The Upside of a Systems Crash? Getting the OK for a System Overhaul

The Upside of a Systems Crash? Getting the OK for a System Overhaul

CIO Henry Chace arrived at Burns & Levinson LLP, a Boston law firm established in 1960, to find an infrastructure almost as old. That was in 2002. Since then, he has replaced everything from servers to databases and desktops and has armed all associates with BlackBerry mobile devices. Recently Chace talked about working in an environment where every hour is billable -- and downtime is not an option.

What happened to your first proposal for a front-to-back system overhaul?
It probably died a summertime death. I presented my $700,000 proposal to a committee in June. But law firms are cash-based businesses. That means the money that I take immediately impacts the partner's bottom line. So it can be hard to get their attention.

But you did soon thereafter. How?
In August the GroupWise server crashed. I'm not a religious person, but I was talking to the server and patting it. A managing partner said, "How could this happen?" I said, "Here's how it happened. You have an unsupported version of Novell. I can't even get tech support for it from the Web." The next week I was summoned to the partners' meeting.

What's it like to answer to attorneys?
I work for people who are very smart and very educated -- and have been trained to ask questions. I have to always tell the truth. I have to be credible.

Ellen O'Brien, a former senior editor at CIO Decisions, is now a senior editor at Storage magazine. Write to her at eobrien@techtarget.com.

This was first published in January 2006