The legal sector is evolving like never before. The need to maximise revenue per professional is now the number one aim for most law firms, as the sector adapts to an ever-changing economic and regulatory landscape, writes Salim Hashamy, UK Account Manager, Casewise.

The rationalisation of the sector has brought with it a wave of mergers and acquisitions as law firms move to consolidate their existing customer base, and expand their offering to new customers. This process brings with it the need to acquiesce and combine two – often different – sets of working cultures and processes in the most transparent way possible.

On top of this, new challenges are beginning to make themselves known in the areas of compliance and risk. From 1 January this year, and on the back of the Legal Services Act, law firms had to modernise and, like the rest of industry, initiate a risk strategy into their businesses by appointing compliance officers.

New solutions for a new era

This brave new world of Outcome Focused Regulation (OFR) will see the detailed rulebook governing solicitors’ practices replaced with principles and outcomes to protect consumers of legal services. There is now greater flexibility for firms in how they achieve the required standards, but with that comes an obligation to appoint a compliance officer for legal practice (COLP) and compliance officer of finance and administration (COFA).There are big decisions to be made around better reporting, referral fees, international trade, and the need to think on a truly global scale. After the upheaval in the legal sector with the jostling for position by mid-tier firms through mergers and acquisitions, and recent high-profile struggles by the likes of Cobbetts, the new OFR rules present a weighty challenge.

The drive for transparency

COLPs clearly have big decisions to make in the coming months and years. But to make the best decisions for their businesses, they have to have access to the right information – and have greater awareness where processes are failing. COLPs and COFAs will need to delve deeper into these processes, and bring together all the data and outcomes within a business to make them more transparent.

Identifying risk within any business isn’t a manual process. The implementation of smart software can act as an early-warning system that will identify systems, data and transactions that are falling outside of your risk boundaries. The processes within a legal business need to be brought to the surface, and the checks on them made easier and more transparent. It’s in this way that risk will become so much simpler to manage.

EBA: building an advantage

How can the legal sector use management techniques and technology to build and sustain a competitive advantage? Winning legal organisations are turning to the discipline of Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA) to help take their business to the next level.

Until recently, Enterprise ArchitectureEBA tended to take a bottom-up approach – led by technical constraints and isolated operational IT solutions. Organisations were working for their IT system, not the other way around. As a result, achieving business goals was way down on the agenda and Enterprise Architecture initiatives failed to deliver anything meaningful.

Learning from this, leading software company Casewise takes a more business focused top-down approach. Creating a robust Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA)-based solution that ensures that EBA initiatives work to solve problems the organisation is facing, contributing to the business strategy and offering a secure platform for the future.

EBA allows a business to adapt quicker, improve faster and work smarter. With IT extending to – and having a huge influence over – all areas of operations, and with the COLPs and COFAs now tasked with ensuring risk compliance through the entire law firm, this is more important than ever. EBA can mean an IT structure that reduces costs, maximises efficiency and contributes towards exorcising risk.

The big issue for the COLPs and COFAs is using EBA to proactively alert them to any risk issues, and how they make this the norm for the workforce. EBA can help with that as it handles the information derived from a business’s processes and understands the relationships between different items of information. In this way, EBA is proactively seeking out conflict which could lead to a breach of compliance.

What EBA can do for the COLPs and COFAs:

- Defines the link between the enterprise business strategy and the results predicted from supporting strategic initiatives.
- Provides a single source and comprehensive repository of knowledge from which compliance initiatives will evolve and link.
- Transforms the information into a fully integrated enterprise model of the business throughout the business.
- Engineers solutions that directly link to the compliance strategy.
- Ensures that risk and compliance projects are not ad hoc, but properly designed and tested, ensuring continuity for the future.
- Give a holistic view of the business and allow them to transform performance through accelerated growth, reduced risk and newfound efficiencies.

