We’re excited to be heading over to Las Vegas next week for the legal sector’s biggest annual conference, ILTA 2013. This year’s theme is “The Catalyst”, which got us thinking… what are the forces at work in legal and technology at the moment that are driving change?
From a technology perspective, Gartner have been talking about this a lot over the past year with the concept of the “Nexus of Forces“, a highly disruptive set of changes, shaping the future of technology. They define this as:
The convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobility, cloud and information patterns that drive new business scenarios. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own; together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. The Nexus is the basis of the technology platform of the future.
Individually, social, mobile and cloud are disruptive shifts in the technology landscape but together these three simultaneous trends are an irresistible force, perhaps the biggest change in technology for the last 15 or 20 years.
Social is fundamentally changing the way that we communicate and collaborate. It can’t be a bolt on or an afterthought any more, it needs be embedded as a core part of everything you do in technology. Consumer social networking platforms have proven the value of social and shown how interaction with the people we know can be made frictionless and deeply ingrained in the way we live our lives. These same concepts can be applied to the enterprise to transform the way people work. As Pete Williams from Deloitte Digital says,
If what you are doing in IT or KM doesn’t have social in it then stop and start again. It’s as simple as that.
It’s a similar story with mobile. Gartner themselves have said that “Mobile computing is forcing the biggest change to the way people live since the automobile.” That’s pretty profound stuff. But think about it, we’re all walking around with computers in our pockets, we’re constantly connected, we can communicate instantly and we have the entire internet at our fingertips. Mobile devices have fundamentally changed the way we live our lives. It’s already happened. Mobile devices have significantly influenced our working habits to the point that there’s an expectation that you’re always available, wherever you are.
Finally, the cloud is the glue that ties all of this together. A smartphone without the ubiqutious connectivity to all of the services and tools provided across the internet might as well be a Motorola DynaTAC. When you lose your data connection and are cut off from the cloud you’ve got no email, no web, no twitter, no facebook, no push notifications, no syncing. The boom in the popularity of social tools is closely linked to the rise in popularity of mobile devices. It’s that instant, real-time connection that transformed the way people thought about communication.
So, back to ILTA and to law firms for a second. What does all this mean for us, what are we supposed to do about these disruptive forces and how do they help us solve business problems? At HighQ we fully believe that social, mobile and the cloud is already transforming the way people work, in the real world. Dion Hinchcliffe captures this perfectly when he says,
Today’s highly mobile, social cloud has set everyone’s expectations for how easy, powerful, and simple IT can be. The genie will never be put back into the bottle.
We couldn’t agree more. So much so that our products are fundamentally based around these concepts. We build secure, enterprise-grade applications used by the largest law firms all over the world for secure file sharing, team collaboration, knowledge sharing and productivity and we bake social, mobile and cloud right into them, out of the box.
We’re bringing the best concepts and ideas from the consumer world right to the doorstep of the enterprise and we invite you to step inside and take a look at the future.
HighQ will be at booth #318, please swing by for a chat.
Stuart Barr from HighQ will be speaking about “Bolstering KM through user experience design” in the KMPG1 session
Mark Salamon from HighQ will be participating in a panel discussion on “Virtual Deal Rooms and Shared Collaborative Spaces: Technical and Practical Considerations for Managing Content“
