Why Did Etisalat Block Flickr
Image [cc] Za3tOoOr!

Nothing really irritates a researcher more than attempting to get to a website only to find that it has been blocked by your network software. In fact, many of you may find that social media sites are closed off at work because someone decided that you’ll spend your time uploading cat videos instead of your real job. Hey!! Cat videos are a fun way to relieve stress, and it really doesn’t take that long to upload. Sorry… got off topic there. Back to the blocked websites.

Most of the time you can call your IT Department and have them exclude you from the ‘blocked’ list (and I highly suggest that you do this first!), but there may be times where you just need to quickly get to the site and get the information. It’s really easy, and it kind of shows that blocking websites might be a lesson in futility. The key is using translator sites, such as Bing Translator or Google Translate as a proxy. Here’s the simple instructions. If you want more information, you can view this Reddit thread, provided that IT hasn’t blocked Reddit.

Steps:

  1. Open translator: (I’ve found Bing to be a bit easier, but both work.)
  2. Enter the Blocked URL in the translate box
  3. Click on the Translate button
  4. Voilà, the translator is feeding the page through and is bypassing your web blocker.

Note: Sites that are not supported by the translator (e.g., Netflix, Spotify, or secured websites) will not work with this method. I’ve found a few sites, like Online-Translator that work around some of these issues (by telling it to translate from German to English), but nothing is 100%.

Here’s a good video that walks through the process. Again, this isn’t 100% perfect, but I’ve found it to be pretty helpful when I was in a bind and needed to get to a blocked website… strictly for research purposes, of course.

IMGP1885 [2011-12-13]
Image [cc] JAM Project

We live in what is referred to as “The Information Age”, but I think that we may have shifted into a new phase that might be called “The Collaboration Age.” There was a very interesting article from The Business Insider a few weeks ago that discussed an Indian Intern’s impression of life in America, and one of the ‘weirdest’ things he found about the culture here is that people are highly collaborative. He talked about how students collaborate and the goals of the collaboration wasn’t to simply complete a project, but it was rather to use collaboration as a way to share, teach, train, and learn until everyone “got it.” This was in an environment (John Hopkins University) that a few decades ago was know for being so competitive that students would hide important books in the library in order to gain a competitive edge over other students. In addition to the need to collaborate, he notices that the students take an ethical approach to the collaboration, and a desire to accomplish something that they will be proud to attach their name to. Therefore, actions that once may have been seen as “cheating”, are now seen as valuable collaborative efforts that help everyone achieve the desired goals. When you step back and think about it, it is really a monumental shift in culture.

There was one part that this intern mentioned that is probably true not only of the assignments within the university setting, but also found in today’s professional work environment. Assignments are extremely difficult, complicated, and complex. Attempting to complete a project on your own is no longer the best option. Whether it is completing an assignment in school for a professor, or answering legal issues for a client, the questions are difficult, and the process of getting to the answers/solutions are complex. Today’s professional workers need to collaborate. We see it in our personal lives, and it is making huge inroads into our professional lives as well.

So that was my long introduction to this week’s Elephant Post answers to what tools do you use to collaborate at your work. There are some interesting answers that range from very old-school tools to some of the new resources available. Enjoy the answers, and think about your work environment and ways that you currently collaborate, and ways that collaboration can be improved.

Steve

We use Jabber from Cisco as an instant messaging, and easy way to pass files to each other. It is a great informal method of communications that is much faster than email, and it also connects to our phone and Outlook calenders so we can tell when others are in a meeting, or on the phone. It is very informal, so it makes it easy to ask questions without feeling like you are filling up someones email. It also allows you to chat with multiple people at once.

Anonymous

I use Box in my law firm. I use it to access my documents from my mobile device when I am away from my office. I also use it since it allows me to easily collaborate with my clients and coworkers easily. It eliminates the need to send multiple emails when working on a legal document, and I can just add a collaborator and we can work on the document by adding comments and tasks in one string of communication. Lastly, I like how I have control and visibility over my documents. I can see when and by whom my documents have been viewed and downloaded, and also password protect access to my documents.

James

We use Confluence quite a lot to facilitate wikis (team collaboration spaces as we prefer to call them) and blogs to some extent. We’ve also looked at using Yammer to encourage teams to collaborate and communicate with each other.

David Glenn

Trello

Anon

SharePoint

Bert Gregory

Microsoft SkyDrive primarily. Box.com as secondary. It used to be Google Drive until they made their public statement that nobody should expect privacy with their services. Our business has 36 employees.

