Peer to Peer Magazine

P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | W I N T E R 2 0 1 8 55 "What are the most pressing business challenges in legal organizations today?" "Do your current IT projects leverage technolo to address those business challenges?" Two loaded questions without simple answers, but they need to be asked. Here are a few more questions: • Do you know what your legal organization's fundamental business challenges are? • Do you know how many IT projects are somewhere in the planning cycle in your organization right now? 10? 100? • Of those you know about, can you point to documentation of the business challenge each addresses? • Is the business challenge being addressed something the IT department defined or is it a fundamental business challenge of the firm, as outlined by management? • Can you articulate project goals in the language of managing partners? • Can you articulate the ways you will measure success of that project, not only from the perspective of the technolo itself but in how it will integrate successfully with other technologies, the tests it has to pass during each phase of the project, how it will be accepted and adopted by the users, etc. • How risk averse is your organization? What is the tolerance for failure? • And, is the project trendy? Does it have the word "innovative" or "AI" or "blockchain" or "app" in it? Feeling comfortable now? What do you think managing partners list as 2018-19 business challenges? Here are a few: • The fragmentation of the legal market and the decline of the institutional relationship with clients, consolidation T H E R E ' S M O R E O N L I N E ! Want to learn more? You're in luck! Click the link below to listen to the audio that corresponds to this article! www.iltanet.org/ winter-2018 Is the business challenge being addressed something the IT department defined or is it a fundamental business challenge of the firm, as outlined by management? • Competition, downward rate pressure, overcapacity, profitability • The ability to differentiate legal service offerings and digitally transform operations to ensure using people, data, processes and technolo to deliver the best client experience • Staying at the forefront of the regulatory landscape How do you match those to your IT Projects? Not too hard for an AI project or security awareness program, but not as easy for Windows 10 upgrades or moving to infrastructure as a service. Sometimes it's a case of just being brutally honest and asking a choice question - "Which option should we go with: do the upgrade so we continue to have a solid infrastructure to build on, or turn that work over to other people to take care of, so we can focus on the projects that directly address our business challenges?" Either way, you want to ensure you have that base to build your strategic projects on; that's where you provide the most value. Back to what business challenge your IT project is addressing. Think of it as a puzzle where you find those outside edge pieces of the puzzle that frame the big picture, by being inquisitive with the powers that be, asking where they see the firm going and what it is most likely to stumble on, and what worries them most about mergers or losing fee earners, or client audits or how profitable every partner is. Every conversation you have

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