Changing cultures

EBA also has knock-on benefits. Better reporting will mean the Solicitors Regulatory Authority are likely to view the business favourably, and let it get on with the day-to-day efforts of increasing fee income. Furthermore, with EBA making the business more transparent, the workforce will be encouraged to take the lead in optimising their processes and decision-making.

And perhaps just as importantly, the more information you have transparently available throughout the law practice, the better decisions you can make. EBA is all about optimising both physical and mental processes; the more confidence the workforce has in them, the more confidence a business’s clients will have in the workforce, and the quicker a law firm can continue to grow, and escape the fate of those which didn’t wise up in time.

Today, maximising profit is harder than ever for banks. The large retail banks have been forced to sell off branches and their investment arms are under increasing scrutiny, writes Tim FitzGerald, Finance & Banking Sales Manager, Casewise.

The need to change – be it adapting to newly-imposed regulatory frameworks, to differentiating yourself from the competition and growing organically while also encouraging customers to switch to you requires agility never before experienced in the financial sector. Organisations that can change quickest will win.

All this requires financial institutions to examine how they might better interact with their customers, see how best they can improve service to their customers whilst making it more cost effective to process once a piece of business has been initiated – be that a trade, a payment, selling a product or indeed introducing new products.

For the financial services sector, successful use of software and IT systems should mean more than just being able to maintain a good working relationship with your customers; it’s about continual improvement, offering more to your existing customers while attracting new ones and growing.

The banking sector relies heavily on IT – electronic trading and settlement is a mainstay of the industry. However it is this myriad of siloed systems and their complexity that makes it hard for management to visualise an end-to-end business process.

We have to ask what the bank is, and what does it aspire to be? How do you make the journey from ‘as is’ to ‘to be’ without mapping it, planning it and making best use of your resources? How do you do Basel III? How do you cope with RRP? How do you introduce that new mortgage product? How do you separate investment from retail?

We only have to look at recent calamities in the financial sector. The Libor scandal, mis-selling PPI, rogue traders, liquidity inadequacies, bank bail-outs and system outages leaving customers unable to access their accounts or pay bills. All of these are down to a lack of proper process or adequate process rigour.

Everyone is responsible for process rigour, but the bank’s board and senior directors are accountable.

Financial institutions operate in a highly regulated industry and it is everyone’s responsibility to follow the right process. But is that process properly documented? Is it published, accessible and digestible by those who need to follow it? Is it auditable? Is it relevant and up to date? Is it aligned with the need to change or operate differently? I suggest that often the answer to most or all of those questions is “no”. Then how can any financial institution effectively mitigate against operational and reputational risk unless this is put right?

You have only to recall the day the London Stock Exchange’s rules changed – 27 October 1986. It was dubbed Big Bang because of the aggregation of measures designed to precipitate a complete alteration in the structure of the market. Traders no longer walked the floor of the exchanges but conducted business electronically from their desks. The introduction of ATMs, BACS, CHAPS, Faster Payments, SEPA, credit card authorisation and Chip & PIN, contactless technology, as well as the information for traders to understand the market, such as services provided by Bloomberg and Reuters and now ‘Bank 2.0’ – the advent of mobile banking services – all these require a heavy reliance on technology. Without this technology enablement we would never have seen the services provided today.

However, for banks to be truly competitive there has to be not just better system integration but better visualisation of the business processes. Better visualisation of how the business process of selling a mortgage interfaces with a current account, better visualisation how a trade is influenced, how it is settled and better visualisation of how the transfer of funds occurs. Who owns that process, when was it last reviewed? What different geographies and locations does that process encompass? Who is involved in that process? Where are the bottlenecks, where are the risks? What else runs on those systems hosting this process? What happens if a location is closed, individuals leave the bank, get promoted, roles made redundant that operate within your process but are outside your remit?

There are three key elements the banking sector should take from the recession:

• The ability to adapt to change will separate the winners and the losers;

• Better process visualisation is the only way to remain competitive;

• Better process rigour is the only way to survive.

