Author: Onit

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. 

The Misconnection of Enterprise Software

Posted on December 17, 2013 by - Business Process Management

It’s an odd thought that in this world of hyper-communications (hello smart phones, texts, social media), it can still be difficult to meaningfully connect. Sentences can be misread. Calls cut off. Intentions unclear.

Consider your personal life. How often have you run into situations like this? Maybe an autocorrected message from your spouse led you to buy rum instead of milk or Rice Krispies instead of brown rice. Or a terse tweet led to an even terser DM.

Which is why I personally find this video hilarious. An ordinary guy roams the airport cell phone crashing – which is basically sitting next to people and joining their conversation as he hears one side of it. The responses vary, with the “victims” doing everything from shifting uncomfortably to flat-out denial that someone is overhearing his/her conversation.

Now imagine discordance like this but with 20, 30, 100, 500 people on different lines. It’s not a disturbance I’d want to be anywhere around, but strangely, this analogy is reflective of the selection process of enterprise software. There are often multiple decision makers, multiple departments affected, multiple integrations and multiple agendas and expectations involved.

Tony Byrne of Real Story Group hit the nail on the head in his article for Information Week titled “6 More Enduring Truths about Selecting Enterprise Software.” He runs through different aspects of adopting enterprise software that can be evaluation challenges – from determining a vendor’s financial health to the strength of their integrations to deciding if you even have a problem this technology fix.

At Onit, we believe that software should be responsive, adaptive, easy to use and effective. That’s why we offer Smart Process Apps that can deploy in a day, be easily customizable by just about anyone and truly fit with your business. These Apps can handle processes from contract management to employee on-boarding to legal process outsourcing.

I invite you to give us a test drive with this free trial. Then you can see how Smart Process Apps can eliminate the uncertainties of enterprise software selection. 

Shall I Drone On? Amazon Will.

Posted on December 5, 2013 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Doubtless, you’ve heard the story that broke earlier this week. Amazon is proposing to deliver your orders by drones, which has sparked off an immense wave of commentary that includes everything from law enforcement complications to if the octocopters will deliver tacos to an Amazon drone Twitter feed.

The concept of flying machinery darting around the city in order to drop boxes at your doorstep is a complex one to get your head around. After all, there’s nothing quite like that happening now. And there are worries about their level of reliability and public safety as well as privacy concerns.  

But the basic idea of drone delivery is intriguing simply because it takes a complex problem – mass logistics and order fulfillment – and offers a new perspective on it. So much of the fulfillment process is automated. Is it possible to automate the actual delivery itself? How the process be streamlined to significantly cut the time traditionally associated with delivery?

Here at Onit, we took a good long look at processes that bog corporations down – everything from contract review and approval to legal process outsourcing to employee onboarding – and focused on how they could be improved from both a time and cost perspective.  How can we introduce easy collaboration capabilities that are both useful AND used? How can we automate extremely manual tasks such as document routing or review? How can we cut time spent herding cats (because – let’s face it – no matter how important the task sometimes, that can be what you feel like you are doing) in order to complete the project? What can we do to help refocus your time to more strategic contributions?

Well, it starts with a Smart Process App.

Below is a list of resources that speak to the successes our clients have realized with our Smart Process Apps including the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. Feel free to browse through them. If you’d like to bypass that and go immediately to our Smart Process Apps demo, you can request one here.

On-Demand Webinar

White Papers

How a Space Odyssey Becomes a Simple Odyssey

Posted on November 26, 2013 by - Business Process Management

Imagine if a famous movie director asked you to do what you do for a living on camera.  Instead of (for example) ensuring that important contracts are finalized or that an important sales quote is approved, you’d be doing that on an expensive set surrounded by bright lights, a camera crew, a director, other actors and more.

For a majority of us with no professional acting experience, it might take you completely out of your element and bring on a serious case of nerves.

That’s exactly what happened when Stanley Kubrick asked Frank Miller to voice mission control for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The military man and real-life mission controller manifested his nervousness by constantly tapping his foot while reading his lines. That’s not an unreasonable reaction. However, the sound of the shoe’s sole hitting the floor bled through into the sound track like the sound of water dripping from a faucet.

How did Kubrick solve this dilemma? He took a simple course of action and placed a towel under Miller’s feet.

