Dennis Kennedy

	Web DennisKennedy.com

« October 2003 | Main | December 2003 »

November 26, 2003

Best Practices for Wireless Network Security

Susan (no relation) Kennedy's article, "Best Practices for Wireless Network Security is the best practical article on wireless security I've seen. She identifies eight areas of greatest risks and then sets out the steps you need to take to address each risk. Great stuff.

Posted by dmk at 04:05 PM

November 24, 2003

John Porcaro Summarizes Key Points from KM World & Intranets Conference

John Porcaro at Microsoft has posted notes from the recent KM World and Intranets Conference.

John says:

"We all took pages of notes, but rather than have you read all of that, we digested everything into the top things we learned (or already knew and agree with)."

I liked this one best: A good Intranet will “give people answers, not documents.”

Another cool thing about blogs - finding prioritized summaries made by knowledgeable people.

Posted by dmk at 02:50 PM

Bob Lewis on SWOT Strategic Planning

Infoworld's Bob Lewis writes the "Advice Line" column and today's column covers the issue of strategic planning using the SWOT (strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threat) approach. After rejecting an unproductive approach, Bob describes a great approach to this type of planning, focusing on steps too often left out.

Posted by dmk at 02:44 PM

November 21, 2003

Dave Pollard on Drucker on Innovation

A cool discussion and summary by Dave Pollard on Peter Drucker's approach to innovation.

Pollard concludes:

"In the last three years business innovation has gone from business' Job One to an insignificant part of corporate strategies, as executives have become obsessed instead with slashing costs and heads in an insane race to the bottom, quality and customer be damned. Such an approach is, like seemingly everything else in vogue in the Bush era, short-sighted and unsustainable. You cannot cut yourself to greatness. It's time to start a new bandwagon for business innovation."

Posted by dmk at 03:17 PM

November 19, 2003

The New Generation of Tablet PCs

Dave Coursey at Anchordesk has an early preview and assessment of the next generation of Tablet PCs.

I have also found Tabula PC to be a good source for Tablet PC developments.

Posted by dmk at 10:41 PM

November 18, 2003

Seven Easy Ways for Law Firms to Throw Away Money on Technology

Technology spending has grown to comprise 4 to 6% of the average law firm’s budget. The sad story is that many law firms, despite their best plans and intentions, are throwing many of their technology dollars down the drain.

I am talking about real money, not potential savings, not speculative productivity numbers, and not “potential” new clients from web sites or “knowledge management” efforts. There are many ways to toss away money on technology. How many of the following ways to waste your budget apply to you?

1. Do not align technology projects with business goals. The results: projects that never get completed or produce any benefit and diversion of dollars away from great projects to pet projects.

2. Do not quantify and measure results. The results: projects with costs far greater than any benefits and lingering projects on which the plug should have been pulled long ago.

3. Buy new software when you already own software that would perform the task you require. The result: your losses compound as you add training costs for the new software to the costs of the software.

4. Be unaware of all of the legal software alternatives. The results: paying too much for software that sort of fits your needs when better options exist.

5.Do not explore volume licensing options and, in particular, new Microsoft licensing options. The results: paying a higher price than necessary and, in the case of Microsoft products, incurring unnecessary upgrade costs.

6. Have a technology committee without experience, expertise and a clearly-defined mission. The result: even simple projects take years to make decisions about and IT staff operates on its own.

7. Fail to educate your IT staff about your legal practice and the unique issues involved. The results: ill-advised decisions, misdirected priorities and technology gaffes involving clients.

And these seven ways represent just the tip of the iceberg. You may also be putting money into technologies already known to be on their way out, locking up your data in proprietary systems, buying overpowered or underpowered hardware, paying insufficient attention to security and antivirus issues, and creating difficulties in communicating with clients. You have to find a lot of extra hours to bill to be able to toss away that kind of money. The best route, of course, is to take a good hard look at what you may be doing wrong, refocus your efforts and save money you are wasting for technology that helps you.