Transformation and adaption are the watchwords of today’s financial sector. However, one should not look at this downturn of the economy as being where the bloodletting will occur. Unless an organisation can effect agility and be adaptable when the upturn comes; if an organisation isn’t capable of seizing the new opportunities a resurgent economy brings; if it cannot cope with new invasive regulation while simultaneously growing its business; if it cannot attract new customers and launch new products quicker than competitors – that is when it will die.

Organisations need the tools in place to see the ‘bank on a page’, to be able to stand at the chart table in the captain’s cabin, to be able to plot the course and know immediately the hazards along the way. Because if you can’t, here be dragons.

Au cours des 4 derniers Clubs Utilisateurs, nous avons eu l’honneur de recevoir plus de 125 Clients représentant des secteurs d’activité très variés. Nous avons été ravis de compter sur leur retour d’expérience et en profitons pour adresser tous nos remerciements au : Forem, La Poste Courrier, l’Agence Française du Développement, Cdiscount, SAGE, Gefco, Ubisoft et Radio France.

Nous fêtons effectivement le huitième anniversaire du Club Utilisateurs Casewise en 2013 et sommes très enthousiastes à l’idée de faire évoluer cet événement pour vous garantir toujours plus de visibilité sur notre offre, davantage de retours d’expérience Client, l’intervention d’experts du marché et la découverte d’un nouveau lieu prestigieux.
 


Nous profitons de ce début d’année pour vous inviter à vous inscrire au Club Utilisateurs Casewise dès maintenant.

Rejoignez la communauté Casewise pour partager les meilleures pratiques du marché et participer à l’évolution de notre offre. Les prochains événements se dérouleront le 4 Avril et le 24 Juin 2013 à Paris.

Nous restons à votre entière disposition pour toute information complémentaire.

It’s always nice to cap off a successful year on a positive note, so we were especially pleased to wrap up the final event of 2012 with the warmly received 28th Casewise France User Club.

Involving customer speakers from the logistics, automotive, eCommerce and the public sector, the Casewise User Club offered an excellent insight into recent customer achievements – and underlined important industry trends as we move into 2013.

The presenters each covered a variety of topics including: Enterprise Architecture, Urbanization, Process Management, Process Mapping and Project Management.

In particular, Urbanization (which translates as “landscaping your IT architecture”), was identified as one of the five key areas for strategic development by one of our client speakers. Some of the excellent key benefits that resulted from this project included cost reduction, application portfolio management and better leveraging technology and security – all of which point toward all-important business growth and sustainability for this client.

The client went on to explain how one of Casewise’s flagship solutions (coupled with a supporting solution) addressed all of these areas and surpassed the competition – thanks to the scalability, ergonomics, cost savings and value added services. The success of the project was also down to the collaboration effort between the two teams, something to be especially proud of.

Another client discussed the complexity of their information system, before going on to explain how Casewise managed 15,000 of their Information System components. The client detailed how they leveraged Casewise technologies for communication, forecasting, reducing risk, scheduling and automation. All of these aspects are deemed critical in a fast paced business environment – where the smallest of errors can have catastrophic domino effect, highlighting the importance of a good architecture and processes.

Another client speaker shared best practices from their implementation: the importance of setting targets, gaining management support and having day-to-day ownership when implementing and rolling out and communicating a business optimization approach. They then went on to highlight how their project created powerful messaging – helping to create a healthy competition amongst the teams internally.

By integrating the modeling tool at the beginning phases of projects, documenting standards were formalized with punctual support and supplemented with training, which helped to increase adoption.

No one organisation which presented at the User Group had the same challenges – but they each found the value in using Casewise solutions to improve communication and collaboration within specific projects as well as throughout the enterprise, yielding additional clarity and supporting change management.

All of the Casewise team would like to take this opportunity to thank our French User Club attendees who took time out of their busy schedules to attend. We would also like to thank our recent speakers from GEFCO, Cdiscount and AFD for joining us – we look forward to seeing you again in 2013!

