The Running Librarian

Does age matter?

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:19:00 +0000

So I've had an idea in my head for a while now and the only way I feel I can get it out of my head is to write a blog post. So some context; I'm sitting in my office completing my appraisal, reflecting both on what I've done in the past year and what I'd like to do going forward and it strikes me that I cant see myself sitting here when I'm 50. Now before anyone accuses me of being ageist I believe I could do the job perfectly well when I'm 50* and that someone else with the required skills and experience could do the job perfectly well when they're 50.

So my question for this community is "Does age matter when it comes to managing an intranet" Here are my thoughts on the matter.

Yes it does matter...you need to be young

Intranet management poses unique challenges and requires an individual to have a mix of skills, including but not limited to technical, creative, analytical, negotiation and presentation skills
Technical skills and in particular understanding and having an appreciation of new technologies and how these can be applied in your organisation are essential. Younger candidates might be more in the know in relation to these technologies
"Being down with the kids" and understanding how they use new technologies and that you use the same can be a boon. For example describing something as similar to Facebook or Twitter only makes sense if you actually use the tools yourself. On a related note I don't think you can encourage people to use Twitter if you're not using it!
Being creative is another key skill, as intranet managers are likely to be creating content that needs to be engaging. Are younger people more creative? I'd love to roll out a report that says they are, sadly I cant!

Yes it does matter...you need to be older

They say that with youth comes enthusiasm and with age comes experience. Experience can be no bad thing when managing an intranet, especially where the intranet needs work around its aims, objectives and the overall intranet strategy
Being older can also be a boon when talking to more senior individuals within an organisation. As they will respect the fact that you're experienced
You will have an understanding of technologies, but you will have seen it all before so are more likely to appreciate when something is going to pass by quickly and when something is going to stick around and be important

Having actually now sat down and written this blog post it doesn't seem as long as I thought it would be also apologies to anyone who thinks any of my comments are patronising, they're certainly not intended to be. So what do people think of my not very well thought about points! Just me and my role or does age really matter?

*There is no particular reason I chose 50 it just happened to be the age I thought of at the time of writing this blog post.

Choosing and using an enterprise search tool - KM Legal 2012

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:06:00 +0000

Earlier this week I took part in a panel discussion on choosing an Enterprise search tool at the KM Legal Conference. The idea behind the panel session was that three law firms would explain what motivated them to choose a particular enterprise search tool and to explain some of the functionality available within the search tool they chose. The law firms were using different search tools and the tools were at very different development stages.

Although the panel session went well one of the comments I saw on Twitter was that we hadn't drawn any conclusions about enterprise search. Now this could mean a number of things but the impression I got was that people wanted to know whether enterprise search is worth doing, so here are my thoughts.

Yes Enteprise or Federated search is worth doing, we work in organisations that are generating more and more information at a huge rate. Having a tool available that allows individuals to easily access content that they may not have previously been aware of is in my mind essential. Enterprise or federated can also be useful when individuals are looking for experts or experience type information. Surfacing this type of information is especially important where your organisation effectively sells knowledge like law firms.

However Enterprise search is something that you can very easily get wrong. You can index too much content and end up adding to the problems that already exist. You can index the wrong type of content and the search is never used. You also have to be aware that an enterprise search tool can look fantastic but if you put rubbish into your search (the metadata/indexes) then you're going to get rubbish out.

There is also increasingly going to be a conflict between different systems, with many organisations looking at or using a combination of the search available as part of their Document Management System (DMS) an enteprise or federated search tool and the search capabilities available within SharePoint. Each of the tools offers something slightly different both in terms of functionality and how results are returned. Identifying what works best for your organisation is one of the hardest parts of deciding whether Enteprise search or another search tool is going to work.

[Photo credit - The Right tool on Fllickr]

Knowledge Management - tales from the frontlines

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:09:00 +0000

Share Knowledge - you know you want to!

Earlier this week I attended a CILIP in London event called "Knowledge Management from the frontlines" the discussion was faciliated by James Andrews from the British Red Cross. James spoke with great passion about Knowledge Management and some of the tools that the British Red Cross were using to facilitate Knowlegde Sharing.

