P2P

71 I L T A N E T . O R G specific skills needed to harness the power of emergent technologies: "I hire for creativity. People aren't used to thinking that way in law firms, but we really need people who can problem-solve creatively. We need people who come from product development, product design, and product development, and ideally some with specialization in automation, both document automation and workflow automation. We need deep understanding of process so that business analysts stop to evaluate and improve the underlying process before opting for a technology skin on the status quo, so you're not speeding up a bad process. We need people who are familiar with data who can work with data in an integral manner across the firm." Whether or not these new skills fall under the remit of the CIO or under some other umbrella in a quickly diversifying law firm environment, CIOs will benefit from embracing a more integrated view of technology ownership across the firm. Shaver adds that "too many IT departments work in a vacuum, and that leads to massive failures in understanding the end-user. It's critical to have people within IT that have very strong connection to KM and to people with practice experience so that you can tap into those close relationships. That's what gives IT and innovation teams with the access and visibility to understand the pain points of the firm and to spot opportunities to leverage technology." Commitment To Collaboration: Avengers Assemble In technical terms, collaboration often refers to specific features that help people and teams share information and files or to coordinate handoffs and communicate status. Out in the broader world, collaboration evokes many messier and stickier feelings in people who aren't particularly technical. This is particularly true within the context of knowledge work among teams of multidisciplinary experts that cut across organizational boundaries, for lawyers who project their sense of self- worth and competence onto client-facing interactions. The psychological and dispositional idiosyncrasies will be familiar to most law firm CIOs, but we stress this point because we believe collaboration is difficult for all humans, not just lawyers and we think it's safe to say we are heading into an environment of increasing pressure, with rising expectations for more change, more innovation, more disruption — all of it faster. Against that backdrop, the mandate of the CIO is best described as a moving target. The most successful CIOs will be those who bring a genuine appreciation for the power of collaboration and who can think creatively to assemble unlikely and non-obvious allies from within and around their organizations. "I hire for creativity. People aren't used to thinking that way in law firms, but we really need people who can problem- solve creatively."

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