Anthony W. Ulwick

KROLL ONTRACK

Discovering hidden growth opportunities
Kroll Ontrack was faced with a strategic opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity lay in the potential market for an electronic document discovery solution for the legal industry.
The challenge? Creating an effective market strategy for a business still in its infancy.

“The term ‘paperless office’ was just coming into vogue,” notes Andrea Johnson, Kroll Ontrack’s vice president of marketing and communications. Lawyers were finding that many documents relevant to a legal proceeding were available only in electronic form. Competitors who had historically served the market were able to meet the paper discovery needs of lawyers but were ill equipped to manage the discovery of these electronic records.

In response to a client’s request, Kroll Ontrack started a small business focused on electronic document discovery. It struggled at first to define a strategy based on customer needs. As Ben Allen, CEO of Kroll and former Kroll Ontrack president, explains, “We knew the potential for electronic discovery—all of the underlying foundational elements suggested that this would be an important industry opportunity. What we didn’t know was how to understand what clients wanted to achieve in a way that could be translated into an efficient and effective strategy for growth. The electronic discovery market was so new that if you asked clients what features they wanted, they didn’t know what you were talking about.”

In order to define a market strategy for a product offering that was still in its infancy, Kroll Ontrack relied on Strategyn’s ODI methodology. “After going home and

reading 17 strategy books,” Allen recalls, “what struck me about Strategyn’s ODI thinking was the concept that outcomes wouldn’t change over time. We were really at the stage where we were trying to figure out what lawyers were trying to accomplish, not what features they wanted.”

Drawing on interviews with lawyers (the end users), the ODI practitioner uncovered approximately 100 desired outcome statements related to “finding information that supported/refuted their case” (the Job-to-be-Done). The outcome statements were rated for importance and satisfaction by a statistically valid sample of the population.