Author: Onit

3 Takeaways from WPC for Microsoft Partners

Posted on July 24, 2014 by - Company News and Events

The 2014 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington DC exhibited a much more partner-friendly tone than last year as it seemed to be more about what Microsoft can “do” for partners rather than what partners can “do” for Microsoft.

Here are three big takeaways all Microsoft partners should be aware of as they plan for the next Microsoft fiscal year and how Onit can help:

1. Microsoft Cloud Services Provider Program

Microsoft announced the Microsoft Cloud Services Provider Program this year, which allows partners to control the complete customer lifecycle in cloud product sales and service by allowing partners to control and manage the provisioning of Microsoft cloud services.

This is great news for Microsoft resellers because it provides more touch-points and higher visibility with your customers allowing you to get even more strategic about your customers’ overall cloud deployment portfolio.

Today, Onit is working with one major North American Microsoft LAR on end-to-end cloud services solutions that allow them to control the business process workflow from quoting the customer to provisioning their cloud software to managing the subscriptions over time.

By controlling the workflow of cloud services provisioning and management with Onit Apps, this reseller will be able to do more with less resources, reduce risk of error in provisioning, and increase customer satisfaction throughout the lifecycle of service.

2. Three New Reseller Programs

Microsoft also announced three new programs for resellers:

  • Small and Mid-Market Cloud Solutions Program

This program focuses on cloud software provisioning and deployment for customers with less than 100 users of Office 365, and includes optimized entitlements for other productivity solutions such as Visual Studio.

This market is ripe for opportunity with more than 9 million prospects in the United States alone.

However, in order to get this most out of this program, your team will need to be efficient with quoting, provisioning, and managing across the a vast long-tail of customers in the SMB market. Having an efficient workflow in place to address this market is critical to success.

  • Cloud Productivity Program  

This program is designed to help partners sell enterprise deployments of Office 365 with support for demos, mobile, and eligibility to participate in Microsoft marketing campaigns.

  • Cloud Platform Program

The Cloud Platform Program is intended for resellers selling Infrastructure-as-a-Service, PaaS, or SaaS solutions on Microsoft Azure. This is a renewed push to compete with Rackspace.com and Amazon.com.

For each of these programs, Onit can build custom workflow solutions to help you efficiently capture a healthy share of the addressable market and further refine your process over time to take advantage of your companies unique resources and core competencies.

3. Business Process Apps are the Next Big Thing

Evident in this year’s Microsoft WPC was a major switch in business strategy for Microsoft from the ‘devices and services’ mantra of Steve Ballmer to a more ‘productivity and platform’ company approach with Satya Nadella.

This means that the way things get done means a lot more than it used to. We are evolving beyond a time when the version of Microsoft Excel and the laptop you ran it on mattered – today Excel is in the cloud with Microsoft Office 365 and you can access your spreadsheet from a tablet, laptop, or workstation anytime you like.

What matters is who you are collaborating with on that spreadsheet, what happens after you finish your piece of collaboration, and what effect that has on the rest of your organization.

Project Siena is Microsoft’s big push into the world of Business Apps. At WPC, they announced a partnership with Fujitsu to work together on building Apps for their new 8-inch tablet.

Project Siena allows business-level users to create Apps using PowerPoint and Excel skills, all without the assistance of IT or developers.

At Onit, we are exploring ways to integrate with Project Siena in order for it to be the front-end user experience to our rapidly adaptable business process workflow technology on the backend. 

Need to Boost Sales From Your Players – There’s an App for That

Posted on July 1, 2014 by - Business Process Management

Every sales organization has three different types of reps:

  • ‘A’ Players who are great performers regardless of the systems and tools they use, however, because they get results, they have a ‘rock star’ mentality and thus are more difficult to manage. This is your top 10-20%.
  • ‘C’ Players who never get with the program and end up firing themselves by constantly missing quota – these are the bottom 10-20% that contribute to the natural churn every sales organization experiences.
  • ‘B’ Players who are the most important and constitute the vast majority of your sales organization, usually 60-80%. From this group you can achieve the most efficient boost in sales with the least possible amount of investment because they are extremely coachable and follow process exceptionally well.

