Spent a few hours this afernoon at a LexisNexis Law Firm Leaders' Roundtable hosted at the offices of Miller & Chevalier a block or so from the White House. The topic on the table was Lexis' Managed Network Services offering - with presentations / Q & A sessions with two firms who have partially implemented the offering (Dinsmore Shohl & Bryan Cave).
Guiding the discussion was Lorin Keuhner - a Legal Technology Specialist with Lexis' Total Practice Solutions group - and was interesting not so much for the particular offering (it was pitched to us a year ago and we choked on the price tag), but more as a reminder of the layers upon layers of beuracracy that some IT directors and managers must endure. Technology committees. Steering committees. Fincancing. Hardware / software / service / infrastructure / telophony vendor macro pow-wows ... sitting around talking about 2 year implemetations. It makes me just wanna poke myself in the eye with a sharp pencil. How do these guys manage to implement technology before it becomes obsolete.
In my perfect world, I knock on the Manging Partner's door and give him the full blown presentation. This is the problem, this is the cure, these are the treatment options, these are the consequences of failure act, this is the ROI, this is the time frame for implementation, here are the alternatives. Sometimes I'll get the thumbs up on the spot - othertimes a week later after it passes through the Admin Committee. 2 year implementation? Firm's have incorporated and dissolved in less time than that.
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