William Buist

Business Specialist: Building trust in teams and communities

William Buist is Managing Director of Abelard Management Services, which specialises in building trust in teams and communities within its corporate and SME client base.

William has had a 22 year career in Insurance, serving as the Head of Business Risk Management and Chief Underwriter for Lloyds TSB Insurance, where he also engaged with a number of consultations with Government on behalf of insurance industry bodies.

In 2001, he became director of a consultancy company that focuses on supporting corporate teams delivering major change, where he has achieved substantial success with many medium and large clients.

William personally focuses on online community development, social networking and collaborative development within and between businesses. Amongst his many clients, he has facilitated the growth of the Ecademy Life Members Community – a premium global group of Entrepreneurs and Business Owners.

William is no stranger to the public arena, and regularly speaks at events and conferences and a guest speaker at corporate events.

The Societal Web

The ‘societal web’ is beginning to emerge. Businesses are moving from telling to listening, from informing opinion to facilitating collaborative insight, from one to many and from mono-media to infinite-media. The challenge for us all during this transition will be on how we can continue to maintain our income streams and on how we can adapt to the changing world.

When the web first appeared it was ‘Read Only’ and businesses presented their products and services for people to browse. Gradually we’ve introduced interaction and conversation to the web, and we are all learning the language (it’s not quite the same as our spoken languages).

Socialising, through social networks and similar sites, has become common. What we see now is meaning being incorporated into the way the web works functionally, some are calling this the Semantic Web, but wisdom will be derived when people harness those semantic additions to the web.

In our opinion we are heading to the development of sharing as a way of working, of collaborating, in a community environment, by all, for the benefit of that community. It’s an environment where providing the knowledge, the means of understanding it (the semantic descriptions), and the facility to manipulate and re-present it enables the community to gain new insights and grow and develop as a society, as a community. Those who gather around your ideas and subject matter become your society, your community, but they set the context and the culture, it’s no longer defined by the owner of the infrastructure.

This is the Societal Web.