Given that I thoroughly enjoy chatting with people about social tools, their use in the work place, and their potential to change and improve organisational structures and systems, this morning's law firm breakfast meet-up here at Headshift made for a top start to my day.
We kicked off bright'n early at 8.30 with coffee, pastries, and a great group of people (coming from as far away as Brighton and Manchester). We started with a short presentation about the challenges for current awareness ('CA') processes and our thoughts about the potential for improving and expediting those processes through the use of simple social tools - such as RSS and wikis.
We then gave a live demonstration of the social software platform (integrating NewsGator ES and Confluence) we recently implemented for Dewey & LeBoeuf in New York. That sparked some interesting questions about how to encourage adoption of the tools, how to integrate the tools with existing systems, and the best use cases for the tools in relation to various work processes and roles.
In our experience, concentrating on discrete areas of information and knowledge sharing (like internal and external CA) helps in the construction of powerful business cases by illustrating tangible improvements and efficiencies to existing processes and systems. And there are some obvious cases to be made here, like the ability to deliver timely information, to do so in a cost-effective manner whilst adding value, relevance and originality to the content.
This is where social tools out-do themselves! Just take a look at the presentation. Or if you want to see the tools in action, let us know and we can give you a demo of Dewey.
Many thanks to all those who attended!
We kicked off bright'n early at 8.30 with coffee, pastries, and a great group of people (coming from as far away as Brighton and Manchester). We started with a short presentation about the challenges for current awareness ('CA') processes and our thoughts about the potential for improving and expediting those processes through the use of simple social tools - such as RSS and wikis.
We then gave a live demonstration of the social software platform (integrating NewsGator ES and Confluence) we recently implemented for Dewey & LeBoeuf in New York. That sparked some interesting questions about how to encourage adoption of the tools, how to integrate the tools with existing systems, and the best use cases for the tools in relation to various work processes and roles.
In our experience, concentrating on discrete areas of information and knowledge sharing (like internal and external CA) helps in the construction of powerful business cases by illustrating tangible improvements and efficiencies to existing processes and systems. And there are some obvious cases to be made here, like the ability to deliver timely information, to do so in a cost-effective manner whilst adding value, relevance and originality to the content.
This is where social tools out-do themselves! Just take a look at the presentation. Or if you want to see the tools in action, let us know and we can give you a demo of Dewey.
Many thanks to all those who attended!
A thoroughly enjoyable and informative presentation, Penny. Thanks very much for the invitation.
Simon Carswell
I also found it very interesting. It has given me some ideas for a piece of research into social media that I'm currently planning.
Martin De Saulles
Great! I would be very interested in hearing about your research in this area Martin.
Penny thanks for the post. I couldn't make the meeting unfortunately and it sounds like I missed out. I really enjoyed the blog post and the presentation, although with anyone talking they are always slightly abstract.
To add to what you have already said current awareness is an area where much value could be added to what Knowledge & Information Teams already do. I know that we spend huge amounts of time undertaking current awareness for our fee-earners, yet we have the technology to simplify and improve the service hugely, it is just those first few steps!
That's right James. There's a great opportunity here for firms to innovate the process resulting in the delivery of value added and cost effective current awareness. Interestingly though, such innovation can be brought about by simple social tools which require only small shifts in behaviour.