Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: NOVEMBER 2015 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 31 Knights in shining armor protected the king's subjects and resources, and lords paid tribute to the king from taxes on the land. The king's collectors, distributed throughout the realm, gathered these taxes. The king's system worked nicely within the realm, its outer limits within a day's ride. But when the king expanded his realm, trouble came to the kingdom. The king had poor communication with the lords and knew little of what his subjects produced and even less of what his collectors collected. His knights no longer returned to the castle at night and were often defending the realm in remote parts of the kingdom. The king called for counsel from the castle's wizard, Alice. She looked into her crystal ball and informed the king he needed a financial system that tracks and manages activities on a large scale. Alice explained that with a financial and matter management system, the king could monitor the entire kingdom. As the kingdom grows, the collection system will get increasingly more difficult to control. As the kingdom spills over its borders, the local billing and time entry system will strain to accommodate and report on new and fluctuating currencies and multiple languages. The king was maintaining numerous local accounting systems to comply with various lords' local accounting and tax laws, which required the collecting staff to re-enter data and manually prepare spreadsheet reports. There is a huge benefit to inputting time entries directly into a centralized general ledger available across the kingdom from one financial management system that will allow the king to receive real-time information on what knights, lords and collectors are doing. The king had a decision to make: Implement a new system or see his reign over the kingdom come to an end. FUTURE KINGS Centuries later, Alicia, the head of information technology at a large firm, was running a genealogy program and saw that her ancestor had advised a king. As the firm's management committee entered the conference room, Alicia closed her laptop and prepared to discuss a milestone: the acquisition of other firms and organic growth into new practice areas. Alicia was there to inform the management committee of their future IT direction — a somewhat perplexing and challenging topic, but, like most IT managers, Alicia descended from wizards. Taking the floor, Alicia informed the committee that any investment in technology must enable the firm to operate more efficiently and ultimately be ONCE AND FUTURE KINGS: FINANCIAL AND PRACTICE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS TO RULE THEM ALL

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