Replacing friction with traction: how technology drift is hurting your P&L

By Steve Miller, Sales Director, Ekco Cloud & Security

Ask a law firm partner, an audit partner and a consulting practice lead what IT friction looks like, and you’ll get three different answers. But the outcome in each case is the same: fee earners fighting systems instead of serving clients, raising service desk tickets instead of invoices.

The commercial argument is valid everywhere, but nowhere is it more directly measurable than in professional services businesses, where time really is money.

 

What two hours a month costs your firm

Let’s start with a baseline. A hundred fee earners, each losing two hours every month to:

• Slow logins and searching through fragmented business data
• Manual workarounds caused by non-integrated system
• Time spent with your service desk rather than with your clients

Two hours. That’s just five minutes and thirty seconds a day. Less than a minute an hour, on average. It’s nothing, right?

That “nothing” costs you £100,000-£150,000 a year.

That’s illustrative, but the causes are likely familiar. And it’s the right order of magnitude to take seriously. Where it comes from will vary between businesses – even in the same sector – but it all hits the same thing: your P&L.

 

Law firm IT costs: transactions, case systems and proof

In a law firm, it shows up as transaction completions that stress-test system resilience. It’s a document management system and case system which suddenly stop talking to each other at exactly the wrong moment. A regulator and an endless parade of PII insurers who now expect proof, not just a policy document. All of this layered on top of pressure to bill.

Dawson Cornwell’s move from a legacy, privately hosted environment and onto Microsoft Azure is a law-firm-specific version of this: infrastructure that used to be a constraint on transaction timelines became a platform that could absorb them.

 

Accountancy and audit practices: peak seasons and unpredictable ones

In an accountancy or audit practice, the friction is seasonal. The annual self-assessment period and the financial audit season aren’t just peak business, but peak risk. They expose exactly which parts of an estate were never built for surge capacity. This concentrates the risk – operational and reputational – into just the few weeks when it can do the most damage. Compliance work that should be a competitive advantage often gets treated as pure overhead. Resources are focused on the threat, not the opportunity.

FRP Advisory, a forensic accounting and restructuring firm, shows what that pressure looks like at its most extreme and least predictable. When faced with a major administration, they needed round-the-clock access for legal teams, creditors and the court simultaneously, without a clear timeline or room for advance coordination. Their high-performance forensics cloud runs on Ekco’s infrastructure for exactly that reason, ready for whenever a deadline lands, not just during a known busy season.

 

Consulting: where IT friction comes out of the margin

In a consulting practice, the mechanism differs yet again. Fixed-fee engagements mean IT friction doesn’t just cost billable hours, it eats margin. Every hour lost to a slow collaboration tool or disjointed workflows for distributed teams comes straight off a fee that was already agreed. It’s a more pronounced version of the same underlying problem, hitting top line and bottom line at once.

Growth by acquisition cuts across all three. nGAGE, a recruitment business accelerating growth through acquisition, shows what that looks like at its most acute. Starting out with 750 users and a hard deadline to exit a legacy Citrix environment, their ongoing M&A activity increases pressure mid-modernisation. Each new acquisition emphasises the need – and the costs of inaction.

 

Building for change

What all three share is the same design principle, where cause may vary but effect is the same. It’s technology plus methodology, where change is an operational reality, not a discrete and intermittent activity. The solution needs to enable that change, not just add more overhead and technical debt to be managed.

The £100k-£150k figure isn’t really the point; it’s how you make your IT work for you, not you for IT. And, ultimately, who in your organisation can make that happen.

 

Explore Ekco Professional Services