Posted by dmk at 09:06 AM

What Gets Law Firms Fired

From The Law Marketing Portal: a transcript of a discussion among three corporate general counsel on "What Gets Law Firms Fired."

It should be no surprise that the participants validate the statistics that communications problems lead to firings of law firms, but the comments on the panel should be instructive to many lawyers.

Posted by dmk at 08:58 AM

November 16, 2003

November issue of Law Practice Today Now Live

November's issue of the webzine Law Practice Today is now live. The theme for November is "Wireless Technologies." There is a nice collection of articles on the subject, including my column on links great wireless resources.

The theme for December is "New Year, New Practice" and we are looking for pieces that discuss new and innovative approaches to the practice of law. For example, I'll be writing a piece on "virtual law firms." If you have something you'd like to contribute, please e-mail me.

Posted by dmk at 12:01 PM

"Idea Practitioners" - This Sounds Like Me

A very interesting article by Thomas Davenport H. James Wilson in Optimize Magazine discusses the subject of "idea practitioners" - "someone who has developed a "practice" of idea implementation, a task that's much harder than idea generation. Idea practitioners determine what makes sense for their companies, modify the ideas to suit their needs, and mobilize their organizations to make those real. In many cases, they're idea creators and translators as well as users. They take risks and often use hard-earned social capital to advance ideas they care about."

There are a zillion "strategic plans" gathering dust in binders on shelves. The key is putting the ideas into action. Talking is easy. What I like is putting ideas to work and making things happen.

This article is fascinating in its approach to this subject. I enjoyed it, too, because it places its finger on one of the things I enjoy most.

Posted by dmk at 11:54 AM

November 13, 2003

Myths about Software in Corporate Legal Departments

Pat O'Donnell's article "8 Myths About Corporate Software," is a must-read for lawyers in corporate legal departments that have been slow to adopt the use of technology.

While it may surprise some to see that this type of article still has to be written in 2003, many corporate legal departments are dropping the ball on easy, solid technology efforts that would control legal costs, manage projects and law firms, and generally improve their work and results.

Because the return on investment for technology in corporate legal departments can usually be shown fairly easily, more legal departments should be questioning the slow adoption approach.

Posted by dmk at 12:02 PM

November 12, 2003

A Five Star Book on Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession

I've written about lawyers and KM here and here and keep a list of links to KM and law resources, so I like to think that I am familiar with the subject.

I just finished Gretta Rusanow's book, "Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer," and it impressed the heck out of me.

I'm impressed with her thoroughness, the way they she is able to divide KM processes and approaches into logical structures and units and her common sense approach. There is a ton of useful practical information in this book and I don't know of any firm embarking on a KM project who would not benefit from this book.

Rusanow emphasizes two key questions that many firms do not ask themselves enough when it comes to any technology project: is the project aligned with our business goals and do we have a way to measure the success or failure of the project?

She gives you a great structure to use when considering KM projects and her checklists of what the people involved in the project need to do could easily serve as a job description. She makes the case for a Chief Knowledge Officer better than anyone else I have seen.

My only caveat is that she does not cover specific technology or software solutions. My first reaction to that was a little negative, but I think that her approach to anlyzing your needs and overview of how to do what you want will help you more in picking an appropriate platform than putting mini-reviews, which would be quickly dated, of various software into the book.

I really liked the way she took two chapters and applied the same principles to legal departments and solo lawyers. That illustrated to me the strength of her approach.

Great stuff. The book is as good a one-volume KM reference for lawyers as I could imagine.

Posted by dmk at 07:20 PM

ABA TechShow 2004 Updates

We have added an RSS feed to the ABA TechShow 2004 web site.

Also debuting today is the ABA TechShow 2004 e-news, a monthly email newsletter with updates and information about TechShow 2004, useful tech tips from Dan Pinnington and Jim Calloway, and more surprises to come. You may subscribe to the newsletter by visiting the ABA TechShow 2004 web site and entering the relevant info in the form at the bottom of the page.

