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The Transformation To Consulting 2.0

Emergent Solutions provides leadership and strategy consulting services, helping companies improve the way they apply leadership to achieve results.

With more than 65 global consultants, working with industry leading customers such as Adobe Systems, BD Biosciences, Cisco, Oracle Corp and Raytheon; Emergent's success relies heavily upon building strong relationships both internally and externally. To collect, organize and share the wealth of information that their consultants provide, and to form secure communities with their customers, Emergent turned to Socialtext.

Engage

When Emergent was first formed, most consultants were located in the same region. A great deal of information was shared via face-to-face meetings, and e-mail was used as the primary communications tool. As the company expanded to include a guild of consultants across the globe, it became increasingly difficult to keep everyone informed and engaged. E-mail was used to distribute updates, but quickly it became apparent that e-mail was not going to be effective for sharing best practices, furthering discussions, or organizing all the details required to successfully manage each client's account. They were stuck in a rut of transactional interaction instead of participating in meaningful collaboration and co-creation.

Emergent founder and managing partner Christine Cavanaugh-Simmons saw the potential for transformation Socialtext could bring. She deployed Socialtext to realize her vision; to leverage the collective intelligence of their consultant community, and to create an environment where account teams and clients co-create together.

To get started, they piloted Socialtext with one of their largest clients. With dozens of coaches actively working on the account, plus numerous client contacts; managing all the people, information, and processes involved was very difficult. Managing the logistics had become a big focus of time and energy, and the account team was challenged to provide richer, more strategic insights to the client.

To tackle this challenge, Claudia Miro, Director of Client Services, set up a Socialtext workspace for this team of coaches and consultants. She created pages for each step of the client engagement, where the coaches could record their work and track their success. This created a more “self serve” system of tracking and managing logistics and status of engagements — which, in turn, freed up Emergent’s resources to focus on providing more high-level value for the client. Additionally, each coach was given a profile page, where they could fill out personal information and provide insight into the projects in process. Using central pages with links to all of the important content, it became simple to organize and manage the vast array of information. Most importantly; by creating content in wiki pages instead of e-mail, everyone was able to contribute, and the most current information was readily accessible.

With all the information about the client and the coaches now in a central place, managing the account became much simpler. The consultants began to treat the workspace as their primary resource for information. They would each post updates on their projects, status reports, and notes. For Christine and her executive team, it was now much easier to get an overall look at the status of an account, allowing them to make informed decisions much faster than was previously possible. The pilot was a huge success — so much so that Emergent now creates workspaces for each customer account they manage.

The use of Socialtext has provided a dramatic reduction in time wasted on repetitive tasks. For example, any time someone has a question, rather than use e-mail they are now pointed to the workspace where they can either find an existing answer, or create a new page to start a discussion on the topic. Everyone has access to all this information, and common items can be linked together making them easy to locate. According to Claudia, one of the greatest results has been that each of the consultants is becoming increasingly self-sufficient, requiring less of her time, thus freeing her up to work on more important tasks.

"People no longer need me to facilitate the wiki. They are creating their own pages, managing their own workspaces, and finding value in them without my help."

Claudia Miro
Director Of Client Services

Inside Matters

The next step for Emergent's use of Socialtext was to facilitate the internal sharing and transfer of knowledge within the company. So in addition to the client workspaces, they also wanted to form internal communities. This has enabled the consultants to share lessons learned with one another, collect and collaboratively update best practices, and form closer relationships with each other via social networking. When new consultants join the guild, they are able to get up to speed quickly, now that all the content is stored in a shared location and not locked away in their colleagues' inboxes.

Taking advantage of internal social networks has led to an increase in activity in their workspaces. People choose to follow the colleagues they are interested in (such as the founding partners Christine Cavanaugh-Simmons and Dave Ancel), and in real-time they can see what these individuals are up to. There is no waiting for a weekly meeting or status update. People can engage each other in open conversations, provide feedback, and feel like a part of the team. When they see pages being updated, they become more active; tagging, editing, or commenting on those pages. Even simple things like adding pictures to profiles made a huge difference.

"The biggest impact was seeing people's pictures when we started to use Socialtext People. Names went from just being text on a page, to now being visual, which made it much friendlier."

Claudia Miro
Director Of Client Services

In the Know

While creating content is important, it is critical that people know about it so that information can be leveraged. Emergent is using Socialtext Signals to make everyone aware of updates to pages in their workspaces, share news about customer wins, and provide community members with links to important articles. With Socialtext Signals, everyone at Emergent is able to keep current, and feel closer to their colleagues.

Coming up Next

With the growing adoption of workspaces for clients and for internal usage, the next thing Emergent will be working on is creating an external resource hub. This Socialtext workspace will be integrated with Emergent's public website, providing both existing and new clients access to a dynamic and ever-changing source for knowledge sharing, books, articles, whitepapers, presentations, and other material.

Consulting 2.0

Socialtext has helped evolve Emergent into the future of collaborative consulting. In the past a consultant would work with a client, suggest changes, then leave and take their knowledge with them. Now, even after the engagement, Emergent can maintain a much more intimate relationship with their clients. By keeping up continual transparent communication, Emergent can provide ongoing value to their clients and develop a “transfer climate” of continued learning post-engagement. Emergent is pioneering the future of Consulting 2.0, and Socialtext is playing a key part in forming that future.