Before I get into the detail of the discussion I wanted to relate a moment of madness that occured just before the start of the discussion. I was preparing to tweet when someone tapped me on my shoulder and asked me to turn my "phone screen off" because it was reflecting the light. I was momentarily taken aback and didn't say anything to the individual but did turn my screen up to full brightness, yes I am that mature. Shortly after this I tweeted to say I had been asked to turn my phone off, this tweet was met with a flurry of headesk, face palm and other ways of saying what a quaint approach this was to audience participation at an event. At the end of the event I was approached by one of the organisers who apologised and indicated that this had happened before with the same individual. I just hope it doesn't happen again!

Back to the actual event and James started by introducing himself and the organisation he worked for. He didn't have a PowerPoint presentation so did really well under these circumstances to explain some quite difficult concepts. One of the first things James asked the audience was what they thought Knowledge was, cue lots of head scratching and discussion within the audience about Knowledge. Now I don't have a definition of Knowledge and I think if you put a room of Knowledge Managers together they would all say something different. My feeling is that Knowledge is actually a couple of things, Data and Information.

Data is a specific fact or figure, without any context. For example, the number 1,000 is a piece of data, as is the name Tom Smith. Without anything else to define them, these two items of data are meaningless.
Information is data that's organiseed. So, pieces of information are "Tom Smith is a CEO" and "1,000 widgets." We have more details, so now the data makes more sense to us.
Knowledge, then, builds on the information to give us context. Knowledge is "Tom Smith is the CEO of our company's biggest competitor, and his company ships 1,000 widgets every hour."

Just to complicate matters there are also two different types of knowledge, explicit and tacit:

Explicit knowledge includes things that you can easily pass on to someone else by teaching it or writing it down. This kind of knowledge can be captured in a staff handbook or workflow.
Tacit knowledge is less concrete. It may relate to the best way to approach a certain person for their help or co-operation, or how to fix the photocopier. This type of knowledge is usually acquired by experience.

In this context Knowledge Management describes the process of managing Knowledge, but what does this actually mean for a commercial organisation like the one I work for? At the highest level it means the following:

The leveraging of a firm’s collective wisdom by creating systems and processes to support and facilitate the identification, capture, dissemination and use of the knowledge possessed by the firm

In reality what this will mean is that a number of tools/systems are used to capture and share knowledge. There are two different ways of capturing and managing knowledge: using technology-based systems, or using softer systems. Examples of softer systems are shadowing or mentoring. These systems are better for sharing tacit knowledge. Examples of technology based systems would include a co-authored staff handbook, communites of practice or wikis. It is easy to access this information, but it takes effort to keep it up-to-date. These systems are good for capturing explicit knowledge.

Libarians definitely have a role to play in both capturing, sharing and managing knowledge and I think this was the point of the discussion to demonstrate that the skills we have as Librarians are similar to those of Knowledge Managers. For example Knowledge Managers need to have the following skills/attributes:

Communication skills
Negotations skills
Relationship building skills
Technical skills
Analytical skills
Organisational skills

& many many more! much like Librarians! I thought this was a very interesting dicussion, although I think it would have been useful for James to have had a screen/PowerPoint as there were a numebr of tables/charts we could only look at on paper. I believe this was because of the venue not because James hadn't prepared one.

After the event CILIP in London were kind enough to forward the details of some of the resources James mentioned during his presentation. Of these two videos are the most interesting one of which, on how to organise a Childrens party I've embedded below - enjoy!

Getting people to participate

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Fri, 04 May 2012 11:34:00 +0000

How do you get people to "participate" or to use an intranet/collaboration tool? If you were to sit down and think about this I imagine you could all come up with a few ideas and the internet is certainly awash with them.

So I thought I'd sit down and think about how I'd encourage people to participate. This list is by no means exhaustive and although some of these ideas have worked, they're not right for all organisations.

It might seem obvious but you have to make the tool easy to use. If people are presented with a user interface that's buggy or clunky or both then they're unlikely to use it again.
You also need to be creating content on a regular basis. Individuals want to see that their content is going to be either updated/read by other individuals or is part of a growing resource. Also nobody wants to be the first person to still their head about the ramparts so populate the intranet early on.
Something that might work is to give individuals recognition/provide competition. Yammer is very good at displaying recognition in leaderboards and I have no doubt that we'll see more organisations looking at how they can use gamification to encourage collaboration.
An important part of any intranet is providing content that people need, rather then just swamping the intranet with useless content. Making content relevant should encourage people to read the intranet. If you don't know what people want, you should ask them!
Giving power to the people is a good way to encourage participation. If you make individuals/departments responsible for adding and updating content it's more likely to stay relevant and be read. At least that's the hope!
Make it social by allowing individuals to comment on content, post "fun" stuff and connect with other colleagues. But remember your intranet will be serving a specific role and that probably isn't a place for people to have fun.
Finally if you can, only post important information to the intranet. This is a tricky one as everyone will say that they don't read the intranet and so will miss stuff, but if you can do this then it will certainly impact on usage.

