The Firm of the Future is Here

Source: VeraSage Institute

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog post by John Shaver.

Let's make the assumption that you and your firm have committed 100 percent to throwing out time sheets and eliminating billable time. What else changes in the firm besides everyone's mindsets? I'd like to share some specifics of what changed for us.

Work Environment:
I don't think there is any way to truly implement value pricing in a professional knowledge firm without also implementing a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) in your firm – see Ron Baker's book review.

The Cloud:
We have literally moved all of our firm's infrastructure into the cloud. No more physical servers or phone systems. Some resources (e-mail, documents, and project management) are in a true virtual cloud environment (we use Google Apps for Business) and others are in a hosted cloud (we use Amazon Web Services).

Our PBX phone system moved to Grasshopper and we use Skype for all of our incoming and outgoing phone calls.

Social Media:
A surprising number of our customers enjoy and look forward to receiving both personal and business information via social media. One of the most important parts of using social media to interact with your customers is to do that interacting wherever they prefer to do it. One customer may love Twitter and another one may feel more comfortable with LinkedIn.

For the complete post, read “What Does a Real-World Firm of the Future Look Like?”

From VeraSage Institute, http://www.verasage.com/index.php/community, March 8, 2011.