In IT is All About Relationships, Alastair Trower examines the implications of customer relationship management for law firms, from CRM and Law Firms at excited utterances.
I took a look at the underlying article and was struck, as usual, by this sentence:
CRM is a complex dynamic that relies equally on people, processes and technology. Like a three-legged stool, if more emphasis is placed on technology than people or processes, the solution is bound to fail.
Trower goes on to say
Few people understand what they want to achieve from an integrated CRM strategy [...] Buy-in is key for the success of CRM within any company. Partners must work with the IT department and administrative staff to set clear and realistic goals. The majority of projects considered to be failures generally overlooked the initial project analysis to establish the business needs. [Emphasis mine.]
I emphasized those points as much for my own reference as anything else. I've seen this over and over again, and I've said it before--for any knowledge management application to succeed in a law firm, the technology must be seen as meeting a perceived need (in other words, shareholders must know that they need the functionality the application provides and will benefit from it; the fact that they might need it and not know it--the position held by many of us in IT--can be irrelevant). The problems experienced by many firms is that someone in marketing, or a partner, attends a trade show or product demo and is understandably wowed by what the new application can do. I can hear it now--"Look! We can see all of the cases this person is connected with, and how! We can see who else knows this contact, who works with them, and manage all of this data and make it information, something we can use!" And they're right, of course--the technology can do that.
No, let me correct myself. The attorneys can do that, or marketing can do that, with the help of the technology. The technology will not do it by itself. And KM implementations that skip the in-depth project analysis, where those pesky questions like "yes, okay, this is fabulous technology, but will people be willing to "pay" to use it by sharing their own knowledge with others?" need to be answered.
In other words, the best KM application rollout will stagnate if there is no perceived need for the product's functionality and an immediate recognizable benefit. As an IT person, this was the hardest lesson for me to learn--regardless of the benefits of an application or tool, the higher cost of participation (in the case of KM, sharing information) must be immediately countered by an appreciably-greater benefit to the end user. The next time I start working on an implementation of any sort, I hope to have this very basic concept of a cost-benefit ratio mapped out in advance, and constantly compare the state of the implementation plan with our goal for the end result. One might think this was the obvious way to go, but in law firms, unfortunately, many tend to jump directly from "ooh, this is cool" to "okay, here you go" without understanding whether "cool" truly equals "necessary."