Those are my errm top 7 tips, not exactly a very round number. What have I missed?

[Photo credit - Student participation in open source projects (A professor's perspective)]

HighQ Forum 2012

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:08:00 +0000

The view from the Sky Lounge

Just before Easter I attended the HighQ Forum. HighQ are a company that in their words provide "secure enterprise collaboration and publishing software" In a previous role I used one of their products to publish content and was impressed by the functionality, although I was only using a very small part of the overall functionality. Before I talk about the forum I want to mention the location and the weather on the day as both were amazing and I'd like to know who HighQ paid to get this weather, as evidence by the photos incorporated within this blog post.

The format of the day was for tables to discuss topics that had been provided by HighQ, followed by someone from the table providing a summary of the discussions. After the round-table discussions, there were a number of presentations, sadly I missed these, but I understand they were excellent from the Tweets I read.

The first topic discussed was Legal Project Management this has become a hot topic in the last year as law firms look at ways in which they can manage not only clients and files more effectively but also what projects they can undertake with clients to add value. Legal Project Management is an interesting concept and one that many people will argue doesn't actually exist. But it does appear that a number of firms are looking at where the firm can save money and add value and Legal Project Management may have a role to play in this process.

The next topic up for discussion was Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The idea behind BYOD is that consumers (fee-earners) are bringing their own devices to the workplace, with the expectation that they will be able to use these devices rather then a company issued Blackberry or Desktop PC. One of the biggest issues with BYOD is the sheer number of devices available and that would potentially have to be supported. What was clear from the discussions was that Apple devices are preferred to Android devices. It also became apparent that have a clear policy in place around the use of devices is essential for BYOD to be successful.

The Shard in all its glory...sort of

Next up was a summary of the challenges in providing current awareness to lawyers and clients. What was clear from this discussion was that law firms should be answering the "So what" question aka "How does this piece of legislation affect our clients" rather then just churning out content for the sake of it. Law Firms also need to look at how they can differentiate themselves, this is especially true in a market which has a huge number of players. The most interesting discussion from my perspective was around the use of internal collaboration tools and how attendees thought these tools would be changing over time. It was interesting to hear what other law firms were doing and especially how they're integrating social tools with more traditional intranets.

The final two discussions were around clients asking for more tailored/personalised services and the impact of the Legal Services Act. In terms of personalisation most firms were looking at services that delivered the greatest value and "what if" factor. Personalisation of course needs to be done in the context of different clients having different perspectives. The last topic discussed was the Legal Services Act this act aims to liberalise and regulate the legal market in the UK, essentially encouraging more competition, which naturally will have an impact on the services provided by Law Firms. Most law firms present said that it was too early to tell what the impact will be but the potential for outside investment in Law Firms using Alternative Business Structures was something that everyone will be keeping a watching brief on. Overall a great afternoon, in a fantastic location, with amazing views and company...just a shame we had to do some work!

Evaluating e-books in Law Libraries

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:57:00 +0000

The iLibrarian has published the slides from a recent presentation on e-books, which I've embedded below. In her talk she outlines some of the benefits and downsides to purchasing and maintaining e-book collections. If you've not thought about e-books before, this is a good introduction to the topic.

I also wrote an article recently about why I don't think Law Libraries should be eagerly buying up Kindles for fee-earners to use within the Library. Why? well the market is in my mind still developing and will continue to develop. Also if you look at the iLibrarian's slides you'll see that there are a lot of benefits, but in my mind the challenges of e-books, particularly around the sales model and libraries relationships with vendors is one that needs to develop in a more positive way.

Anyway to cut a long story short, the slides are great and well worth having a look at.

Evaluating e-Book Offerings

View more presentations from Ellyssa Kroski

An introduction to metadata and taxonomies

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Are you "into" metadata an taxonomies or alternatively like understand the concepts but are looking for a bit more information? Then you'll definitely be excited (perhaps not excited) by this blog post from the Brain Traffic blog. In the blog post the author looks at some of the concepts behind metadata and taxonomies.