The upshot of this ‘B’ player majority being able to follow process exceptionally well is that if you provide this team with the right tools to run a well-designed process, they will boost the revenue in the majority of your customer base.

The challenge comes in providing the tools required to manage a well-designed process. Most companies try to fit a workflow into their CRM system or SharePoint, and neither of these systems are built explicitly with the intention of building and managing workflows. Moreover, a well-designed process inherently must change with the evolving needs of your business – so even if you were able to create a workflow in your CRM or SharePoint, it is difficult or even impossible to change the process once it is in action.

As a result, most sales organizations end up ignoring process optimization all together. They stick with ‘back to basics’ programs in the hopes that if they make more calls, send more email blasts, buy more ads, or take more ‘decision makers’ out to lunch, they will get that incremental boost in sales they need for their shareholders.

Dedicated Processes Have Dedicated Tools

The ‘B’ players who you want to get that big boost from need a focused, dedicated system to work with to accomplish the tasks prescribed in your process. Imagine if it was as simple as your sales managers telling reps “there’s an app for that” – a simple interface that was designed to enable the sales reps do that one thing very well. And, if that same system could notify them at the right time and place to do that one thing, you can be sure they won’t miss their cue to shine.

Managers need visibility into the overall performance of the process in order to understand the bottlenecks and performance gaps – reporting that shows them exactly how to improve on the process so that your customers get the strategic output you believe will make the difference.

We’re Onit

Fortunately, there is a team that can help you raise the selling level of your ‘B’ players.

Using Onit Apps, you can get a handle on that middle 60% of ‘B’ players to drive the team with unprecedented insight and control in a way that they will understand and quickly adopt.

Onit’s team of consultants will guide you through every step of the way to designing and implementing a world-class workflow solution – all within a matter of days. Onit Apps are built from the ground up with change in mind, and the Onit team will help you analyze reporting from your process to continuously improve and get a dramatically bigger impact.

Request a free consultation with an Onit team member today to talk about your goals – we will build a process diagram for you and implement a demo of that process in an Onit App for you to see first-hand what our software platform can do you for you – free of charge. 

Onit Presents at LegalTech West Coast 2014: A Case for Business Apps at Johnson Controls

Posted on June 25, 2014 by - Company News and Events

In the growing legal industry, workloads are increasing and processes are becoming more complex. Enterprise software has helped to manage records and tasks on the corporate level, but modifying enterprise software for your evolving business is expensive and time consuming. Smart Process Apps have risen to help firms manage collaborative business processes and matter management by filling in the gaps of existing software infrastructure.

On Wednesday, June 25 at 10:30 a.m. PT at LegalTech West Coast in Los Angeles, Paul Zengilowski, Customer Development Executive at Onit, and Ted Jankowski, managed the introduction of the Onit App Builder at Johnson Controls (currently retired), will present a case study on how Johnson Controls deployed Apps to systematically addressing business opportunity and legal risk.

5 Ways Smart Process Apps are Re-Inventing Legal Operations:

1. Enhance capabilities to manage risk.

Onit Apps help legal teams streamline operations, control costs, and gain visibility into projects. With imbedded awareness data and analytical tools designed for real-time evaluation of business activities, Apps help companies adapt and reduce risk.

2. Improve responsiveness to business clients.

Onit Apps are design by people, for people. They offer a truly collaborative platform and visibility into every stage of the process, helping law departments solve real business problems and adapt to their changing client needs.

3. Increase productivity of staff attorneys.

Collaboration is vital for managing processes. Onit Apps give team members a simple way to communicate in a shared workspace, reducing the time spent on tasks and document research and increasing overall productivity.

