Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | T E C H S O L U T I O N S 25 The Destination If you don't know where you want to go, any road will take you there. This sentiment shows up in everything from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to songs by George Harrison (Any Road) and Dawes (From a Window Seat). This simple idea stands the test of time because it's true. Without a clearly defined destination, you will eventually end up somewhere after traveling for a long enough time. The trouble is, that somewhere may not be anywhere near where you want or need to be. We began our journey by focusing on that destination. What would success look and feel like? What impact would success have on the organization? How would people think and act differently? What business challenges would we tackle? Adopting the mantra "go big or go home," we defined success as nothing short of supporting the entire client relationship life cycle. This would not be "just a Marketing project" or "one more KM tool." This would be bigger—much bigger. We would know we had arrived at our destination when the internal intelligence solution (in whatever form it would take) addressed the challenges inherent in each stage of the relationship life cycle from attracting the attention of high-value clients and winning the business through serving the client and sharing results, and back again. A successful solution would tackle a variety of challenges including: • Attract attention by ensuring that the scale and sophistication of the firm's services are accurately reflected in league tables and other rankings and directories • Win business through compelling proposals that highlight experience and resources aligned precisely with the client's needs along with budgets and pricing that are both competitive and profitable and built on concrete data • Serve the client by making it easier to quickly identify internal experts and prior work product that speak to the specific issues or characteristics of the matter at hand • Share results internally to make the newly gained knowledge available for future use and externally when permitted to highlight the achievements of our clients Our list of use cases and requirements were documented in even greater detail as we laid out our business goals and objectives. This master strate document became the equivalent of "X marks the spot" on a pirate's treasure map. We knew where we wanted to go. "We defined success as nothing short of supporting the entire client relationship life cycle."

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