Category: Business Process Management

Ten Things You Need to Know About Enterprise Apps and How They Relate to Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

Posted on April 2, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

1. The landscape for in-house legal departments has fundamentally changed. General Counsel (GCs) must think outside of his/her department when it comes to managing the entire enterprise’s legal affairs. This shift has meant that visibility into risk and compliance issues handled across the company, and metrics around spending and productivity are essential to a GCs success. Enterprise Legal Management is a term that has evolved to define this greater need for aggregated information across disparate departments in order to make better company decisions. 

2.  Enterprise Legal Management is a class of technology that helps GCs navigate this new landscape. The aim of ELM technology is to organize and inform through data. This class of technology makes it easier for GCs to gain visibility into potential legal risk across the wider organization, moving away from the siloed approach of yesterday. This enables a more proactive approach to managing the enterprise’s legal affairs and mitigating risk wherever it exists. 

3.  Enterprise Apps are the nimble cousin of your existing Enterprise Legal Management system. While larger ELM systems can give you easier access to global data, these systems don’t necessarily address the collaboration required to harness and use that data to benefit the organization. Built from the ground-up, Enterprise Apps are simple-to-configure, and easy-to-deploy solutions that aim to address complex and everyday processes that require a high degree of collaboration between knowledge workers. 

4. Enterprise Apps can integrate with existing ELM systems. Although these Apps can replace larger systems of record, they are more often than not, a way to bridge the gap that exists in those larger systems. Do you have a gap in functionality in an existing enterprise system that requires collaborative workflow? An Enterprise App can be used to bridge that gap at a fraction of the cost, rather than having to reconfigure your existing system. 

5. Companies of any size can benefit from Enterprise Apps. In-house legal departments dealing with organizations of any size, from small businesses to multi-billion dollar global corporations, can benefit from Enterprise Apps.

6.  Enterprise Apps are a quick way to drive meaningful operational improvements. Unlike the development and implementation process for a large enterprise legal management system, which can take several months or years, the average time it takes our clients to implement an Onit App is 19 days. While the most complex implementations can take up to 90 days, this still beats the average for ELM systems by months. 

7.  Enterprise Apps can help your legal department transform the way it works. In one example, Onit partnered with a large Fortune 500 client to deploy an NDA App. The company’s in-house legal department dealt with over 10,000 NDAs annually, with the average time from start to finish taking over 16 days. Onit developed a prototype App to handle global submission, negotiation and electronic signature of NDAs. The result? The company processed over 1000 NDAs in the first month of deployment, with the completion time reduced to just 24 hours and 90% of the NDAs being processed without lawyer involvement. 

8.  Enterprise Apps are secure.  Like your larger Enterprise Legal Management system, your Enterprise App data is hosted in secure commercial data centers. In most cases, your data is more secure than if you hosted it in your environment. 

9.  Enterprise Apps require little or no IT involvement. In many cases, customers can configure, deploy, and support enterprise Apps with no corporate IT involvement. App developers, such as Onit, achieve a “low code” or no code development structure, which also speeds up the time to value for our clients.

10.  There is an Enterprise App for every need/process/workflow. Apps for very standard processes like contract review and approval, NDAs, alternative fee arrangements, and matter or legal spend management are available.. Alternatively, Apps can be created from scratch to meet a particular process or set of circumstances unique to your business.

When you are exploring enterprise legal management systems, it helps to have a technology partner who can walk you through the process of creating an effective solution that works for your department. Onit can help you determine your best course of action, and we’ll be there every step of the development process.

With a small investment of your time – typically 60 to 90 minutes – to help us understand your business process, we can configure an App. Contact us today!

A Simple Process Improvement Plan for Legal Departments

Posted on March 20, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

The business climate around us has changed, and in many cases, not for the better, with undue value placed on eking out more productivity (not the good kind), while spending less. For legal departments, this means a triple whammy of smaller budgets, fewer resources, and increasing workloads being brought back in-house. Businesses that best adapt to their changing climate will not only survive, but thrive. In the words of Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” One way to ensure your business continues to thrive is by engaging in strategic process improvement.