4. Achieve greater transparency and insight around portfolio of work.

Onit Apps automate manual, cumbersome, and often paper intensive processes, while giving team members visibility throughout the process. The enhanced insight provides opportunities to make changes to the workflow and adapt as needed.

5. Manage evolving business processes through adaptable, quickly deployed tools.

Unlike traditional enterprise software, Onit Apps can be configured and implemented in weeks, so you can reap the financial and operational savings more quickly. Additionally, enhancements to Onit Apps can be made anytime giving you the power to adapt your software to your ever-evolving business, not the other way around.

If you are interested in helping your firm or law department control costs and increase efficiency and automate business processes, join us today at LTWC to learn how Onit Smart Process Apps can help!

The New Onit.com: A Smarter Way to Learn About Smart Process Apps

Posted on June 6, 2014 by - Company News and Events

Here at Onit, we pride ourselves on offering Apps to help simplify and streamline your unruly business processes. Recently, we decided to turn that critical eye inward and overhauled our corporate website. With an improved homepage design, cleaner layout of page content, and an intuitive and consistent site-wide navigation system, our new website offers quick and easy access to product and company information.

“One of our primary objectives was to create a more interactive experience for visitors,” commented Eric M. Elfman, co-founder and CEO of Onit. “To achieve this, we simplified the content structure and navigation so the visitor could get the information they were looking for in as few clicks as possible.”

Smart Process Apps are the star of our new website. From the Onit homepage, you can promptly learn more about our department-specific technology solutions, from human resources and IT, to compliance, legal and sales. Built to help professionals drive efficiency and productivity, automate manual processes and solve problems that directly impact customer satisfaction, employee productivity and profitability, Onit Apps can be configured and implemented in weeks – not months – so companies can reap the financial and operational savings quickly.

The enhanced Onit Enterprise App Market pages include expanded content and product screenshots. Straightforward call-to-action buttons make it easier to request a demo and contact us for more information. The website also contains market intelligence, information about upcoming webinars and tradeshows, and a library of resources that includes white papers, eBooks, videos, collateral and case studies.

If you are interested in improving your business processes and working smarter, Onit can help!

Contact us or schedule a demo to see how.

Onit Client AIG Named Best Legal Department by Corporate Counsel

Posted on May 30, 2014 by - Company News and Events

Onit congratulates our client AIG for recently being named 2014 Best Legal Department by Corporate Counsel. The AIG legal team was recognized for its tenacity and steadfastness during the economic meltdown that almost toppled the company. In particular, Corporate Counsel commended the lawyers from AIG’s Global Legal Compliance Regulatory and Government Affairs for “prioritizing innovation and attention to process efficiency in order to save resources and survive the financial crisis.”

Read more…

“[AIG’s] lawyers have proven that they can work hard, innovate through tricky situations and use technology and process management to grow ever leaner and more efficient.”
– Rebekah Mintzer, Corporate Counsel

Here at Onit, we pride ourselves on being able to help legal departments create more efficiency and transparency, and innovate their processes. Companies such as AIG use the Onit App Builder platform to configure and deploy their own Apps in just days. Onit’s light weight, customizable, and flexible Apps allow companies to easily adapt to changing process demands and collaborate smarter.

Onit App Builder combines business process management, collaboration and transaction management functionality into one innovative tool. With Onit App Builder, it is easy to develop and deploy Apps that streamline business processes and solve real world problems, which directly impact customer satisfaction, employee productivity and profitability. Looking for a solution to your evolving business process? Contact us to see how Onit can help!

Filling in the Gaps: Adding Engagement to Your Enterprise Software

Posted on May 9, 2014 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Enterprise software arose to answer specific needs within corporations — from processing bills to tracking legal matters or managing content. In its inception, it helped enable the mastery of what would be considered simple tasks on an individual level, but were immensely complicated challenges when multiplied to the corporate level. Gradually, this software became more sophisticated, facilitating terabytes or petabytes of information. 

