Digital White Papers

38 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Expertise Location and Social Collaboration: Three Case Studies on a Winning Formula activities and leverage firm competencies for client advantages. The search and filter functions continue to undergird the entire KM platform. At Sheppard Mullin, delivering relevant information when and where it is needed has become an expected component of work product. Equally important was giving the organization a straightforward way to share knowledge. Several aorneys in practice groups such as corporate and intellectual property litigation already were familiar with social soware and understood the value of moving away from email and into a social solution for team interactions. Using Neudesic Pulse's social capabilities, the KM team equipped these practice groups with a more robust and secure social platform that integrates with their SharePoint portal. This access to social-enabled communities is essential to institutionalizing communities of practice as a social fabric. Looking forward, we plan to go mobile with this technology –– and our users could not be more excited. All We Have Is Knowledge A best-of-breed, customizable expertise and social platform can be the key to starting or advancing KM's digital journey, reducing reliance on internal IT teams, maintaining flexibility for new use cases and quickly building on firm culture. Optimized platforms should allow point-and- click customization, easily adapt to the ever-changing needs of the firm, and keep requests out of the IT queue. This enables KM leaders to deliver immediate value with relatively lile resource involvement, establishing an early win for KM to drive perception and adoption into the company culture. By combining expertise location and social collaboration, firms gain a competitive edge by taking advantage of expertise in real time and on demand as it is created, updated and shared. ILTA With the Practice Chairs' Blessing Buy-in from senior leadership is critical to effective implementation of a KM solution. With larger firms, this might be the group practice chair. Associates look to partners to provide a road map of how the KM solution will unfold and see how the technology is used by leaders. Firm leadership must "walk the walk" for KM solutions to become integral to firm culture and ensure that expertise lives on, even when an associate or partner leaves the enterprise. Once top-to-boom belief and acceptance of the technology have been established, adoption rates grow throughout the firm. At Akerman, for example, implementation of a leadership- based adoption strategy led to a significant milestone: 50 percent adoption overall. In some groups, adoption was as high as 86 percent in the first four to five months of deployment. These high adoption rates indicate just how badly the solution was needed. Users found welcome relief from "pardon the interruption" messages and embraced the solution quickly with their practice chairs' blessing. ILTA RAMIN VOSOUGH Ramin Vosough is Neudesic's Vice President of Product, focused on technology products that advance expertise location and social collaboration globally for law firms, legal departments and other professional services organizations. Contact Ramin at ramin.vosough@neudesic.com.

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