digital[behaviour]

The focus of our work is not just on collaboration, but on helping our clients to deliver real benefit from it.

Our consultancy services are concentrated in the following areas:

Business Change

Major change initiatives rarely fail just through inadequate IT applications or failure to complete sub-projects. They stumble through an inability to fully engage those impacted by changes taking place. By helping you take a more collaborative approach to change we can help you to deliver lasting and effective change in the shortest time possible.

Our change management expertise covers the full range of business process, communication, and organisational change services to help ensure a programme can succeed.

In addition, we can help you to:

- join-up and consolidate change initiatives to reduce cost and overlaps

- make use of virtual teams working across organisational boundaries

- embed practical approaches to manage and engage stakeholders

- develop effective communication strategies which establish a dialogue with users and stakeholders rather than just a series of one way messages

Online Communities

Online communities provide a powerful means of linking people within the organisation and customers and suppliers beyond it. Digital Behaviour have been helping clients to use online communities within their organisations for many years; we believe this gives us unrivalled experience in the UK in how to make online communities deliver - as part of Knowledge Management programmes or cross-organisational initiatives.

In our experience, communities can be delivered without extensive consultancy support. Most organisations are able to handle key stages of setting up and launching online communities in house. We help you to speed that process up ? and remove the risk - by bringing expertise at specific points.

Our services are focussed in the following areas:

Strategy and Research: Communities are relatively easy to set up and launch but difficult to sustain. We can help you to avoid the risks of empty online spaces and develop a thorough strategy to reach critical mass.

Plan and Launch: to support you through the development of initial planning and preparation phases through to the actual launch of your online community initiatives.
Facilitation: Facilitation of your online communities to help them reach critical mass; this allows us to directly transfer skills to you.
Evaluation: Evaluation of existing online communities and networks to benchmark performance and identify areas for improvement.
Technology Selection: Assisting you in the selection of an appropriate technology platform to support your community initiative.

We also provide short training courses for those setting up or managing online communities. Details below.

Networks

Networks are an important part of how large and small organisations operate. In large organisations, informal networks help to increase communication and knowledge flow, filling in the significant gaps left by more formal initiatives and processes. In smaller organisations - and federations of organisations - networks help their members to access resources and expertise previously restricted to bigger players.

Traditionally few organisations have explored how their networks operate - or understood how they can be nurtured and developed. But the increasing importance of networks in the fast moving, knowledge based economy requires a different view. It is precisely because networks are flexible and non-hierarchical that they can be used to build connections and improve communication where other approaches fail.

We have a strong track record in helping organisations to understand people or 'social' networks and deliver value from them. This includes:

understanding how networks contribute to knowledge management or communication programmes

taking practical steps to increase the most valuable networking opportunities in an organisation
developing approaches to networking for membership based organisations or small businesses
facilitation of face to face networks

We can combine this experience with structured techniques such as Social Network Analysis and sophisticated modelling tools which provide insight into how networks underpin activity and communication across an organisation or set of organisations.

email: info@digitalbehaviour.com for details

Technology

Technology is a key enabler for collaboration. Getting the right technology in place - and ensuring it catalyses rather than inhibits collaboration - is key to any collaboration or knowledge sharing initiative. However there are a number of associated risks - primarily the cost of inappropriate IT investment.

Good collaboration depends on many different factors, and understanding the real needs for collaboration within your organisation is essential. Sophisticated document management is quite different from the needs of online communities. Real-time collaboration is different from simple group communication and shared task lists and calendars. The risks around security and integrity must also be understood as people work together more; integration with other applications, including intranet, is also important.

Getting the right combination of functionality is crucial - the risk of a 'feature rich' solution which actually stops people working together is high.

From many different consulting assignments we have unique experience in what really makes collaboration work from an IT perspective. We can help you understand what technologies you do - and don't - need to support communication, joined-up working and knowledge sharing.

Our services include support for Requirements Definition, Technology Selection and Technology Audit.

We are supplier independent and have significant experience of most of the different technology solutions available - including Microsoft Sharepoint MOSS 2007 - and how they are being used in practice.

Training and Development

Ultimately it is people who collaborate, no matter what tools are employed to support them. Organisations become more effective as highly motivated individuals with well developed collaborative skills and behaviours begin to work differently.

Skills for Collaboration
We help our clients develop these capabilities through both off and online learning that is tailored to their specific needs. For example:

Measuring the benefits of collaboration
Best practice video and voice conferencing.
How to manage a virtual team
How to run an effective online meeting
How to choose the right collaborative technology
Engagement and Stakeholder Management Skills

Training for Online Communities
In addition we run two formal training courses for those building online communities:

Community Fundamentals: How to research, plan and launch an online community.
Community Facilitation: How to build participation and facilitate a vibrant online community

Personal Knowledge Management Training
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is an important part of any Knowledge Management programme, complementing more formal 'top down' approaches. This course equips individuals to take responsibility for how they manage and share their knowledge and expertise, and provides them with a wide range of skills, approaches and techniques to do this.

email: courses@digitalbehaviour.com for details

This is just a selection of the capabilities we help to develop. For most clients, the collaborative opportunities that are identified will drive the selection of appropriate learning modules.