I was thinking the other day about Legal IT and who was going to define its future? It got me thinking about innovation in LegalIT and what our 3 main customers expect. They are each with their own requirements and needs, so do law firms, the lawyers and the law firms clients expect IT departments to be innovative?
A broad definition of what innovation is; “Innovation is the improving of an existing product, service, system or process and the introduction of something better.”
In my opinion OneNote has always been MS offices forgotten soul, with Microsoft not really pushing it and its potential value. It’s been easy for firms like mine to ignore it as a nice to have.
I haven’t been using it for long but i like it. I think in the 2010 version it offers a good set of features and potential to enhance current working practices for those working in projects or collaborating who want a simple platform for sharing content and ideas.
Here’s a few things that I have used it for; Continue reading
It’s on many firms horizon and a Win7 desktop with Office 2010 is a great project to get your teeth into. Especially considering all of the good stuff Microsoft have put into both. Considering how poorly Vista was received in the business world there seems to have been a great deal of effort on the part of Microsoft to re-engage with the corporate world.
From a legal perspective we are generally not too fussy about the bells and whistles (so we say) and our business output is traditionally a ‘document’. Our internal document collaboration is normally hindered by parallel accessibility, so I was really interested to read more about co-authoring of documents. This ultimately prompted me to write this very high level take on the functionality. Continue reading
In the last 12 months it’s become very apparent about the changes law firms are having to make to streamline their processes. Whether that’s changes in the way they provide legal services to their clients or the changes in business support functions who provide support to facilitate the delivery of legal services. There’s no doubt things are changing.
So what’s your next job going to be and what options are available to you? My first post (ever) was about improving ones skills in this current climate. It got me thinking and I recalled a post by Kupe Kupersmith (Twitter @kupe) I read sometime ago on career progression and I thought I’d extend it and try to apply a legal perspective.
Kupe essentially talks about “in the box” and “out of the box” career progression. Continue reading
This follows a very useful starter for 10 list of considerations when moving from WinXP to Win7. The link to the article is here and the author is a another BA in a law firm. You can follow him via twitter @LegalBA
Windows 7 and Office 2010 is a good opportunity to think strategically and not just treat it like another project. It could be a good point to think about some of the key points Andrew mentions like security and applications but also the delivery of IT services in general. My top 6 things to think about when discussing going from WinXP to Win7 (Office 2010) project.
1 – Deployment of your Win7 desktop. Think about VDI – It’s hard to ignore it…
Virtualisation of servers and storage is something many firms have done or is on the immediate road map. VDI was a step behind but it is getting harder to argue against the reasons for going VDI
a) One size doesn’t fit all. Expect to virtualize 80% of your users
b) Choose the delivery mechanism well and you will be able to provide your services to mobile devices, tablets, pc and laptops even if they are not owned by the firm (allows the firm to reduce it hardware overhead perhaps by offering an allowance to staff to buy their own kit)~
c) Cheaper to deploy – no big teams gallivanting across the globe for weeks on end
d) Energy savings can be leveraged unlike some/most server virtualisation projects
e) Costs savings. Most firms replace pc’s in line with the standard 3 years warranty levels but delivery of a VDI means you can extend your old kit’s life expectancy
f) Reduce the build maintenance overhead. Have 1 (or minimum) image for all rather than 40 different images for 40 different hardware types Continue reading
Musings of a Legal IT business analyst 