White Papers | Business Vision + Technology = Competitive Advantage
How does your organization view technology? Is it a necessary evil or a competitive advantage? Where does technology intersect with your firm’s business strategy?
Technology is never going to win a case or close a deal on its own, but technology investments can provide a tangible and measurable return when they are aligned with a firm’s strategy and culture. The challenge is how to make that happen.
In today’s business environment, organizations that believe technology is a necessary evil typically make IT decisions in isolation. Law firms and other professional services firms that fit this description have the following characteristics:
- Technology goals and objectives are established without regard to specific business strategy.
- The technical staff may be aware but not driven by the organization’s goals and strategic objectives.
- System stability is a driving factor; firm management asks for additional functionality and capability; “Solutions” are sought to respond to upgrading technology not necessarily providing competitive edge or fixing business issues.
Unfortunately, this mindset is all too common. In an environment such as the one described above, technology decisions are almost always reactive. Both Firm management and IT staffs are missing the best opportunity to increase the value and return from their technology investment.
Let’s look at the situation in greater detail. In a reactive environment, organizations are focused on hardware and software upgrades as an end result to meet a particular need. In many such organizations, the IT department has been tasked with the job of keeping systems stable. If management needs something they ask for it, and IT is expected to respond. Until that point, IT is generally not brought into any discussion about leveraging the business. It simply is not their job.
As a result, technical people aren’t expected to understand or appreciate return on investment or the need to drive "process" as a means of controlling overhead costs and leveraging resources. In short, they are rewarded for remaining in a reactive role.
For example, an upgrade to the latest version of a business application is promoted because the organization might otherwise be left behind. In the event a manufacturer issues a notice that a particular version of their product will no longer be supported, an upgrade will be implemented immediately. The fact that compatibility issues will require that many other parts of the system also be upgraded is simply a reality the organization has to deal with.
Ironically, the people component of the upgrade – where a firm potentially could see its greatest return on investment – often is overlooked.
When we ask about training the staff on new applications, we frequently are told that it is not necessary because staffers are smart. The discussion continues with statements such as, “The staff knows how to use the current version of the software, so the newer product should be easy for them to figure out on their own. Besides, who has the time for training? The partners/managers won’t come anyway. We can send the staff and they can train their bosses, if necessary.”
What is happening here? The firm is investing in products but not in people or process. More importantly, nobody is asking the most important question about the technology investment: “why?”
This disconnect persists because the technology investment has not been tied to a true business purpose, such as seeking to capture or better secure a particular market segment or introducing a new service to the customer base. Since nothing is measurable, no value is assigned to the investment. It is simply overhead – a cost of doing business.
From a different, but no less important vantage point, the members of the firm are generally focused on their practice area rather than the firm as a total entity. The picture of where the firm is going may not be clear to all. More importantly, the answer to “what’s in this for the client?”, is neither apparent nor addressed.
As a result an organization, such as the one described above, will create a certain core foundation of support services. But beyond that everyone is on his or her own. Work process standards are difficult if not impossible to establish because everything is geared to “ME” rather than “WE.” There are no economies of scale and no leverage of the firm’s key resources: people, time and money. A typical illustration of this mindset is the fact that ratios of administrative/paraprofessionals to professional staff will tend to hold constant or even increase with additional business.
Three critical shifts must take place in order to realize significant return on investment: a shared vision, a client focus and a proactive mindset.
- A shared vision. The firm must first open the kimono to share its vision of where it is going with all levels of staff. That vision will give purpose and substance to the question asking, “Why are we investing in this, and what does it mean to the client and the firm?” Once this buy-in is established, the firm has a good opportunity to establish some standardized work processes that ultimately will improve utilization and cross training of staff members.
- A client-focus. Perhaps most important, the firm must shift its focus to center on the client (external) rather than the inpidual (internal). The client is the ultimate consumer of a firm’s services – not the immediate boss. Therefore, the firm needs to focus on how it can deliver services more effectively to meet and anticipate the needs of its client base. Obtaining buy-in to this different approach to operations will shift the way everybody in the organization works, thereby reaping significant returns for the firm.
- A proactive mindset. Technology personnel at law firms and other professional services firms must be freed to move away from being reactive and toward being proactive. They must be rewarded for aligning the firm’s technology investments with its business strategy. They need to be encouraged to have the perspective that technology is a means to leverage their business initiatives and to manage their critical assets: time, people and money. And they must appreciate the need to drive “process” as a means of controlling overhead costs, leveraging resources and providing quantifiable return on investment.
As we stated earlier, technology is never going to win a case or close a deal on its own. However, when closely aligned with a clear business strategy, technology can help to level the playing field and give your organization a competitive advantage.
