A recurrent (and painful, at least to judge from readers’
emails) issue in complex law firms, as in other far-flung
businesses, is a chronic disconnect between what management
thinks IT should provide and IT’s ability or willingness
to do so. From management’s perspective, the CIO and
his organization are being obtuse and speaking some indecipherable
language. From the CIO’s perspective, senior management
is playing a passive-aggressive game: To quote one
I spoke to recently, "Lawyers don’t like what you give them
but they won’t tell you what they want."
If
you read CIO Magazine as I do, this goes by the
name of "business process alignment," or simply "alignment." Are
the systems, capabilities, hardware platforms and software
tools IT is providing to the organization "aligned" (or not)
with the organization’s "business processes"—what
the firm actually needs to get done to perform its function
and stay in business? For
us, that means things like keeping track of court calendars
and creating and filing motion papers and briefs on time,
dealing with discovery ("litigation support"), putting together
deal documents efficiently and effectively using templates
from past transactions, tracking time and converting it ultimately
into bills and collections, etc.
The phenomenon of the CEO and the CIO talking past each
other is so common it virtually has its own literature in
management-land, but trust McKinsey to
help you think through it by providing a clarifying terminology
and framework. Specifically, they distinguish between
what the CIO must "supply" and how he can in turn shape the
organization’s "demand" for IT services.
"Supply" is the basic stuff: Keeping the
trains running on time, the email- and web-servers up and
updated, the wordprocessing flowing, the time recorded, etc. Not
sexy but clearly indispensable. The biggest mistake
a CIO can make here is thinking once he’s done this he’s
done his job.
"Demand" is where it gets interesting. McKinsey
uses the term to encompass the CIO’s efforts and ability
to help the organization innovate through technology. Unfortunately,
problems immediately arise when business unit leaders (think
practice group managers in a law firm) doubt the CIO really
understands what they do or that he can think strategically
about it. Then there’s the always-hot-button of cost. If
an IT initiative comes with a meaningful price tag, the inherently
skeptical will doubt its payoff. And let’s not forget
turf: Just how far is the CIO going to be permitted
to "intrude" into the business leader’s domain?
Nevertheless, one can identify three conditions obtaining
where firms are able to capture greater value from IT investments:
- Key business executives as well as the CIO have a clear
financial understanding if IT costs and investments, and
discuss it in a common, business-focused language. - Business-side executives are accountable for IT and take
responsibility for generating value from IT investments. - Both business and IT managers consciously study how new
IT investments can improve productivity and competitiveness–in
other words, they seek innovations that will change the
business.
Can CIO’s make the transition from just "keeping everything
up and running" to forming true strategic and thought-leadership
partnerships with the firm’s leadership? Hard as it
can be, the payoff can be tremendous. IT can move from
being perceived as a perilous sinkhole of costs to assuming
a role as a key enabler of innovation. Not all CIO’s
can maneuver the transition, to be sure, and not all management-side
lawyers will embrace the mind-shift either. But your
firm deserves no less.
