1. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
High Performance IT: Process and Organizational Maturity
An IT Department’s value is not based on the technology it provides, but on the
performance and value of its services. Today, more than ever, an IT department
must look beyond being technology-savvy to being business- and practice-savvy.
Much of the IT infrastructure is built on standardized technologies and hence, even
though they remain complex, should be managed as commodities – for price and
performance. It is the alignment of the IT applications and services built on this
infrastructure with the practice, productivity, and management needs of the firm
that creates the greatest value. Achieving this alignment is difficult. In this paper, I
outline a perspective that looks at IT from two directions: IT Operations and IT
Consulting. By understanding the different mix of priorities and management goals
for these two areas, a firm should be able to better take action to adjust each to
improve alignment.
I use the term “operations” in a purposely broad manner to include everything
about the network, servers, facilities, WAN, telecommunications, and aspects of the
help desk. It likely consumes about 70% of your costs, staff, and attention. IT
Consulting on the other hand, includes those aspects of IT that work to directly
understand and improve the effectiveness of the departments and practices of the
firm.
Both parts of IT are mission critical. However, they are headed in two different
directions.
IT Operations
You should be streamlining IT Operations. The sheer growth and complexity of
technology infrastructure in law firms means that you won’t continue to scale your
staffing and budget proportionate to the increasing demands of your business. If you
do scale proportionately, then you will be paying for more resources and less
efficiency than other streamlined organizations.
Law firm IT personnel often work very hard to keep ahead of fire fighting mode, and
important elements like business continuity, documentation, proactive monitoring,
formal testing, and data management are left on the to-do lists. This results in
perpetuating the situation and exponentially increases the effort necessary to
manage the growing network.
In most law firms, IT Operations acts on an “ASAP” basis, with the assumption that
this approach provides the most flexible and responsive support environment and
that this is necessary to match the dynamic “everybody is your boss” nature of law
firms. While this approach has some advantages, our work with law firms reflects
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2. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
that an ASAP approach decreases support levels in key areas and generally increases
costs and risks. Unfortunately, when we interview lawyers, secretaries and the
leaders of other departments in an ASAP environment, they often don’t share IT’s
perception that support, fixes, or projects happen as soon as possible. While it may
be a case of “you can’t please all of the people all of the time”, evidence reflects how
much the expectations of providers of IT and users of IT can be mismatched.
Clarifying expectations for service levels and the corresponding roles and processes
allows IT Departments to meet these services expectations. These basic steps should
cause a rather fundamental change in how IT work gets done.
Service Level Agreements: The use of SLAs is a foremost sign of a mature IT
organization. Following the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure,
SLAs provide the clarification of what you are managing and they specify the
measures. As the CIO of one law firm told me “It is hard to believe that IT
departments are willing to operate without SLAs when they allow IT to specify the
investments and staffing necessary to provide the expected level of service. They
allow us to reflect the actual performance we can provide.”
Two concerns about SLAs often stop their development before they begin. First,
some fear that SLAs can lower service levels by setting minimum standards that IT
will not bother to exceed, as in “I have another 12 minutes until I have to respond, so
leave me alone.” Of course, poorly written SLAs could create such a situation.
However, well developed law firm SLAs employ a combination of high standards,
priorities, defined VIPs, subjective satisfaction measures and continuous
improvement to push performance higher.
Second, some fear that SLAs are too rigid for the flexible, custom-fit nature of a law
firm. This requires a balance. In some ways, you may determine that certain policies,
such as the downloading of unsupported software onto firm PCs, should be more
rigid to mitigate risks and allow IT to maintain high service levels. However, a well
written SLA itself does not have to be rigid. A guideline we incorporate is to make
80% of the work in meeting an SLA based on standardized, repeatable processes –
while making 20% of the effort about “handling exceptions well”.
A good starting point for SLAs is with User Support. Such an SLA defines Level 1, 2,
and 3 support roles (if such designations are used); timing for problem responses
and resolutions; escalations; coverage hours; scope of responsibilities;
communications; and other criteria. Introduction of this SLA affects the entire IT
organization and can introduce staff to more formally defined roles and processes.
The other base SLAs generally center on infrastructure (network, WAN, storage) and
core business applications such as e-mail, document management, financial system,
HR system and litigation support. In more advanced situations, SLAs focus on
project delivery, data management and particular events, such as the opening of a
new office.
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3. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
System availability, recovery times, performance and maintenance windows cross
each of these SLAs and should be incorporated accordingly.
Roles and Processes: Traditionally IT is organized roughly along the lines of
infrastructure, applications, support and project management. Many IT changes
require resources and coordination across all of these areas. Law firms are tapping
into the best practice guidance provided by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to
define these broad processes. ITIL is not like the ISO standards in which a company
becomes certified in its use, but is a set of guidelines that establish the de facto
objectives, terms, processes, and roles for managing IT well. While ITIL has been
guiding outsourcers and corporations for some time, few law firms have progressed
further than manager-level training at this time. It is a necessary complement to the
development of SLAs. In fact, if your firm develops SLAs but doesn’t reconsider its
processes and roles, then it will likely only increase costs as IT staff levels grow
instead of becoming more streamlined.
