Take a look around any medium-sized firm and you will more than likely see a not-inconsiderable IT network reaching out to all corners of the office. It will invariably consist of a lot of ‘fat clients’ (i.e. the powerful desktop PCs popular with lawyers) and a number of servers dotted around the place, loaded with a couple of databases. Enough computing power, in fact, to serve half of Nasa, and all for what? To do some word-processing, make a few case and accounting enquiries, send e-mails and surf the internet.
That is a very big and expensive sledgehammer to crack a relatively small nut. No practice needs to be sold on the benefits of IT anymore. They have all seen the business advantage accruing, ranging from improved working capital to greater productivity and profitability. But have they asked themselves at what price? We are talking about more than just monetary cost. It goes much further than that to what we might term complexity of ownership (COO).
