Making the law accessible on the Web

Everyone needs access to the law eventually.

At some point, you're going to incorporate your business, write your will or get a copyright or patent. Ten years ago, a couple clever lawyers put their heads together and hatched the idea of making some standard things related to the law available on the internet. Today LegalZoom has been able to provide those services to over a million people, not eliminating all the paperwork and hassle, but a good part of it.

LegalZoom's CIO Tracy Terrill talked with me about his job combining technology and the law for an article in CBS Interactive this week. He brings a tech background from some other notable companies, including Universal Studios, Warner Brothers and Gartner.

One of the most interesting things going on with LegalZoom these days is their Facebook page, where attorney Joe Escalante masquerades as "Free Joe Friday," and has gained the page more than 50,000 followers with his gratis advice.

On social media marketing Tracy says:

"We're still in the early days of our social media presence, but things are starting to come together... Free Joe Friday is an example of that... We actually have about 10 times more followers on Facebook than on Twitter right now."

You can find the free PDF download of the entire interview here.

Bending the failed expectations curve - 10 Questions with Jay Gardner of NetIQ

After 30 years in IT, Jay Gardner has landed as the GM and VP at NetIQ, a recent acquisition of Attachmate, privately held company that seeks to "bridge the divide between open source and proprietary source software.

Jay talked with me about getting IT value and bending the "failed expectations curve" when it comes to technology adoption.

"The failed expectations curve is really a financial picture of the business case where the Y-axis is value and the X-axis is time... There is going to be a certain amount of deterioration in the value, or at least a diminishing gain, as the adoption curve levels off and you go from the value of implementing to the value of maintaining and improving... it often comes down to the talent in the organization that makes things happen..."

Once we had covered ten questions on this topic, I also asked Jay to draw on his experience for his best recommendation on making a remarkable business presentation.

"My best recommendation is to tell a story. Always try to relate an example of what you're talking about, either a business process or a customer story. Make it memorable and credible, and unique. That's the way to get people's attention and keep it. Data can support it, but people have to be able to relate to what you're talking about in an illustration rather than bullets. When you can tell a good story, being persuasive is a natural outcome."

You can read the complete interview with Jay on the CBS Interactive site.

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(* Did you already read my interviews on cloud computing with Jimmy Harris and virtualization with Mark Egan?)

Virtualizing your Reality

Mark Egan, whose company VMware is synonymous with trailblazing and dominating the area of virtualization, recently talked with me about his perspectives on the future of real technology in a virtualized world.

"...if you think of social-media apps, for example, how do we take some of these systems with a Soviet-era interface and make them look like Facebook and be as easy as Twitter? I believe the user interface trumps functionality."

Another insight from Mark was on his top recommendation for making a more remarkable business presentation.

"I always like to see a speaker who keeps the focus on the question, 'What is the business problem we're trying to solve?' and ultimately answers it. In my humble opinion, as a CIO I should always be focusing on three areas for the company: growing revenue, reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction. Everything I do should track back to those three. Sometimes in our presentations I think we lose the translation to those areas. Those are the things I think we need to see made relevant, and in some cases I've seen my peer presenters get sidetracked to other things."

You can find the entire discussion with Mark in the article out today at CBS Interactive.

25 bullets will kill you - Cloud expert Jimmy Harris on making better presentations

Accenture's Director of Cloud Services Jimmy Harris talked with me recently for an article in TechRepublic about his ideas on cloud technology. Part of our discussion also covered his best recommendations for making more effective presentations. His first thought: cut down on the bullets.

"This is my first rule of presentations: the density of the data presented is inversely proportional to understanding. If I put up a slide with 25 bullet points on it, I'm just distracting people. No one can remember 25 things anyway.

Another mistake I hear presenters make is saying, 'I know you probably can't see this, but...'

One variation on this I've seen is the presenter who put up a detailed, hyper-convoluted chart, pointed to an indistinguishable spot, and said, 'There it is!' Not a single person had any idea what he was talking about.

To the expert making a presentation, that kind of data represents a command of information and demonstrates their credibility. To the audience, the fact that your the epidemiologist, or whatever other kind of expert you may be, already demonstrates that you know more about it than I do.

Another thing I can tell you about my own presentation approach is that it's about extending understanding through storytelling and symbols. We're brought up to remember things that way. For example, in describing the cloud, I imagine I'm trying to tell people in Asia about banking. There are two billion people there with no experience in personal banking. The question is how to create an environment in which you can economically deliver banking services to these people who have none of the infrastructure, who have never even seen a bank. So in my presentation I talk about the components of the cloud in terms of deploying bank services across multiple devices at a lower cost."

For the rest of the conversation with Jimmy on the way cloud computing changes things, see the article published this week by CBS Interactive.