Posted by dmk at 06:56 PM

November 11, 2003

Remembering Angels on Veteran's Day

Because it's Veteran's Day and the Jessica Lynch story is front and center today, I've been thinking about my great aunt, Eleanor Garen, who retired as an Army major after being a POW in the Philippines during World War II. As an army nurse, her experiences included work on both Bataan and Corregidor under extreme conditions before the surrender of Corregidor and her capture. She spent several years as a POW in the Santo Tomas prison camp Manila with a group of army nurses who were known as the "Angels of Bataan."

After Aunt Eleanor's death, I ended up with her papers and materials, including items and documents from the prison camp, which are now displayed at Northwestern Hospital and the Michigan's Finest military museum in Frankenmuth, Michigan. Some of those papers and a series of interviews with my great aunt were instrumental in the writing of Beth Norman's highly-praised book, "We Band of Angels, which tells their compelling and little known story.

When I grew up, we really only knew that she had been a POW in World War II and not much else, other than that she didn't have the highest opinion of McArthur, who was evacuated from the Philippines before the end stage. I did know that she had a fabulous sense of humor and a commitment to education. Her gift of $1,000 on my high school graduation, an immense amount to me at the time, came out of her belief in the value of education and because she wanted to recognize me for being the first in the family to go to college. Ironically, I later learned that she graduated from Northwestern Hosptial's nursing school in the 1930s and attended a variety of college classes most of the rest of her life. I now think that I am the second person in my family to go to college.

I know that my Aunt Eleanor never really told anyone much about her story because, as she said, she didn't see herself as having done anything special and she didn't think people really wanted to hear about her experiences.

This book tells her story and it's been gratifying to know how many people do care about her story. There are very few of the "Angels" still alive today, which is sad because they do have a special place in our history.

When I looked through the boxes I had after Aunt Eleanor's death, I really wanted to make sure that her story didn't stay locked in those in boxes in a basement. With the help of Susan Sacharski at Northwestern and others, we got some that material and more to Beth Norman. Beth Norman worked very hard and succeeded in telling the great story of these women. This book is compelling and will definitely touch you. I definitely recommend that you add it to your reading list.

Posted by dmk at 09:54 PM

November 07, 2003

Cool Blawg Presentation via Blog

What Blogs Can Do for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers is a cool new approach to doing presentations via blogs by Carolyn Elefant and Jerry Lawson. It has great content and is a highly inventive use of the blog form.

I think the "blog presentation" approach makes great sense as a way to repurpose a presentation on the web. My opinion, however, is that this approach is too "texty" for a live presentation and PowerPoint, used well, is a better tool.

Posted by dmk at 10:54 AM

November 06, 2003

The Dirty Little Secret of Spam Filtering

I don't answer my phone anymore because of the pervasiveness of telemarketers. Leave me a message and I'll call you back. The other day I was home and the phone rang 14 times during the day, without a single voicemail message. I assume that they were all telemarketing calls.

The fact is that telemarketers have ruined the phone system. We no longer call people in the evening because we know that they won't pick up the phone.

So, we switched to e-mail for personal communication. Now it has become another marketing vector and people are now lamenting the future death of e-mail because of spam.

Enter spam filtering. It's now US$600 million business.

But, is the cure for spam worse than the problem? I shudder when I even think of laws designed to prevent spam. Talk about the probability of unintended consequences. I'm not sure if I can even e-mail someone I don't know who happens to live in California.

Spam filtering software and systems have now caused their own unintended consequence, and it is a serious one.

Buzz Bruggeman got me thinking about this issue with his recent post on spam filtering. Buzz noted that a number of people had told him that he hadn't responded to their e-mails and he didn't know that they had sent him anything. He also noticed when he checked his spam holding file that there were 2,500 blocked messages that never got to his inbox.

