September 17th, 2008

Fraser Kelton gave an interesting talk on some ideas he has developed around some unintended side effects of this Web 2.0 thing. He outlined four trends that have the potential to create big problems for the adoption of new technologies. 

1. Open source and the commoditization of hardware: The costs of entry are so much lower today and as a result there are many, many, many new startups. Many of them are not good.
2. API’s and <blink>cloud computing</blink>: Small companies can stand on the shoulder’s of giants. They are trying to leverage existing innovation but most only offer a single “new” feature and since it is relatively easy to do, there are many copycats.
3. Blogs and aggregators: There is a tremendous increase in the velocity, frequency and volume of information. There is simply too much information about new companies to even attempt a thorough vetting.
4. Social features and read/write web: User generated content is a great thing, however, it does create a lock-in situation for many users. If you have been an avid user of Flickr and have built a network up around your photos you are unlikely to want to move to a new and better platform. Not a technical roadblock per se, but definitely a hindrance to innovation and new platforms in certain markets. Anyone up for developing a new and better photo sharing site?

Albert Wenger, a VC from Union Square Ventures gave a great talk on <blink>cloud computing</blink>. So what *is* cloud computing? A mere buzzword? The latest trend? Clearly there is something going on here. There was a huge public outcry when Dell attempted to copyright the phrase “cloud computing”. 

The concepts behind cloud computing have been around for over 40 years. John McCarthy, a computer scientist and inventor of Lisp stated in 1961:

“If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility… The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry.”

The industry has touted utility computing and grid computing and neither technology was widely adopted. Virtualization may be the technology that will make cloud computing a reality. Tony Chung has a nice write up here.

Wenger defined four principles which define cloud computing for him:

1. No more machines! (Amazon’s EC2 is therefore not in the cloud)
2. Code over configuration (Cloud computing should not require the “arcane knowledge passed on by the secret society of sysadmins”)
3. Applications can scale without unreasonable demands on developers
4. Making it easy to bring web services together

I started out this morning at People Powered Products … but it wasn’t what I thought it was about. A quick permanent redirect across the hall landed me in Knowledge Sharing at Ideo presented by Doug Solomon and Gentry Underwood. Much more interesting for me. This talk outlined a year long project at Ideo to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the company. Knowledge workers face ambiguous and dynamic problems on a daily basis and must adapt and be innovative in real time. The goals of the project were to empower teams to learn from one another, connect geographically seperated offices and enable global collaboration. They came up with 7 lessons that are transferrable to other organizations:

1. Build pointers to people
2. Help people help themselves (wikis, portals)
3. Keep it simple and intuitive (wysiwyg, LDAP, auto-navigation)
4. Go where people already are (leverage existing blogs, email distros)
5. Reward individual participation
6. Aggregate the myriad of voices (self organizing streams of information)
7. Iterate early and often (Fail early and often to succeed quickly)

According to this AmLaw Daily article, Still Loading: Law Firms lag behind the Rest of Corporate America on the Web, “there are still law firms of substantial size that have relatively poor Web site offerings, surprisingly poor Web sites.”

Yet as Sonny Cohen pointed out in his previous blog post, Award Winning Websites Announced By Web Marketing Association, legal websites that get their web design right are recognized and rewarded.

So what’s the real story here? Are law firms’ web designs lagging or worthy of lauding?

If you’re comparing American law firms to corporate America, apparently you’ll find lag in the area of website usability, interactivity, and innovation in design. But many law firms are going beyond “brochure-like” content towards client-centric and service-oriented site designs.

I appreciated Sonny Cohen’s comments on the AmLaw article, saying “the targeted personas for law firms are clients, prospects, potential lateral transfers and first year lawyers” and basically pointing out to other commenters that matching the needs of the users of the law firm’s website is more important than criticizing it based on their own personally-formed beliefs. Plus you need to tie the design into the firms business objectives – and being bookmarked isn’t a business objective. A persona-based approach to website design makes a lot of sense to me, and metrics for judging the effectiveness are a must.

The AmLaw article ends with a ranking list of the Top 100 AmLaw firms web sites. One note it does give you as a takeaway is that you can’t correlate web site design with revenue per partner. Yet without metrics there’s no way to prove this takeaway one way or another.

I found the AmLaw article informative but the comments were just as important – when analyzing effectiveness of a design or handing out rewards, make sure the criteria for judging the content and design matches that of the users of the site. Nicely done.