KnowledgeForward

There was a seminar this morning on E-Discovery that focused on the intersection between the law and IT with regards to information retention and discovery. There were presentations by Joseph L. Fogel and Hillard M. Sterling (attorneys at Freeborn & Peters LLP), Karen Hobert (Burton Group analyst for Collaboration and Content Management), and Trent Henry (Burton Group analyst for Security and Risk Management Strategies). Then I moderated a panel with the four speakers. The audience was about one third lawyers and two thirds IT people. E-Discovery is not my normal area of research, but I found the issues and discussion fascinating and thought it could be useful to others if I posted my notes here.

• I had an interesting discussion with Joe before the seminar about how the courts reconcile the leading edge nature of e-discovery and the conservative nature of many large corporations when it comes to IT. It’s all to easy for someone who hasn’t been a part of IT migration and upgrade plans to see a brochure for some great search, categorization, or discovery tool, take that as a proof point that a high level of information is reasonably accessible, and then assume any corporation that isn’t using such technology is just being obstinate. I’m not a lawyer, but Joe pointed to a Rule 26(b)2)(B) that says “a party need not provide discovery of electronically stored information from sources that the party identifies as not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost. …”. This market is obviously at the leading edge of its growth curve judging by the number of disconnected technology markets, number and size of vendors, and confusion among IT shops in what to do. So how quickly are organizations expected to be able to adopt the newest technology and best practices? Joe’s answer is that, like much else in law, it depends on the judge you get. There is a wide variance in the level of understanding of technical matters that judges have and that can strongly influence whether he/she deems an organization to be lax in its duties for disclosure.
• It was made clear that policies for retention or auto-deletion of information have allow for modification due to potential pending litigation. Rule 37(f) (”safe harbor”) was cited. To me this means the policies have to be flexible and there needs to be a path of communication between legal and IT so that they know who to tell in IT that auto-deletion must stop and that it can be stopped quickly once that order is sent.
• Hillard mentioned that for most of the large judgments that are handed down for inability to disclose requested information in a reasonable amount of time, there is usually a historical pattern of non-compliance present. An angry judge then sees a pattern of obstruction and decides to make a statement.
• There still seems to be a legal limbo between countries that affects global US-based companies. US discovery laws may order the disclosure of information from, say, the London office of a company. But stricter British privacy laws may make compliance with that order illegal in England. During the panel the attorneys were asked how that is resolved and it seems the answer is that issue is still up for debate.

There is a lot more depth that was discussed, but needless to say one morning wasn’t enough for me to feel my opinions would be worth much. This was just my first taste of a topic I hadn’t been exposed to before. Just as we had three groups in the room - legal, IT security, and IT communication/collaboration/content - many organizations need to build bridges between these groups before e-discovery issues come to a head.

There have been scores of great presentations at our Catalyst conference this week, but I wanted to take time to single one out that was a bit outside the norm.

Joe Miller (VP of Platform Technology at Linden Lab) did a presentation on Second Life, focusing on its collaboration, community, and enterprise aspects. From conversations at lunch, it seems attendees were pleasantly surprised how many enterprises have a presence in Second Life to interact with their customers. And even more surprised how many have a presence for their own internal use as well. It’s well known that IBM has made great use of Second Life as an outreach system, but Joe described how it is used internally by 5,000 IBM employees for uses such as gatherings of retirees and fellows.

I was speaking to Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services after the presentation and they have looked extensively into Second Life. Personally, I think the concept of a virtual bookstore would combine the best of the instant access via search that the web provides with the serendipity that browsing bookshelves can provide. Alas, Amazon doesn’t do that quite yet. But there does seem to be something important about spacial relationships. He mentioned that their Second Life real estate is located near that of a number of other retailers, forming a cluster of online retailers. The concept of being “near” the other retailers is one that could only be realized in a virtual world.

One conclusion we came to in our discussion is that it’s difficult to really comprehend the potential value of a tool like Second Life without actually using it. From a textual or verbal description, it seems one could communicate and collaborate just as well with a group of distributed people over IM without the virtual browser around it. But then again, people seem to like gathering in person to communicate information that could be conveyed over the phone as well. There’s value in personal contact and gestures and some of that seems to apply to a virtual environment as well.

 Reading a few postings on Twitter lately (such as this one on /Message ) I was reminded of a consistent piece of party planning advice I’ve seen many times.  Despite all the technical details about seating (assigned seating? let people sit where they want? force them to stand?), themes, and how structured to make the evening, they always mention that who you invite to the party is the most important factor in success.  I’ll define a successful party as one where people having a good time and/or getting something out of it such as business or social connections.  If the people you invite mesh well and have something to say, it makes all the difference.

