In The Cloud
Prior Articles
In meteorology, clouds are defined as a “visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals made of water suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the earth”.(1) In the old British fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk”, clouds were where the Giants lived. Distracted people are often said to have their “heads in a cloud.” As a pilot, I was always trained to stay “clear of clouds” but that’s nearly impossible these days. Today, everyone seems to be doing everything in “The Cloud”.
As you probably know, The Cloud is not really a cloud at all but actually a vast, ground-based collection of spinning hard drives offering nearly incomprehensible volumes of electronic storage. What is conceptually described as a kind of vapor is actually backed by hard wiring and fairly old-fashioned (read: reliable) technology. This serves as a nice analogy for the information we exchange in modern times: it’s easy to put up a lot of smoke; but sooner or later people need hard content. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the only kind of information I’m interested in.
Don’t get me wrong, I am no Luddite: I am as impressed as the next adult by the array of information available to us instantly, anytime, anywhere. When I began my business career, “communicating with clients” meant speaking to them on a telephone, writing them a letter, or meeting them somewhere face to face. Then came the remarkable “wired” world of faxes and email and now we’ve taken the leap to “wireless.” Indeed, many of us spend whole days working in this new “Cloud”.
Consider the sensorial changes we have experienced since then. We used to visit people in their offices, meet and mingle with co-workers. Telephones rang, typewriters clacked, and (bit later) printers whirred. In that paper environment, I was often asked to review thick files stacked high on desks, mining them sheet-by-sheet for the information I needed to design structured settlement plans.
Those days are gone. Now when I visit clients at their places of business, it’s whisper-quiet, a faint clicking sound of keyboards the only signal that anyone else might be around. Those mountains of paper files have been replaced with thumb-sized flash drives. By simply plugging one of those little gizmos into my laptop, I am able to instantly access seemingly infinite amounts of information (legal briefs, medical records and life care plans) without even having to stand up. With this level of technology, I can provide clients with all the answers they need in minutes instead of hours - or days.
But there are limits to this Cloud. As easy as it is to “work from anywhere”, that also means that many offices have dispersed and a lot more people work alone. But maybe worse, so much raw information pours out of our computer screens now that it’s hard to differentiate fact from opinion. The explosion of blogs, bloggers and Wikipedia may have created an enormous reservoir of data and a virtual reference library, but it has also led to a great deal of inaccuracy and vitriol—a virtual highway of mean, wrong-way streets.
One view of life in The Cloud holds that while “credibility and civility certainly matter, so does popularity.” Popularity? Hmmm. Really? In theory this can work; Google certainly has made a fortune guiding us to the websites with the most “links” directed to them. But that in turn has spawned its own industry of people who are paid merely to increase your link count. They are not paid to research, contemplate, verify, and develop valuable information tailored to your specific needs. There’s no denying that oceans of data are available in The Cloud - but most of it is just spray.
To me, content is still king. Solid, well-communicated, and relevant information will always be welcome. That is what I try to put into each of these newsletters and that is how I approach every one of your cases. What are the facts? What information is missing? Where can I find it? I build my recommendations off of hard information, not smoke.
Lastly, when it comes to developing a strategy to resolve actual cases, sending messages through The Cloud is just no substitute for a good, interactive discussion of the issues. You have to be able to toss out ideas and reject or re-shape them into a unified strategy.
Ours is a relationships business. After all, you are trusting me to help you resolve some very serious issues. Sensitive matters should be brought to a trusted colleague grounded in knowledge and experience not tapped through a wisp of mist.
Storm clouds building around any of your cases? Want a beacon to follow to settlement? Contact Frank Kilcoyne at frank.kilcoyne@jmwsettlements.com or
800 544 5533. I am here to help.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud
