Mobile, accessible and global – Norton Rose's Sheila Doyle outlines the firm's ambitious bid to build and integrate flexible information systems that can support its staff across its expanding international network

The fanfare has sounded, the celebrations are over and now it's time for the hard work. As Norton Rose Group moves into new territories – with Canada, Africa, Latin America and Kazakhstan joining the Group – the IT team is aligning systems across the expanded business.

The benefits of our growth will not materialise without key business processes combining onto a single global IT platform. This involves a culture shift for all of us, not least our IT department, which is moving towards providing services on a firmwide 'just-in-time' basis. The result will be a standard, simpler working environment across all our offices in different timezones – one intelligent enough to recognise people's differing IT needs.

In practice, this means that fee earners from London who need to work out of our Singapore office for a period of time can arrive, switch on whatever device they bring – a laptop or iPad, for example – and see the same screen information as usual. Ultimately, they will be able to see it on any digital device and their office/private working environment will blend securely into it. In this way, fee earners' data and applications will 'follow' them for maximum mobility and flexibility wherever they are in the world.

This is the foundation from which we can offer a distinctive and compelling proposition to a wider group of clients, allowing us to combine expertise across key jurisdictions and free our people to operate consistently, no matter where their location.

The Norton Rose Group IT strategy, based on a global integration model devised by IT research company Gartner, will take two to three years to complete and is divided into quarterly cycles. We have set an ambitious pace in integrating our businesses across this IT platform, with phase one already operational. In the three months since we announced our plans to expand, we have created five centres of IT excellence, which manage the delivery of higher quality IT services consistently across all locations. They do this with standard network performance, wherever possible, and across all timezones.

Within this standardised operating environment, we have segmented our lawyers' and staff's IT requirements away from a one-size-fits-all approach. We have identified six key types of IT user, from those who always work from one location to those who travel frequently, often working from airports and hotel rooms, and in markets with less reliable infrastructure for making phone calls, for example.

This is the case in some of the emerging nations in which we have positioned ourselves, such as Southeast Asia and Latin America – markets which are nevertheless becoming the world's drivers of growth. This segmented approach will enable us to tailor services more effectively to our people's IT needs.

As part of this, we will be introducing a self-service portal which will enable peopleto, for example, install approved applications beyond the basic toolkit and service identified for them.

In later phases of integration, we will standardise our applications in line with the requirements of the business and streamline our data centres around the world. We will divide our IT support into three regions: Asia Pacific; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and the Americas.

Ultimately, this is designed to create a competitive advantage by fostering business relationship management – in other words, create greater engagement between our clients and our lawyers by making it easier to access knowledge. We have created new business relationship roles within our IT unit so as to work closely with our partners across financial institutions; energy; infrastructure, mining and commodities; transport; technology and innovation; and pharmaceuticals and life sciences to identify opportunities to create more integrated solutions for clients.

For example, one of our significant clients has given its staff iPhones, and we are working on developing an application that connects its employees securely and directly to Norton Rose Group from their iPhones. The key is to be agile enough to create and respond to such opportunities.

We believe that over the next decade the legal market will be run by a global elite of no more than 20 to 25 recognised global legal practices which will attract the best lawyers and the best quality work from the world's largest clients. We aim to be one of them, and our IT strategy is one of the essential building blocks to helping us achieve that goal. 

Sheila Doyle (pictured) is the chief information officer at Norton Rose Group.

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