Chad Burton

With our team, we use Box (document management), Clio (internal client matter communications and other matter-specific collaboration) and Yammer (for general idea sharing unrelated to client matters and as our virtual water cooler). Oh, and there is always the dreaded email (Google Apps for Business). We use these platforms because they all integrate.

Anonymous

We are using MS Lync in our firm quite often and everyone seems to like it. We are able to have quick just-in-time chats with one person or multiple people. We have are using it for at your desk video conferences. Right now it is just 1-1 video conversations, but may expand to multiple parties. People are still getting used to the video thing, but it is a good way to connect over long distances. We also use Lync to share documents, charts, web pages, etc…, for comparison and review.

Ketan

  • Google Docs (paid to increase security, despite NSA monitoring)
  • Shared and layered calendars (cross platform)
  • Wunderlist
  • Google Hangouts for video chats
  • Google surveys/forms!

Previously:

  • Yammer
  • Skype messaging

Not too long ago, Jordan Furlong wrote a good post on what law firms sell. Normally I would go all “Dan Aykroyd” on him, but not this time. His post got me thinking about the broader question of what law firms sell in terms of product offerings. And here’s the catch: They don’t know what they sell.

And now a car analogy …

If Ford acted like a law firm, they would know they sell automobiles. They would probably know they sell some volume of sedans, SUVs, trucks, coupes, etc. But beyond that, they would not know how many of each product they sold. Under SUVs they would not know how many Explorers versus Escapes versus Expeditions were sold. Oh, and in the SUV category there would be some sedans, trucks and coupes included.

Of course if Ford acted in such a fashion, they MIGHT know they sell automobiles

Law firms know what they sell only at the high level because that is all they have needed to know until recently. Although most firms have some taxonomy of matter types, they are rarely used effectively. For most firms, the work gets a high level categorization based on the billing partner’s practice designation. This means transactional work can be tagged as litigation if the billing partner is a litigator. The choice of matter type when it is an option, is too often made by a secretary. These well-intentioned secretaries picked the most convenient type or the one least likely to get anyone’s attention. Therefore when someone wants to see “Single Plaintiff Employment” cases, the only way to find such a list is manually – which means it never happens.

This is obviously an opportunity for Knowledge Management (KM) to shine. But I predict the usual challenges for KMers who tackle this problem. First – a firm will appoint a committee to develop a ‘comprehensive’ list of matter types. The Committee will want to make sure every possible matter type makes it on the list, since Fred’s Admiralty practice is just as important as the rest of the firms’ commercial litigation practice. The result will be a long list of never-used matter types … and we’re back to where we started.

My advice: Firms need to know what they sell, down to a reasonable product level. Finding that reasonable product level is a task for marketing and leadership and then KM can be the engine to continually support this effort. Once firms know the true volume and margins on each of their product offerings, then they will know where to focus their market efforts and product resources.

Let me shake your hand
Image [cc] Nathan Rupert

At any given moment, I may have one, two, three, four, or more collaboration tools at my disposal that allows me to nearly instantaneously communicate with my friends, peers, co-workers, and staff. Be it the old fashion telephone (although mine has video build in… ’cause I’m special like that), or email, or Instant Messaging, or Twitter, or Facebook, or even getting up off my duff an walking next door to actually verbally communicate face-to-face, there are tons of ways to communicate.

I’m kind of a big fan of the Private Facebook Groups, and the flexibility that it gives me to send out actual business related questions to a set of peers, or to send out classic viral cat videos to the same group. It can be formal, but it tends to be very informal. It is extremely convenient, and we really hope that it remains behind a privacy fence (although, I think we unofficially know not to say anything that would get us into too much trouble if that fence were to fall down.)

So this week’s Elephant Post question is this:

What Collaboration Tools Do You Use?

Tell us about some of the interesting resources you use, including any non-traditional tools, or maybe some resources that are so old-fashioned, they are actually new again!! I’ll pull these together and post all of the answers on Friday. Please take a moment and either fill out the embeded form below, or email me (xlambert at gmail dot com). You can see what others have answered by going here.

 

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Postcard - Painted Map of Canada
Image [cc] Adam79

I’m not sure why, but I seem to have a high percentage of Canadian law library and legal industry friends. Plus, as far as I can tell, they are all much smarter than I am, too. So maybe I should just consider myself lucky that they are willing to be seen with me in public.