This is important.

I've had people contact me about not getting e-mails about some fairly important matters, only to find that their spam filters had treated my messages as spam through content filtering, in certain cases because they interpreted my innocuous use of a word as an "adult" use of the word (think "bare," for example). It used to be that I knew that if someone didn't reply to my e-mail, it was because they didn't want to reply. Now, I increasingly wonder whether the message even got to their inbox for them to decide. As IT departments move to thermonuclear level spam filters, it's hard to know what will get through.

So, here's the dirty little secret of spam filters. They have fundamentally broken the trust and confidence that was at the root of the whole e-mail system. Fundamentally broken the whole system.

If I can't know for certain that I am getting the e-mail being sent to me that I want to see and that I can't know whether my recipients get my e-mails because I don't know what kind of hyperaggessive spam filter they might be using (or, in some case, might be employed at a server level without their knowledge), then where am I? Do I have to resort to calling to be sure that you get my e-mail? Am I back to hand delivery?

The all to clear answer is that I have to look to other options. That's sad. I love e-mail. I used to love it when the phone rang.

The death of e-mail is probably exaggerated. The relegation of e-mail to a secondary form of communication, however, has become all but inevitable.

Spam itself might have broken the e-mail system, I'll admit, but in other ways. Unfortunately, spam filtering may have broken it at the root level of trust.

I'd like to be wrong on this, but I don't think that I am.

Posted by dmk at 12:29 PM

The Subtext of the Reagan Movie Controversy

As it turns out, I was reading over the last few days the new collection of Ronald Reagan's letters, Reagan: A Life in Letters, which I highly recommend. If you want to understand what people who lament the lost art of letter writing mean, this collection will show you. Reagan, who apparently wrote over 10,000 letters, is a master of the craft of letter writing. Whether the simple gracious thank you, words of advice, stories or plotical arguments, these letters offer great examples of excellent letter writing.

Now, that may be a surprise to some. I was surprised that I was staying up late, and not blogging, as I read.

I realize that there is a political component to all of this and that people's opinions on Reagan are pretty well set, as the recent TV movie controversy demonstrates. One thing about Reagan is that you always knew where he stood politically - you see great consistency throughout these letters. I've seen people who oppose Reagan politically say things about him personally that shock me. I was living in the DC area when Reagan was shot and I sometimes feel that people who didn't live there were not as affected by the event of those who were there. I also enjoyed the fact that when we watched the Redskins games on Sundays, we always knew that our president was watching, too.

I've always seen a great separation between Reagan the individual and Reagan the political figure. That, to me, is a lot of what is at play in the recent controversy over the Reagan TV movie.

Here's what I think the subtext is that matters. Reagan is very close to dying. There have been a number of signals to that effect recently.

The root issue, no matter how much people want to dress it up and wave the censorship and right wing control flags, is that the concern at this time is not for Reagan the political figure. The concern, instead, is for Reagan the individual and his family as he moves toward what he referred to as "the sunset of my life" in his letter to the world about his diagnosis with Alzheimer's (worth a second look for how to handle such an event with grace and dignity), so that his sunset can happen with dignity and respect for him, his family and the people who revere him.

The political gloves can be put aside until later. It is a matter of public politeness at a time when public politeness seems all but non-existent. If you read these letters, you will want to give him and his family quiet and dignity at this time where the end seems to be very near and, who knows, you might even see him in a new light.

Posted by dmk at 11:50 AM

November 04, 2003

Ten Ways to Address Security Concerns in IT Contracts

I've posted the November issue of Dennis Kennedy's Practical Technology Contract Review News on my web site.

The feature article this month is called "Ten Ways to Address Security Concerns in IT Contracts," a fairly self-explanatory title. In addition to pointers to some useful resources, I also provide a tip on protecting customer data in contracts and discuss a few details about survivability clauses.

Posted by dmk at 03:55 PM