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Getting Smart About Managing Smartphones
In a recent study, management-consulting firm Altman Weil cited lack of responsiveness as the number one reason clients terminate the services of a law firm.
Lawyers need to have reliable, continuous access to clients ' whether they are on the road with a smartphone or in the office behind a desk. Having access to the firm's experienced professionals and extensive supportive resources without service errors, delays or interruptions is critical when a case is on the line.
At Shook, Hardy & Bacon (“SHB”) we have a network of three Blackberry Enterprise Servers (“BES”), and 700 globally distributed mobile devices. Keeping our smartphones up and running is a daily challenge that demands close interaction with our firm's Exchange administrator and networking group. Our attorneys are power smartphone users, averaging 500-600 e-mails a day. For some, smartphones have altogether replaced laptops ' serving as their only connection to the client and the members of their legal team.
Last year, in an effort to advance SHB's mobile support infrastructure, our telecommunications team received a challenge to be more proactive. Specifically, we aimed to establish real-time visibility into our mobile infrastructure, with the goal of preventing mobile issues before they could impact attorneys and their legal teams. Instead of investing more time and money into our current system, we initiated an RFP to find a commercially available solution.
Being Proactive
With our goals in place, it became very clear the number one issue we needed to solve was our ability to be proactive. Even if the problem was beyond our control, like a service outage, we wanted to be the ones notifying attorneys of the issue rather than waiting to hear about the problem from them.
Second, we were spending too much time searching for updates, aggregating this information into our troubleshooting system, and taking servers offline to fix problems. Finding intermittent problems was an arduous guessing game that could easily take an hour or more. As the number of BlackBerrys in the field escalated, we found ourselves constantly on the phone with the carrier or a network provider discussing mobile problems of unknown origin. Bottom line: We needed better visibility into the devices we were supporting, and insight into other networks to improve response times. And, we wanted to avoid asking attorneys to physically surrender their smartphones while we tried fixing the problems.
Finally, we wanted to create a tiered support system whereby non-critical issues could be dealt with by our help desk, and more severe Level 2 or 3 problems could be escalated to my group. Skilled administrators were expensive and in high demand, and their time could be better spent supporting more advanced troubleshooting issues.
Shopping for a Solution
Right away, we realized that some of the technologies we originally considered didn't make the cut. Vendor-backed management tools were an option but lacked support for other platforms that might be deployed 12-18 months from now. Long term compatibility with our mobile infrastructure and heterogeneous support were critical. We also considered “monitoring-only” solutions. These products did a good job of alerting us when a problem occurred, but provided little insight into how to actually fix the issues. For these reasons, we decided to
go with a mobile service management solution with heterogeneous support and a high degree of automation.
In August 2007, we conducted a one-month pilot program with 15 VIP lawyers on the east and west coasts. The goal of the program was to find a solution that would help SHB improve administrator efficiency and customer service, and produce a measurable ROI. We evaluated Zenprise MobileManager and were able to hit the ground running. At one point during the pilot program, RIM suffered a network outage, which the software alerted us of before the official news from RIM hit the media. Zenprise sent an automatic notification to all of the mobile users in the pilot, notifying them to be prepared for an outage.
The level of automation and proactive management we received during the pilot convinced us to go with Zenprise. With Zenprise, we estimated a 50% savings over other mobile management software considered in the initial evaluation.
Automating Mobile
Service Management
Since implementing Zenprise, SHB has shifted from reactive to proactive management of its mobile IT environment.
Zenprise MobileManager works by automating mobile service management with proactive monitoring and powerful diagnostics. A
Web-based console provides a holistic role-based view of all devices, servers and networks in our mobile environment. It creates a flowchart depicting connections between the user, device, carrier network, BES and mail server. If there's a problem at the carrier level, or if any one of our 18 BES and Exchange servers is not operating as expected, we are immediately notified and it is graphically displayed with a red “x.”
