We are delighted to introduce Steve Perry as a partner in Headshift’s project delivery network and as a guest author on our blog. Steve was a client of Headshift at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, and whilst there implemented the Confluence enterprise wiki to replace the existing intranet. This was a major success and resulted in a significant increase in fee earner participation and usage. Fee earners there feel they can go quickly and easily into an area and contribute insight or intelligence on a client, sector or cross-cutting issue and that the wiki provides an excellent platform to do this.
I am helping to demystify social business networking/computing and encouraging firms to take practical, pragmatic steps to embrace it in their organisations.
Firms, large and small, can exploit the value of social business tools to help link individuals and teams divided by geography, time-zones or culture, and capitalise on the power of shared knowledge and expertise. This approach can have huge benefits for improving current awareness, expertise location and business intelligence and the value of social business networking/computing is evident once people use the tools as part of their daily work processes. A richness of very valuable content soon builds up once a number of fee earners start collaborating using the wiki.
Many legal professionals have been slow to embrace social networking and social tools for reasons of; fears of security, privacy breaches, perception of time wasting and Internet horror stories but organisations must learn to manage these risks and challenges, as with previous “new” technologies.
There are many lessons that were learnt from implementing the confluence wiki at Freshfields and over the next few months I will explain a number of them to you. The top three for me were:
- I established a ‘tight loose’ approach. There are some things you need to grip tightly like the corporate look and feel/branding along with the high level taxonomy but then leave many areas loose and flexible so people experiment and try things out to see what works for them. You don’t always know how it’s going to be used and you can be pleasantly surprised with how creative people can be. Very quickly you find that some good practices start to emerge which become the standard way of working
- Make sure you have a strategy with clear goals for how it will improve the business. Design the pilot/trial around an issue/problem and have some top down guidance along with encouraging a bottom up self organising approach
- Set appropriate expectations of time and effort and don’t over promise too much in the early stages. Once you have some success stories under your belt then crank up the PR/comms
Congrats Steve, look forward to reading your future musings on the FBD implementation.
Great!
Can’t wait to get your feedback on this subject!
I’m the office manager of a law firm and we just launched a wiki …
These are three great tips.Especially the first one which I wholeheartedly agree on.
The most interesting thing in my experience of introducing social software into big business is the culture change that goes along with it. I won’t say anything more for now, but I’m subscribed, and I’ll be sure to post a comment when you hit that topic.
Mark.