Share & Not Share Alike

While companies tend to think of telecommuting and remote access as something to support domestic employees, business strategist Ross Dawson believes it will be increasingly important to offer access to employees and collaborators working overseas. He believes companies should strategically review their information holdings and identify what information they would benefit from sharing with trusted partners and clients, and then establish an information infrastructure to support that.

Dawson says a first important step for companies that want to create a collaborative environment is to perform a strategic information audit. "An organization can categorize its information three ways: information which is openly available, information which it is happy to share with trusted partners and information which it does not share. Once you have worked out which information sits where, then you put in place the supporting technology and business processes. So far very few organizations have looked at this from a business process and technology view," Dawson says.

According to Clarke, already there are demands coming from lawyers working overseas. "One of our partners went overseas and used Skype. Usually when partners go overseas their telephone bills are horrendous - it's another example of consumer technology leading the way."

Clarke is in the process of drafting a virtual office strategy that will document the infrastructure and environment to allow the firm to tear down the walls on the corporate information systems.

Currently Clayton Utz has about 1000 fee earners, 500 corporate laptops and approximately 750 RSA access tokens, and allows access to systems via a Citrix server. (An Australian technology capable of providing a similar form of remote access, called ThinPoint, is currently being trialled for a hot disaster recovery site). All partners and senior associates are provided with a BlackBerry and mobile phone - out of Clarke's budget. "I'm a very generous man," he says. "On a back-of-the-envelope calculation, if someone services a client outside the office then the payback is almost immediate. It is a cost of doing business. You'd never go through someone's drawers and say: 'Oh you've got two pens'. It's the same with computers. It won't be long before all fee earners use BlackBerrys." The firm is also trialling a VoIP soft phone, allowing calls to be routed automatically to where a lawyer is working.

Clarke knows though that while his decision to rip down the walls from the computer systems is popular within the firm, it is less so outside. "I've had other CIOs say: 'You bastard - now we've got to do it'."

Clarke says that despite the additional demands of remote access his IT budget has actually dropped in real terms over the past three years to around 4.0 to 4.5 percent of revenues, which he says is below some competitors'. Meanwhile lawyers expect remote access to be granted without argument, regardless of cost. "The hoops that people have to jump through have diminished over time. To get a laptop a couple of years ago you needed to put in a business case and have that justified," he says. "Now if a lawyer wants access from home they come in and ask for an RSA token. We are not giving them anything extra - but we are giving them more flexibility."