The first thing I want to say about this blog post is that although it's quite short it's packed full of content and it uses diagrams to great effect. The author also says that any conversation about metadata and taxonomies can get "big" very quickly, the important thing as the author says is not to get intimidated..."these terms have been around much longer than the Web, and can be applied in a wide variety of contexts"

So what did I learn from the blog post. Well the first thing was an excellent quote about metadata, which is as follows:

Metadata is "information about the content that provides structure, context and meaning" I also now know that there are three main types of metadata:

Structural metadata defines the elements that need to be collected; labels like title, author, date created, subject etc all make up structural metadata.
Administrative metadata is often created automatically when an item is added to a CMS or a Document Management System. This metadata is used to manage the content.
Descriptive metadata describes aspects specific to each piece of content like title, subject and audience.

Tied together these three types of metadata makes content findable and perhaps more importantly understandable to a human or computer.

What about taxonomies?

In a previous role I used to do a lot of work with taxonomies, so understand how crucial they can be and perhaps more tellingly how passionate individuals can become about terms within a taxonomy. In its simplest sense a taxonomy groups stuff into hierarchical groups. This stuff could be anything, legal subjects, animals, pop groups, you name it you can apply a taxonomy to pretty much anything.

In the digital world (aka websites or intranets) taxonomies are used to provides a structure within which content (which contains metadata) is published.

Common taxonomy types include:

Term lists are a standardised list of terms created to ensure consistent tagging of content
Hierarchies are a list of terms contained within a structured framework that have parent/child or broad to narrow relationships
Thesauri are used to translate conceptual relationships between content into something a computer can understand

How do taxonomies and metadata work together?

As the author says..."at its simplest a taxonomy organises information and metadata describes it. For the taxonomy to be able to organise the information, terms need to be stored as metadata"

That would be an excellent way to end the blog post, but the author then provides a diagram which illustrates this point. You'll have to read the original blog post to see it though :-)

Enjoy!

Paddock Wood half Marathon 2012

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I took part in the Paddock Wood 1/2 Marathon, this was my first 1/2 Marathon of 2012 and my first 1/2 Marathon since the Margate 1/2 in October 2011. I'd be doing a lot of training, including Janathon, so I was hopeful of a decent time, close to my PB to 1:43:15. With that in mind I'd created a pace band for a race time of 1:44. As it turns out I did run a new PB for 13.1 miles but it was a staggering (at least in my mind) time of 1:38:48. For anyone that's interested that's 7:31 minute mile pace and an average speed of 7.99 miles per hour.

So why 5 minutes faster then in 2008, when I set my HM PB. A couple of things (1) The course was very fast and flat, there was only one significant hill at 1.25 miles, which lasted for about 4 minutes.(2) I've been upping my mileage for some time now, which I think this result showed. I still think I could have run a bit quicker. For example the first mile took me 7:50, so next time I'm going to aim for a 1:37 and see what happens!

So what about the race itself, well it was very well organised with about 2000 runners. I was number 2025, but there were only 1915 finishers. There was adequate parking, but you do need to get there early otherwise you end up parking in the local housing estates like me. Also if you park the wrong side of Eldon Way, where the race starts, like me you'll end up waiting for ages to get out of Paddock Wood, as they close a lot of the roads part of the 1/2 Marathon route. Would I run the race again, absolutely, a PB setting course and a very well organised and managed race.

6 (good) reasons for having staff photos on the intranet

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Does your intranet include photos of individuals? If your intranet doesn't, then you should definitely read this blog post from the Intranet connections blog. In it their guest author lists six reasons why you need to include staff photos on the intranet. Note I've cut this list down to five as the 6th was very specific to a particular type of organisation:

It encourages familiarity and discourages cold responses: you are less likely to be cross with someone who has a face.
It encourages community.
It provides a sense of identity to a department or group or school.
New or transferred staff can be highlighted on the intranet home page as a “Look Who Joined Us”
For each person, their face on the intranet allows them to say to the organization “I am not just a name or a position, I have an identity and I am happy to share it with everyone”

All very good reasons for including staff photos on your intranet, but don't forget in the UK their are number of laws that Intranet managers need to be aware of when using photos. I recommend reading the Intranetizen blog post called "10 law for intranet mangers" for a detailed list of these.

What's next for social intranets?

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:48:00 +0000

My last post was about the Social intranet journey so it was interesting to read two blog posts about the same subject, which seem to support the ideas in the Webinar.

