The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34686
The Capability Curve The Dangerous Danglers These are the IT processes that your organization simply should not be involved in. Because of the degree of specialization and resources required in these areas, the organization puts itself at risk by attempting to create capability here. It is not unlike a patient who attempts self-diagnosis without the skills and background to understand his or her medical condition. If you haven’t sourced these yet don’t even bother asking why, just do it. The Marginal Minority The capabilities needed for these processes are not necessarily out of scope but require a set of skills that take significant time to develop. Perhaps these are cloud-based or mobile capabilities, which change quickly and often require highly specialized expertise and careful supervision. While you can always hire specialization, people ultimately want mobility in their careers and balk at being pigeonholed. These specialized areas can create a voracious technology appetite that must be fed with fresh talent. This is especially true in growing organizations. Get rid of it by spending wisely on organizations that have the ability to be constantly on top of this game. The Mass of Mediocrity This is the 80 percent of processes and systems where many IT organizations have the greatest difficulty in making a decision to source or partner. They might sense that they are not fully capable of doing the job, but the cost of their inadequacy is typically veiled or even considered an acceptable cost of doing business. In most cases, these areas of mediocrity are perpetuated until one or more players in the industry decide to change the benchmark. Otherwise there is simply no competitive mandate to invest in change. Moreover, the processes that underlie the inadequacy might be so convoluted and poorly understood that the effort to reengineer the process is far more daunting than dealing with the consequences of the 68 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer inadequacy. Your best bet is to spend time and effort to define these processes so that partners can understand them and so that you can measure performance against them. Yes, it’s a tough job to do this and you’ll likely need outside consultants to help. But the cost is worth it when you consider how it will free you up to move into the next two areas. The efficiency of a free market, the advent of the cloud and global IT sourcing will ultimately eliminate those IT organizations that operate in only these first three segments of the bell curve. Those that survive will live in the last two categories. The Edge of Excellence These are the processes that support the differentiation of your business, how you deliver your services in an innovative manner and ultimately how you define the ongoing value of IT. The irony is that we expect the edge of excellence to remain an edge — that is, to be the thin edge of the blade rather than to define a substantial part of the IT organization. This attitude is at the heart of why transformational IT has been so slow to catch on in many firms. Begin to challenge that notion. Look at the historical ways in which IT has differentiated your firm in the market and in the eyes of your customers. You want this legacy to become the substance of how you plan for sustaining innovations going forward. Business Transformation Lastly, IT should be at the heart of the disruptive and transformational business models that will lead to the long- term success of your firm. By definition, any enterprise in business long enough will experience these disruptive innovations. Your objective should be to create the ability in IT, as well as the responsibility to identify and enable these disruptors for the benefit of your organization. If you’re mired in the first three segments of this bell curve it’s a given that you’ll barely be able to respond to disruption, much less enable it. The ultimate ambition and objective of in-house IT should be to move almost fully into the two latter segments. ILTA Mass of Mediocrity Marginal Minority Dangerous Danglers Business Transformation Edge of Excellence