NKOTB

March 3, 2005 | Filed Under General 

No, not this.

The new kid on the (blog) block is Rees Morrison, who has launched the “Law Department Management” blog here. No RSS feed on the site, which looks to be part of the law.com’s “network” of blogs. Perhaps one of his fellow network bloggers can help this new blog serve the food for the feed.

Mr. Morrison is a consultant with Hildebrandt, which is owned by Thomson, which in turn owns West, which turn owns just about everything legal that hasn’t been bought by Reed-Elsevier.

Mr. Morrison is very experienced in the area of legal department consulting; Hildebrandt publishes an email newsletter entitled “Law Department Management” (hmmm, sounds familiar…). I don’t recall requesting it; but I do enjoy reading it.

From the topics covered, it looks like Mr. Morrison is off to a fast start. He also had a very productive day on Feb 20th–seven posts put up for view in less than an hour.

Welcome to the party, Rees.

P.S. Thanks to Bob Ambrogi for the pointer.

Understanding Overhead

March 2, 2005 | Filed Under Managing 

In today’s bottom-line oriented evironment, every company is concerned with O&M costs. Staff functions that support revenue producing activities are sometimes referred to as “cost centers”. Running a “cost center” without providing more is a one-way ticket to marginalization.

This is the subject of a recent article by George Tillmann in Strategy + Business, In Search of Overhead Heroes. He captures the situation thusly:

The overhead business concerns coping with bureaucracy and being responsible for a necessary expense that’s rarely viewed as a source of competitive advantage. Whether its function is accounting, human resources, information technology, or marketing, running a unit that’s considered overhead is among the most frustrating corporate jobs there is.

Mr. Tillmann goes on to offer his view of managing “overhead”, through his experience as the CIO of Booz, Allen & Hamilton. He goes beyond the canard of “running your group like a business” and offers a view of “market driven management”, which seeks to act on the following questions:

What is our purpose?

Who are our customers?

What do different customers want and need to be more effective in their jobs?

What services and products should we, and can we, provide?

Are we satisfying our customers?

The answers to the last question involve measuring quantifiable factors, a key point in demonstrating value to the enterprise.

While the article is written from the IT perspective, its analysis is directly relevant to the management of a corporate legal department.

Take “IT”, and replace with “Legal”.

Stir.