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries is hosting its annual conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba (that’s directly north of North Dakota, in case you’re looking for it on that map over there…), and the ever so lovely Karen Sawatzky has asked me to speak at the conference as a plenary for the conference themed “At the Confluence: Where Knowledge Meets Inspiration.” The conference will be held in a reportedly haunted hotel, and I hear that Winnepeg is actually quite nice between May 25th and 28th. 

Karen asked a favour of me to push out the CALL’s Call for Program Submissions. If you have any program ideas, please visit the page and fill out the submission.

I am really looking forward to going up and hanging out with many of the folks I see on Twitter or SLAW and going out for one or two or three of those strong Canadian beers after the sessions are over. If you’re going to be there, contact me and let me know!!

The Mixed Media Project
Image [cc] La Tête Krançien

At first it was really cool. Then it got really, really bad. Eventually, I had to just shut down the browser to escape the music and sensory overload!! A YouTube replay of Miley Cyrus at the VMAs?? No… I could actually sit through that. I’m talking about The Festival Issue of VENTS Online Magazine.

It isn’t that the concept is a bad idea, but the final product is simply not very good. In fact, it is a good example of what NOT to do with online magazines and mixing medias. (I’ll place a link to the magazine at the bottom, and you can click on it at your own personal sensory risk.)

Okay… where do I start?? Let me put a list out of what I think VENTS was wanting to do. Remember, good idea, bad result.

Good Ideas

  • They used Calaméo as the back-end product to create the magazine. Simple, straight-forward, process of creating an online magazine
  • A 146 pages of black background, white print, two-page spreads, with lots of dark images to blend in nicely
  • Short, interview style articles that were very easy to read and or skim
  • Actually worked pretty well with my iPhone (I’d probably be writing a different article if I hadn’t opened it up on my PC)
  • Music and videos embedded into the articles related to the bands being interviewed

Bad Results

  • I’m still not a fan of the online magazines that attempt to look exactly like a glossy paper magazine. I really don’t like the swishing sound that is made when you turn the virtual page, or for that matter, I don’t like the virtual turning of the page, either!
  • Flash based from the PC browser
  • When mixing medias, it is important that the reader/listener/viewer maintain control of the different medias. Don’t automatically start the music or videos. Let the user decide when to do that.
  • When you have media embedded into the product, make sure it works. I couldn’t control the sound from the embedded soundbar. I had to actually turn the computer’s volume control down because it was blasting as soon as I ‘flipped’ to the next page.
  • If you have control bars for the media, make sure they work. I couldn’t find a way to turn off the music, and when I did find the media tool bar for the embedded video, none of the controls worked.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I initially thought this was really cool. An online magazine that talked about specific music festivals, specific bands, and gave me immediate access to information, text, links, video, and music to learn more about these festivals and bands. Good idea… something that the people behind the Van’s Warped Tour should consider doing. But, MAN!!, don’t overload me like that with automated media that doesn’t work properly. I’m not sure if the problem lay with the magazine producers or with the backend company producing the format. However, it really ruined a good concept.

Okay… now that I’ve gone on and on about it, here is the link to the online magazine. I tested it in Chrome (bad), Internet Explorer 9 (bad), and on my iPhone 4s (good). If you are on a PC, you might want to turn your volume down before opening the link (otherwise your office neighbors give you funny looks for the rest of the day.) If you can make it through to page 146, you’ll find one of my favorite bands featured there!!

ILTA has published many of the Audio recordings and Slide Presentations from the 2013 Conference here.  They are available for ILTA Members free of charge.  If you are not a member, I highly recommend you become one, or make friends with a member so you can get access to this wonderful resource.  I spoke on Monday afternoon in an experimental session with 3 other terrific speakers.  We each took 12 minutes and presented on a stand-alone topic in the style of a short TED talk.  I spoke third, but I’ve chopped my own presentation out of the others and embedded it here.  If you find this at all interesting, please go to the ILTA page and listen to some more.

The complete talk is about 12 minutes long. I presented without slides and with a single prop.

See also my short story, The Granny Bug, which was inspired by my research into the Internet of Things.

BONUS: This also doubles as the first ever 3 Geeks Drinking Game! Grab your favorite beverage and drink every time I say the word THINGS. Although I’ll warn you, you probably won’t make it through the first 3 minutes.

Full transcript after the jump….

I’ve cleaned up some of the wording to make it more clear in writing. I think I got my points across in person, but maybe I was just rambling.