In a recent article by George Dunn and Wendy Hufford, both experts in process improvement, the authors lay out a simple 3-step process improvement plan for legal departments. Process improvement can be an overwhelming project with many teams stalling just out of the gate because of the truly daunting nature of change. The article does a great job of distilling change down to a few exercises so that you can start putting pen to paper when it comes to a much-needed change.

According to the authors, step one is to get acquainted with the various process methodologies out there. Everyone may be talking about process, but there are many different ways to approach it. The five methodologies noted by the authors are Continuous Process Improvement, Business Process Management, Re-engineering, LEAN, and Six Sigma. Sometimes, it takes a combination of methods to find the right fit for your organization. At Onit, our solutions employ a combination of business process management (BPM), which focuses on “innovation and flexibility through combining process and technology changes,” and the continuous process improvement methodology, which focuses on making small changes over time rather than one big overall change.

Next, you should identify the areas within your department that could use improvement. Anyone who’s worked on an in-house legal team will be familiar with the common departmental vulnerabilities outlined by the article. Onit Smart Process Apps aim to create efficiency in common tasks that typically cause a lot of backlog and frustration. Processes such as contract management and administration, records retention and storage, and email communication are ripe with unnecessary frustration due to lack of visibility, the tracking down of documents, approval delays, and exposure to risk. So, how can you tell if a process is ripe for change? Look out for these five signs.

At Onit, we offer Smart Process Apps to tame common processes such as contract review and approval, NDAs or alternative fee arrangements. Need a custom solution? Our nimble App Builder platform allows you to create a customized solution that can adapt to grow with your business. Onit’s overarching philosophy across all of our technology solutions is to provide a new level of visibility and transparency into processes to help knowledge workers involved in the process be more productive, happier and more successful.

The third and last step is to create a process improvement plan for your department. The article lays out some specific items to think about, consider, and finalize, in order to put that plan into place. One important item is to start creating a culture of change within your organization. One way to do this is to build a coalition of like-minded individuals united around one inefficient process area. Check out our blog post: “3 Steps to Creating a Solid Foundation for Your Change Initiative.”

Another big part of creating a plan is to prioritize potential process improvement initiatives and to audit current processes to find soft spots and opportunities. Need help conducting a process audit? We’ve put together four exercises that will help you deconstruct your process in order to figure out your baseline and lay out a plan for improvement. Finally, an important step as you engage in any process improvement initiative is to enlist the help of a third-party partner who can help you every step of the way.

Have some process improvement ideas for your legal department, but not sure where to start? Onit can help! Contact us or schedule a demo to learn more about our Smart Process Apps and App Builder platform.

Need more inspiration to start a change initiative? The Darwin quote above comes from an excellent list of quotes about change from Inc.com.

 

Four Exercises to Help You Set Change Goals for Your Organization in 2015

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Are there changes you’d like to drive in your organization this year? Now is the perfect time to sit down and draw up a basic framework for that initiative. We’ve put together a list of questions to help you perform a basic process audit of your organizational processes. Once you go through a process audit, you’ll be able to set goals for your organization for 2015.

Before you can determine which processes your initiative will tackle, you need to understand how those processes affect the customers within and throughout your organization. Any change that improves efficiency in delivering product or services to customers will provide a return on your investment in making the change.

Exercise #1 – Which processes drive your business?

Choose three processes or workflows that drive how your organization delivers on its objectives. For our example, we’ll be looking at sales contract administration for Corporation X.

Exercise #2 – Are these processes delivering on their objectives?

To help you choose a few processes to isolate, here are some high-level questions to answer:

  • How do these workflows help or hinder the overall productivity of your team or organization?
  • Is there an inefficient, but critically important part of the process in which team members are repeatedly bogged down?
  • Do you deliver any product/service to internal or external customers without a formal process? (major red flag)
  • Are these processes hard to manage because a gap exists around them in your existing software?

Exercise #3 – What are the considerations for each process?

Now it’s time to conduct a basic process audit for each of the three you’ve identified through the preliminary questions.

Process/Workflow Name

Example: Sales Contract Administration

What is the deliverable?

Example: an executed contract for client XYZ…

Who is (are) the client(s)?

Examples: CTO at client XYZ and VP of Sales and Accountant at X Corp

What are the steps involved in completing the process?

