Catch-up with Peter Williams of Deloitte Digital – the intersection of digital and professional services

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I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with Deloitte Digital‘s CEO Peter Williams, someone who is always on the vanguard of innovation in professional services. A few things he mentioned about what they’re up to:

* Yammer (enterprise micro-blogging) has taken off and is getting substantial use across Deloitte Australia. They did a security test on Yammer for some clients and it came out solid. They are still using the free version though are talking to Yammer about a paid version.

* Deloitte has implemented an internal ‘Innovation Academy’ which among other functions enables idea submission and voting, which they’ve created by mashing up several tools. The system has generated ideas already worth $15 million to the company.

* One of the ideas was GreenID, a joint venture between Deloitte, Edentiti and Global Data Company that provides fast online identity verification for clients who have traditionally done this offline.

* They have also created an XBRL gateway to facilitate conversion of accounts into XBRL format.

* A collaboration with Cooperative Research Centre ACID yielded an interesting visualization and view of the mental models of how ideas are generated in the professional services frontline. Unfortunately this is not available online yet.

Lots of nice things happening here.

I recently wrote from my own experience about Six high-return initiatives for driving innovation in professional services, and Chapter 9 of my book Living Networks is primarily about how digital channels are changing how professional services firms operate.