TRANSCRIPT:
So, I’m going to change gears quite abruptly. [adjusting microphone] And I want to talk about something that came up a little bit this morning in the Keynote.

Sometime between 2005 and 2008 the number of things on the Internet surpassed the number of people on the planet. It’s estimated that by 2020 there will be more than 50 Billion things online.  Now things, in this context, are Internet connected devices with uniquely identifiable IP addresses.

These things are the things that we use to connect to the Internet.  Mostly they’re computers, and tablets, and smartphones.  You could call them things on the Internet of People.  However, most of the things coming online recently are not on the Internet of People.  They are things that connect to other things.  They are what we call, for lack of a better name – or any imagination, things on the Internet of Things.

If you Google “Internet of Things” you are going to find an entire Jetson’s future fantasy world of automated devices that promise to make your life easier.  You’re going to find the Nest Thermostat, which is probably the most famous thing on the Internet of Things.  It’s a thermostat that learns your preferences and over time it starts to adjust itself automatically. But it also has sensors that can detect when there are people around and it knows when no one is home so it can turn itself down. And it also is connected to the network so it can communicate with your power provider and it can find out what the [power] demands are expected to be for the day, and it can adjust itself.

You will also find things like the Ambient Umbrella. This is a Wi-fi umbrella that has LED lights in it’s base that light up when it’s expected to rain. It communicates with the weather service.

You’ll find something that I think is my favorite thing online, the EggMinder from GE.  This is a little plastic egg carton that sits in your fridge and it has a Wi-Fi connection.  It syncs with an app on your phone so that anywhere in the world, at any time, you will always know exactly how many eggs you have in your fridge.

Now, all of this stuff is really cool, and a lot of fun, and exciting. But there are some outstanding issues that are preventing these things from becoming mainstream. Preventing the Internet of Things from becoming mainstream.

All of these devices are stand-alone technologies.  They all communicate very well within their own platforms and their own ecosystems, but they don’t communicate very well between each other.  The Internet of Things, at this point, is in a very similar state to where the Internet of People was prior to the development of the World Wide Web.  There are a lot of little networks that work fine on their own, but trying to get between them is difficult.  There are companies that are working on a Web of Things concept.  There are several of them [competing to provide this type of easier communication]. And I have no doubt that one of them, in the very near future, is going to step out from the pack and everyone will get on board, and we will get that Jetson’s future that we’re all hoping for.

But as I was thinking about this talk and as I was researching it.  I kept wondering one thing.  One thing was stuck in the back of my mind. And that is, “Is that all?” I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want a Wi-Fi toaster because it’s cool, but really? Is this what we’re hoping to get from this Internet of Things concept?  So I started trying to forget all of this consumer device hype.  [And I wondered] what is the Internet of Things at it’s base? 

And it got me thinking about physics.  I wish it had gotten me thinking about chemistry because then I could do a really great Catalyst metaphor [ed. the theme for this year’s ILTA conference was “IT – The Catalyst”], but instead it got me thinking about physics.  And specifically Quantum Mechanics.  And there’s a concept in Quantum Mechanics called entanglement.  The idea is you take two particles and you bring them together and their quantum fields begin to entangle.  (What ever that means.) When you spin one of these particles the other is going to spin too.  But the crazy thing is you can then separate them, and you can send one of those entangled particles across the street, or across the country, or to the other side of the universe and when you spin the one you still have, [the other] one is going to spin too.

Now, no less a visionary than Albert Einstein derided this concept.  He called it “Spooky Action at a Distance.” It has since been proven.  But spooky action at a distance is really good description of the Internet of Things, because at it’s core, it’s a sensor that senses the world around it and then communicates that to an actuator that can actually do something about it.

That’s a concept we’re all familiar with within our devices. If you’ve got your iPhone and you put it up to your ear, the proximity sensor turns off your touchscreen so you don’t accidentally hang up with your cheek. The Internet of Things does the same thing, except it allows you to spread out and separate the sensors from the actuators in much the same way that our two particles that are entangled can be separated.  Whereas the particles can be anywhere in the universe, the sensor and the actuator can be anywhere on the network.

So if you start thinking about the Internet of Things in those terms, rather than thinking about it in terms of these consumer devices like the EggMinder.  You start to realize that actually, THIS is the coolest thing on the Internet.

