that this will become the "home" post in this series. With that said, let's get right into the rules!

The Professional is Personal
The 40 Hour Illusion
It's Your Career
Blocking is Somewhat Pointless

Use eRazer to Wipe Drive?

2009-06-08T23:40:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Craig Ball has a review of a small tool called the WiebeTech Drive eRazer , which is a relatively small, easy to use, device that wipes a hard drive and overwrites it with zeroes. While there are better, and even free, tools available to accomplish the same result when you want to wipe a drive before giving it away, or other situations, most of them do require a bit more technical know-how than the typical home user has. The Drive eRazer, though, is pretty straightforward, even if it does have it's own issues, as Craig points out.

Makes me wonder though, if there isn't a market for something like this, that can simply take a hard drive, connect it to a small device, and wipe it, without the need for a full PC setup, or any disk wiping tools? Possibly. I could see it being pretty useful for someone who would need to wipe drives on a semi regular basis, without the expense of having a spare machine just for that purpose, especially a small business that is replacing drives as they go bad, or something similar? What do you think, would you recommend it to anyone you know?

Maybe they Should Title the Comments "Why Everyone Hates IT"

2009-06-04T20:10:00.000-04:00

Why Does IT Hate Facebook and Twitter.

The article itself really doesn't shed much light on why, it just throws out some numbers about the number of IT departments that block them, etc. The comments, on the other hand, are a treasure trove of why people hate their IT departments.

A sampling (with my comments in bold):

Social networking needs to be banned in the business environment. - Because connecting with other people serves no business purpose, right?

I am always amazed how many supposedly employed people have so much time to spend on these distractions. - And IT's role in that situation is.....? Again, if people (stress PEOPLE) are wasting time and not getting their job done, that is not a technology problem! And that's assuming they are wasting time, maybe they're discussing a great idea and how it was implemented at another organization, or following an expert in their field and learning how to be more efficent. Do your server logs tell you this?

Facebook and Twitter and the likes should be banned at work. You are paid to work not play.- And interacting with peers in your field couldn't possibly be work if it's happening online, right?

And my favorite, when someone pointed out the irony of people commenting on a blog about other people wasting time with social networking:

Well played. I justify my participation as professional interaction, at least when I'm responding to the professional topics. That said, I don't see a use for social apps outside those departments that work directly with the public or customers - Marketing, customer and shareholder relations, HR. - His wording implies that it's not always just professional topics that he replies to, but even so, he works in IT, his interactions online are professional even though they aren't with customers, yours are not, period! The high holy IT Director has spoken!

I'm contemplating putting together a series of posts over the next few days/weeks fully exploring the ideas of social networking, personal and professional time, productivity, etc. I've hinted at a number of my own ideas, and I think maybe it's time to put them in a manifesto, so to speak, about how I view the knowledge workers role in a wired business world, and how I think management should view it. I realize that my comments in this and other recent posts hint at a worldview that I may not have ever fully explained, or even thought out completely to myself. Now that I am a manager, albeit a very low level one, I want to do that. You'll get to be the sounding board. :)

Information Management isn't just for Compliance

2009-06-04T18:42:00.001-04:00

At least according to an HP global survey.

A global survey undertaken by HP found that less than half of business decision-makers have a high confidence level in the quality and accessibility of information within their organisations.

The survey, and the linked article seem very focused on the need to retrieve information as part of an e-discovery request, or compliance measure, but the concept that this many organizations don't really know what data they have or how to get it also dovetailed nicely with an article my boss had sent me earlier in the week about the software company Autonomy. Specifically, this quote:

"Look at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that are driving a lot of this compliance business. That goes back to Roman law and is the basis of the discovery process and it makes sense, particularly in simpler times," Lynch said. "But imagine today the role of IT in trying to track and store and catalog and find every voice mail, every Word doc, text message, etc. It often leads to a type of legal lockdown where companies feel paralyzed because they just don't know how to get started or how to ensure they have all that unstructured data and can index it and find it.

"And we think our potential is that once companies have done that type of work for legal indexing, then they can use it afterward for many other things, primarily to get a richer and more-complete view of customers. For example, on average, large corporations today have 9,000 systems across the enterprise, and all of those represent some sort of architectural silos that resist or confound efforts to see and interact with customers in a unified way."

Solid information management isn't just about compliance and e-discovery, even if that is the primary motivation right now. It's about imagining all the things you could use that data for if you knew what it was and how to analyze it. So maybe e-discovery readiness isn't just about the costs versus risk of litigation, maybe e-discovery readiness can also be about getting to data that can grow your business? Turning a cost center into a revenue center? Priceless... ;-)

Kurt Leafstrand Gets It

2009-06-02T21:11:00.000-04:00

On the e-discovery 2.0 blog yesterday at least, he gets what I've been saying about social media in regards to legal risks, there's not much that's new here:

There’s talk of intellectual property being cast out, irrevocably, onto the Internet for all to see. Or slanderous things being uttered for which your company may be held liable. But, hold on a second: is there really anything new here? Anyone heard of e-mail? Web pages? Peer-to-peer? Google? Instant messaging?