By Jeff Fraleigh, US Managing Director, Casewise

Our User Groups are, as the name implies, events aimed at delivering value for our users.  As a customer-centric organization, everything we do at these events focuses on them, from the roundtable discussions, to the keynote presentations, to the customer appreciation events, etc.  It’s all about giving them a platform to learn and share with their peers. At the same time, however, Casewise leverages these events to learn more about out customers: how they are utilizing our solutions, the value that they are delivering, their needs for the future, etc.

At this year’s conference in Chicago, there was one overriding theme we wanted to focus on: expansion. The Casewise slogan is: “When You Can See More, You Can Do More”, and expansion of your Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Analysis initiatives allows many others in the organization to see more and do more.

When we think of expansion, it can be broken down into three key areas:

• Information Capture
• Governance/Quality
• Communicating Value

We recognize the challenges with getting information from different people in the organization – most who don’t understand (or rightfully care about) EA or BPA! Finding ways to easily collect information from those people who “own the data” with little hassle has been a focus for Casewise and enables expansion.

In addition, executives and other stakeholders want to feel comfortable with the data so they can have confidence in the decisions they are making. That’s predicated on having accurate and timely information.  Setting and enabling governance around information quality, timeliness and management is another key enabler for effective expansion.

Lastly, expansion is about getting the “right” insights out to the right audiences – depending on their roles. So, having reports and dashboards that are meaningful to non-architects or non-analysts allows for broad, expanded value of your initiatives.

So, as you can see, expansion allows you to see more and do more. That success then perpetuates itself, with more people contributing to the repository, gleaning insights from it – and making decisions based on it.

We thank all our customers who took time out of their schedules – we really do appreciate the effort that goes into attending. We especially thank Capital One, Carson Wagonlit Travel, Northrop Grumman and Pfizer for sharing compelling case studies as well as industry thought leaders John Zachman and George Paras for presenting thought-provoking and entertaining keynote speeches.

If you’d like more information about how Casewise can help you expand the value of your initiatives, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at Jeff.Fraleigh@casewise.com

Look forward to seeing you next time!

A blog by Geoff Hook, projects director at Lanner

I was lucky enough to be able to attend both days of the recent Optimize 2012 conference arranged by Casewise. This conference was a little different to many software vendor specific events; in that the content was wide and varied as opposed to repeatedly having presentations containing numerous screenshots that illustrate details of the product that was used. This meant the conference was accessible for a wide range of attendees, users and people with a broader interest in improving business performance through business process improvement and enterprise business architecture.

Possibly the highlight of the conference for me was the speech given by Michael Portillo, who described himself as a member of the ex-potential future British Prime Minister club. Joking aside, and there was one or two good ones from Mr Portillo, he went on to present an illuminating analysis of the current economic crisis and in particular the state of the Euro. I found his comparison to other currency amalgamations very insightful, re-uniting of Germany and the single Deutsch Mark and the situation in North America after the civil war where again a single currency was adopted. No doubt having ‘celebrity’ speakers at events does make the event look attractive, however in my experience few celebrity speakers have been as interesting and thought provoking as Mr Portillo.

The conference featured many interesting speakers, all of which had obviously prepared well and communicated excellently with the listeners. I did find the story of savings made in IT by the UK HMRC particularly stimulating since I am a UK tax payer. Aside from the good use of Casewise products at HMRC to achieve the savings made, sound data collection, basic analysis and common-sense were also contributors. This was brought together by good project management and charismatic leadership otherwise I doubt the great success achieved in the time wouldn’t have been possible.

I’d like to personally thank Crimestoppers and Jane Parkin for presenting a fascinating case study on how simulation was used by the anonymous crime reporting charity to refine their call centre operations to cope with higher demand. This was a perfect example of why Casewise have partnered with my company Lanner in order to provide best of breed simulation technology to all Casewise customers.