However, enterprise software is like steel plumbing — expensive to lay, difficult to manipulate or move and often more expensive to replace.

Due to the increasing complexity of the business needs these solutions handle, it is often extremely difficult to modify workflows, user preferences, reporting and more without intervention from IT and potentially more bills from the software provider.

Companies are looking towards a new model of systems of engagement, which encompass not only management of tasks or processes but also the communications and collaboration preferences of its users on a whole. These systems — enabled by technologies we know and understand such as email — serves customers, partners and employees equally, removing the barriers that prevent out-of-department stakeholders from taking part in vital processes that impact their goals and productivity. A system of engagement is focused on in-the-moment tasks and decisions, leverages social and cloud technologies and includes short, rapid, iterative release cycles.

Rather than trying to compete with existing enterprise software installations, these systems of engagement are embracing an “App” approach that enables them to fill in the gaps of existing software infrastructure. Forrester Research has coined the term “Smart Process Apps” for this new software and predicts it will be a fast growing segment of business software.

Find out how you can get ahead of the curve by reading our whitepaper on the transition from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement.

Transitioning from System of Record to System of Engagement

Posted on March 28, 2014 by - Business Process Management

Sales force automation is a powerful concept. The promise of keeping sales focused on the important areas of their job (working with customers and closing deals) while minimizing the administrative areas (updating records, transcribing notes) has spawned an industry of CRM vendors. These systems often become all encompassing within a company, sending out tendrils to every department. They become the system of record.

This has laid the groundwork for building a cohesive customer experience across all stages. Each different department is able to access the data from previous and concurrent interactions. As the holistic customer experience becomes the organizational focus, more is needed out of a sales automation system than tracking the data. 

The interactions that begin to happen between groups and departments needs tools that clearly define, track, and report on who is responsible at each step and who is taking over. This is driving the shift towards systems of engagement that manage the human aspect of processes. 

The primary function of any systems or Apps that add a layer of engagement onto a system of record is to make the processes happening around the data clear. A system of record is only as good as the data included into it. Without clear (and simple) process for capturing and sharing data, the records in a database can quickly get outdated. This can cause internal confusion and have a negative impact on the customer experience.

With the rise of Enterprise Apps – SaaS software focused on specific tasks that are easy to implement and run – adding the engagement layer to a system of record does not require major infrastructure changes. Apps can provide an easy-to-use front-end for your internal users, while pushing back relevant data to the system of record already in place.

With an App platform, each department or group can build exactly what it needs to get its work done. Updating the system of record happens behind the scenes without affecting the front-end workflow. The flexibility of Apps means that they can also be changed quickly – sometimes even on the fly by end-users – without disrupting the entire system or process.

Data collection in a system of record has been, and continues to be, an important element of sales operations. As more departments get involved in the customer experience, matching process with that data will become increasingly important to companies who want to maintain their advantage. 

 

Come see how Onit Apps can help you transition to a system of engagement.

5 Reasons Legal Department Operations Is Taking a Second Look at E-Billing

Posted on February 4, 2014 by - Business Process Management

Legal e-billing has been around since the mid-1990s when it was introduced as message-based store and forward systems based on EDI technologies developed during WWII. Many legal departments implemented these burgeoning e-billing systems as enterprise-scale software deployments at great cost.

Secure Ebilling

Unfortunately, not much has changed since then, and many legal departments find themselves still using the system they originally installed.

But now, savvy legal department operations leaders are taking into consideration the huge advances in technology to increase visibility and efficiency while reducing risk for their department.