ITIL defines over twenty processes ranging from the management of infrastructure
to the approach IT takes in working with users and management. However, a law
firm should not consider the goal to be an “ITIL implementation”. It should consider
ITIL, along with guidance from other sources such as Project Management Institute
and third party experts, as guidance and consider the program to be a “high
performance” transition.
The IT Service Management Forum (itSMF) is a non-profit organization that
promotes best practices in managing IT services. They frame the stages of maturity
by using Capability Maturity Models. These are a simple and effective method to
rate a firm’s status and desired situation, such as this model focused on processes.
Most often firm’s IT processes rate in one of the first three categories. At this stage in
law firm IT, we recommend that firms plan to reach the “Managed” stage within 18
months of beginning a transition.
The definition of service levels, processes and roles is to be done with the objective of
creating an IT department that can handle change better (e.g., fewer incidents, more
projects completed on time), mitigate risks (e.g., continuity planning or the
dependency on that one IT guy that has the server configurations in his head), make
informed decisions about outsourcing and address growth without adding staff at
proportional rates.
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4. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
Some firms have very successfully turned to third parties for all or most of the basic
IT operations services so that their internal staff could focus primarily on one-on-one
support, training and the consulting services described below. It is increasingly
common for larger firms to expand the role of third parties in this same vein. By
streamlining the IT organization; however, you can be agnostic to outsourcing. That
is the approach we find works the best for law firms – rather than assume
outsourcing is right or wrong, by comparing internal service levels and costs to third
parties, a firm can make informed decisions about outsourcing or know where to
fine tune its internal services.
IT Consulting
IT Consulting, here meant in an internal sense rather than as an external consulting
company, is where firms gain the most value once IT Operations are streamlined. As
firms increasingly look to technology to help support and improve business
processes, the IT Department’s role grows well beyond just installing and supporting
software. IT Consulting is about introducing change across people, process, and
technology and then working with IT Operations to incorporate these changes into
everyday life.
In considering internal consulting services, ask these questions:
• Who communicates with lawyers and understands how technology
affects them?
• Who can help design the working practices for lawyer-facing
applications, like records management, document management and new
matter opening?
• Who understands the data stored in each of the firm’s systems and works
to ensure its accuracy, integrity and consistency across systems?
• When leading IT projects, who is ensuring projects meet lawyer
expectations in both impact and timing?
• Who communicates with users on how technology changes will affect
their role and working habits?
• Who establishes the roadmap for how all the firm’s systems work
together to help lawyers and secretaries get their jobs done with more
effectiveness?
An important element is that it doesn’t really matter if these roles are in the IT
Department or another business department or even the legal practices. What must
be in place are the processes and relationships so that if these skills are elsewhere,
then IT personnel know of them and know how to effectively make them a part of
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5. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
projects and changes that involve the IT Department. Likewise, having staff that
report to IT but are embedded outside of IT can also be an effective model.
To a large degree, the level of focus a firm has on the consulting aspects determines
its overall organizational maturity, as reflected in the maturity model below. Each
firm’s situation varies, but we look for law firm IT Departments to reach the
“Customer Focus” level. While a “Business Focus” level may be a long term
objective, few IT departments have consistently invested and operated at this level as
it involves deep integration in the legal practices.
Core areas of expertise in relation to consulting include planning, business analysis,
application integration, architectures, data management and IT’s relationships with
those outside of the department.
Planning: In addition to managing the project queue, high performing IT
departments participate in planning across the departments of the firm to
establish a collective set of business objectives. More day-to-day, planning helps
to review and evolve project priorities, service levels, capacity plans, and staffing
gaps.
Business Analysis and Application Integration: The ability to step outside the context
of software and listen to how lawyers, secretaries and other firm departments do
their jobs is one of the biggest factors in the relationship between IT and its
constituency. At a minimum, this listening can be done in the interest of
increasing “usability” of existing systems. Ultimately, business analyst skills
work to fundamentally reconsider business processes such as new matter intake
or financial reporting. Bringing these business processes to life by configuring an
application or by integrating several applications is an aspect of an IT
Department that has the most potential to reflect the department’s value to
lawyers.
Architectures and Data Management: Architectures provide a roadmap and master
design for areas such as the firm’s electronic information, applications, network
and even the user interface of the system. Having an architecture in each of these
areas conveys that you are aware of the current situation (regardless of how
many separate systems contain parts of the architecture), and that you have a
master plan for bringing it all together.
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6. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
A midsize firm performed an internal audit on how many separate times an
employee’s name appears in its IT systems. The answer was 27, and other firms
assume that they may be no different. An information architecture, for example,
would work toward minimizing this number to perhaps six occurrences and
keeping these occurrences coordinated. The impact on user name additions and
updates has a significant impact on streamlining IT operations and allows IT to
have a higher SLA for user maintenance.
