Peer to Peer Magazine

PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA 30 We held follow-up training sessions with individual practice areas to lead them through basic orientation and the potential for their new prototype communities. To encourage individuals to build personal profiles, we sponsored photography sessions to accelerate the inventory of photos available, putting faces to names. We also encouraged everyone to enhance their bios with references to special skills and expertise, and we demonstrated how the powerful search engine could retrieve profiles based on just a keyword or two. We turned over much of the initial training to a young knowledge management intern who, as a digital native, could project great enthusiasm for the new technology. She convinced some reluctant adopters that most communication in the platform was intuitive and easily learned as she herself had quickly picked it up with no special technology background. Tone from the top was essential in communicating the vision. Our General Counsel and senior managers participated in videos posted in RBC Connect, and we profiled people from different global locations in short video clips posted in the main communication site. We also leveraged the point system in RBC Connect that attributes points to users as they become more active. Our General Counsel posted a challenge to get our first 25 "newbies" to progress to the next level of "novice." RBC reward credits served as an incentive, and the challenge proved very successful. EMPOWER BROAD-BASED ACTION We are empowering action by creating prototype communities for many kinds of groups. Some are formed around traditional areas of legal practices, others around social or charitable undertakings, group- wide initiatives, geographic regions or global teams. Unlike the intranet, which requires IT specialists to maintain, publish and edit content, RBC Connect makes each person his or her own publisher and editor. It empowers people to own their communications and work more in the moment. The most creative and effective communicators can carry influence well beyond their level in the corporate hierarchy. Most communities receive an introductory presentation from the knowledge management team. It challenges them to take ownership of their community and leverage it for their own team purposes. There is ample training available online and individual follow-up as requested. As we create new communities within RBC Connect, employees can receive email alerts in their regular Outlook inboxes whenever new content is posted in the communities they are following. When they reply directly from Outlook email, the reply is automatically posted to relevant communities. In the short term, this email alert system has the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, email traffic. However, it provides a bridge to the new communication platform and allows "in the moment" communication as adoption takes root. Working with the theory that every group holds meetings and can benefit from a visible place to store agendas, minutes and presentation materials, we introduced a "Knowledge & Meeting Hub" feature in most practice area communities. The challenge is to post content in the Knowledge Hub that is most likely to be reused — the real go-to information that is sometimes a struggle to locate in a rush. This is not intended to compete with the document management system (DMS) but rather to elevate a few items from the DMS to the team's community in RBC Connect, where they will pay dividends to busy subject-matter experts. By posting this knowledge near regular meeting content, we hope to keep key knowledge front and center so subject- matter experts will maintain and curate it. Once busy professionals find their favorite precedents in a well-maintained repository, they will make it a regular pattern in their workflow. SMART MOVES

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