The first is a blog post from the Intranet Connections blog called "What is next for Social intranets" in it the author reports on a blog post which discusses the struggles of trying to get organisations (enterprises) to adopt social software. The author has an excellent piece of advice, which is:

"Jumping into social networking for the enterprise is a challenge and often requires a major shift in culture for an organization. A great piece of advice I took away from a Webinar was to focus social interactions around a business goal or campaign. Leverage the use of social tools to facilitate business"

This is definitely something I would encourage any organisation considering implementing a social intranet to look at. The second blog post was from the Intranet connections blog again. In this post called "5 Ways to Harness the Power of Social Tools on Your Intranet" the author lists five ways in which you could use social media tools to align your organisations corporate culture. These are listed as follows:

"Allow it to shape and manage your company culture: Use your intranet to reinforce the values, goals and ideas that you have for your organization"
"Allow it to help you strengthen change management initiatives: Be transparent with your employees and let them see what the organization is working towards"
"Allow it to help you improve execution of corporate strategy: Get your CEO connected with employees in an open forum on the intranet"
"Allow it to let you better facilitate corporate communication: With a social intranet you can reach out to your coworkers to share business tools, ask questions and learn from one another"
"Allow it to let you better manage and increase employee engagement: Empower your employees on the intranet and give them the ability to personalize their own intranet work space"

Some excellent tips here on how you can harness the power of social media tools. The last two will in my opinion be the most obvious and well known uses of social media tools within an enterprise. What do you think?

The social intranet journey

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:44:00 +0000

Last week I attended a Webinar organised by Interact Intranet about Social intranets and how increasingly organisations are looking at how they encourage their employees to use collaborative tools as part of their role.

This was a very interesting Webinar and one of the key things I took from it was that in most circumstances you shouldn't talk about collaboration but rather about actions or tasks, as individuals will be able to relate to these more easily then collaboration. Another way of looking at this is to think about collaboration being the objective not the activity. Any objective needs a focus and in the case of collaboration or social intranets, this should be what people need to do aka a task or activity.

Fear is another issue when people start to talk about collaboration. Not just from an organisations perspective but also the user. Fear can take many forms and could potentially include any of the following:

What will users talk about?
What if users don't use the tools?
What if I do it wrong?
Should I be working?

Fear is something that should be approached early on as it can be a huge impediment to encouraging collaborative working within an organisation. Another impediment is where content and collaborative tools aren't integrated within the same platform. Having separate sites, where individuals have to logon with a different username or password will become a barrier to usage. Where possible collaborative tools should be integrated tightly with any existing content to ensure individuals have a seamless and more natural experience.

What should the collaboration journey look like?

In the final part of the webinar we were asked to think about what the collaboration journey should look like. One of the first thing to do is to break the journey down into small steps or bites. So an initial first step might be to encourage users to complete their intranet profiles or add a status update.

The next step is to focus on the problems within the business, what problems could be solved using collaborative tools. The last two steps were to be realistic about what you're trying to achieve and to keep trying, Rome wasn't built in a day and encouraging individuals within your organisation isn't going to happen overnight. Keep this in mind at all times and where possible involve other people so you're not the sole advocate.

If you do all of these things then you're well on the road to a successful social intranet. Ignore any of the factors, Fear, impediments etc then you face a long uphill struggle.

14 signs you've lost the intranet plot

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:21:00 +0000

I absolutely love this blog post from the team at the intranetizen blog, if you're not currently subscribed to this blog you absolutely should be! It's a blog maintained by four intranet managers who in my mind post about the stuff other intranet managers want to read about. They linked to one of my blog posts in a recent post, which I consider a huge honour!

Anyway back to the post in question, this post called "14 signs you’ve lost the #intranet plot" lists you wont be too surprised 14 signs that you should take as evidence that the intranet is turning into something BAD! Don't do these things kids is basically what the guys are intranetizen are saying.

So what are these signs, well I've listed them here in full for you, but you 'll need to visit the intranetizen blog, for more information on why you shouldn't be implementing them.

The weather
A world clock
Empty social activity feeds
Email widgets
Links to and feeds from lots of external sites
Animated gifs
Photo of the day
A daily dilbert cartoon
A whole page page viewer
Icons
Logins
Click here - yes! I am so here with this one, click here to find out why...:-)
The word welcome
Word of the day widget

Enjoy!

[Photo credit - Steeter Seidell, Comedian by Zach Klein from Flickr]

How good is your people search?

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:56:00 +0000

Does searching for people within the organisation you work for leave you feeling frustrated, angry or worse? If it does then you might want to refer your intranet manager to a blog post on the Clear Box Consulting website, called "How good is your people finder?"

