Are you maximising your firm’s technology investment?

When your firm last made a significant IT investment, you had a clear understanding of why you made it and the return you were seeking to achieve.  You might even have had to justify it to a partners’ committee and make various assurances that it was the best thing for the partnership.

Why invest in IT?

We’ve always understood that IT projects are driven by three main requirements – more capacity,  new capability, or risk reduction.   Often it is a combination of the three.

Having a clear understanding of what success looks like for each of these, and thinking about the blocker to these is critical.  Often there are a very small number  of actions that need identifying – normally around the practical steps of how the IT is applied.

For example, there will be a range of people using the new platform, and often they are built with help from people who know the needs best, and are most familiar with how things should work.  But of course,  most users don’t have this understanding, and in many cases, success of the project relies in their experience of the system.

So what can you do to get maximum benefit from your IT investment?

As you consider these ideas, it’s a natural extension to apply the same logic to tools you already have in place.  Are they being used as intended?

Workforces change over time. People have joined the firm, and the newcomers become the old-hands, they train others in both good habits and bad  habits and business needs change as well.

It’s worth evaluating each system that’s already in place, with a view to making sure it’s being applied and used in the best way possible.  It is an absolute certainty that unless you have these activities in place, then there will be low-hanging fruit in terms of gains to be enjoyed.