The Many Faces of Mike McBride

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Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Fourth Rule of Knowledge Workers - Blocking is Somewhat Pointless

It's been a little while since I wrote anything in this series, Part 3 was way back on June 21st, which just goes to show how time can really get away fro you! So, here's the next topic for discussion, why blocking social networking sites may just be pointless.

First, let's examine the reasons, as I see them, that many management and IT types give for blocking.

1. It's not productive, it leads to people wasting time instead of working.
2. It's dangerous, employees might leak confidential information or just say something that makes us look bad.
3. We're worried about virus and malware exploits coming from social networks, or bandwidth being unavailable for other uses.

Of these, I can see maybe half a real reason to not allow social networking sites, but even that reason is somewhat disingenuous in many cases. Let's take them one at a time.

1. People have been wasting time long before the internet, in more ways than I could possible recite in a blog post. Some people waste just a few minutes at work each day, but always manage to get their work done as needed, and some don't. If you really think the people who work for you who are not getting their work done suddenly will because they can't use Twitter, you are obviously too naive to work in management. Go do something else. Besides, as I like to say, if you have employees not doing their job, why on earth are you talking to the IT Department about that instead of HR? You have a personnel issue, not a technical one.

2. Yup, they might do something or say something they shouldn't online, just like they might do the same thing every time they pick up a phone, send an email, chat at lunch in a crowded restaurant, talk about work to friends at the ball game, etc. You have policies covering confidential information and employee conduct, those still apply in the online world, it's not any different. Instead of blocking, just remind them of existing policy, and that they apply on Facebook too.

Also, if you're blocking because you don't want employees sharing confidential information, what do you do when they go home? They're probably already using social networks, and probably have 1, 2, maybe 15 profiles, all done on their own time with their own internet access, and you have to go home to see what they might be saying. That makes no sense.

Besides, if you're going with reasons 1 and/or 2 as to why you block social networking sites, any employee with an iPhone or any other sort of mobile phone with internet access gets around you in a heartbeat. So much for being protected from the evils of social networks!

Finally, number 3. I do actually see some rational thought going on here. Social networks do come with certain types of malware dangers, mostly due to their social nature. It's maybe a bit easier to trust a link from a Facebook friend, for example, and the malware guys seem to be catching on to that. At the same time, though, you have very similar dangers in email, and in many, many other websites. For example, I once witnessed a nice little piece of drive-by malware trying to load on my machine from a banner ad on a Major League Baseball site. Not a site that many people bother blocking, but also not really one that was related to my work. So, while you might eliminate a risk or two by blocking social networks, it won't make you safe by any means. You'd be far, far better off investing your resources in solutions that will help eliminate all risks of malware coming in to the PC, and being passed on to the network, regardless of source. There's always a new source, eventually you end up blocking everything. :)

Also, a note about bandwidth, also something I think there is some reason to be concerned about. Again, blocking social networking might free up some minor bandwidth, but singling out social networks as a source of bandwidth "waste" might also be a bit off base. We've already talked about the fact that there are many professional and career benefits in connecting with people in your industry, online or off. So, if you are blocking it for fear of bandwidth shortages, you'd better make sure social networking is less valuable than every other thing you allow to use bandwidth. That goes double for all you bosses that like to stream some music while you work.

Just saying.

To me you really have two choices. You can block all this social networking junk, and just hope that all of your employees who are using it anyway don't do anything stupid. That's a tad ostrich-like for me, personally. Or, you can engage in social networking right alongside your employees, encouraging them to connect with professional and educational resources, reminding them that the online world is just an extension of the world in which we all live and work, and therefore the same rules apply, and showing them that not only are you the boss, but you're also a real live human being with a real family, hobbies, and maybe even a sense of humor.

Of course, that might come as quite the shock to many of them, so do be careful!

Labels: Blogging, Career

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Monday, June 29, 2009

Dublin Irish Festival Gets Social

Well, yes, technically speaking any festival that gathers thousands of people in the same place on the same weekend is social in nature. But, I'm specifically talking about an interesting use of online social networking.

If you look at the Entertainment Schedule for the Dublin Irish Festival coming up July 31-Aug 2, you'll see the option to not only create your own agenda and either print it or save it so you can access it on a mobile device, but also an option to share it with others. If I were to create one, for example, it would show me hanging around the Celtic Rock stage from 4ish Saturday afternoon on. Since that's not exactly complicated, and I'm lazy, I didn't actually create one, but if you were doing something more complicated and hitting different shows at different stages, I could see where this would be helpful not only to keep your plans straight, but to also let other folks know where to find you.

It appears that they are using a paid service, sched.org, to provide this functionality, and I would think it's a good idea for some events. Certainly multi-stage musical events, but also multi-track conferences like TechShow or ILTA09 would be interesting places to have a similar functionality, if the budget allowed for it. You could let folks know, well ahead of time, which sessions you're planning on attending so they could find you to say hello, speakers could have a small idea of who will actually be in the audience ahead of time, and I could use it to stalk e-discovery experts. ;-)

It's a win-win!

