About to implement an enterprise social network? Wait! Read this first.

A predicted 65% of large European enterprises will have adopted social tools for business purposes by the end of 2014, so it’s increasingly likely that if your company hasn’t already adopted an enterprise social network it will this year. Adopting social tools is easy enough, but making sure it is adopted properly is a whole different matter.
Simply rolling out an enterprise social network and expecting people to start using it is not enough. In fact, implementing an enterprise social network requires planning, strategy and careful project management which begins before the system is even in place. So how should you prepare to implement an enterprise social network?

1. Plan, plan, plan

Before you start doing anything else, you need to figure out exactly what you want to achieve from your enterprise social network. If you’ve had to pitch to higher ups in order to get buy-in for an enterprise social network, chances are you’ve planned it to the minutest detail already. Nevertheless, as with any project, planning is the most important step and it is without it that a project (and an enterprise social network) fails read more.

Enterprise collaboration enables new ways of doing business

At HighQ we love to be part of the community and contribute our thoughts to the industry.

Our resident social business expert Ben Wightwick has contributed to FreePint’s topic series, The Social Enterprise, which looks at the ways that organisations are making the most of their internal social networks and knowledge management.

FreePint produces and publishes content and offers communities of practice and consulting based on its position and engagement in the business information industry.

Ben’s blog post and extended article, Enterprise Collaboration Enables New Ways of Doing Business, looks at factors to consider when reviewing enterprise collaboration solutions and some of the influencing trends associated with social business and the future of work.

Head to FreePint’s website to have a read.

Enterprise collaboration news: February 2014 round-up

February was all about social. Maybe that’s because it’s the month of love, or maybe it’s because people finally felt like they wanted to interact with their friends and colleagues after a month of New Year hibernation. Whatever the reason behind it, connected organisations, enterprise social networks and information sharing were all over our favourite blogs and news sites, and here’s our pick of them.

An article by Himanshu Sareen in Wired proposes the idea that enterprise social networks may one day replace email. This is something we’ve been suggesting for a while, though we freely admit that email will never die completely. Himanshu explains that enterprise social networks facilitate increased interaction and cohesion among co-workers (especially in large organisations). However, he acknowledges that “like any corporate initiative, progressing toward a social business requires significant strategic thinking.” By way of emphasis, Himanshu quotes Gartner, who state that “80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.” read more.

How to stay focussed by centralising your notifications

When you’re busy, you want to keep your focus and make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. When you’re getting emails here, LinkedIn InMails there, instant messages, phone calls, post-it notes and – god forbid – faxes from every direction, you are at risk of getting distracted from what you’re doing.
Whether you’re trying to find a handwritten note in a stack of paper or can’t remember if someone shared important information with you in an email or an instant message, it is time consuming to search through all your notifications and communication channels to find it.

Keeping all your notifications in one place will help you to keep your focus. Instead of alerts interrupting your train of thought, you can use your enterprise collaboration platform to manage your notifications for you. You’ll be able to search and find just the right piece of information exactly when you need it, rather than scouring through many message silos to find what you’re looking for read more.

Stuck at home due to the tube strike? HighQ Collaborate keeps you working

We’re headquartered in London, and today we’re in the midst of tube chaos as Transport for London staff hold a two-day strike. Londoners are struggling to get in to work, stuck on buses, queuing outside stations, or waiting in hour-long lines for taxis.
For those who have tried and failed to make it into work this morning, having regretfully given up after seeing the hopeless crowds attempting to make any kind of Central-ward motion (Boris bike stands empty, overground train platforms packed), working from home is the last option.
Even this causes disruptions to working folks’ day, as many businesses are not geared for home workers. For companies where all documents are hosted locally, email is the only way to communicate with the office and this relies on at least one poor soul to have made it in through the chaos to be able to email files to demanding colleagues.
Without the physical presence of the team, meetings must be cancelled, client catch ups must be postponed, and projects must be delayed. The tube strike isn’t just a mere irritation to thousands of commuters, but in fact causes thousands of pounds of losses in productivity for businesses across the capital read more.

Adding value with HighQ Diligence

Back in September 2013 I wrote a blog announcing the launch of our latest product, HighQ Diligence. This generated a lot of interest from our existing clients but also from firms we haven’t partnered with just yet. In the past few months we’ve been extremely busy showing the product to over 40 organisations and so far the reaction has been excellent. We’ve shown the product to the following industries, in the UK, Europe and North America:

1. Law firms

2. Banks

3. Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) providers

4. Accountancy practices

What’s been really interesting is that we’ve discovered a number of additional benefits and use cases that the product can generate, and so I thought I’d write about some of these in this piece. I end with an insight into what we’re considering might be in store for due diligence and our product in the future.

Quick recap

We designed and built HighQ Diligence in conjunction with several large law firms to address the common pain points firms experience when undertaking due diligence exercises for clients. The product has been built to make due diligence review exercises more efficient, transparent, less prone to errors and more standardised within a firm. We also built a document engine which at the click of a button creates a firm’s house style due diligence report, saving vast amounts of time and money, allowing law firms to report back to clients much faster. So overall, the product is all about saving money (on billable hours lost in inefficiencies) and providing a much better service to clients with faster and more accurate due diligence reports read more.

A day in the life of HighQ: Head of Operations EMEA

In the first of a new series of blog posts revealing how we at HighQ use our own system, Sebastiaan Bos, our Head of Operations EMEA, tells us how he uses HighQ Collaborate to stay in touch with our global team and the clients he works with most closely.
I am based in HighQ’s Netherlands office in Amsterdam (Schiphol-Rijk). From the Dutch office we work together with the all global regions: London, India, Australia and the USA, and on a daily basis I stay in contact with them through HighQ Collaborate.
As we’re such a global company it’s really important that we stay in constant communication, otherwise it’s easy to get left behind. Collaborate helps us to become “spiders in a web” as we say in Dutch – it connects each of us together within one network and when we’re all using one platform it makes our lives easier.
I spend a lot of my spare time checking the activity stream on Collaborate. I use it as a replacement for checking my inbox and catching up on the latest news and updates from our global offices. My email is reduced to client emails, and I do the rest of my internal communication through Collaborate. I interact with my colleagues largely through the activity stream, as I will read their microblogs, comment on their files or pages, and like their updates read more.