Peter High
05-28-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Hogan Lovells is a global legal practice that helps corporations, financial institutions and government entities with their critical business and legal issues both globally and locally. It is among the top 10 largest law firms in the world, with more than 2,500 attorneys operating out of more than 40 offices in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States.
Yet until three years ago, the firm had never had a global CIO. Mike Lucas was elevated to that role from the position of CTO, and in the process has helped drive tremendous change through better use of technology for purposes of collaboration, knowledge sharing and management, among other initiatives. Here, he describes his journey to CIO Insight contributor, Peter High.
CIO Insight: You are the first ever Global CIO of Hogan Lovells. What spurred the need to develop this role?
Mike Lucas: It started with the need for a global strategy. A natural outflow from developing that strategy was recognizing the need for a global realignment of the technology function. That work required a global leader; hence the global CIO role was born. The primary mission at the time was to streamline decision-making and unify the technology function globally.
CIO Insight: When you were named Global CIO, you needed to pull together a very diverse team that resides across multiple countries. What steps did you to take to be sure the right people were in the right roles, and ensure they were motivated to stay?
Lucas: It was most important to strive for balance in team composition, to recognize previous accomplishments, and to form a diverse team with global scope and responsibility. Reinforcing an already present focus on ‘customer first’ service, and establishing good IT governance were key drivers.
We place a great deal of emphasis on proper governance and transparency to the business. The next step was to permeate this approach down the organizational stack so that everyone understood and aligned with our global mission to deliver the very best service to our lawyers.
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