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PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Making IT A Group Effort
Professional services firms use groupware and the Net
to provide better service
By Bruce Caldwell
Issue date: Sept. 18,1995

Last spring, during the height of tax season, Michael Richards, a tax supervisor at Comdisco Inc. in Rosemont, Ill., found a bug in his tax management s oftware. Because Comdisco was a client of Price Waterhouse LLP, all Richards had to do was call up a Lotus Notes server run by the New York professional services firm and download a fix. The result: Comdisco met its tax compliance deadlines.

In the professional services sector, working closely with customers is key. That's why most major consultancies and systems integrators are focusing their information technology efforts on groupware and, increasingly, the Internet. They want to share as much information as possible with their customers.

At the same time, these firms are boosting their mobile computing abilities, providing staff with remote access to database and electronic-mail servers so that they can work at customer sites and still have the required resources at hand.

Groupware is a near-universal effort in the industry. It helps professional services firms identify the human resources needed for client projects, while mobile computing keeps overhead costs low by reducing the need for offic e space. "Everyone is going into groupware, building a knowledge base, and sharing information with clients," says Thomas Rodenhauser, editor of Consultants News , a newsletter in Fitzwilliam, N.H. "Anyone not on the groupware bandwagon will get left behind."

Lotus Notes is the groupware of choice at many services firms. Price Waterhouse, which became one of the first large Notes sites in 1989, has close to 30,000 users. Early adopters Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting count 55,000 and 35,000 Notes users, respectively. Ernst & Young has 30,000, while Coopers & Lybrand, with the first enterprisewide Notes license, has 40,000.

But Notes can be costly to manage, about $4,000 a year per user, according to International Data Corp., a research firm in Framingham, Mass. That includes license fees, training, applications development, servers, and general maintenance.

Then there's the cost of linking Notes users. At Price Waterhouse, the telecom charges for replications between the fir m's hub in Tampa, Fla., and local Notes servers have become too costly. To lower costs, the firm is installing a new internetworking architecture based on Novell NetWare and frame relay switching in both the U.S. and Europe.

Users now access large Notes databases directly over the wide area network, reducing the number of replications from the Tampa hub, lowering traffic, and cutting costs, according to Mark Lutchen, chief information officer at Price Waterhouse.

Consider The Alternatives
A few firms are using alternatives to Notes. Booz-Allen Hamilton Inc. and KPMG Peat Marwick each use FirstClass, an electronic-mail, conferencing, and database search system from SoftArc Inc. in Markham, Ontario.

The difference in software licensing costs between the products is significant. For 1,000 users or more, a FirstClass license is $15 per user. The Microsoft Windows NT version of FirstClass, released this month, costs $35--still a far cry from the $275 per-user cost of Lotus Notes when purcha sing 50 or more copies.

FirstClass, says Allan Frank, partner-in-charge of enabling technologies at KPMG Peat Marwick in New York, doesn't mimic the filing cabinet motif found in Lotus Notes. Instead, it searches across corporate databases in response to queries.

Regardless of which groupware product a consulting firm uses, the knowledge developed by one group--tax partners for instance--can be used by others, says Frank. Professional services firms are increasingly organized into multidisciplinary teams covering specific industries, he notes. This approach is better served by universal access to corporate knowledge than by compartmentalized databases.

But information sharing is useless unless a professional services firm can link far-flung professionals with each other and with customers. That's why so many are investing in the Internet and online services.

To help navigate the gigabytes of information that Peat Marwick generates--not to mention the resources of the Internet--Frank is devel oping Knowledge Master, a cyberspace librarian that will use virtual reality to ferret out information in a virtual world where data might have a shape, color, and sound.

Professional services firms have begun turning to agent software to scour the Internet. Price Waterhouse, for example, built a proprietary link between Notes and the Internet to access corporate documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, says David Kalish, managing partner for Price Waterhouse's World Technology Centre in Menlo Park, Calif. The technology, called Financial Data Server, then moves the data into spreadsheets.

PW Radar, a project now in beta test, carries the Financial Data Server project to the next level, says Kalish. The newer technology gleans financial data about a company and its competitors from the Internet, then creates graphics and spreadsheets in order to make performance comparisons.

But none of these efforts will work well unless consultants and other workers are guaranteed hassle-free online access. Last spring, successfully logging into corporate systems from remote sites often took eight or nine tries, making the effort to fetch an electronic file an exercise in frustration, says Booz-Allen Hamilton CIO Ed Vaccaro. Vaccaro, formerly a professional in the IT consulting practice, volunteered last April to help improve the quality of mobile computing at the firm. When the CIO quit soon after, Vaccaro took the job and began to remedy the remote access problems.

Vaccaro set communications standards, choosing AppleTalk Remote Access for Macintosh PowerBooks, and NetWare Remote for Intel-based Toshiba and Compaq notebook computers, and Telebit or Shiva for TCP/IP support. He also added communications ports to the Shiva LANRove and Telebit NetBlazer servers. Workers now log onto a version of the FirstClass groupware that's souped up with Booz-Allen documents and search engines.

The developers who customized FirstClass also began creating an internal Internet service that uses browsing a nd server technologies from Netscape Communications Corp. By the beginning of next year, this internal Internet, called Knowledge Online 2.0, will replace the earlier version based on FirstClass, according to Aron Dutta, a principal at Booz-Allen.

For a total cost of $170,000, "we turned the Web inside out to run our enterprise," says Dutta. Knowledge Online 2.0 will tie into Booz-Allen's billing, time and expense, staffing, and other systems, he explains.

But the revolution has a price. Booz-Allen's IT budget this year is $31 million for expenses and $9 million for capital spending, mostly for new notebooks, compared with last year's $21.5 million for expenses and $2.1 million in capital spending. Next year will be even greater, partly because of new hires and expansion, with a budget of $39 million for expenses plus $13 million in capital spending, as Booz-Allen continues to upgrade its laptops and beef up end-user support staff.

How does Booz-Allen justify those costs? "We don't use productiv ity measures," says Vaccaro. "It's more a qualitative thing. We know intuitively we can do more business without having to burn our people out."

Ernst & Young, with 67,000 employees worldwide and an annual IT budget close to $120 million in the U.S., is looking for more tangible returns. "Giving everyone a laptop is a significant investment," says John Parkinson, partner-in-charge of E&Y's Center for Technology Enablement in Irving, Texas. "We would like to see the revenue stream from an individual increase by some multiple of that investment."

A program called PowerStart is Ernst & Young's means of quickly establishing a temporary IT infrastructure to support auditors or consultants at a client site. According to Parkinson, if four or more professionals will need to work at a site for at least one month, Ernst & Young dispatches a truck or van loaded with servers, which are sometimes IBM ThinkPads, plus cabling for a Novell wide area network, Lotus Notes, and printers, a videoconferen cing station, and a router and T1 line for a link to the Ernst & Young office node.

Perhaps nowhere are the benefits of new IT better illustrated in the professional services industry than at Coopers & Lybrand , which is using the Internet to communicate with clients. C&L plans to post a skills-search tool called ExperFind on its World Wide Web home page when AT&T Network Notes and Lotus Notes 4.0 are available, says Richard Koppel, managing partner of information technology at the New York firm. Any company will be able to go online and see if it has the skills needed for a particular project.

The Coopers & Lybrand effort is emblematic of all IT trends in the industry: It links the benefits of groupware, remote access, the Internet, and online services, freeing employees and integrators from their offices.

The next step: giving employees business cards with no street, city, or state--just an address in cyberspace.

(To view the Profesional Services chart in PDF format click here)

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