The top five reasons to re-evaluate e-billing software for the modern era are:

  1. Software As A Service (SaaS) has removed the barrier to replacing or augmenting software.
    No longer are legal departments constrained by IT resources the months required to implement and configure a new system. SaaS software makes it easy to get started with a new system in days rather than months.
  2. The need for a shared workspace has become critical as working with outside counsel has exploded.
    It’s common for a legal department to be working with multiple (even numerous) law firms for a variety of tasks. Trying to keep track of all the firms – much less stay on the same page for open matters, timekeeper rates, budgets, and invoices – is difficult in legacy e-billing systems.
  3. Processes need to be flexible – without working around the system.
    Processes change from instance to instance, from day to day. Different people need to get involved depending on changing criteria. Companies need the ability to include additional people ad hoc to a process without ‘faking’ it. This is important both for getting work done and for creating audit trails.
  4. Poor timekeeper management reduces cost benefits.
    Tracking all authorized timekeepers and their rates is complicated in legacy e-billing systems. Timekeeper rates are less static than in the past as well, when this data is out-of-date, your department may be spending more than it realizes.
  5. Management expects analytics around every facet of outside counsel work.
    Many e-billing systems fall down when it comes to reporting. The need to report on metrics that matter specifically to your department, and quickly track your KPI’s with dashboards, has only recently been tacked on to legacy e-billing systems. You shouldn’t need to export everything to Excel before you can analyze it.

Today, Onit announced the launch of BillingPoint, its suite of Legal E-billing and Matter Management Apps, at LegalTech New York 2014. This new suite of Apps enables corporate law departments and laws firms to share all the types of sensitive information (i.e., matter types, practice areas, timekeeper rates, expenses, invoices, budgets, or any document essential to their financial relationship) in a truly collaborative workspace.

Now law firms and law departments can now take advantage of the first real innovation in legal e-billing in more than two decades. BillingPoint was designed from the ground-up by experts in legal e-billing — the founders of Datacert — Eric M. Elfman and Eric Smith. Onit has developed the first truly innovative e-billing software that takes advantage of all the advances made in technology over the last 20 years.

Come learn more now.

 

Image courtesy of Sujin Jetkasettakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

2013 Year in Review

Posted on January 6, 2014 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

It’s been an exciting year at Onit and we appreciate the opportunity to share it with you. We’ve made great progress this year, both from a product and customer perspective, and I wanted to highlight some of our accomplishments.

To begin, we have successfully deployed Apps at numerous Fortune 500 and privately held companies. In addition to seeing unprecedented user adoption rates, our Apps have been deployed globally in more than 175 countries. This has taken off faster than we anticipated.

Second, we have built new Apps on our App Builder platform (as anyone can do) to serve the growing needs of our customers. Some recent Apps that have been deployed include:

And our biggest news of 2013 will be officially released at LegalTech NY 2014. Check back here later this month to see the next way we’re changing how legal departments get work done.

General Counsel: Ask Your Outside Counsel for a “Career Associate” and Lower your Legal Spend

Posted on January 3, 2014 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Imagine seeing this title on your AmLaw 200 law firm bill: career associate. While a bit odd, it may be the latest way large firms are controlling costs and creating a lower threshold for billable hours.

The ABA Journal reports that law firms have been experimenting with different titles that can signify different career paths for outside counsel. For example, the above mentioned “career associate” references a lawyer at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe that works at lower rates and reduced hours and is excluded from the partnership track. The article reports similar trends at Greenberg Traurig and Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.

But are these title changes semantics or substantive?

According to an expert interviewed for the article, the changes reflect the “economic challenges of the past five years” and “lawyers’ changing professional expectations and desires.”

Truth be told, law firms have been juggling titles for quite some time. While this may be just marketing machinations, the fact that some of these new titles charge a lower rate could translate into substantial savings for corporate law departments – who have, for years, pushed for an appropriate and applicable mix of billing levels on outside counsel bills. After all, basic work doesn’t need “drive by” billing from a senior partner. Now, with the advent of these new positions, there is the possibility to move basic work from associates to an even more budget-compliant level of attorney.

So if you happen to see career associate, legal resident or department attorney on your latest bill, give yourself a moment to smile as you (hopefully) savor the spend savings.