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Bill Kirby advice corner: Aligning IT strategy with business goals
- taken from CityTech magazine, May 2006
Delivery of IT projects will never be instant – balanced infrastructure, business continuity and optimum performance don’t appear by magic. Despite firms wanting it, there is no magic bullet.
The success of IT or alignment with business goals, starts with a clear statement of a firm’s business strategy: the business plan (the route from a – b) and the clear statement of business objectives and priorities.
Armed with this an IT manager or director should be able to deliver a phased IT strategy and a plan understood by all. The benefit is that once completed, plans can be shared internally and with vendors to help everyone understand your objectives better - you all pull in the right direction.
Even with a business goal though, delivery of an IT strategy requires effort, understanding respect and compromise from the lawyers and the IT department. It also requires patience and realistic expectations about what can be delivered - not assumptions or guesswork. As many vendors will tell you, their products have limitations, they are not all singing and dancing and it is important for management and fee earners to understand this. Technology like medicine is not always an exact science – the prescription is different for everyone and is sometimes trial and error. Although in a recent survey lawyers highlighted the importance of IT in their business for risk management, cutting costs and gaining competitive advantage, interestingly few plan to spend any more on IT in the next two years.
In my view this is a mistake. The increased reliance on IT by law firms means it’s going to be essential to release latent IT potential to bring investments up to speed. This doesn’t mean vast amounts of money set aside to change major systems more allowing your IT department financial leeway to enhance existing systems. This could be done through business process development (automating mundane processes), training acceptance (minimal training is one of the main causes of high desktop support costs and frustration), by installing software upgrades or perhaps adopting smaller, complementary IT applications in the practice, to enhance systems. Change is inevitable, my advice would be to ensure the financial resources required are available to your IT department to ensure they can fulfil their role of IT support for you and your fee earners successfully. This should be married with realistic expectations from management of their IT departments and IT of their vendors.
Aligning IT strategy with business goals: a ten-point plan
1. Commit money to unforeseen costs like necessary project management, business process review and training. Most projects fail or are less successful because of lack of ongoing investment in training and project management. Once the big bucks are spent many don’t want to spend more but it’s a mistake. Project management and training are not free and they represent the glue that holds your bricks together.
2. Have a clear, written business strategy for the firm.
3. Have a business plan that states the path “from now to then” within the business strategy.
4. Share this fully with the head of IT and expect a matching strategy and phased implementation programme in return. Ensure you all understand it and have agreed ways to measure success or failure. For instance: lawyers spend less time phoning desktop support equals fee earning hours improve or: lawyers give better advice/win more clients because knowledge on offer is now real time and not out of date.
5. Benchmark /network with similar firms for ideas/knowledge/peace of mind/to ensure your budget is in line. Set aside budget for this to attend conferences or meet colleagues.
6. Do think about what business returns are expected for the IT investment proposed. Do you expect ten more clients if you install this software? Is this enough to cover costs first year? How will the software achieve this (automated processes, information portal to save lawyers being engaged with clients on menial tasks or information).
7. Ensure there is a communication methodology within the firm that makes this clear to all (intranet, regular meetings, monthly report).
8. Agree to measure IT performance with set criteria ie how effective IT desktop support is (ie number of complaints), delivering applications on time and within budget and look for a simple measurement for ROI (for instance year on year profits or incoming clients (where did they come from – website can be measured for instance and is an increasing source of new business).
9. Don’t be afraid to ask questions so that you build realistic expectations about what a proposed system can achieve. Ask: ‘will it do this?’ ‘Will I be able to do that?’
10. Focus on improving core applications that assist the business, don’t be distracted by fancy ‘bells and whistles’ that deliver no long term business benefit and eat up IT budgets
Bill Kirby advice corner: Aligning IT strategy with business goals
- taken from CityTech magazine, May 2006
Delivery of IT projects will never be instant – balanced infrastructure, business continuity and optimum performance don’t appear by magic. Despite firms wanting it, there is no magic bullet.
The success of IT or alignment with business goals, starts with a clear statement of a firm’s business strategy: the business plan (the route from a – b) and the clear statement of business objectives and priorities.
Armed with this an IT manager or director should be able to deliver a phased IT strategy and a plan understood by all. The benefit is that once completed, plans can be shared internally and with vendors to help everyone understand your objectives better - you all pull in the right direction.
Even with a business goal though, delivery of an IT strategy requires effort, understanding respect and compromise from the lawyers and the IT department. It also requires patience and realistic expectations about what can be delivered - not assumptions or guesswork. As many vendors will tell you, their products have limitations, they are not all singing and dancing and it is important for management and fee earners to understand this. Technology like medicine is not always an exact science – the prescription is different for everyone and is sometimes trial and error. Although in a recent survey lawyers highlighted the importance of IT in their business for risk management, cutting costs and gaining competitive advantage, interestingly few plan to spend any more on IT in the next two years.
In my view this is a mistake. The increased reliance on IT by law firms means it’s going to be essential to release latent IT potential to bring investments up to speed. This doesn’t mean vast amounts of money set aside to change major systems more allowing your IT department financial leeway to enhance existing systems. This could be done through business process development (automating mundane processes), training acceptance (minimal training is one of the main causes of high desktop support costs and frustration), by installing software upgrades or perhaps adopting smaller, complementary IT applications in the practice, to enhance systems. Change is inevitable, my advice would be to ensure the financial resources required are available to your IT department to ensure they can fulfil their role of IT support for you and your fee earners successfully. This should be married with realistic expectations from management of their IT departments and IT of their vendors.
Aligning IT strategy with business goals: a ten-point plan
1. Commit money to unforeseen costs like necessary project management, business process review and training. Most projects fail or are less successful because of lack of ongoing investment in training and project management. Once the big bucks are spent many don’t want to spend more but it’s a mistake. Project management and training are not free and they represent the glue that holds your bricks together.
2. Have a clear, written business strategy for the firm.
3. Have a business plan that states the path “from now to then” within the business strategy.
4. Share this fully with the head of IT and expect a matching strategy and phased implementation programme in return. Ensure you all understand it and have agreed ways to measure success or failure. For instance: lawyers spend less time phoning desktop support equals fee earning hours improve or: lawyers give better advice/win more clients because knowledge on offer is now real time and not out of date.
5. Benchmark /network with similar firms for ideas/knowledge/peace of mind/to ensure your budget is in line. Set aside budget for this to attend conferences or meet colleagues.
6. Do think about what business returns are expected for the IT investment proposed. Do you expect ten more clients if you install this software? Is this enough to cover costs first year? How will the software achieve this (automated processes, information portal to save lawyers being engaged with clients on menial tasks or information).
7. Ensure there is a communication methodology within the firm that makes this clear to all (intranet, regular meetings, monthly report).
8. Agree to measure IT performance with set criteria ie how effective IT desktop support is (ie number of complaints), delivering applications on time and within budget and look for a simple measurement for ROI (for instance year on year profits or incoming clients (where did they come from – website can be measured for instance and is an increasing source of new business).
9. Don’t be afraid to ask questions so that you build realistic expectations about what a proposed system can achieve. Ask: ‘will it do this?’ ‘Will I be able to do that?’
10. Focus on improving core applications that assist the business, don’t be distracted by fancy ‘bells and whistles’ that deliver no long term business benefit and eat up IT budgets