Business Continuity Planning: In addition to the fault tolerance and system
continuity planning in IT Operations, BCP includes the preparation for ensuring
people and processes continue during incidents. These responsibilities may or
may not lie within the IT Department, but comprehensive planning and testing
cannot focus only on keeping the hardware and software running.
IT Relationships: If IT’s relationship with users is primarily through the help desk,
then it is unlikely to have sufficient insight and respect of users to carry forward
on planning and business analysis. Responsibilities focus on interaction with
secretaries, lawyers and other business departments in the firm. Direct client
interaction is a bonus but often IT’s focus is on helping lawyers with their client
communications. Since relationships can exist for IT at many levels, these
responsibilities should also exist at many points, if not all points, across the
department.
IT Hesitations
The changes discussed above are difficult. I have seen IT managers go through
stages of denial and then acceptance. This is understandable, as discussions about
measures and processes are not often second nature to IT professionals. These
perceptions can be expected:
Fear of Exposure: “By revealing our existing processes and service levels, we will
be showing our warts. Firm management has the opportunity to scrutinize areas
where we are not already following best practices.“
Commoditizing the Job; Bureaucracy: “Defining repeatable processes takes a
challenging job and makes it more like a factory worker – follow the instructions
and don’t think for yourself. There will be lots of paperwork and a dozen
approvals to get anything done.”
Outsourcing: “Streamlining my role allows you to outsource me. Benchmarking
internal services against vendors will make us look bad since we do so many
things that are special and custom to our firm.”
Rather than address each concern individually here, I can share my experience that
good IT staff see the most benefit from these transitions. Senior IT staff is often over-
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7. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
worked because they perform many responsibilities that only they can do well in the
existing situation. The objective isn’t to commoditize everybody’s job but to make
distinctions between tasks that should be made routine and those that require special
expertise to handle exceptions well. The exposure of current practices may be a
sensitive topic, but establishing a plan for improving the practices is what
management will recognize the most.
Overall, I have been impressed with the attitude and involvement level of IT staff
going through such transitions once they are underway.
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8. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
Initial Steps
The irony of moving toward these improvements is that IT staff is already too busy
to change the way work is done today. There is no magic bullet, but it is critical to
break down the changes into digestible parts that can provide incremental and
immediate value. In many cases, the execution of changes is expected to free up
more resources than it consumes which can allow a firm to lower costs and/or
redeploy these resources in other areas.
Create a Baseline: Every to-do list should start with “have a plan”. If you have a clear
technology plan that defines the operating strategies, principles, priorities, and
services of IT, then you are ahead of the game. For most firms, a baseline snapshot of
the current environment is a practical starting point. If the initial focus is on
streamlining Operations, then there is much progress that can be made without a
strategic vision tied to the business. A baseline assessment should give you a picture
of how well IT delivers each of its services currently, in terms of costs, staffing levels,
risks, service levels, design and fit to user needs. By understanding this information
by service, you can compare more apples-to-apples to third parties and ITIL best
practices. Because IT surveys generally lack detail and comparability, we worked
with a consortium of law firms in 2004 to establish a standard approach to
categorizing and calculating this information. This allows a fair comparison firm-to-
firm. If you are interested in learning more about how to incorporate these standards
in your IT department, contact me as we are working to make the approach and the
results of the past two years’ assessments more generally available to the market as
an index.
Develop SLAs: The drafting of service level agreements is a defining exercise for IT
managers. It can challenge how managers review their team’s performance. It opens
conversations about what users believe is important and how teams within IT
communicate with each other. IT must determine what it is capable of measuring in
order to know how well it is performing. Because SLAs will be new to IT, you will
need to start with Service Level Requirements (SLRs) or Objectives (SLOs) that
contain the same information but aren’t agreed (or perhaps even communicated)
with the people they affect until IT is ready to do so.
Establish Core IT Change Processes: The Information Technology Process Institute
studies the common processes of high performing IT departments. It recommends
the same order of priority that works for law firms focused initially on Operations
streamlining. In summary, these processes include the areas of Release (planning,
designing, building and configuring hardware and software), Control (managing
changes, assets and configurations), and Resolution (managing incidents and
problems). The key theme is investing upfront in processes that allow the
organizations to spend as little as 5% of their time on unplanned activities.
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9. High Performance IT
ILTA White Paper on Using ITIL Practices and Maturity Models in Law Firm IT
While it is ideal to work through these three initial steps in order, much can be done
in each of these areas concurrently.
The evolutions of IT management will continue. These steps to simplify operational
effort, while applying service and process management to the entire organization,
are signs of a natural maturing of IT in law firms. Fortunately, this maturity reflects
that the role and value of IT is increasingly substantially.
Dave Cunningham
Managing Director
Baker Robbins & Company
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