Every now and then this research turns up some really interesting results – as with our latest whitepaper, “Professionals and Electronic Document Management” (EDM).  In this case it’s a really strong example of how the reality of EDM exceeds all expectations.

We asked people who are considering the implementation of an EDM system whether they expect it to provide a significant increase in efficiency and productivity.  31.6% believed it would.

When we asked people who have already implemented an EDM system if it significantly increased efficiency and productivity, a whopping 72.8% said yes.  That’s more than double the expectations of those considering EDM.

Efficiency and productivity are not the only benefits of EDM.  You can see some of the other benefits and what our respondents thought of them in the graph below.  In the whitepaper we also ask respondents how EDM can improve other aspects of a business, such as assisting the management of Governance, Risk and Compliance and facilitating working remotely.

Source: Professionals and Electronic Document Management, CCH 2009

At the moment only 40% of our respondents (primarily medium and small professional firms) have implemented a comprehensive EDM system.  Where does your business stand when it comes to Electronic Document Management?  Do you have it all sorted from scanning documents in to sending out electronic invoices?  Maybe you’re more like most of our respondents, managing a number of documents online but still keeping a few filing cabinets out back. 

If you’re considering EDM but are not convinced that it will be worth the effort, I encourage you to read what our respondents had to say – and see how the reality really does beat all expectations.

Last Thursday I attended a seminar on using IntelliConnect hosted by Lachlan Macquarie Chambers in Parramatta.  We have been preparing these seminars tailored to the research needs of barristers for a while and it was wonderful to finally hold one.  The first lesson for me was that my map reading skills need polishing and I can’t assume that I will always have access to GPS.  Jennifer Rose Hannan (the driver I was misdirecting and one of our client trainers) displayed her usual calm and got us safely to our destination.  The anxiety I experienced while trying to navigate was the only anxiety I experienced in an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.

We were welcomed to the Chambers by Paul Sansom (a family law barrister) and Anna Zambellakis, the clerk.  As well as members of Lachlan Macquarie Chambers Paul had invited barristers from Arthur Phillips Chambers (the other chambers in Parramatta) and a number of his instructing solicitors so we had a range of Parramatta family law practitioners as our audience.

The atmosphere at the session was relaxed and welcoming and the level of engagement and participation by the attendees was amazing.  Jennifer started by running through some information about IntelliConnect and the design principles underlying it.  The most important point was that it was designed in consultation with our customers and that it will continue to evolve in consultation with our customers.  In fact as part of the session Jennifer took note of some suggestions from the participants to feed back to the design team.

Jennifer then moved on to showing IntelliConnect live using research terms / scenarios suggested by the attendees at the session.  It was intensely rewarding to watch people move from positive but slightly sceptical to clearly impressed as the capabilities of IntelliConnect became apparent.  The session ended with 2 curly research questions* (that the questioners clearly expected wouldn’t be answered) being answered by in one case a single search and in the other a single search with a small amount of filtering of the results.

All in all it was a thoroughly rewarding experience (although I’m glad the next one on 13 August is in Phillip Street in the CBD so I won’t have to navigate).

*Question 1:  can I marry my niece?
*Question 2:  was there a case that considered the grant of a stay in the context of a transfer of proceedings between the Local Court and the Family Court?

Last week I had the opportunity to get out of the office and head up to sunny, warm Brisbane for the day (it’s pretty cool in Sydney at the moment!).  The occasion was a workshop I was running on IntelliConnect as part of the Law Librarianship: Legal Research course run by the Queensland University of Technology.

The course is a week-long intensive designed for librarians who have just moved or are planning to move into law librarianship.  The students came from university libraries, government departments and state libraries and were pretty clued in about research practices in general. 

The course itself seems to be incredibly interactive and practical – I wouldn’t have minded doing it myself!  All three large legal publishers, including CCH, offered a workshop on researching with their services.  There were also group discussions led by practicing law librarians on topics such as training graduate lawyers.  I was lucky enough to sit in on this one and it was fascinating to hear the experiences of different librarians.