This is called a Twine. It’s a little box and it’s got a battery, a Wi-Fi antenna, and three sensors. It senses temperature, orientation, and vibration. So I can log into it and set rules, that when one of these sensors is triggered it sends a communication across the network.  I can set up a rule and I can leave this on my dryer, and when my dryer stops vibrating, it will text me that my laundry is done.  I can leave this in a window on a hot day, and I can have it set so that it will warn me when my house plants are getting to hot. With a little bit of ingenuity I can tie this into If This Then That, which is an online site that allows you connect various internet services together.  By doing that I can actually make my Twine tweet, or put up a Facebook post. Or I’ve got the Wi-Fi lightbulbs from Phillips, I can have my Twine turn my lights on and off.

Now, you’re going to laugh, but this device, I think, will change the world.

That sounds a little ridiculous, but I want you to think about it this way.  Sixty-Five years ago I could hold a few transistors in the palm of my hand.  Today I could hold billions.  Now, I don’t expect Internet connected sensors to shrink at the rate of Moore’s Law, but if you can imagine that maybe they could shrink at a quarter of that rate, then sixty-five years from now, I could hold more than ten thousand of these in my hand. At that point they’d all be about the size of a grain of sand.

Now, if that happens, these won’t be in boxes like this, and we won’t weld them to our devices. They’ll be everywhere.  We’ll put them in our clothing, in the carpet, on the walls, and in our furniture.  At a certain point, that changes the way we interact with the network.  In fact, the physical world can become the user interface to the network. The physical world can be something that allows spooky action at a distance. And I don’t know exactly how that will work, or what that will look like, but I can imagine, by way of analogy, how it might feel.

If I asked you today, “What computers have you used recently?” We’re all techies, you can probably list a dozen. But if I asked the average person, even they could tell me, “This is the computer I own, this is what I like about it, this is what I don’t.”  Computing is at the forefront of our minds, it’s an active technology.  Something we’re conscious of doing. We use computers as tools to accomplish certain things.

But there are other technologies that are no longer conscious, but they’re still there, and we use them all the time.  If I were to ask you, “What motors do you use?”  You’ll probably think of your car, but as you think about it more, you’ll realize, “Well, there’s the garage door opener, and the lawnmower…” and on and on and on.  You’ve got motors everywhere, but you’re not aware of them.  You’re not conscious of them.

I think that the real promise of the Internet of Things is that it holds the potential to eventually make computers and computing a background technology, so that you are not aware of it in the same way.  So that in seventy five or a hundred years from now, if I asked you “What computers do you use?”  You’ll have to think about it.  And when you come up with an answer it might be, “Well, there’s my toothbrush, and my shoes, and you know, of course the walls.”  But you might answer, “You know, I don’t think I really use computers, but I’m always on the Internet of Things.”

Thank you.

I have had more than a week to recover from ILTA 2013 in Las Vegas and I am slowly starting to return to normal.  But, that is the problem.  I don’t want to return to normal.  I desperately want to maintain the heady state of learning and collaboration that we establish every year for four short days in some ridiculously hot location in late August.  I’ve attended ILTA for the last three years and every year it manages to recharge my batteries and get me excited about what I’m trying to do at my firm.  That enthusiasm usually lasts for a few short weeks before I’m slowly drug back into the muddy reality of “This is what [high level partner] thinks is important, so that’s what we’re going to keep doing for the foreseeable future.”  First my shoes get stuck, and then the walls close in, and soon I’m standing nose to gypsum with just enough room to pull my head back an inch so I can gently bang my forehead repeatedly against the wall in front of me. (Yes, writing blog posts is much cheaper than therapy.)

I am not above a little hyperbole to make a point, but I know I’m not the only one who feels like this.  Something wonderful happens at that conference and it’s not strictly the learning sessions, or the vendor parties, and it’s most certainly not the food. It’s the people.

That may sound like a touchy-feely, sentimental, Up With People, BS statement, until you understand that I am not in any way, shape, or form a people person.  I have friends and I like many people. I can easily talk with anyone about any particular thing, but I don’t easily do small talk. I’m not very good at meeting new people. And I struggle with most conversations that begin “So, what do you do?”  The thing about ILTA is that I have very few of those conversations. Strangers at ILTA begin conversations with phrases like, “We’ve been trying to do this. Do you have any thoughts?” Or, if they overhear your conversation with someone else, they’ll speak up and say, “You know, we built/bought something that does that…”  The focus of most interactions and conversations at ILTA are centered around solving problems.  Conversations at ILTA end with, “I’m so-and-so, what’s your name?  And what do you do?”  Then you exchange cards and walk away.  Until you see them in the corridor the next day and introduce them to someone you just met who has a similar problem to the one they’re trying to solve.

