The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/67910
The BYOD Café sessions were promoted as IT giving extra services after the winter holiday break, and that's amazingly how they were received. People were not cynical at all, as they sometimes can be when IT projects are marketed. They accepted it as a totally altruistic effort by IT, although we were getting just as much back in experience and engagement as we were giving. Perhaps it was because of this giving environment that the sessions felt relaxed and fun, and there was very little pressure on our IT staff. If we didn't have the answer to a user's question on the spot, that was fine. We provided follow-up afterwards, and that was treated with even more good will. How Things Worked Sessions were held between 12:00 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. on a Monday or a Friday, allowing us to capture the maximum amount of traffic in the café areas. We promoted details in advance via email messages and kept the tone light-hearted and fun by including a related cartoon. To point people in the right direction, we put colorful signs up around the café, and we manned them with at least two IT staff members. We also loaded our tables with flyers for mobile phone discounts from our carriers, the Microsoft Home Use Program and how to get started with Yammer (our internal social networking tool that has an iPad support group). For our third and final session, I was concerned that we might have already reached attendance peaks. To entice a few more people, we held a raffle for two $50 Apple App Store gift cards. That definitely helped create some buzz, and we saw more people in that session than in the previous ones. Questions Fielded by Café Experts More often than not, a user coming into the BYOD Café had only one question on their mind that was specific to their device and usage. Once that had been covered, we followed our own checklist to guide the conversation into other areas (if they had time). Sometimes the conversations were very basic (e.g., Wi-Fi connections or shopping advice), and some discussions got into the trickier aspects of using our systems in a particular type of workflow. Our team enjoyed the diverse range of conversations, the challenges they were given and the satisfaction of helping users get the most out of their devices. Managing Expectations As much as we want to promote a BYOD environment and help support our users, we had to manage expectations about the types of devices the firm supports. To accomplish this, we added a disclaimer Peer to Peer 45