Since all of the troubleshooting is automated, during business hours we are free to work on a variety of ongoing projects without having to manually monitor our mobile infrastructure and devices. Productivity is at an all-time high. As a result, we've measurably improved the number of issues we are able to prevent from about 150 to 314 per month.
At night or on weekends and holidays, we can go home knowing that mobile systems performance will automatically continue being monitored without the physical presence of an administrator. If a problem is detected, Zenprise automatically sends detailed notifications to our BlackBerrys with instructions on what to do next.
Step-by-Step Resolution
With Zenprise usage reports, we've experienced a 75% reduction in time spent on support calls based on the insight we receive. With that knowledge, instead of spending 60 minutes on a call, we now spend about 15 minutes. Everything we need to know about an individual user's device, such as battery life and signal strength, is available at a glance. Having detailed information at our fingertips helps us quickly divert a variety of potentially critical issues. For example, when attorneys reported they weren't getting messages during certain time intervals, the reports showed us that secretaries were inadvertently deleting emails before the attorneys had read them. We simply turned off e-mail reconciliation so secretaries could delete messages but the attorneys could still read them.
The automated troubleshooting and detailed reports have also equipped our help desk and other staff to support routine Level 1 and 2 issues. Administrators can watch as Zenprise diagnostics automatically reveal the root causes of underlying problems in minutes. As a result, we've cut the volume of trouble tickets in half. My team is now freed up to focus on solving more elusive Level 3 issues, and training administrators to handle swapping, device activations and other mobile management tasks.
A key feature in Zenprise is the expert knowledge base that ties into RIM, Microsoft and other information sources. The knowledge base provides step-by-step resolution instructions that are logically organized and worded so anyone on the support staff in any practice area can understand and follow the steps. Scheduled knowledge base updates are automatically pushed out to support teams, who are assured of having the latest break-fix procedures available with respect to domain rights, mailbox flow, SQL reporting or other matters.
For anyone in IT struggling to support a law firm with a growing number of smartphones, take heart. Do the research, evaluate different technologies and don't settle on a product unless it provides tangible cost and time savings to your support team. Our transition from a reactive to proactive support system coupled with the subsequent improvements in uptime gave us the validation and positive ROI we needed to make a case.
Andrew Collier is the telecommunications manager at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a law firm specializing in multiple practice areas, from food safety and real estate to e-discovery, public policy and tax litigation. He is responsible for managing the firm's global network of smartphones in the U.S., Europe and the United Kingdom.
In a recent study, management-consulting firm Altman Weil cited lack of responsiveness as the number one reason clients terminate the services of a law firm.
Lawyers need to have reliable, continuous access to clients ' whether they are on the road with a smartphone or in the office behind a desk. Having access to the firm's experienced professionals and extensive supportive resources without service errors, delays or interruptions is critical when a case is on the line.
At
Last year, in an effort to advance SHB's mobile support infrastructure, our telecommunications team received a challenge to be more proactive. Specifically, we aimed to establish real-time visibility into our mobile infrastructure, with the goal of preventing mobile issues before they could impact attorneys and their legal teams. Instead of investing more time and money into our current system, we initiated an RFP to find a commercially available solution.
Being Proactive
With our goals in place, it became very clear the number one issue we needed to solve was our ability to be proactive. Even if the problem was beyond our control, like a service outage, we wanted to be the ones notifying attorneys of the issue rather than waiting to hear about the problem from them.
Second, we were spending too much time searching for updates, aggregating this information into our troubleshooting system, and taking servers offline to fix problems. Finding intermittent problems was an arduous guessing game that could easily take an hour or more. As the number of BlackBerrys in the field escalated, we found ourselves constantly on the phone with the carrier or a network provider discussing mobile problems of unknown origin. Bottom line: We needed better visibility into the devices we were supporting, and insight into other networks to improve response times. And, we wanted to avoid asking attorneys to physically surrender their smartphones while we tried fixing the problems.
