ARTICLE

AI-Enabled Professional Services Digital Office Complex

The Professional Services Digital Office Complex is a digital infrastructure that streamlines and integrates core collaborative business processes, including strategic management, business development, service delivery, and project management for consulting, research, advisory, human resources, and legal teams. Because it is the central data repository for the firm's extensive knowledge capital, teams can utilize AI tools to enhance proposals, project work, and deliverables.

Figure 1 is a conceptual model of a Professional Services Firm's Digital Office Complex (see marker "1") containing multiple practice area team digital offices (see marker "2") with links to associated client project team digital offices (see marker "3").

Professional Services Digital Office Complex Model

Figure 1. Conceptual model of Professional Services Digital Office Complex

Practice Area Team Digital Office Model

The core capabilities of a Practice Area Team Digital Office are shown in Figure 2.

A. Team goals. Identify and track team goals aligned to the firm's strategy.

B. Collaborative business workflow for the practice area. Team members receive requests from clients; estimate costs, time, and resources; and once approved by the client, prepare and manage a project plan to produce the client deliverables. Example:

Stage 1 - Opportunity (acquire clients);
Stage 2 - Services Delivery (receive requests from clients, plan and execute project);
Stage 3 - Transfer (deliverables for client a); and
Stage 4 - Close (invoice, receive payment).

C. Deliverables. Work products produced by the teams.

D. Team decision support capabilities. Tools to collect and prioritize ideas quickly. Examples: SWOT analysis, risk identification, and research priorities.

E. Security. Permission and access rights.

The structure of the digital offices facilitates user navigation from team-to-team, assisting the user with quick orientation to each team's digital office, making it easier and faster to locate relevant information.

Figure 2. Practice Area Team Digital Office

Digital Office Complex: Acme Professional Services Firm

cordin8 is a collaborative business platform for professional services firms. Figure 3 is a screenshot of a cordin8 user's home page. Each tile on the home page, such as "Austin Practice", links to a cordin8 TeamMachine™, or digital office, to which the user has permission. Clicking the icon in the upper left-hand corner of the window will present a complete directory of cordin8 TeamMachines™ (digital offices) in the digital office complex.

Figure 3. cordin8 User Home Page access to cordin8 TeamMachines™ (digital office).

Digital Office: Acme Professional Services Leadership Team

An example digital office for the firm's leadership team is shown in Figure 4. It is organized to support (see left-hand navigator):

Strategy. Manage the firm's strategy. The teams within the firm align their goals with the firm's strategic objectives. The dashboard shows the current health of the objectives based on the indicated measures (KPIs). The translation of the colored dots is: cyan-exceeds target; green-on target; yellow-below target; and red-significantly below target. The trend arrows convey whether the current performance has improved, worsened, or stayed the same compared to the previous reporting period.

Portfolio. Manage the portfolio process for initiatives associated with the strategic objectives.

Meetings. Store and retrieve meeting agendas, minutes, and action items.

An example of a digital office is the firm's "Austin Practice" shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Strategy dashboard in cordin8 TeamMachine™ for firm's leadership team.

Digital Office: Austin Practice

An example of a digital office for one of the firm's practice areas is "Austin Practice" as shown in Figure 5. It is organized to support (see left-hand navigator):

Practice Performance (Home). Live performance status for the team's core processes of business development (acquiring new clients) and delivering work requested by clients.

Team Goals. Section to support creating and tracking the team's goals aligned with and contributing to the firm's strategy.

Business Development Opportunities & Calendar. Section to manage the collaborative workflow for acquiring new clients.

Client Requests & Delivery Activities. Section managing the portfolio of service requests and associated project work.

Figure 5. Practice Performance Dashboard in a Practice Area digital office using a cordin8 TeamMachine™

Digital Office: Collaborative Business Development Process

Team members use the "Opportunities" section to manage the business development process through a series of stages, as shown on the board in Figure 6.

Figure 6. "Opportunities" board for managing business development process

Digital Office: Collaborative Service Delivery Process

The team utilizes the "Client Requests" section to manage the service delivery process, from client intake and cost estimation through to producing the deliverables. The board shown in Figure 7 is the high-level workflow.

Figure 7. Client Requests Board to manage service delivery

Figure 8 illustrates the sub-stages for "1-Estimate" (purple stage) in the previous screenshot.

Figure 8. Sub-stages for "1-Estimate"

For client requests that meet the firm's criteria for being a medium- or large-size project, a digital office is created to support them. Figure 9 is an example of a cordin8 TeamMachine™ structured for a client project to select a CRM software package. A navigational link is stored with the client request item in the "Austin Practice" team digital office to the project's digital office (recall the link in the diagram of Figure 1).