Oftentimes, it is the simplest solution that solves problems. Consider, for example, the tasks you face at work. Getting dozens of contracts approved worth millions of dollars is a time-consuming, arduous process often taxed with multiple reviewers and even more edits.

Sure, there are options.

You could handle the whole process manually with spreadsheets, emails and documents. But that can lead to long hours, multiple versions of important information and documents being capture across multiple, disparate silos.

You could also rely on enterprise software to help shepherd the process to completion. But that means you’re typically working with an expensive solution that is hard to customize and use.

So what’s the simple solution? Smart Process Apps from Onit. You can create and deploy them in hours. They are extremely user friendly and offer a unified repository for information. And they can significantly reduce the time and effort expended by professionals to complete standard processes necessary to a business’ health.

With this in mind, we created our own tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Take a look at it here and let us know what you think.

Work Five Extra Hours a Week and Earn More Each Year

Posted on November 15, 2013 by - Business Process Management

No, this is not one of those spam-filled blog posts that touts mysterious “work from home” measures to earn more. This is actually about a study.

That’s right – a recent study revealed a correlation between an increase in work hours and pay hikes.  As the Harvard Business Review summarizes it:

For young, highly educated workers who usually put in long hours, working 5 extra hours per week is linked to a 1% increase in annual wage growth, according to a study of thousands of U.S. workers by Dora Gicheva of the University of North Carolina.  

Work SmarterIt seems to make sense, doesn’t it? Working more equals making more money. However, what sort of work is performed during that time? Is it composed of valuable projects that address critical business objectives and priorities? Or is it time bogged down with inefficient activities such as paper pushing or tracking someone down for a status update?

At Onit, we believe in working smarter, not harder.

For example, take this Fortune 100 global industrial company. An internal audit revealed process weaknesses around sales activities. Although the design of these processes was effective and compliant, the execution of these processes suffered due to user inconsistencies and a lack of transparency of the overall progress toward goals. People were often over-included or the process could take an inordinate amount of time to complete.  

This probably wouldn’t be so a large inconvenience for a smaller company. But for a company that deals with multi-million dollar sales quotations and deals on a regular basis, it was vital to quickly and consistently produce, review and finalize quotations and contracts in order to increase profits. 

The company introduced a mass amount of efficiency into its sales quotes and approval activities by introducing Smart Process Apps from Onit. It eliminated the need for manual tools that stored information across multiple databases of information – think documents, spreadsheets and emails. Its flexible workflow automated the review and approval process as well as provided a valuable platform for time-saving collaboration.

The adoption of Smart Process Apps from Onit greatly increased the transparency and speed of the quotation review process. It has now been deployed to the company’s worldwide sales force and has significantly accelerated the quotation review process.  To date, quotations worth billions of dollars have passed through the app for review at a far quicker pace than email review.

With this in mind, perhaps future studies will record how much more money individuals can make with working smarter, not harder.

 

 

Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Here’s One Way to Reduce Legal Spend by 30 Percent

Posted on November 8, 2013 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

According to a recent survey of 71 law departments, legal spend is expected to increase, the use of alternative fee arrangements will continue to grow and ethics and compliance is now rated as the highest priority in 2013.

The crux of the survey examines how law departments combine numerous processes, practices and technologies in order to create a smarter working environment (along with smarter results.) Positioned by Huron Legal as “a comprehensive management program,” successful corporate law departments leverage a mixture of the following items to nurture more efficient (and cost-saving) operations:

  • Defined panels and/or pre-approved lists for sourcing
  • Regular budget reviews
  • Matter-level budgets
  • Alternative fee arrangements
  • Matter management and e-billing technology

According to the survey results, law departments that used this mix realized 30 percent lower total legal spend as a percent of company revenue.

The surveyed law departments hailed from companies with revenues from $5 million to $89 billion. Operations on that size are consistently challenged with complex processes that need proper technological support. Even a “simple” process such as finalizing a contract can turn into a nightmare when you factor in reviewers from multiple organizations or departments, numerous versions of the contract and several review cycles – all which normally relies on tools such as Outlook or Excel to track it.

The right technology, such as a flexible, scalable, light-weight Smart Process App, can more easily support a law department’s path to more efficient and budget-compliant operations than enterprise-level software implementations.