Ex. 1. – Client XYZ is interested in purchasing goods or services, and the sales executive requests a contract to solidify the deal.
2 – Contract is drawn up at X Corp and sent to XYZ to sign.
3 – Contract is reviewed at XYZ.
4 – Edits or signed contract sent back to X Corp
5 – X Corp reviews edits and/or signs contract (steps 4 & 5 may happen more than once)
6 – Contracted executed by XYZ and X Corp and delivered to both parties
7 – Final document stored for reference
8 – Sale of widgets, or services to be rendered between X Corp and XYZ can begin.
9 – Contract must be managed for compliance, deadlines, expirations, etc.

Which roles are involved in delivering this product?

Examples: Sales at X Corp; VP Sales at X Corp; Legal team at X Corp; Admin at X Corp; Requesting Department at XYZ; CTO at XYZ; Legal team at XYZ; Admin at X Corp

How do you measure success?

Examples: number and velocity of executed contracts has a direct impact on sales revenue; client XYZ and X Corp receive a clear contract document

How successful is the current workflow?

Examples:

  • 5 clients went to competitor because they needed an executed contract in a much quicker timeframe;
  • Admins at X Corp have to do a lot of back and forth with version tracking and mistakes are often made; due to mistakes made in version tracking, several client relationships are strained;
  • The process is much more expensive from a time perspective than it needs to be;
  • Due to the added time spent by personnel, the process is more expensive than it needs to be;
  • Executed contracts cannot be located quickly and produced on the fly

Exercise #4 – How can the process be improved to deliver on objectives more successfully?

By examining each step of the process under a microscope, you can more easily see issues and identify opportunities for improvement.

Look at your process audit and determine what changes would improve it.

Examples of improvements could be:

  • Team members collaborating in real-time will reduce the potential for mistakes that happen when tracking versions of a contract in a static environment;
  • A quicker process from start to end will improve efficiency overall and lead to quicker delivery of product;
  • Transparency of process gives team members visibility into where the process is currently

In evaluating the outcome of your potential changes, make sure the answer to the following questions will be a resounding YES.

  • Will the process be quicker, therefore allowing for more efficiency?
  • Will the accuracy of the process be improved by the change?
  • Will the optimization of the process increase productivity?

Now that you’ve gone through the exercises, we hope that you are inspired to take on advocating meaningful change in your organization in 2015. Check out these additional resources on our blog:

3 Steps to Creating a Solid Foundation for Your Change Initiative

5 Telltale Signs a Process is Ripe For Change

How to Map and Organizational Process in 5 Steps

Ready to get started on your First Enterprise App? Download our whitepaper Your First Enterprise App: 6 Steps to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

Whistleblowing is Evolving; is Your Organization Prepared?

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

From the continued ripple effect resulting from Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA surveillance programs, to increased reporting stemming from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whistleblowing is a hot topic. A recent article in Corporate Counsel, Lawyers on All Sides See Whistleblowing Evolving Fast, explains the changing whistleblowing landscape. For one, the sheer number of whistleblowers has exploded. Take Dodd-Frank for example; according to a SEC report, in 2011 there were 334 tips compared with 3,620 in 2014. Secondly, the awards are getting bigger, with one recent payout amounting to an impressive $30 million. With statistics like these, companies have to be prepared.

Is your organization prepared?

Do you currently have an internal or external reporting policy or program? Even well-intentioned companies with reporting systems in place, haven’t quite found the right balance between encouraging reporting, protecting employees who come forward and protecting the company interests over time. A recent article in the Journal of Accountancy, Are Organizations Hindering Employee Whistleblowing?, discusses this phenomenon:

“Companies that maximize their employees’ willingness to report fraud in-house position themselves to learn about problems before they become bigger issues – and before employees feel the need to report them outside the organization.”

The article also references a 2009 study published in Auditing: Practice & Theory, that found that employees are more hesitant to report possible fraud to outsiders as opposed to using internal company reporting programs. In addition, employees are much more willing to report if they can do so anonymously.

Onit can help.

