How to conduct your own technology audit

October 31, 2008

Technology gurus have spent years marketing, selling, and convincing us to add more and more technological tools to our lives. Many of us are old enough to remember that when we began our law practices, we prepared documents with typewriters and dictated on to tape. When we went home, we listened to music on vinyl and made calls on a rotary dial phone. Now our briefcases are burgeoning with laptop computers, digital voice recorders, portable hard drives and iPods. Like Batman, our belts hang with gadgets, from the ubiquitous cell phone to the increasingly standard (and constantly buzzing) BlackBerry or iPhone. We’re awash in so many power cords that it looks like there are unruly mounds of black, plastic spaghetti piled under our desks.
It’s time to lighten up and run lean. No, I’m not talking about embarking on a rigorous exercise plan; rather, it is time to cast aside our obsolete technology and perform a ruthless technology audit. With each technological innovation you’ve embraced, you have added new hardware to your briefcase, desk, office and home. In order to fight this accretion of techno-junk, you need to identify the redundancies and start moving away from some of the old and outdated technologies that are hanging around. Once you perform this audit, you’ll see that while you likely have already adopted the replacement technologies, you are probably holding on to the old stuff chiefly out of habit.

Six steps

Here is a six-step technology audit you can undertake today to slim down your expanding pile of yesterday’s technologies:

1. Fling your fax. The fax machine has been a feature of our offices for decades. It has been a well-used warhorse, but it’s also the first device to move from the desktop to the dumpster. The fax originally grew out of the need to transmit documents from one place to another rapidly a need which has only increased over time. For the last dozen years at least, though, e-mail has made transmitting documents easier, faster and less expensive. When paper documents need to be transferred, most folks scan the document and send it attached it to an email. Some of us, on the other hand, still cling to our fax machines as if they are life preservers in rough seas.

Viewed dispassionately, faxing is an expensive and inconvenient form of document transmission. Fax machines are expensive to buy and maintain and usually require a dedicated phone line. Some companies also maintain fax servers with the associated expenses that go along with them. Others utilize services like Efax.com or Myfax.com that bear corresponding monthly and usage fees. Typically, a law office spends between $100 and $1,000 per year just to have the option of sending and receiving faxes.

It is time for lawyers to abandon the fax in favor of e-mail with scanned images attached. Nearly all of us have a scanner (and if you don’t, stop reading and go buy one now, they’re cheap) and an e-mail account. Let’s fling our fax machines and be rid of this dated technology. We’ll save on phone lines, fax services and the annoyance of failed faxes and busy signals.

2. Ditch your external disk drive. Many of us have external hard drives sitting next to our computers and servers. The price of these drives, with their mammoth capacities, has dropped like a rock. A capacious 500-gigabit drive can now be purchased for as little as $150. As the prices have dropped, these drives have proliferated throughout businesses like mushrooms. They are often used as backup devices or supplemental storage for personal computers with small drives. The problem with these drives, however, is the lack of centralized management: They are scattered around our offices, and no one really knows or manages what resides on each drive.

It’s time to jettison these drives and move all of your data to a centrally managed location. This way, all users can share and organize the data, ultimately resulting in a more economical use of hardware. It also ensures that you know what has been saved and archived and what has not and leads to better knowledge management.

It is now possible to store all of your company’s data on an off-site server at a very reasonable price. Check those out.

3. Ditch your old dictation equipment: Many of us still have dictation equipment on our desks along with a word-processing department that transcribes our dictation. Services such as Speak-Write.com allow an attorney to dictate over the phone, into the computer or on a digital recorder, all without the need for significant equipment or personnel. Some of these services also take advantage of the wage differences between the United States and other countries to perform the transcription at reduced rates.

It’s time for your dictation equipment to meet up with the fax machine in the dumpster.

4. So long, software. Software is another area ripe for pruning obsolete technology. For instance, lots of folks are now using Web 2.0 solutions such as Mozy.com to manage the backup process for computer data. This eliminates the need to buy and maintain software and hardware for backups, and it creates a safe backup copy of all data at a secure, off-site location. Web-based office software suites, such as Google Docs, also are leading some businesses to move away from owning copies of Microsoft Office. E-mail software can also be easily replaced with hosted e-mail solutions from providers such as Google and Microsoft. The bottom line is that the fewer software packages a business owns, the lower its cost of maintenance and upgrades. It’s time to evaluate all new software packages on a case-by-case basis and to say “so long” to redundant applications.

5. Bye-bye burners. Most personal computers today come with built-in CD and/or DVD burners. Years ago, however, some of us purchased stand-alone disk burners that still take up valuable real estate on our desks. Most of us have towers of blank disks piled high in the office supply cabinets that we use for either storage of old data or transfer of data to someone outside of the office. Both applications can be done better and more easily via solutions other than burning data to disks. The bulky, slow CD/DVD burner sitting on your desk can now be easily replaced with a compact, fast USB flash drive smaller than a matchbook. USB flash drives are available at any office supply store, and most of you probably already own one or more. A four-gigabyte USB drive can be had for under $20. A two-gigabyte drive costs less than $9.

USB flash drives are convenient for situations in which data needs to be physically transferred rather than sent via the Internet. While it generally makes more sense to e-mail the data, there are some instances when that is not feasible. The most common of these situations is when the files attached to e-mails exceed the size limits accepted by the recipient’s e-mail server, which will block the e-mail. (As an aside, it is inexcusable in a modern office to have an e-mail program that blocks large attachments; what’s the attachment size limit on your e-mail solution?) When your attachment hits the size barrier, consider online file transfer services such as Yousendit.com, which allow for the easy transfer of very large files by uploading to a free Web site.

6. Keep your phone for now. While it is somewhat premature to abandon your phone system today, rest assured that the day is coming. Eventually we will have the option of using a hosted phone system rather than buying the expensive hardware and software currently in use at our offices. Some companies already have moved their systems to data centers or have started using services like Gotvmail.com. Others are abandoning traditional phones in favor of providing cell phones with unlimited calling plans to all employees. It’s not yet clear what solution will eventually toss your phone system into the trash can, but the possibilities are multiplying fast.

Technology, like money, is an excellent servant but a poor master. The point of technology is to make our lives simpler and more productive. In order to achieve that end, your personal use of technology must continue to evolve through casting aside the old and taking on the new. Simply piling the new on top of the old reduces the utility of the technology and ultimately impedes our personal effectiveness.

It’s not easy to cast aside technologies that you’ve grown comfortable with, that you’ve used in your practice for years. Growth is seldom easy, but nearly always worth it. Start your technology audit today and lighten up!

Lee S. Rosen practices law in North Carolina. This article originally appeared in North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, another Dolan Media publication.

Written by Lee S. Rosen  |  Filed Under Technology 

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