I think the same applies to collaborative and social technologies as well.  Is Twitter a good technology that plugs one into a social network with disarming simplicity or a bad technology that mirrors our tendency to want to be connected whether it matters or not?  Like a good party, Stowe Boyd points out it is who your “friends” are that matters, not the technology.  Show what a set of people who are not at all like you, uninteresting to you, or maybe even just plain dumb are doing on the technology and one can paint Twitter to look pretty bad.  Show what a set of interesting, thoughtful people that have similar interests to you are doing and it paints a more favorable picture. 

The same could be said of virtual worlds like SecondLife, blogs, wikis, bookmarking, and tagging as well.  They are judged too often by the functional aspects of the technology because those are readily apparent, rather than what truly matters which is who is using them and how.  All these technologies provide different takes on the infrastructure for social interaction, but it’s the users that make the party.

Today’s thought provoker though comes from Dilbert:

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20070321.html

In case you can’t see the picture, it’s a riff on e-mail free Fridays, a phenomenon more popular in the press than in corporate America. It seems the idea is to reduce dependency on e-mail and/or e-mail overload by banning it once a week. If done once, I could see it as an interesting experiment to re-familiarize people who have forgotten how to use any other communication method with alternatives (face-to-face communication and phones no doubt). But there’s no reason Friday’s emails are any less important than any other days. And the examples I’ve seen in real life generally involve quite a few loopholes (clients, partners, emergencies, etc.).

If organizations feel e-mail is being overused I would prefer to see carrots to encourage better alternatives rather than sticks. Instead of instituting e-mail free Fridays, organizations can take tougher, but ultimately more useful steps to improve communications (from the presentation I’m giving in Las Vegas in May):

• Encourage or force usage of unfamiliar tools. Establish patterns of behavior by selecting ways to push usage of underused tools (place registration for the golf outing on the intranet if people aren’t using the intranet for example)
• Make sure the tools are as accessible as possible. Built into standard builds, links from the desktop, contextual access, provide clients for other devices as needed
• Be the first to say “gimme a call”. Create collaborative discussions after responses go 3 iterations or more than a page.

I don’t see e-mail free Fridays as anything more than a gimmick or band-aid for dysfunctional corporate culture. But meeting-free Mondays is something I’d definitely back!

I performed an interesting experiment the other day.  In preparing for a presentation on which communication and collaboration tools should be used in different cases, I decided to explore why businesspeople communicate.  I’m not sure if I’m a representative sample of this audience, but I was conveniently available.  I randomly trolled my emails (sent and received) and came up with a set of purposes that seems to encompass all the emails I send and receive from a business point of view (might have to alter this for personal use).  They include:

• File
• CYA
• Connect
• Validate
• Inform
• Confirm
• Feed back
• Negotiate
• Author
• Brainstorm
• Swarm

Email seems to be involved from CYA to Negotiate. IM has a narrower scope, gong from connect to confirm. Collaborative workspaces span a broad range that includes filing and everything from connect to feed back.

Connect and validate encompass the touchy-feely part of this spectrum and encompass most of the communications that involve simple reaching out (”Just wanted to touch base and say hello”=connect) or pat someone on the back (”Hang in there! You’re doing a great job”=validate).

I’d be interested to hear from readers of this blog to see if there are communications or collaboration that involves technology and doesn’t fit into one of these categories.

I was talking to Irene Greif the other day (she heads the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Group at IBM Research) about attention management and she made a good point that IM has developed a cultural protocol to ask “do you have a minute?”  I agree – in my experience it is pretty common to begin IMs with a polite query or “hi” to verify availability and pauses are usually not considered insulting. That got me thinking how odd it was that at a time when computer users are generally taken to be inconsiderate lunkheads in regards to interrupting other people, a social convention has developed on its own that is both polite and useful.

I would like to see a study on how the cultural conventions around communication technologies emerge and how they evolve.  It seems clear to me that some technologies have established rude (or anti-social or interruptive) conventions while others have developed nicer ones.  Talkers seem to be intolerant of pauses on cellphone conversations with people driving but IM pauses are fine.  E-mail blasts are very common while IM blasts are rare.  Probably 80% of the difference is due to technological differences – IM is asynchronous while the cellphone is synchronous so pauses are more tolerable. IM has a smaller window so people keep messages shorter.  But I’d be very interested in the 20% or so that is simply due to the cultural norms of the types of people that first get into the technology, the cultural attitudes of the time around responsiveness and formality, and the popular activities these technologies become a part of.  My thesis is that our social norms for how we relate to communication technology do evolve, but they are anchored to the people that first evangelized the technology and the time they lived in.

Unfortunately, it seems difficult to change people’s habits once they are established.  After getting an unsolicited phone call from a local business yesterday I realized how quiet my evenings have been since a combination of legislation and caller ID sharply decreased the number of dinnertime soliciting interruptions.  I just hope something can shape the cultural use of e-mail to avoid the senseless e-mail blasts, spam, and one word “OK” answers.