The Onit Whistleblower App enables you to customize an internal reporting & case management system for your organization’s needs. Using simple reporting forms, employees can anonymously report issues into a single repository, giving management visibility into potential problems that might otherwise go unnoticed or unreported. The larger benefit to the company, of course, is that by getting early insight into exposed risk, management can start internal investigations and address the issue before it becomes a much larger problem. As with other Onit solutions, the Whistleblower App allows for a collaborative workspace, enhanced visibility into cases, and supports compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  Affordable, intuitive and easy to use, Onit’s Whistleblower App can help you effectively manage your organization’s risk and exposure in a way that encourages employee reporting in a protected environment.

Click here to learn more about our Whistleblower App. Contact us to find out how Onit Apps can help streamline any number of your business processes.

2015 Business Resolution: Change

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Resolution: Change
Where is your organization headed in 2015?

It’s that time of year again, where we take stock of what happened over the past year, both the good and the bad, and declare our hopes for 2015. What are the things you’d like your business to accomplish next year? What changes or improvements are necessary to bring this about? Taking stock of where your business is today, how can you evolve to meet the demands of digital business next year and beyond?

First, we think it’s helpful to look at the trajectory of technology and digital business. It serves as a reminder that the world is changing around us, whether we like it or not. Looking at these trends also reminds us that we are in this boat together, so let’s learn from each other and grow together. Working with our clients over the past few years, we’ve observed that technology as a business tool has fundamentally changed, so has the role of IT. The move towards customer-driven solutions, and away from large-scale systems of record has had far-reaching consequences. The way our customers research vendors and buy products now is accomplished largely outside of a direct human-human sales context.

Gartner’s recent predictions for 2015 and beyond tell a similar story. In their list of Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015, analytics will play a huge role in critical app functionality. However, it’s not enough to have access to big data, instead “we’ll need big questions and big answers,” in order to put those analytics to work. Also on the list are Cloud/Client Architecture (centrally coordinated apps that can be delivered to any device) and Software-Defined Infrastructure and Apps. Of the latter, Gartner says, “computing will have to move away from static models to deal with the changing demands of digital business.” With regards to who is engaging the new technology, Gartner found that almost 38% of technology spending is happening outside of IT, signaling “a shift of demand and control away from IT and towards business units closer to the customer.” (Gil Press, Forbes). This is something we see at Onit all the time, given that most of our buyers are from legal or sales departments.

For the first time, Gartner predicts that technology through connected devices will improve our overall health. Technology is better responding to the needs of consumers and is providing incredibly useful tools to manage our health and to reduce the amount of mundane processes we go through to get information or to accomplish our objective. As mobile technology will impact our individual health and efficiency, Onit believes that nimble app-centric solutions will impact our businesses’ health for the better. By removing or improving the tactical processes that impede or delay progress, these apps can drive department efficiency and reduce risk, impacting both employee’s job satisfaction and the bottom line.

Evolution is a necessity for business survival, but you needn’t scrap your existing systems and start over. We have found that meaningful change can come from some of the smallest, projects or processes. Our customers have developed apps for everything from contract administration to whistleblowing, to vendor management and sales enablement and have seen tremendous success.

So, what are your improvement goals for 2015? Onit can help. Contact our team, and check out our new whitepaper, Your First Enterprise App: 6 Steps to Successfully Implement Change in Your Organization.

Sources:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2014/10/09/gartner-predicts-top-trends-for-technology-it-organizations-and-consumers-for-2015-and-beyond/

http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fgjd45eldm/4-advanced-pervasive-invisible-analytics-2/

Your Change Initiative: Four Strategies for Preparing for and Overcoming Resistance

Posted on December 17, 2014 by - Business Process Management

Advocating change in any organization is a daunting process. A major hurdle for every change initiative is overcoming resistance. Your idea could be sound backed up by solid facts and figures, but you are still likely to encounter resistance. No matter how beneficial your change is, you’ll have to get around the “corporate immune system”. As can the immune system in our bodies, the corporate immune system can squelch things that are outside the “normal” way of doing things.

Once you have established a solid foundation for your change initiative, it is important to develop a set of strategies and tactics for overcoming the inevitable headwinds that precede meaningful improvement.

