Who owns the digital workplace?
Most firms discover their ownership gaps after launch. This brief maps them before the first decision is made.
Across nearly every Big Law firm we work with, ownership follows the same pattern. IT owns the infrastructure. Knowledge Management owns the experience. Practice groups own their content. Compliance owns the guardrails. The model holds because each group operates within a clearly defined domain, without needing to negotiate every decision with the others.
Knowing where clean ownership ends and shared ownership begins is the difference between a digital workplace that sustains itself and one that quietly degrades.
What’s inside
- A four-layer ownership model to present to leadership: Platform, Experience, Content, Data and Compliance
- RACI: who owns what across ten capabilities: IT, KM & Innovation, Practices, InfoSec / Rec, Marketing / BD, HR, Finance
- Where clean ownership ends, shared ownership begins, and how to govern the boundary
The firms that launch and sustain effective digital workplaces are not the ones with the largest teams or the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones that defined ownership clearly before anything was built, treated the shared objects as governance problems rather than IT problems, and aligned KM and IT on the same side of the table before the first decision was made.
