That IT professionals can’t "speak" to business professionals
and vice versa is a universally recognized truism. (To paraphrase
Mae West, "Men and women have nothing in common; all men think
about is women, but all women think about is men.") If
anything, the language/culture gap is even greater between IT professionals
and lawyers.
If I had a magic bullet to solve this problem, you’d be reading
a blog about IT and business alignment instead of about the economics
of law firms, but the chronic difficulty in coming up with a common
language—where words like "cost," "process," "function,"
and "risk" actually mean the same thing to people on opposite sides
of the table—can and often does have a serious detrimental
impact on a firm’s finances both through wasteful and failed projects
and through less-than-optimally-productive "solutions."
Neither side, let me hastily say for the record, is right or wrong. Both,
understandably, proceed from their own comfort zone. IT professionals
may think that their focus on a coherent overall IT "architecture"
for the firm and delivering specified functionality to the "desktop"
is enlightened and strategically correct. But lawyers
may think that short or nonexistent learning curves, always-on
availability, and seamless integration of digital and hard-copy
documents is the name of the game.
I have a suggestion. Or rather, both McKinsey and CIO magazine have
a suggestion: Create a joint IT/lawyer advisory council
or steering committee to ensure alignment of IT initiatives with
lawyers’ actual needs. The goal is to move conversations
past crisis management and budgeting, and on to the plane of securing
managing committee buy-in for IT’s work.
The CIO piece discusses this straightforwardly and with
great competence.
The McKinsey piece, characteristically, adds a back-flip and a
spin, but one of tremendous value: It points out that a chronic
"failure mode" of IT spending is the perpetual motion spent on
trying to scotch-tape and baling-wire together an endless array
of disparate systems (client information, conflicts, financial
reporting, time-keeping, practice group metrics, e.g.) and that
a newer and more enlightened approach is to substitute small stand-alone
software "modules" (think LEGO blocks) for today’s "spaghetti." These
discrete, stable modules can then be assembled into full-dress
systems. An example clarifies the concept: How many
ways does your firm have for users to log in and authenticate themselves? If
the answer is > 1, you can start there.