While I am not a member of our dedicated training team, I really relished the opportunity to train some fellow librarians on IntelliConnect.  For the past year I’ve been part of various projects related to the development of IntelliConnect (and some of them are ongoing!) so it was quite exciting to let some librarians loose on the system for an hour or two and see what they thought.  Here in Australia the main migration to IntelliConnect is in August, so these students were really getting a sneak peak at the platform and what it can do.

All of them seemed to find it easy and intuitive, and were impressed not only with the smoothness of the system but also some of the funky extra features such as being able to bookmark and search across your favourite titles, or store results in a research folder for review a few days (or weeks or years) later.  The final assignment for the course is an evaluation of one of the three major research platforms, so I’m looking forward to more feedback from the group as they really put IntelliConnect through its paces!

Search has been quite a hot topic of  late, with Google launching new features and Microsoft unveiling Bing.   There’s also been a fair bit of buzz about the launch of WolframAlpha, a “computational knowledge engine”. 

So what on earth is a “computational knowledge engine”?  It is a search engine that allows you to type in a fact- or calculation-based question and the engine will provide a single answer. It could be the next step down the track to Web 3.0 or the “semantic web”.

Just to clarify - here is how you conduct research in the current online environment.
1. Start with a problem/need. “I need to find out about x”
2. Extract keywords from your problem.
3. Enter keywords into search engine
4. Filter and scan list of results for relevance
5. Analyze authority of selected sources.
6. Revise search and repeat as necessary.
7. Collate responses into a coherent response to your original query.

If you want to get all Web 2.0 about it, add in “6a. contact friends for assistance” or “6b. place greater preference on sources used by your friends”.

In the ideal Web 3.0 world, here is how your search would look:
1. Start with a problem/need.
2. Enter the question/need into search engine (no need to pick out specific keywords)
3. The engine will provide you with a pre-collated response.

That’s a much shorter process, and is essentially what Wolfram Alpha is offering. But it begs the question - what is going on in between steps 2. and 3? Who is taking care of all the extra steps that you no longer control?

Brian Bergstein raises a very good point in his Sydney Morning Herald article on Wolfram Alpha. 

..for all the fears that Google is making us stupid by making it too easy to look up information, at least Google and its rivals enable the critical thinking that comes from scoping out multiple sources.
Unlike search engines that deliver links that match keywords in your query, WolframAlpha is more of a black box. If you have it perform a calculation, it gives you an answer, along with a small link for “source information.” Open that and you’ll generally be told the data was “curated” - found and verified - by the company behind WolframAlpha. In other words, “trust us.”

Do you trust WolframAlpha?

I’m not sure I do. I’ve never heard of them. Why should I trust the answer they give me?

But would you trust the same answer from Encyclopedia Britannica? Or CCH? Or Proquest? All established brands in the knowledge market. Are you happy to receive a single answer, as long as it comes from an “authoritative” source? And how do you, as a searcher, define authoritative anyway? These brands have spent a lot of time developing a reputation for quality, authoritative content. If I was going to trust a “black box” search, I would rather it be powered by people I already trust.  What do you think?

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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At our internal launch of the new online platform Intelliconnect last Friday, the CEO of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting division, Kevin Robert, told us that “tool is a four letter word”.  Creating cool little tools to aid our customers in their work has been surpassed by a much more sophisticated concept: dynamic connectivity.

Sounds good but what does it actually mean? Well it’s all about knowing what comes next in a process and then streamlining that process. If we understand the relationships between the tasks in a workflow, between different departments, between a firm and its clients, between CCH and our customers then we will create a genuine solution. The aim of dynamic connectivity is to break down the barrier of conscious use ie you use something so automatically you don’t even think about it – like driving a car. You don’t think of your car as a tool to get you from A to B; you just get in and drive it. Likewise, Kevin Robert was outlining our goal of creating solutions that our customers don’t even have to think about using. It’s all about flow v. function.

As New Business Initiatives Director this is of course very interesting to me. Dynamic connectivity is not going to happen overnight so I will be working on initiatives that drive us towards it. First up we will be increasing the level of enhancements made to our online services and I’ll blog about them as we progress so watch this space.