The post is a "checklist" to help intranet managers identify how "mature" their people search is, with points assigned to different functionality. The checklist is a mixture of what I hope would be fairly standard functionality and some more advanced functionality.

How does our intranet fare, that's something I'm not prepared to share!

[Photo credit - Frustrated by Martinak15]

The value of internal blogging

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:04:00 +0000

The benefits around posting technical documents, policies, guides etc to an intranet are obvious - employees need quick access to these documents and an intranet provides a structured and usually organised environment in which to publish these.

But what value is derived from encouraging employees to blog within an intranet? That's the question asked and answered in this post on the badass data science blog. .

What are the benefits of providing blogging on an intranet

The author suggests there are several reasons why blogging within an intranet is useful;

Internal blogging provides useful insights
Internal blogging builds individuals comfort with risk - this is an interesting point and one I agree with to some extent, writing a blog post and encouraging employees to comment on blog posts are certainly are good way to make them feel more comfortable with these tools.
Internal blogging is a great way to manage project updates. Again it's certainly easier in my mind to post a project update on a blog rather then send round an email to all project team members.
Internal blogging promotes visibility. This is especially important if you work in a large organisation and you want to become known as an expert in a particular area. A blog can help an individual do exactly that by allowing them to post about subjects they have an interest in.

Should you encourage blogging within your organisation

My feeling is yes - but where possible I would allow employees to post to their own blog or a blog which has a general theme rather then expect one or two individuals to contribute to a blog around a very specific subject. This is moe then likely to fail or there will be some interest in the blog initially but it will wane over time.

Law firms taking a half-hearted approach to social media

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 11:23:00 +0000

This is the title of an interesting news story on the Managing Partner website, which looks at the results of a survey of Law Firms use of social media tools. There aren't to be honest too many surprises when it comes to the social media tools that law firms are using. In summary;

"LinkedIn is by far the most popular social media platform among law firms (with 77 per cent penetration), followed by Twitter (31 per cent), Facebook (29 per cent) and YouTube (10.9 per cent)"

And further on in the article:

"Over the past year, adoption of LinkedIn by UK firms has increased dramatically. The number of partners and employees at mid-sized UK law firms that have LinkedIn accounts has typically doubled from under a quarter in 2010. In addition, the number of people following top 50 law firms on LinkedIn has almost doubled to nearly 50,000, according to Kelso Consulting research"

So according to the article and the research that was previously undertaken LinkedIn is by far the most well used Social Media tool. So why the hesitancy to use other social media tools?

Ethical considerations

One of the biggest issues for law firms is around ethical considerations, especially in the light of the Practice note issued by the Law Society around the use of social networking tools by solicitors. It's very clear from the practice note that some activities, for example friending clients on facebook are unacceptable and may be in breach of the Solicitors Regulation Authority Code of Conduct.

However usage does vary dependant on where the law firm is located. Unsurprisingly North Amercia leads the way in terms of use of an engagement with Social Media sites. UK law firms are also taking advantage of the opportunities provided by social media. So on first appearance it might appear that the use of social media tools by law firms is quite poor but actually the global use of these tools is quite encouraging.

Are employees rejecting SharePoint?

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:48:00 +0000

Now this is an article that is well worth reading if you have a spare five minutes. In it the authors discuss whether SharePoint is being rejected by employees in organisations where it has been deployed.

In the blue corner...I mean in the Yes camp is Sam Marshall from Clear Box Consulting. Sam argues that although SharePoint is a success in some respects, look beyond an organisations firewall and you'll find that SharePoint isn't being used as it was intended to be. For example blogs and My Sites, which are particularly powerful features of SharePoint 2010 have very low adoption rates.

The difference between SharePoint and a traditional intranet

Sam suggests that a major reason for the failure of SharePoint is that the way individuals interact with SharePoint is different from a traditional intranet. On SharePoint there is an expectaton that users will be active participants rather then just passive users. Sam also points out that SharePoint is inherently complicated "It’s highly complex, and some of the collaboration patterns are quite sophisticated, such as metadata, versioning and workflow. It makes it hard to selectively switch these elements off so that people can learn progressively"

The counter (No) argument is provided by Camilla Herrmann who is an internal and digital communications consultant. Camilla sets out her stall by saying yes some of the collaboration tools within SharePoint aren't great. "The wiki is very basic and full of annoying little characteristics, so it’s not really surprising if it gets little use. The discussion forum is nearly as poor" However Camilla then goes on to say that with a little tweaking the collaboration tools within SharePoint can become the most useful//powerful part of your intranet, especially where they're supported by central management.

