Intelligent SME.tech Issue 07 | Page 46

// END-USER INSIGHT //

AS A FIRM WE RECOGNISED
THAT TECHNOLOGY
WAS REALLY GOING TO BE A DIFFERENTIATOR
AND COULD ENABLE US TO OFFER MORE OPTIONS TO
CLIENTS . we would have planned for and that was definitely the same for Verlata – their working day ended up starting at 9am their time and finishing somewhere around 6am or 5am .
Communication is key and if you have got people who are good at communicating and a good plan , it works .
What are the key benefits you ’ ve experienced as a result of this implementation ?
I think the immediate benefit is just how easy it is for people to go about and do their job , which was harder under the earlier system . Just having simple things like a folder in Outlook that synchronises to a folder in your document management system is kind of revolutionary to some people and in the first week we had 26,000 new documents added . It ’ s been a system , crucially , that people were able to get to grips with quickly , that ’ s intuitive and the interface really guides you around .
As we look longer-term , we ’ ve now got a platform that is allowing us to integrate with other systems . As we come to review the practice management system , for example , we need something that ’ s going to work hand in glove with this document management system . We ’ re now in a position where we ’ ve got a document management system that ’ s leading edge and which we know will be an advantage for us , as opposed to a hindrance .
We ’ re in a position where we can look after our clients ’ data securely , we ’ ve got good , secure access to it and we can make it available to them very easily .
How far would you say the solution has enabled your organisation to scale ?
We went live across the whole firm on October 26 , 2020 but we had an unexpected pilot , where we had a group join us from Orrick in April , 2020 . We were in lockdown and this group had been using NetDocuments in Orrick .
The last thing I wanted to do was to take them off NetDocuments and put them back 20 years into a system that wasn ’ t really going to work for them . So , we ended up taking them from the Orrick instance of NetDocuments and putting them into the Forsters instance of NetDocuments , and they kind of existed in their own ecosystem for a few months .
The reason we weren ’ t expecting a pilot group is because when we did the analysis , assisted by Verlata , we really came to understand that the practice areas at Forsters are so integrated , that to rip one of them out and put them into a separate document management system as a pilot would really hamper the interaction between those teams that were already established . But for the new team who had joined , that wasn ’ t a problem , and they were self-contained for a short while .
That meant that we could grow from 20 people to 450 people . And we ’ ve got a solution now that can scale as big as we want .
What advice would you offer other businesses in your industry who might be looking to use cloud tools for business benefits ?
One thing that is really important about cloud tools , in my opinion , is how do you get your data out ? It was crucial for us to make sure that we could get data out , as well as in .
And then security is another key consideration . The way that documents are stored in NetDocuments is incredibly secure – each document splits many sections which are hidden away and encrypted .
But you can still just log on with a username and password if you let people do that .
So , make sure the cloud service that you ’ re going to consume fits into the standards that you have for the security in your environment . Of course , we secure NetDocuments and our other systems with multi-factor authentication , certificate authentication and things like that .
While the cloud provider is highly likely to be more secure than the environment that you ’ ve already got , you need to make sure that your access to it is just as secure .
And then the whole reason for going to cloud is flexibility , not just in terms of your technology but also in scalability , so make sure you can scale up quickly and scale down as you want to . �
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Intelligent SME . tech