I'd actually go further, anyone heard of the telephone, or face to face conversations in public places? (Not to mention cell phone conversations on a commuter train, *cough*)

Any time one of the people who work for your organization is talking to someone outside of the organization, there's a risk they'll say something they shouldn't about their workplace, and yet we still actually let them do it! Shocking!

I don't know how business has survived this long, surely it's time to start requiring your workforce to live in company camps and only interact with coworkers, isn't it? I mean if you let them go out to dinner, or to a ball game, you have no idea who they might be sitting next to and who they might strike up a conversation with. Surely you can't risk them complaining about their job, or leaking confidential information, can you? These communications must be blocked! Or at the very least we should have strongly worded and specific policies regarding any and all such possibilities. Just giving employees general guidelines that apply to all such situations can't possibly be enough. We need a new policy for every new possibility!

Yeah ok, overkill, but not by much.

ILTA09: Seems So Official Now

2009-06-01T21:25:00.003-04:00

It's June 1, the day the fine folks at ILTA released the full list of sessions and speakers for the annual conference in August. Naturally, I went looking for the session I'll be speaking in, which made the whole idea just a little bit more real, and thus scarier. :)

Seriously, though, I'm looking forward to both attending and speaking at the conference this year. I've never been before, but I hear nothing but good things, and looking at the full schedule leads me to think that I'm going to have a hard time choosing which ones to attend! Heck, even our session is up against some serious competition, specifically that judges panel on e-discovery and a panel on disruptive technologies. I'm actually sort of sorry I'm going to miss those!

So, who's going to be at ILTA this year?

How do you Cover for Specialists?

2009-05-31T22:50:00.000-04:00

Some of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen that I worked late a couple of days last week as some sort of epidemic has swept the help desk area of our firm, leaving them quite short-handed. In fact, they were left with no one available between the regular folks who work there, and the couple of usual backups to cover the phones until 6PM each evening, which is the customary procedure. Not having any immediate plans after work, I stepped in and covered them.

While I was down there, another one of our IS folks and I were discussing how much tech support has changed. Time was when he, and everyone in the IT department where he worked, had the help desk line on their phones and we expected to answer it when the regular folks were tied up, but that was when all you had to support was PC hardware and maybe MS Office apps. Now, there are dozens of apps in use, in a variety of specialties, that he doesn't even know how to use, much less support.

As we talked, I realized how much that is true. The folks who were brought in as specialists, like for Networking, Telecommunications, and DBA, simply don't have the knowledge to do general end-user support. Our firm is a little luckier than most, because some of the other IT specialist positions are folks who started out working at the help desk, like myself, and can step in. On the other hand, it's only been a bit more than 2 years since I worked there fulltime, and there have been some applications added that I don't use, and couldn't possibly support. (Luckily no one called with a question about those while I was flying solo down there!) The others who've been away for even longer, have even more apps where that is the case.

We came to realize, not just that we really only had a limited number of people who could effective backup the help desk folks, but that we had very limited backup for any of our positions. When our telecomunications guy is on vacation, there is an official "backup" person, but what can be handled in his absence is very limited. A major telephone system meltdown during his vacation is going to result in a serious problem. Now with our Litigation Support Department consisting of me, and one other person working remotely 4 days a week, on that 5th day, if I get sick, and there's someone needing trial prep work done, there's no one to do it. Same goes for our one web developer. If something needs done, and she's not there to do it, what happens?

As more and more firms try to "do more with less" in this economy, how many IT people are having to be "on call" even when they're on vacation, or over weekends, or when they're sick, because they're the only one's who can handle some tasks? What does your organization do to try and prevent this, or do you simply require them to live with this expectation? Are your IT people expected to always be reachable? Are they therefore limited in where they can go on vacation, because of this expectation that they will always be able to log in remotely and work on something at a moment's notice? Is that really fair?

Personally, I don't think it is. More importantly, if there's only one person at your firm who can fix certain issues, what do you do when that person gets hit by a bus? Or leaves? Aren't you asking for trouble if you simply ignore the fact that skills and knowledge haven't been shared among the whole team and you've simply laid these expectations at the feet of your folks as your "solution"?

So as technology gets more specialized, and budgets get tighter, what do you do to have a backup plan?

Photos from the Latest Trip

2009-05-28T22:31:00.001-04:00

The weather didn't always cooperate with our plans this past weekend, so we had to get creative sometimes to get some photos on our visit down to Tennessee and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC.

Still, we managed to get a few breaks in the clouds to get some photos in the small town where we we married in 2001, and on the campus of Angela's alma mater, as well as a chance to spend some time with Angela's grandparents, so I can hardly complain, can I?

As always, it was just fun to get out and shoot photos and see what we could find, reminding me once again that I need to do that even when we aren't traveling!

You can see the whole bunch over at Flickr.