Camilla also suggests (and I agree with her) that allowing employees to comment on items and rate documents for usefullness is a great way to get employees to "dip their toes" into collaboration.

Should you be using SharePoint

Ultimately the choice about whether you choose SharePoint or not wont come down to one individual but if you're considering using it then I would highly recommend reading this article first.

10 things that make an intranet critical and social

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:34:00 +0000

What is it that makes an intranet social and critical? Well this post, rather unsurprisingly called "10 things that make an intranet critical and social" outlines what in the authors opinion are the 10 elements that are critical to the success of an intranet.

New style social intranets focus more on people then content. Although content is still relevant
Content is authored collaboratively by anyone and the emphasis is either knowledge sharing or documentation that is useful
Anyone can contribute and everyone is involved (from CEO to PA’s)
The intranet supports work processes and helps people get their work done more efficiently
Publishing workflows and approvals are kept to a minimum
The intranet has a mix of key social features: activity streams, authoring (wiki style), networking and blogging
Outcomes are measured in terms of business performance: better and faster decision making, improved knowledge sharing etc
A community manager or team is in place alongside a light yet necessary governance policy
A mobile version of the intranet is available
Gaming constructs (gamification) play an increasingly important role as a way of rewarding contributions

Do I agree with the points made in the blog post. For the most part yes. Gaming and gamification isn't something I've looked at, although I understand the concept having signed up for and played Foursquare, although some will say Foursquare isn't actually a game. Governance is an issue I've looked at and have started working on, as it's essential in the long run, but unfortunately tends to get overlooked whenever a new intranet is being implemented.

What do you think, are there other critical factors?

[Photo credit - Condition critical from Stock.xchng}

All wrapped up!

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:45:00 +0000

Two posts in one today, the first a summary of my final run on Janathon I'd like to say the thought of finishing Janathon after 31 sometimes cold, sometimes wet and sometimes windy morning/afternoons/evenings pushed me to perform faster then ever before but that would be a lie.

I did run quite quickly but that was probably due to it being close to or below freezing when I went for my run! I've been really pleased with my efforts in January and they appear to have paid off, not just with my very impressive (at least to me) time in the Canterbury 10 mile but also in my new semi-svelte figure!

Bring on January 2013! could we make it shorter next year though?

Run summary

Distance - 5.59 miles
Time - 44:22
Runners encountered - not that many, what a surprise
Runners overtaken - 13*
Dog walkers dodged - 0

*A record and no they weren't just standing in a big group

Run summary 30 January

Distance - 3.91 miles
Time - 29:12

So that's it for Janathon 2012. I will still be blogging about the races I run in so if any Janathoners want to continue to reading my blog I'd be very happy to keep you "entertained"

[Photo credit - Simple present wrapping close up]

Canterbury 10 mile

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:16:00 +0000

So this was something of a double-header a 10 mile race and my 29th run of Janathon. I'd set my expectations for this race at around 1 hour and 20 minutes, having previously run the race in 2010 where I set a time of 1:22:17. Given that I'd run every day for the last month I was hoping I'd be a little bit fitter, despite being two years older. As it turns out I ran pretty much the perfect race, apart from slowing down when going up the hills. I really need to join a running club even it's just to do some hill training. So these were my splits, sadly they're reliant on my memory so there are some gaps.

Mile 1 - Didn't see the mile marker, but the first time I looked at my watch it said 10:41
Mile 2 - 15:53
Mile 3 : 22:23
Mile 4 : 30:33
Mile 5 : 38:23
Mile 6 : 46:03
Mile 7 : 51:13
Mile 8 : 1:01:14
Mile 9 : 1:08:19
Mile 10: 1:15:51

So some pretty quick miles towards then end, but then from about 8 miles onwards it's all downhill - which is a relief given that between miles 4 and 7 it's pretty much uphill all the way! I even had a sprint finish in my legs, thanks to another runner who said go for it. He was apparently running with a groin strain - now that's commitment! That time meant I finished 303rd out of 889 runners. You can look at the full results on the IEK Chip timing website There are supposed to be 5 mile split times listed but I cant see these at the moment.

I should also say I ran yesterday 1.35 miles in 10:51 but failed to blog about it. I don't know whether this makes me a Janathon failure or not! Tomorrow I expect I will be aching somewhat but will happily run in the knowledge that there are only two days of Janathon left and after surprising myself with this time!

