The 13th annual technology survey of AM Law 200 firmsmakes for a disappointing read from a social software/organisationalchange perspective. The report suggests that firms are grappling withissues like “what emerging technologies are worth investing in – andwhich aren’t ready for prime time”. However, in respect of’collaborative’ technologies respondees were asked only whether theirfirms use web conference software, blogs or wikis. What! No mentionof RSS, feed readers or aggregators, let alone micro-blogging, friendfeeds, personalised pages, social tagging or content filtering.
The report blandly states that:
“While some firms have dipped their toes in the water –43 percent run one or more blogs; 24 percent use intranet wikis (Webpages that let users contribute or modify content) — it’s been fairlyho-hum stuff by Internet standards. Blogs with lawyer posts on happenings in a practice area and wikis to collaborate on interoffice documents are the norm. It’s still unclear what sort of future these technologies have in a law office. But seemingly everyone is thinking about it.”
Of course firms are thinking about it! Else they will findthemselves sitting on the wrong end of the technology commoditisationprocess which turns yesterday’s shiny innovation (*email*) into today’subiquitous baseline or even legacy tool. Not only do such tools offerno competitive advantage, they also trigger negative consequences, likeinformation overload and silos of out-of-date content.
And the examples in the report of how blogs, wikis and socialnetworking tools are being used in firms certainly are ‘ho-hum’. Fromadoption and knowledge sharing perspectives, the Allen & Overyuse of group blogs (integrated into wiki spaces) for knowledgenetworking is far more instructive. As for wikis, they can be used tocapture ideas, questions and comments in respect of groups or projects,and then to aggregate all interactions with content, so as to highlightrecent activities, popular and/or salient items (from an individual orgroup perspective). All these collaboration activities are quitedistinctive, yet supplementary to, document management activitiessupported by other systems, as these articles illustrate:
Those are just a few examples of how firms are endeavouring to adaptand apply new techologies to help people work in smarter more socialways. And there are even greater opportunities for the’re-engineering’ of knowledge intensive processes in firms through technology. As Simon Wardleyhas emphasised, unlike previous generations of technology, whichessentially offered the opportunity of ‘substitution innovation’ (doingwhat had always been done a little better), new technologies like RSS,micro-blogging, social tagging and networking tools, offerpossibilities for radical change in the way in which things are done.
These are some changes we are seeing or expect to see very shortlythrough the use of integrated platforms incorporating a range of socialtools:
- Reducing information retrieval costs by encouraging users to employmonitoring and delivery modes of information retrieval (via RSS feeds) rather thansearching for information or navigating to static destinations (likeexternal sites).
- Helping people to get out of their inboxes by offering alternatives to email.
- Using micro-blogging to spark quick reaction to breaking news, increase awareness of on-going work and to strengthen social ties across the firm
- Eradicating the static expertise directoryand instead pulling information from the user’s activities, includingblog posts, comments, tags, feeds and favourites into a dynamic’public’ profile which provides a rich picture of the user’s status,work, professional network, expertise and interests.
- Providing personal dashboards to allow people to design and control their interactions and information flows to best suit their changingneeds. That means allowing people to easily add, organise and viewactivities, discussions, news, feeds, communities, colleagues, etc.
- Delivering more targeted relevant information by recommending andfiltering information based on the individual’s tags, subscriptions, oractivity with content, communities, projects or individuals.
All examples of how firms need to continuously adapt just to stand still.
