Author: Onit

Corporations are struggling to migrate into socially enabled organizations but fully recognize the complexities involved with this transition, according to a recent study.

The study, conducted by Oracle, Social Media Today and Leader Networks, complied results gleaned from 900 marketing and technology executives worldwide.

The study defined a “socially enabled enterprise” as:

A set of collaborative processes that have the potential to yield improved business processes that are customer-driven such as a faster time to market with new products and services, more successful research and development outcomes and refined market messages that are explicitly influenced by customer needs.

The study identified a strong adoption of social platforms in polled organizations, with organizations with more than 50,000 employees leading the charge more successfully than smaller companies.  A majority of the respondents considered this part of a strategic agenda but also conceded that it would not be a simple transition.  

One finding that drew our interest here at Onit included the need for collaborative processes as a basis of a socially enabled enterprise.

Traditionally (and especially in large government agencies or Fortune® 500 corporations), organizations adopt enterprise software to handle tasks that may appear simple but are exponentially more difficult due to a larger number of the tasks of the same nature performed within the organization.

For example, think about a corporation executing a contract. Contracts can come from any number of different departments – Sales with a new customer, Procurement with an inventory order, or any department starting work with a new vendor. Legal must be involved – that’s a no-brainer. But once they begin negotiations, the information is loaded into legal’s enterprise software system which holds updates and notes only the legal department can access.

Any additional clarification, question, or redlines are handled outside the system via email, phone calls, or hallway discussions. This administrative overhead to keep everyone in the loop is too high to make collaboration feasible for every contract. This leaves invested stakeholders unable to access information about the status of a contract or provide valuable input to move it toward completion.

All of this combined makes it difficult for the multiple parties involved – for example sales, legal, and their clients – to easily ascertain an update on progress, the latest version of amended documents, discussions that may be holding up the document and how long overall it is taking overall to finalize the contract.

This is where Smart Process Apps comes in. These process-specific, light-weight apps are adept at handling tasks of this nature while housing all documents and discussions in one easily accessible repository, shepherding the contract through to completion and breaking down all obstacles to collaboration.  They make getting a status update on a project as easy as clicking on a link.

Forrester estimates that the market for Smart Process Apps will grow to $35 billion by 2015. Taken into context what they enable and how easily they enable it in a social business, this isn’t a large surprise.

Want to learn more about Smart Process Apps? Read our breakdown at onitprostg.wpengine.com/forrester.

Apps have come a long way in a very short amount of time. In 2009 when they began to gain wide-spread acceptance, they were primarily known as a new (albeit slightly chunky) way to access important information on the go – be it the weather, email or schedule. Now – a mere four years later – Apps have extended their clever (and sleek) influence beyond individual consumers and are cementing their usefulness in a corporate environment. This new breed of Smart Process Apps can play a vital role in any corporate department.

Call them part of Business 2.0. They’re leaner, more productive and less expensive than traditional software.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our newly launched Onit App Market. It features more than 20 Smart Process Apps from Onit that tackle complex processes for compliance, HR, IT, legal, procurement, real estate and sales. They simplify and streamline important components of corporate success including contract administration, employee onboarding or termination, legal holds and board kit distribution.

Over the coming weeks, we will highlight our various Apps. But in the meantime, visit the Onit App Market to learn more about Onit Apps or request a free demo. It’ll be your first step to app-ifying your processes.

You’ve survived the re-branding from being a Microsoft Large Account Reseller to becoming a Licensing Service Provider. Of course, that name change also came with changes to campaigns, promotions, and a focus on mobile products and Microsoft services. But you know that you haven’t weathered your last storm. With Steve Ballmer retiring and Microsoft’s emphasis on cloud computing, you know change is a constant in this industry.

Your ability to act quickly directly impacts your ability to stay competitive.

Often, however, the enterprise-class software you use doesn’t allow for rapid change or fast action on a time-sensitive opportunity. A new class of software is rising to address the need to be nimble with the need to manage large volumes of data.

Smart Process Apps – coined by Forrester – are light-weight, online apps that focus on providing collaborative spaces for dynamic workflow. With the ability to define approval processes, automated kick-off and next steps, and run reports for on-going work, these tools complement the repository and record-keeping functions of an enterprise system.

Legal Process Outsourcing – Embracing the Change

Ask your department to change a process. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

What did you hear back?

“Why change? It’s working fine.”

“It’s never been tried before.”

“Customers won’t buy it.”

What is it about change that brings out the mule in people?  These responses and 47 more like them were recorded and published in 1959*. Yet, they still get a great workout in 2013.

Departments – like individuals – form (or inherit) habits, requirements, processes and perspectives and then often hold on to them with undying loyalty.  And this loyalty can continue even when it is acknowledged that the habits are negatively impacting performance and productivity.

Take, for example, legal process outsourcing (LPO). By outsourcing repetitive or specialized legal projects such as records management, patent applications, research or eDiscovery, law departments can better control costs, gain additional expertise and create higher levels of service for their clients.

However, this forward-thinking model often suffers from a reliance on traditional tools that impede the process.

The most common methods of tracking LPO activities and results usually involve manual processes and inadequate tools. Spreadsheets identify who handled an individual case and the overall status. Emails contain matter-specific information and conversations that are privy only to individual accounts holders.  Word documents house important drafts across multiple servers or machines.  When you factor in the number of projects and the individuals handling them worldwide, the result is a process that lacks transparency and accurate reporting, and (frankly) wastes valuable time.

It’s time to reject the mule and embrace the change.

The alternative to this hand-me-down process is a new category of software called Smart Process Apps. This new cloud-based software provides highly dexterous applications that easy accommodate collaboration-heavy processes with an intuitive user interface – and it runs right in a web browser. In fact, these Apps are becoming so prevalent that Forrester estimates the market for them will reach $34 billion by 2015.

With a Smart Process App, law departments can easily collect, automate, store, route and report on LPO projects and activities. It establishes a more systematic, intuitive and transparent approach to managing work portfolios and evolves users beyond the use of familiar (yet inadequate) tools that are used simply because they are handy.  Its configurability and features can accommodate the collaborative and unpredictable process and provide structure, reporting and organization visibility that tools such as Outlook, Excel, Word and SharePoint cannot.

In fact, one law department saved more than $1 million in costly outside counsel spend and now sources the appropriate attorneys to handle their appropriate work – all thanks to the adoption of a Smart Process App.

* Thanks to Bill Taylor for sharing this list in his article “The More Things Change, the More Our Objections to Change Stay the Same.” This is worth a read!

Image courtsey freedigitalphotos.net and Danilo Rizzuti