P2P

12 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 | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1 put a lot of us in these situations, and sometimes more often than we'd care to admit. While it's seriously not great to be there, and we do our best to prepare for all outcomes, it can make us look amazingly productive when we pull it off. Unfortunately, when the dust settles things can also look a little rough around the edges. Without a doubt, the pandemic and shifting workplace made us in legal IT uncomfortable by and large. A slow and steady path forward allows us to plan appropriately and strategically. Aligning business goals with technology, in lock step, and pushing the boundaries with solid footing as we endlessly trudge toward an ever changing vision. We can make hardware and software decisions based on projections. We have tools at our disposal. We have meetings. We perform the due diligence. Licensing is probably the perfect example of where things went awry during the pandemic. Normally we see it coming when we need to true up or bump down licensing numbers here or there. In fact, we see it coming so far ahead of time we get our budgets adjusted to account for it. It's good business. Obviously this process didn't play out like we drew it up for 2020. We saw the dramatic need to increase licensing, software, and hardware resources as we beefed up remote architecture. We find that spending the money is easy, but getting it back might not be so. It's one thing to think about the uselessness of a staff member's desk in the office when they're spending all their time at home. Sure, it's a useless desk at the moment, but only temporarily. What happens when you go from licensing half your workforce for remote resources to licensing all of them, and then want to go back? Can you do that? If you decide to go back to pre-pandemic infrastructure which is an article in itself, how seamless will that be? It all really depends on the products, platforms, and vendors in question. Extreme vertical and horizontal scaling flexibility in all directions is not necessarily something firms thought of before the pandemic.Those with primarily on-premises architecture felt the most brunt of this impact. Sometimes we dealt with things that are not as black and white as licensing. We're doubling remote workers, let's double our licenses. A lot of times it's that easy. Does doubling remote workers mean doubling other things too? Probably not. Do we need to double bandwidth to our ever growing public or private cloud? Well we can, but we might end up only using a quarter of that total capacity. And again, if we did do this, can we go back? If we stood up a disaster recovery line are we going to need to ride out a three year contract to decommission it? I think going forward there should be more of an emphasis on flexibility. We were plunged into a world where we didn't know what to expect from one day to the next. I'm not saying let's all do one year deals and monthly subscriptions from now on but there are certainly new considerations to be made as we continue to navigate this unique time. We shouldn't be scared of what the future will bring or how our plans may be decimated. We need to continue to have strategic visions, incorporating what we have learned from the experience. Managing Expectations This subheading normally has a negative connotation. Managing expectations almost always means lowering expectations. Admittedly, it would have been quite a bit easier to just lower expectations as we shifted to remote work. Things will be slower. Things aren't going to be what you're used to. You won't have this. You won't have that. At Miller Johnson we decided very early on that this would not be the approach, and we were fortunate in that we had the buy-in to shoot for the stars. The fact of the matter was that clients were expecting to get work done with Miller Johnson like normal, so we had to deliver at least what was normal. In this case managing expectations did not mean lowering expectations. What has stuck with us since week one was the concept that a home office is a real F E A T U R E S "Changing client expectations will put pressure on IT departments to continue to support architecture put in place during the pandemic."

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