P2P

47 I L T A N E T . O R G L ittle did we know when we set out to replace our homegrown experience management application that the rollout would land squarely in the midst of a global pandemic. What, at first, felt like a big blow to our project plan ended up having both positive and negative consequences. The ability to stay agile was never more valuable than during this rollout. Through it all our goal remained the same, but the path to success evolved. In the end, even in a pandemic, our new firm intelligence solution was adopted with great enthusiasm. What follows is an overview of our project and rollout, complete with lessons learned for those who are considering introducing a comprehensive firm intelligence solution at their firms—pandemic or not. Replacing an Existing System For more than 15 years, Akin Gump had been using a sophisticated homegrown experience database built by our information technology (IT) department. We came to rely on it for traditional experience management, as well as our firm directory. The downside? We outgrew its search capabilities and needed something that would be both more flexible and easier for lawyers and others to navigate. Our system was also showing its age and was requiring an increasing amount of IT resources to maintain. When practice needs shifted and marketing wanted to track new information, it would take our capable IT team many hours of work to make even a small change because of the system's age. It became more work to make incremental system improvements than to track information in spreadsheets, and, in the end, we needed a system that required less effort to maintain. A Firmwide Vision The decision to replace our experience database was a joint one driven by the marketing and IT teams with significant support from our project management team. We shared a common vision of expanding the use of a new platform beyond marketing, providing access to knowledge and experience across departments and practices. We wanted an extensible platform that maintained much of the same functionality of our bespoke system, including all our current data and fields, as well as new fields and search capabilities that we knew we'd identify during the process. What we wanted to trim was the extra IT effort. For the firm to be more agile, the configuration of the system should rest in our business users' hands. Of course, the main driver was the people who use the solution day in and day out. If we wanted everyone to use the new platform, it needed to have a slick, modern interface that would be a pleasure to use, even when constructing a powerful search. Our wish list in hand, concerns still lingered that an off the shelf solution wouldn't be able to match what we already had, including integrations with other internal systems and desired integrations with external systems. After an extensive search, we selected the Foundation Firm Intelligence platform. From our evaluation, Foundation was the only third-party solution that allowed us to both exceed our current functionality and relieve the burden on IT for ongoing system enhancements. Setting our Goals To truly understand the needs of all stakeholders, our first step was to form a steering committee and define requirements for a round of focus groups. Cindy Bare at Foundation helped facilitate the focus groups. Since everyone at the firm would touch the new system, we enlisted people from multiple departments to ensure they

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