Peer to Peer Magazine

WWW.ILTANET.ORG 29 At RBC, we have been re-examining how we deliver legal service and challenging ourselves to be more innovative. Putting Kotter's criteria into action, we created a new social enterprise technology platform — RBC Connect. CREATE A SENSE OF URGENCY On this first of Kotter's points, Shackleton had it easy. The urgency was obvious when his men realized they were stranded. Among a busy, successful professional group, however, urgency to change direction or innovate is much more elusive. We have introduced RBC Connect in phases over the past few years. This Jive technology is now accessible to almost 80,000 employees and is rapidly approaching full global deployment. We have a variety of established communities in RBC Connect and several lessons learned. BUILD A COALITION A knowledge management project requires senior management involvement and support. A pilot program can be initiated with relative ease, but senior managers must provide additional momentum. With RBC Connect, we started modestly, creating a community for a small practice area devoted to e-commerce and privacy law that posted content relevant to the practice area. They used pre-established category tags and one-off tags for easy retrieval. In short order, the Google-like search engine proved its worth as it retrieved content rapidly. Early adopters reported a marked decline in email generation as more communications could be posted to the community. Community members became familiar with search techniques, the ability to "follow" individuals and content, and other functions familiar to users of social media. This was a great start, but to build a coalition, we needed to show that a business purpose of significance could be served. The group made a commitment to innovative efficiency and explored the technology further, and our General Counsel Group embraced the new direction. DEVELOP A VISION AND STRATEGY For RBC, social enterprise technology holds the promise of a more collaborative environment in which to develop, share and apply knowledge and expertise to achieve business objectives. A 2010 McKinsey study by Bughin and Chui identified high-performing employees as better connected and having networks about a third larger than average or low-performing employees. Corporations using internal social media identified the top benefits to be increasing access to knowledge, reducing communication costs and increasing speed of access to internal experts. RBC Connect provides a platform for: • Broad-based, collaborative dialogue • A central archive for "top of mind" knowledge transmission • Easy retrieval of information via a powerful, intuitive search engine • Email reduction • Enterprise support and adoption, enabling collaboration within the Law Group and throughout RBC Those who explore the tool find a rich blend of knowledge — documents, threaded discussions, internal experts, video clips, etc. New insights will continue to be discovered as more people contribute to the collection. COMMUNICATE THE CHANGE VISION We want our communities to flourish because they enrich and unleash knowledge otherwise stuck in individual silos. The vision is of community and a culture that rewards collective intelligence and group participation. We communicated that vision to our General Counsel Group with a short video presentation on the benefits of RBC Connect within the context of our overall mission to deliver legal and related professional services in innovative ways. A second video used the onscreen recording software Camtasia to show our audience how to navigate RBC Connect. Shackleton had to build a coalition of backers to outfit the Endurance and equip it with lifeboats. Those lifeboats provided critical shelter when the crew was forced to haul them over vast stretches of ice to eventual salvation.

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