I was sitting in an office late one evening this week checking contract documents for a bid, as tends to be our lot as professionals, when my legal colleague commented that here we were again as well trained legal experts formatting documents late at night.
I was very sympathetic as I had just spent a frustrating half hour using Format Painter to persuade a reluctant Word to do consistent numbering. By the way this is a great "cheat" to use which avoids getting stuck in intricate numbering commands.
However my colleague was right. Why were highly trained professionals whose task is to draft and manage risk instead doing complex word processing tasks? We were in fact fortunate to be assisted by a technical professional document author who had uncovered (and fixed) a document which bizarrely altered text when you put the document in print mode.
Do you remember how there used to be secretaries, even in in house legal practices who could do this sort of thing? It is years since I had access to a secretary, and then she was shared with three other fee earners. These women and men earned their money by taking the organisational burden off lawyers and other professionals and were experts in typing and in Word processing and the other administrative tasks of an office. The stereotype of making tea and primly taking dictation was far from the real truth and value of these support staff.
I am not suggesting a return to this world which for many of us has gone for ever. What I am advocating, as we all look at how roles can be broken down into their constituent tasks to re-engineer professional work, using technology and lean thinking, is that maybe just maybe we should recognise the value of professional support services more than we do.
This would allow the professionals to concentrate on the added value tasks that we seek to carry out in order to preserve our role in our online world. Richard Susskind argues persuasively in his book "The Future of the Professions" that "there will be an "incremental transformation" in the way that we produce and disseminate expertise in society" which will eventually result in the "dismantling of the traditional professions".
I agree, but as expertise floats up the value chain and becomes more rarified, somebody or some technology still has to make document formatting work, and it should not be the legal or financial experts on a transaction. And (just to be controversial) somebody or perhaps some computer programme or app, or maybe even a robot, has to make the tea and order the pizzas!
I was very sympathetic as I had just spent a frustrating half hour using Format Painter to persuade a reluctant Word to do consistent numbering. By the way this is a great "cheat" to use which avoids getting stuck in intricate numbering commands.
However my colleague was right. Why were highly trained professionals whose task is to draft and manage risk instead doing complex word processing tasks? We were in fact fortunate to be assisted by a technical professional document author who had uncovered (and fixed) a document which bizarrely altered text when you put the document in print mode.
Do you remember how there used to be secretaries, even in in house legal practices who could do this sort of thing? It is years since I had access to a secretary, and then she was shared with three other fee earners. These women and men earned their money by taking the organisational burden off lawyers and other professionals and were experts in typing and in Word processing and the other administrative tasks of an office. The stereotype of making tea and primly taking dictation was far from the real truth and value of these support staff.
I am not suggesting a return to this world which for many of us has gone for ever. What I am advocating, as we all look at how roles can be broken down into their constituent tasks to re-engineer professional work, using technology and lean thinking, is that maybe just maybe we should recognise the value of professional support services more than we do.
This would allow the professionals to concentrate on the added value tasks that we seek to carry out in order to preserve our role in our online world. Richard Susskind argues persuasively in his book "The Future of the Professions" that "there will be an "incremental transformation" in the way that we produce and disseminate expertise in society" which will eventually result in the "dismantling of the traditional professions".
I agree, but as expertise floats up the value chain and becomes more rarified, somebody or some technology still has to make document formatting work, and it should not be the legal or financial experts on a transaction. And (just to be controversial) somebody or perhaps some computer programme or app, or maybe even a robot, has to make the tea and order the pizzas!
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