75% of organizational change programs fail because leadership didn’t create the necessary groundswell of support among employees.
(pwc.com: How to Build and Agile Foundation for Change)

Here are four strategies for preparing for and overcoming resistance:

Balance your coalition with people from all angles of the problem

The common element that will bring your coalition together is the problem that needs changing. If you’ve seen a need for process change, there is no doubt that this need for change has firmly rooted itself inside and across cross-functional teams. Form your coalition from all angles of the organization, from different departmental perspectives. For example, there may be strategic concerns in addition to tactical when dealing with an inefficient process. Colleagues working behind the scenes will view the problem differently than the sales team. If you have identified how the problem affects people at all levels of the organization, and have built your coalition to reflect those varied perspectives, you are more likely to get buy-in. The added benefit of a diverse coalition is that when it comes time to sell the initiative to the larger organization, you will have already addressed a variety of perspectives, including those of your resisters.

Present an emotionally compelling case for change

Change can be difficult for people. Although your case for change has a solid foundation of facts and data, don’t discount the human, emotional component. The inefficient process you want to change may cost your company money, but it also causes undue frustration and wasted time on the part of the people involved in the process. Present not only facts and figures, but convey how the improved workflow will help them be happier and more successful in their jobs.

Analyze organizational factors that can help or hinder your change initiative.

In “Choosing Strategies for Change,” from the Harvard Business Review, John Kotter and Leonard Schlesinger recommend asking the following questions when preparing for potential resistance:

  • How urgently does your organization need this change?
  • How powerful is your coalition in relation to resisters?

The strategy for your organization-wide persuasion tour will revolve around these two questions. If the change you are advocating for is extremely urgent and your coalition is more powerful than your potential resisters, it is full steam ahead. When the polar opposite is true, you’ll need to proceed more delicately. If the change is urgent, but your coalition is less powerful than the resistance, it might be helpful to bolster your coalition with a member of the leadership team. By analyzing and anticipating these factors, you can better prepare your coalition for the necessary selling-in process. You can also set more realistic expectations when it comes to change deployment.

Put tools in place to mitigate ongoing resistance

Just because you’ve sold your idea for change, and the larger organization is on board, your job as change-agent is not done. Kotter and Schlesinger recommend implementing tools to help manage ongoing resistance. Consider an infrastructure that will enable education, skills training, support and the offering of incentives. No matter how good a job your coalition did at convincing the company to embrace the change, success of the initiative hinges on a support infrastructure. Getting to the stage of being able to deploy the process change is the first step, but having people use the improved process in their daily jobs is the key to long-term success.

Onit can help you be an agent for change. Now that you have strategies for overcoming resistance learn more about embarking on your first change initiative. Download our whitepaper, Your First Enterprise App: 6 Ways to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

Five Telltale Signs a Process is Ripe for Change

Posted on December 8, 2014 by - Business Process Management

The key to your first successful change initiative is picking the right process to target for improvement. Although you probably witness an abundance of everyday inefficiencies in your job, you want to start by selecting a process that will allow you to celebrate a quick win. Choosing a process that is central to driving your business is important, but it does not have to be a large, unwieldy process. Don’t overlook small business processes as they can have a big impact. Look for repeatable projects. When there’s repetition present, there’s always an opportunity to create or improve a formal process around it!

To help you choose the right project for your initiative, here are five telltale signs that a process is ripe for change.

#1 – A Project Lacks Visibility & Transparency

Do you find yourself or your team spending inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out the status of the project? Do you have a maze of steps and gatekeepers to go through to gain valuable insight such as the budget or who’s responsible for what? You are not alone. It can be difficult to attain critical information related to contracts and near impossible to run reports on those contracts. Other examples of a lack of visibility or transparency in a project might involve a team member having to email the whole group to find out where a contract is in its lifecycle, or the budget runs over because the latest budget document wasn’t updated correctly.

#2 – Simple Projects Take Too Long

Do standard contracts, such as NDAs, take days rather than hours or minutes to complete? When simple contract workflows get mired in administrative pileups, this can cause larger project delays or prevent projects from getting off the ground in the first place. In many organizations, it takes more than two days to execute a standard NDA. Wrangling the various interested parties can be a struggle, with many teams involving 5 or more people in the administration of a typical contract.