Just in time!

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:58:00 +0000

A very very short post before I forget to post anything at all. I really have very little to say but promise to post something more significant over the weekend.

Run summary

Distance - 4.01 miles
Time - 32:02*

*A whole 3:45 quicker thenmy effort at the same distance yesterday. I guess this proves that I don't like running in the rain!

Just going through the motions...Janathon Run#25

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:31:00 +0000

A short post as I'm feeling a bit world weary! Running today literally felt like I was just going through the motions, drink some water, put kit on, warm up, start watch, start running. Given that I've run every day for the last 25 days I'm not surprised but I'm hoping it's not just me.

As it stands there are only 6 days left until the end of Janathon (boy has this month flown by) and I have to say I'm actually going to miss it. Although I do have to get up early tomorrow and Friday to do a run, which I'm definitely not going to miss!

I'm also pleasantly surprised that;

I haven't been ill in January
I haven't picked up any injuries, unless you count a pain in my right bum cheek, which I told myself I wasn't going to mention...dammit

Run summary

Distance - 3.91 miles
Time - 29:46

Runners encountered - loads
Dog walkers dodged - 0
Cobblestones crept across - thousands

A very fine rain...Janathon Run#24

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:36:00 +0000


Part of my 5.5 mile run route*

A short update today as I'm busy at work and am out this evening so not able to blog later. Today wasn't a day for the faint-hearted, cold, miserable and wet was a good summary of the weather and worse the rain was that horrible type that seems to soak you even though it wasn't raining that heavily :-(

Despite that I manged to drag myself outside into the "fresh" air. Unsurprisingly that weren't that many runners out and those that were out had plenty of rueful smiles!

*According to the many notices I see along this part of my run Thames Water plan to turn this part of the river front into some sort of super sewer. What is it with me and sewers?

Run summary

Distance - 5.59 miles
Time - 46:42

Runners encountered - Not many
Runners overtaken - 3
Runners who overtook me - 1
Dog walkers dodged - 2
Puddles stepped in - lots
Number of times drenched - 1

Jokeathon

Why did the weather forecaster move to another country?

Because the weather didn’t agree with him.

[Photo credit - Canary Wharf from Flickr]

Artichoke hill...Janathon Run#23

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:50:00 +0000

It really does look like this

Here's a famous fact you may or may not know. Artichoke Hill is one of the places long running Police show the Bill was filmed it's also part of the 3.91 run I undertook this afternoon. Or rather it would be If was to run up Artichoke Hill.

Unfortunately

Artichoke Hill isn't that much of a hill
I run across/past it rather then up it

But never let it be said that I don't grasp an opportunity to promote an unknown part of London. Even if it was unknown to me until I looked it up! If you have the time you really must have a look at some of the results for Artichoke Hill on Flickr

Run summary

Distance - 3.91 miles
Time - 29:05
Runners encountered - a few
Dog walkers dodged - 0
Famous, but sadly now defunct sets run past - 1
Less salubrious establishments run past - 1

Jokeathon

I thought I'd struggle to find a clean joke about Artichokes*, how wrong was I...

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Artichokes

Artichokes, who?

Artichokes when he eats too fast!

*Not the greatest joke in the world admittedly

[Photo credit - Artichoke Hill from Flickr]

An almighty stink...Janathon Run#22

noreply@blogger.com (James Mullan) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:11:00 +0000

So today was another day of firsts, the first running on this particular route and the first time I'd run 40* miles in a week. If you saw me tweet about my run and looked at my running route, you might have noticed that I also ran past a sewage plant. I can confirm that yes it did stink and the wind wasn't even vaguely blowing in my direction.

Aside from the sewage plant, which I promise not to mention again, the run took me through some of the Ebbsfleet valley and up close and personal to Ebbsfleet international station, home of HS1. I'd love to tell you more about the plan for the Ebbsfleet valley, which I believe includes building a few homes but sadly the Land Securities website doesn't work and I'm not even using IE! We'll just have to wait and see I guess!

Run summary

Distance - 9.36 miles
Time - 1:17:53

Runners encountered - 3
Dog walkers dodged - 8
Sewage plants passed - 1
Sprints past sewage plants - 1

Jokeathon

I tried I really did but I couldn't find anything appropriate so no joke today I'm afraid.

*Okay okay it was 39.9 miles this week!