Finally, we wanted to create a tiered support system whereby non-critical issues could be dealt with by our help desk, and more severe Level 2 or 3 problems could be escalated to my group. Skilled administrators were expensive and in high demand, and their time could be better spent supporting more advanced troubleshooting issues.
Shopping for a Solution
Right away, we realized that some of the technologies we originally considered didn't make the cut. Vendor-backed management tools were an option but lacked support for other platforms that might be deployed 12-18 months from now. Long term compatibility with our mobile infrastructure and heterogeneous support were critical. We also considered “monitoring-only” solutions. These products did a good job of alerting us when a problem occurred, but provided little insight into how to actually fix the issues. For these reasons, we decided to
go with a mobile service management solution with heterogeneous support and a high degree of automation.
In August 2007, we conducted a one-month pilot program with 15 VIP lawyers on the east and west coasts. The goal of the program was to find a solution that would help SHB improve administrator efficiency and customer service, and produce a measurable ROI. We evaluated Zenprise MobileManager and were able to hit the ground running. At one point during the pilot program, RIM suffered a network outage, which the software alerted us of before the official news from RIM hit the media. Zenprise sent an automatic notification to all of the mobile users in the pilot, notifying them to be prepared for an outage.
The level of automation and proactive management we received during the pilot convinced us to go with Zenprise. With Zenprise, we estimated a 50% savings over other mobile management software considered in the initial evaluation.
Automating Mobile
Service Management
Since implementing Zenprise, SHB has shifted from reactive to proactive management of its mobile IT environment.
Zenprise MobileManager works by automating mobile service management with proactive monitoring and powerful diagnostics. A
Web-based console provides a holistic role-based view of all devices, servers and networks in our mobile environment. It creates a flowchart depicting connections between the user, device, carrier network, BES and mail server. If there's a problem at the carrier level, or if any one of our 18 BES and Exchange servers is not operating as expected, we are immediately notified and it is graphically displayed with a red “x.”
Since all of the troubleshooting is automated, during business hours we are free to work on a variety of ongoing projects without having to manually monitor our mobile infrastructure and devices. Productivity is at an all-time high. As a result, we've measurably improved the number of issues we are able to prevent from about 150 to 314 per month.
At night or on weekends and holidays, we can go home knowing that mobile systems performance will automatically continue being monitored without the physical presence of an administrator. If a problem is detected, Zenprise automatically sends detailed notifications to our BlackBerrys with instructions on what to do next.
Step-by-Step Resolution
With Zenprise usage reports, we've experienced a 75% reduction in time spent on support calls based on the insight we receive. With that knowledge, instead of spending 60 minutes on a call, we now spend about 15 minutes. Everything we need to know about an individual user's device, such as battery life and signal strength, is available at a glance. Having detailed information at our fingertips helps us quickly divert a variety of potentially critical issues. For example, when attorneys reported they weren't getting messages during certain time intervals, the reports showed us that secretaries were inadvertently deleting emails before the attorneys had read them. We simply turned off e-mail reconciliation so secretaries could delete messages but the attorneys could still read them.
The automated troubleshooting and detailed reports have also equipped our help desk and other staff to support routine Level 1 and 2 issues. Administrators can watch as Zenprise diagnostics automatically reveal the root causes of underlying problems in minutes. As a result, we've cut the volume of trouble tickets in half. My team is now freed up to focus on solving more elusive Level 3 issues, and training administrators to handle swapping, device activations and other mobile management tasks.
A key feature in Zenprise is the expert knowledge base that ties into RIM,
For anyone in IT struggling to support a law firm with a growing number of smartphones, take heart. Do the research, evaluate different technologies and don't settle on a product unless it provides tangible cost and time savings to your support team. Our transition from a reactive to proactive support system coupled with the subsequent improvements in uptime gave us the validation and positive ROI we needed to make a case.
Andrew Collier is the telecommunications manager at
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