#3 – Project Inefficiencies Cause Missed Deadlines or Opportunities

Another key trait of an ineffective process is that teams miss deadlines, or can’t capitalize on quick-turnaround opportunities. It could be simply not receiving client feedback in a timely manner in order to respond and turn an adverse situation into a sales opportunity. Alternatively, perhaps your marketing team is unable to capitalize on a key promotion opportunity because it cannot wrangle outside vendors in time. It could mean that the lack of a defined set of steps necessitates that your sales team has to “go with their gut,” leaving valuable revenue on the table. Either through a lack of visible information or intelligence or delays caused by inefficiencies, teams that cannot execute deliverables to their full potential are in need of business process improvements.

#4 – Critical Project Paperwork Goes MIA

Contract administration is a crucial function, but the storage and retrieval piece is often neglected. It does not become a problem, until the unthinkable happens – an NDA cannot be located and produced to diffuse a precarious situation. This leaves your company vulnerable. For many companies, contracts are left to languish on a shared drive buried in a labyrinth folder system. At the opposite end of this spectrum, companies might have more than one contract repository (some with over 10+!) making it very challenging to find an executed contract on demand. With these situations, it is a wonder that anyone can find an executed contract when they need it!

#5 – Spreadsheets are Still Your Go-To Project Tracking Method

If your tracking system is a series of spreadsheets with various users contributing or accessing pertinent information, your project is ripe for an overhaul. No matter how sophisticated the pivot table, or how interactive your Google doc seems, spreadsheets do not give you a real-time, all-encompassing view of the project and its status. Because spreadsheets are dependent on the users adding information, your project tracking is only as organized and accurate as your team members. Teams consist of humans, and humans make mistakes. Why leave that up to chance when there is a better way to track projects and deliverables?

Inspired to improve a process that suffers from one or more of these qualities? Onit can help you be a change agent for your organization. Download our whitepaper, Your First Enterprise App: 6 Ways to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

How to Map An Organizational Process in 5 Steps

Posted on December 2, 2014 by - Business Process Management

In order to kick off an organizational change initiative, you need to understand how things are being done today. After all, how can you draw out directions to where you are going if you do not know where you are now? For most people, the idea of process mapping can be overwhelming. To help you get started, we’ve listed out the five basic steps to take when mapping an existing process and laying the foundation for a new, more efficient process map.

#1 – Determine How Your Organization Delivers on Objectives

The first step to recommending an organizational change is to understand how your company gets from point A to point Z. What projects or activities are driving the most business? What are the most important workflows? Next, ask yourself, which of these activities (for internal or external customers) are being created without a formal process? For steps 2 through 5, pick a project to evaluate and dissect.

“If it’s a repeatable project, it can be a process.”

#2 – Consider Your Inputs & Outputs

So, what are inputs and outputs? For any project or process, something is submitted to kick off the process (input), those inputs are transformed, approved, augmented or summarized, and then the result is delivered (output).

#3 – Define Your Roles

We are not talking specifically about Joe in accounting or Mary in legal, but rather abstract versions of the roles you have in each stage of your process. The roles involved in an accounts payable process, for example, might be: vendor, requester, department head, accounting.

#4 – Assign Your Activities and Dependencies

You know your inputs and outputs, and you’ve defined your roles, now it is time to lay out specific activities for your process. Think also about which roles will own those activities, and what needs to happen before the process can progress to the next stage. Taking the accounting example above:

  • Activity = verify invoice information and add an internal code. Role = Requester
  • Activity = approve invoice. Role = Department Head
  • Activity = pay invoice. Role = Accounting

Given that accounting cannot pay an invoice unless it is both approved by the department head and coded properly, the last activity is dependent upon the first two being completed. By clearly defining your activities and dependencies, accounting would know not to waste their time looking at the invoice before it is duly processed.

#5 – Build a Process Map

With steps #2, 3 and 4 under your belt, you are ready to create a process map. Check out an example of what this might look like when you finish.

Now that you’ve delved deeply into one of your organizational processes, now it is time to improve that process. From the exercise above, you already have a clear roadmap.

Ready to get started? Onit can help. Onit Smart Process Apps can help you maximize the efficiency you get out of your business processes by filling in the gaps of your existing enterprise software infrastructure. Download our whitepaper: Your First Enterprise App: 6 Ways to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company to learn more.

3 Steps to Creating a Solid Foundation for Your Change Initiative

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - Business Process Management, Digital Transformation

The need for change is ubiquitous in today’s business environment. Moreover, true leadership is recognized and celebrated when people develop a great idea for change and successfully implement that change in an organization.