There is an openness to this community. One that, by necessity, admits to its own vulnerability.  There is very little pretense or braggadocio. The strength of every success story I heard this year was built upon the foundation of the failures that came before.

When we return to the “real” world, those administrative and bureaucratic walls that too quickly close in around us, also make it very difficult to share our stories, or to ask for help, or even to openly admit our failures.  For four short days in the desert we have no walls and we are free to learn and collaborate with our peers without the constraints of politics or bureaucracy.  It may be that that kind of communication and collaboration can only exist for short periods of time among acquaintances and strangers.  It may be that such a thing can not possibly exist on an ongoing basis within the confines and constraints of a law firm environment. But if I truly believed that, there would be no reason to keep banging against those walls.

They’ll come down. If not this year, maybe after ILTA 2014.

Here I am, sitting in my office, planning out my budget for the next year when along comes this announcement from Amazon: “Introducing the Kindle Matchbook.”  It seems that Amazon will provide you with an ebook copy of a book that was purchased from them in print for a nominal ranging from a Free (yes, I said free) to a high of $2.99.  And they’re willing to count purchases made all the way back to 1995.  There is one limit:  this is only available for titles that the publishers have opted in on.  I think this is pretty darn exciting but what will really be interesting is how widely the publishers support this program.

As a Law Librarian (or Research Services Specialist if you prefer), I’m thrilled to see a purveyor of the printed word that acknowledges that it is cheaper to publish books electronically and gives you a benefit for purchasing the print edition.  In the Legal Publishing world, Firms are expected to pay the same price for an ebook as they do for a the printed edition (and yes, you do save on the Shipping & Handling charges) and you need to spend several thousand dollars annually on software to manage the confounded things.  Perhaps this move by Amazon will shake this model up.  You can find more information about this Amazon program here.

Google and Apple - true love
Image [cc] Joakim Jardenberg

Since the demise of Google Reader, I’ve been a little less frequent in going through my RSS feeds using the Feed.ly platform. Over the long weekend, I tried to catch up (and am still trying), and came across an article from bwagy on the different approaches that Apple and Google take when it comes to preparing their customers for change. Apple takes a slow, methodical, periodic approach. Introducing the next #Version in the series, followed by the next #S version about every two years. There are significant changes with each upgrade, but not so much that the customer feels unfamiliar with the product. Apple seems to hold back on some changes so that they do not get too far ahead of its customers. Google, on the other hand, pushes out changes as they come available, sometimes at the expense of leaving some customers very uncomfortable with the changes. The interesting thing that has happened over the past few years is that Google has become cool, and Apple has become the stable platform for the masses.

The whole concept of how to approach change made me think about the way law firm librarians package the mass amounts of online, print, and on-demand resources we buy for our firms. We all know that most of our lawyers, paralegals, and other members of the firm that use research products are usually creatures of habit, and don’t adapt very well to new platforms. Many of us know that there are partners out there that are still upset that WordPerfect 4.2 was taken away from them. However, change is the one constant, and there are many times where we know the products we are familiar with are transitioning into new platforms, or have been purchased by one of the big legal publishers, and eventually will become either completely obsolete, or with just completely go away altogether. So how do we approach the inevitable changes? How do we prepare our customers for the changes?

Some of us push the next level of technology or research platforms out to our users much in the way that Google pushes change. New product comes out. Buy it. Push it out. Train, train, train. Then use the early adopters as champions to show that it can be done, and that everyone needs to get on board. The Google approach can also include bringing in a wide variety of unrelated products that address a broad range of needs. Changes come quickly, and sometimes a product can change multiple times over a relatively short time period.

Some of us push the Apple approach to change. We coordinate contracts so that they align and the changes come periodically. Since we know we have two or three years before we need to make changes, we hold back the changes and have them fit a set life cycle to fit those two to three year periods. The information about the changes come well in advance of the change itself. Many times the customers watch as their peers from other firms discuss all of the new bells and whistles of product version #S, while they are still stuck using the pre#S version. This can create an interesting dilemma of driving demand for change from a base that is usually change-resistant.

The common thread between the Apple and the Google version for addressing change is that they plan for the change and the customer base understands the pros and cons of how their favorite technology companies push change to them. Take a look around at your change policies. Which version do you take when it comes to pushing change to your customers. Do you even have a policy? If you don’t, it might be time to consider implementing one. The only thing worse than pushing change out to your customers, is blindsiding them with it.