deal architect

Technology Innovation and Law Firms

They come up with the maddening language that is influencing open source licensing, privacy and compliance debates, intellectual property protection. But lawyers themselves can be pretty conservative when it comes to using technology.

Or are they? I spent some time this weekend with Walter Aye, who runs a small law firm in Tampa. His son plays chess with my kids. And he was complaining about laptop batteries running out during court. Hard drives not being fast enough. His customizing his PCs with specific hard drive brands. Heat generated by chips. Failure rate of motherboards. I had to double check he had not taken up a part time job as a service technician. 

This survey shows law firms have been investing heavily in technology - the dramatic shift from WordPerfect to MS Word to the leverage of electronic document management.

The survey does not even cover law firm blogging (as this San Francisco firm is), podcasting for lawyers, web based depositions.

Of course, this ABA web site on technology for law firms appears to mostly have articles pre-2002. Yellow pads will continue to still be very popular.

Competing on Analytics

Tom Davenport has a neat article in Optimize on creating an analytical culture and has a number of examples of (mostly) customer and profitability centric analyics. A few weeks ago, Businessweek had an even more fascinating article Math will rock your world which explored how "quants" are revolutionizing many aspects of CRM, search, other areas of pattern recognition.

When we look at how many cycles the average company spends in developing, revising, re-revising, politickng its annual budget, we know the state of analytics in most companies is frozen in the 80s. The new analytics, and those coming out of the supply chain (see LARTE - Location Aware Real Time Enterprise), are pretty revolutionary and I liked the portion where Tom talks about building an analytical culture. 

With one caveat. An earlier generation of analytics has destroyed many an airline. Using  yield management airlines still try and optimize inventory pricing. Many got too smart for their own good, and lost price leadership to the Southwests who delivered fairer and more predictable (and not always cheaper) pricing.

For all the left brain stuff these analytics deliver, organizations still need their right brain functions.

SleepyCat or Jet Lagged?

Om Malik reports this open source story from S. Korea (and elsewhere in world). I had written about City of Mannheim earlier. The target is Microsoft, but are Oracle and other large software vendors far behind?

Technology Innovation and Daytona 500

The Daytona 500. 3,400 pound monsters. 200 miles-per-hour around a track that is 2.5 miles long - a lap every 45 seconds.  Incredible G forces.  Cars within inches of each other.  Lots of decisions and adjustments  real-time.  Non-stop for 4 hours. No commercial breaks for the drivers.

NASCAR stock car racing has always been about the driver, not as much the car. NASCAR bans  high-tech wizardry during the race.  But as the 48th Daytona 500 kicks off, it is impressive to see the way technology has changed the way drivers and crews prepare  for the race. And how the race is tracked. And broadcast. Of course, the best in automobile technology gets rolled out each year.

Gentlemen - start your laptops, GPS, HDTV....

 

Bloggington, DC

They say Washington is 60 square miles of real estate surrounded by reality. Washington has some of the best parties in the diplomatic quarter and with all the lobbyists. And some of the best journalists writing about the craft of politics and the characters. And the rest of us go through life amused at the goings-on.

Blog world is becoming like DC.  We have media writing about bloggers - positive and negative. We have chic Web 2.0 parties. And then you have reality - CIOs control over a trillion dollars in IT budgets. They are just amused at the goings-on in blog world.

Politicians who last spend a lot of time in their constituencies. Us bloggers need to do a lot more with CIOs and buyers rather than VCs, vendors, analysts and other bloggers. True North is on Main Street not tech.memeorandum.

Is Innovation Dying?

may be of too fast a heart beat if you see these stats from the US Patent Office

It took 75 years to get from patent No.1 to patent 1 million. It has taken less than one tenth of that time to go from 6 million to 7 million patents.

In a related story, when it comes to patents, plan to take to trip to  Luckenbach Marshall, TX  as this article lays out. Willie and Waylon and the boys will be waiting.

Web 2.0 in Enterprise

Jeff Nolan reports on a panel on the convergence - and related confusion. Zoli Erdos has a minute by minute here.

Lots of people and the audience talking across each other. But since people are involved probably leads to conversation and collaboration technologies - let's see that will affect employees, customers, vendors, partners...

Time Shifting

I have had a busier blogging week than usual. Let you in on a secret. I have been posting to future dates so some of the posts which showed up this week were done a few days prior. So please don't send me kudos if you think I was blogging at 3 am.

Blog world is great for instant analysis and feedback. Journalists and analysts I know are jealous at the speed at which blogs react. What we do not do as good a job about is planning ahead and anticipating events and developing more substantive analysis .I say we - I am sure many bloggers do a pretty good job of that. I have not so far. So I am trying to space out the posts, write more off line on planes etc. Need to get an off-line blog editor.

There. That plus 6 quarters may buy you a cup at Starbucks.  While you are blogging on-line?

AlwaysOn Power List

AlwaysOn names its movers and shakers in tech

My perspective - not enough enterprise representation. I may be hard on IBM, EDS, EMC, Verizon, ATT, Accenture on my blog but how you ignore $ 300+ b in revenues between them?

How can you not have at least one from Gartner. Forrester, TPI on the list - between them they influence hundreds of billions in corporate deals each year?

I did like the fact that the list is global - Skype, Infosys, Baidu, MySQL, SAP execs are on the list...

When Elephants Dance

I smiled when I saw this entry on the EDS blog  where it says the "EDS Agility alliance" is launching a publication called "Synnovation".

Who is in the EDS Agility alliance? Every major vendor (notable exceptions IBM, HP, Verizon, ATT, Accenture).

They say when elephants dance, chickens should be very afraid. Come on Sergey, Marc, Nandan, Linus...why are you not shivering?