You already have many ideas for how to change things for the better. You see inefficiencies every day in your job. Once you have that great idea for change, now what? The key to successful change management is making sure you lay a sturdy foundation for the change process you are advocating.

Here are three foundational steps you should take as you begin your change initiative.

1. Establish a Sense of Urgency

Establishing a sense of urgency is extremely important. By making your issue a daily topic of conversation, you will find people who agree on the need for change as much as you do.

2. Form a Change Coalition

Putting together a coalition simply means forming an advocacy group that will help you communicate and lobby for your vision. The people that you find by discussing the urgent need for change will become early members of your coalition. The members of your coalition will have one thing in common: the problem that needs changing. Ideally, populate your coalition with people from cross-functional teams as this will help you get buy-in from all levels of the organization.

3. Communicate the Ugly Reality (and Your Vision for a Brighter Future)

Once you have your coalition by your side, it is time to communicate your vision across the organization. An important part of this task is being prepared to diffuse various types of resistance you will encounter. There are myriad reasons why change initiatives meet resistance, but by recognizing that all change requires persuasion, you can better prepare your argument. The key to getting people in your organization on board is making the problem compelling and relatable, presenting data that supports your vision and appealing to their reptilian brain that your vision is the only way forward.

By devoting some time and focus to creating a good foundation for your change initiative, you set yourself up for a greater chance of success. Onit can help you be an agent for change.

To learn more about initiating your first change initiative, download our whitepaper, Your First Enterprise App: 6 Ways to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

Closing the Loop in the NDA Lifecycle

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

For many organizations, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) lifecycle is an often-overlooked Achilles heel. These critical documents protect intellectual property, but too often they are pulled together haphazardly, not countersigned, and left to languish in an email inbox. Work commences, and both parties forget about the NDA until a problem arises.

However, products and services are becoming more complex, meaning that more businesses have their own “secret sauce” that needs diligent protection. Combine this with an evolving workforce trending towards third-party contractors, NDAs are an essential first step in establishing a business relationship. If that first step takes too long, or isn’t handled properly, it can mean a missed opportunity or worse, a dispute where you lack the legal leg to stand on.

With the increased need for tools that help track NDAs, as well as standardizing mechanisms that help to facilitate a timely preparation, organizations are left looking for solutions. Some companies have adopted rudimentary word processing templates; others rely on spreadsheets for tracking sent NDAs and monitoring renewals. Progressive organizations are storing the NDAs in document management systems and calendaring renewal dates. At the end of the day, someone still has to ride herd on NDA formats and statuses. This becomes especially true when non-standard or special provisions need to go into NDAs dealing with the most secret of secret sauces.

How To Close the NDA Lifecycle Loop

There is a solution to this gaping compliance, however. Fortune 500 companies have discovered the solution to their NDA woes in a customizable, quick-to-implement and easy-to-use App. Onit’s NDA App can hit the ground running in a matter of days, not weeks, and integrate with document repositories for easy access to documents that need attention. Getting started with an NDA is simple: the NDA App allows users to cement business relationships quickly using standard NDAs, and work can start. And with the NDA App, organizations can track outstanding NDAs and know when their agreements are up for renewal.

When NDAs become a simple, repeatable process, leveraging the NDA App to add that level of consistency and visibility, organizations can stay on top of their legal obligations and protect their secret sauce. There will be exceptions, of course, when a relationship calls for a more complex NDA. However, instead of the legal team reviewing every single NDA generated, the legal team can focus on the ones that are the exceptions, not the rule. Meanwhile, the user-generated NDAs comply with company policy and are fully audited.

Onit’s NDA App effectively closes the loop on the NDA lifecycle: notifying the participants and closing the request once an NDA is fully executed.  Moreover, as the icing on the cake, Onit’s NDA App also includes support for the two most popular e-signature vendors, EchoSign and DocuSign. The NDA App helps you manage the NDA lifecycle from creation to execution, jump-starting what will be a productive working relationship.

To learn more about how an app can simplify the NDA lifecycle, download the whitepaper: Coming Full Circle: Using Technology to Close NDA Lifecycle Gaps.

To close the loop on your NDA lifecycle, Onit can help! Contact us today.