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Sunday, June 28, 2009

Sedona Commentary on Achieving Quality

Many of you may have noticed that it's been a bit of a quiet week around here, in terms of me writing anything of substance instead of pointing out some other stuff. I can explain. I have been writing a whole bunch of things, just not here. In fact, I finished a three-part series on the recent Sedona Conference Commentary on Achieving Quality in E-Discovery over on the firm's e-discovery blog.

You can read it over there, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Obviously, by the time I yanked all of those words out of my brain, there hasn't been much left for my own blogs, but hopefully a little R&R over the holiday weekend next week will put me back in the right frame of mind. Not that I don't have a couple of things planned for this week as well, but I'm struggling with the words for those too!

In the mean time, go check out the series, and read the Sedona Commentary itself, it's very interesting reading.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

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Thursday, June 25, 2009

LegalTech West Coast Coverage

I have to admit, I've been so busy the past few days that I haven't spent nearly any time paying attention to tweets and blog posts coming out of Legal Tech West Coast the past couple of days.

Luckily, it looks like the Posse List is doing a good job of putting together the highlights. Their day-one highlights from the e-discovery side of things seem like there's some interesting presentations being done, though also think much of it is not new to anyone who's been paying attention. On the other hand, maybe some of the folks who show up to things like this conference haven't been. Either way, it's good stuff that everyone working in the legal field needs to hear, and think about!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

It's a Small World

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend some time with a small group of folks from my office explaining and demonstrating social networking tools. As part of the demonstration, I went live to my Twitter and Facebook profiles, which was actually a little nerve-wracking. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, some of whom don't always come across as very professional in their interactions. :)

As it turns out though, there wasn't much that the folks I follow were saying that was worth worrying about, but it was interesting when I had the screen up and the following conversation took place:

Coworker: "You know that person?"
Me: "I know him online, don't think we've ever met, but we travel in some of the same Columbus area tech circles"
Coworker: "I was at his wedding"
Me: " You know him much better than I do then." :)

That made me think, one, it's obviously a small world, but also, isn't that the power of networking, whether offline or online? You never know who you're going to connect with, and you never know who they're already connected to!

Labels: Blogging, Career, Personal

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Sunday, June 21, 2009

Third Rule of Knowledge Workers: It's your Career!

Last week, in the second rule, I talked about how, when management is pushing for you to account for every minute of those 40 hours a week, it's tempting to give them exactly that, and nothing more. The third rule could also be called, why you shouldn't do that!

No matter what your employer does, and the end of the day, it's your career, not theirs. There may have been a day, though I kind of doubt it, when you could work somewhere and expect that they would give you whatever training you need, or look out for new opportunities for you, and make the right connections for you, but if you're waiting around for management to do that for you now, you're going to be severely disappointed!

Don't wait for your boss to come tell you when you can go to training, who you should be mentored by, or what opportunities might be available to you. Use whatever tools you have at your disposal to do it for yourself! Get connected to people in your field whenever possible, sign up for free webinars, follow them on twitter, go to local events whenever possible, get involved on LinkedIn, get involved with the people you already know, find out who they know, ask about people who might be able to help you, etc. Heck, read some books for that matter!

Yes, it's true that you'll be spending some of your non-work time working on your career. Boo freakin hoo! It's your career, if you can't be bothered to spend some time working on it, and getting the career you want, and deserve, then you'll end up with the career your employer wants you to have. What they want you to have is completely based on what benefits them, not your plans. (Though a good employer will try and consider both what benefits them, and what will keep you there, not all employers are that good. Most, I would guess, are not.)

A good knowledge worker doesn't check out at 5PM and quit working on bettering themselves and their career. They know that learning and networking are valuable enough tools for their career that they'll make time for it, even if their boss doesn't recognize it as "work".

Labels: Career

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Friday, June 19, 2009

My First Attempt at Streaming

So when @wyliemac asked last night if anyone had a webcam to stream the Ignite Columbus 3 presentations tonight, I said I did, and would be glad to help out, thinking I could pop my Macbook up there and use the built in webcam, if that's all we could come up with.

As I considered it last night, and through this morning, I decided on a different track. I borrowed a video camera from work (I'm the one who normally uses it, and in fact I'll be using it Monday morning, so it's not like it's missing from work or anything.). It's an old Panasonic that normally records to tape, but which has a firewire connector. Running the firewire through to my Macbook Pro at lunch today and then going out to Ustream and creating an account allowed me to fire on the video camera, and send the video out to the web. My test worked perfectly, so that's the gear I packed up to go to Ignite tonight.

Once on site, it was just a matter of finding good spot to capture the presentations from, a power source, and getting connected to the OSU wireless. Ran into a bit of a problem with Safari crashing, but discovered that as long as I had the Ustream set to DV Audio, it would crash when I tried to connect, but if I had it set to another audio source when it connected and switched it to DV audio, it worked fine. Go figure! Anyway, it took me about 5 minutes to figure that out, and that was really the last hiccup I had. I think, for a first effort, it turned out rather well, but you can see for yourself at the Ustream archive.

Even if you don't really care about my adventures in live streaming, the presentations were pretty darn good and are worth your while as well!

Labels: Tech

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