Digital Office: Client Project Team

The configuration of the cordin8 TeamMachine™ for the CRM Package Selection Project includes:

Team Home. Communication for announcements, upcoming deadlines, meetings, etc.

Initiative Plan. Collection of collaborative smart documents for creating and tracking project plans, including the project charter, scope, schedule, budget, risks, issues, and so forth.

Package Criteria. Section to organize the criteria to be used to evaluate the various vendor CRM software packages, which is used with a team decision support for team members to rate each vendor against the weighted criteria to produce a total score.

Benefits Plan. Section for creating and tracking benefits that result from the project, which, in this case, is the implementation of a new CRM software package.

Vendor Research Notebook. Section to organize the results of researching the top vendors.

Figure 9. Example cordin8 TeamMachine™ for Project Digital Office.

Team Decision Support Capabilities

One of the key activities of a consultant is to collect and prioritize ideas from clients. Figure 10 illustrates one team decision support tool. The consultant facilitates a workshop with participants from the client organization. After the participants have brainstormed ideas, the next step is to prioritize them. The workshop participants rate the list of ideas on two dimensions: 1) value to agent and 2) simplicity of company effort. Shown here are the results. Those plotted in the upper right quadrant are top ideas. They are the most valuable and easiest to implement.

Figure 10. Example cordin8 TeamMachine™ for Project Digital Office.

Deliverables: Collaborative Smart Documents

To enhance the efficiency of the work product development process, the team utilizes a "collaborative smart document," as depicted in Figure 11. This tool enables team members to work concurrently on different sections of the document, fostering parallel development. Participants can contribute by leaving comments, asking questions, and offering editorial suggestions. Additionally, they can attach supplementary files containing detailed evidence to substantiate or defend the positions presented within the document.

Figure 11. Example of collaborative smart document.

Another example of the power of a collaborative smart document is the ability to reference content from other sections. When the document is viewed, it automatically pulls the latest content from the referenced section. In Figure 12, "3.1 Milestones" pulls data from the schedule section for a monthly status report, thereby saving the team from cutting-and-pasting the data each time they need to prepare the monthly report for the client.

Figure 12. Example of collaborative smart document pulling live data from the schedule section.

Digital Offices: Engaging with Clients & Partners

Clients and partners have custom interfaces to permissioned data in the team's digital office, represented by the arrows in Figure 13. The interfaces are tailored to their needs.

Figure 13. Clients and Partners have custom interfaces to permissioned data tailored to their needs.

The screenshot shown in Figure 14 is an interface for a client to submit requests to the practice team. When the request is submitted to the Practice Area Team, it is added to the Practice Area Team's "backlog" of client requests. This approach eliminates the need and time of monitoring an email inbox, creating a "request" entry in the team's "backlog" and copying the contents and files from the email, all of which accelerates the process.

Benefits to clients include the ability to track requests directly rather than through phone calls or emails. Documents are shared through the interface for client review, feedback, and approval.

Figure 14. Example of custom interface for a client of a practice area team.

Digital Office Complex with AI Tools

The power of AI can be put to use to analyze the firm's vast and growing data of client work stored in the digital office complex. Figure 15 adds an AI interface to the Digital Office Complex.

Figure 15. AI-enabled Professional Services Digital Office Complex.

By leveraging the knowledge capital captured in the Digital Office Complex, e.g., client proposals, project plans, and client deliverables, AI provides a foundation for efficiency, creativity, and higher-quality project outcomes. Some of the benefits include streamlining the development of documents and producing higher-quality work products by learning from past successes and failures. Examples:

Identifying Gaps and Improvements. By comparing the content of past deliverables to project outcomes, AI can pinpoint areas where the deliverables were incomplete or lacked impact. For example, if previous risk assessments overlooked certain critical factors, AI can suggest including those in the new project’s deliverables.

Enhancing research reports. AI can extract key insights, trends, and patterns from previous reports to inform new reports. For instance, if a prior report identified a significant market trend, AI can suggest updates based on recent developments.

Automated Drafting. AI can draft new proposals by pulling language, data, and successful strategies from past proposals for similar projects.

Performance Insights. AI can analyze which proposals were most successful and highlight features that contributed to client wins, ensuring these elements are included in new proposals.

Creating Knowledge Libraries. AI can categorize and index past deliverables into searchable libraries, making it easier for teams to find and reuse content.

Insight Generation. AI can mine past projects for insights that are useful for new deliverables, such as lessons learned, successful methodologies, or frameworks.

The digital office complex for professional services accelerates collaborative workflows. Additionally, it consolidates the vast content produced by teams across the firm into a single location that can be utilized with AI tools, enhancing project work and work products. It may also open up opportunities for new service offerings (Service "x").