The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
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Fig 1 Fig 2 Accounting Human Resources Transform Time Tracking Human Resources Document Management Transform Transform Transform PMS Other CRM CRM Document Management Time Tracking Email © IntApp, Inc. 1 across systems, the challenge with MDM is not so much to get systems and processes to share information (as in traditional data integration), but rather to get systems and processes to agree about the information they commonly share. Today, more and more law firms are adopting a master data directory (MDD) to define and collect the attributes related to clients, matters and people of most value to performance and growth. With this model on hand to set an authoritative, central data source that feeds downstream systems, firms successfully use MDM to reduce operational costs, increase efficiency, manage risk related to conflicts and information security, and increase lawyer productivity. DATA INTEGRATION VERSUS MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT In broad strokes, enterprise computing can be approached in two ways: • Use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to centralize information management; or • Adopt multiple applications with functionality specialized to execute tasks and solve problems that vary by department. With few exceptions, law firms prefer the "best-of-breed" strategy, using different systems to manage documents, records, billing, conflicts, confidentiality and other legal process needs. Although this distributed architecture supports specific business activities, it hampers firmwide processes that require 62 Peer to Peer 2 Portal © IntApp, Inc. multiple applications. The crux of the problem is that data sets used by various applications structure their representation of business concepts in different ways, even if they refer to the same real-world entities. For example, as software applications often use different conventions to tag matters, firms struggle to keep information affecting a matter confidential through its life cycle. Any process requiring multiple systems needs a way to reconcile the competing representations. The traditional solution is to solve the problem discretely, transforming how data look in one system into how they look in another (Fig. 1). This type of integration solution provisionally helps automate processes that require multiple applications, but it ultimately causes additional headaches for the firm with: • Confusion and Complexity: A complex labyrinth of integration solutions using different techniques (ETL, replication, SQL transformations, etc.) augments implementation and maintenance costs (Fig. 2). • Vendor Lock-In: When one crucial system — such as a practice management system (PMS) — is tied to many others by means of various discrete integrations, it becomes difficult to switch systems during growth or mergers. • Reference Disagreement: Lacking an authoritative source, there is no means to resolve inconsistencies that can arise from duplication or errors in different systems used by different departments.