The evening dinner was accompanied by a sportsman’s presentation, which is a well tried and trusted formula. On this occasion Ollie Phillips was the speaker, the England Rugby 7’s captain. Ollie spoke convincingly about the importance of planning, technology and teamwork in the right balance as key to achieving that extra performance that makes a winning team.

The venue was the extravagant Andaz hotel adjacent to London’s Liverpool Street Station, I did manage to spend a short time relaxing in the 1901 bar, amazing architecture and good wine list… after all you do need time for some networking and team building at a conference.

Alexandre Wentzo, Casewise CEO

Casewise is evolving – that was the message that emerged from our Optimize 2012 event, held at the Andaz Hotel in London recently.

The event, which brought together organizations committed to delivering tangible value and optimizing performance for their enterprises, heard from speakers ranging from former MP Michael Portillo, to HMRC’s Louise McCarthy, and England Rugby Sevens player Ollie Phillips, to name a few.

By coming together at Optimize 2012, it allowed us to spend time networking with like-minded individuals and learn from each other.  As a customer-centric organization, Optimize 2012 helped Casewise to garner even more knowledge about how to meet our clients’ needs in the future.

It’s important to not only think about what we’ve been able to accomplish as an industry, but also to think about the ways that we will evolve to continue to find solutions to bring even more business value to the industry and the organizations we work with.

The theme running throughout Optimize 2012 was one of change; organizations must adapt to not only survive but also thrive. They need to have better insights, to make better decisions to optimize their performance. They will need to further embrace collaboration and teamwork and be committed to changing the culture to better align IT and Business. Casewise suggests that vendors will have to offer new technologies and solutions that will enable this new way forward.

Technology plays a significant role in all of this. But, as you all know, it goes way beyond just technology. Sure, technology enables your organizations to better understand what you do, how you do it, but a winning culture, a commitment to change and innovation are absolutely essential to thrive in this new way forward.

The choice of Hotel Andaz was no coincidence. Similar to Andaz, Casewise has a rich tradition that it is proud of, while at the same time being extremely innovative and customer-centric.

Casewise’s evolution is from offering a modeling tool to one that is a solution provider. The next stage for Casewise is about using new technologies and techniques from the social media and gamification world to help further accelerate the expansion of Enterprise Business Architecture and Business Process Management initiatives to a broader audience – taking it more enterprise-wide.

Today, there are over 600 million users on Facebook. If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest behind China and India. There are 106 million twitter accounts, with over 65 million tweets a day. LinkedIn has over 100 million users. 2 Billion videos are watched on YouTube every day.

At Optimize 2012 Alexandre Wentzo, Casewise CEO will present: “The Role that Social Media & Gamification Will Play on Your Enterprise” and expand on these staggering numbers, which continue to grow.

Social media is not a passing fad. We live in a social, and interconnected world. It’s the way we communicate today with our “network” – our friends, our colleagues, customers and our prospects. Identifying ways to incorporate “social” and gamification principles into your enterprise will be essential for the successful growth of your organisation.

See Alexandre’s recent blog post on gamification – Playing the game – at http://blog.casewise.com/2012/08/playing-the-game/.

Alexandre has served as Chief Executive Officer of Casewise and as a member of the Casewise Board of Directors since 2010.  As CEO of the world’s leading business process and business architecture solutions company, Alexandre is helping lead Casewise into a new phase of growth with a focus on strategic planning, solution and marketing innovation as well as operational excellence.  Having joined Casewise in 2003, Alexandre has held a variety of Sales and Operational roles, with increasing responsibility.

This is just one of the many thought-provoking sessions at the upcoming Casewise Global Summit, Optimize 2012, September 26-27. To learn more, go to http://www.casewise.com/optimize2012/ or join the conversation on Twitter at #optimize2012.

By Dr. Mathias Kirchmer
Executive Director / Partner – Business Process Management, Accenture
Affiliated Faculty, Program for Organizational Dynamics, University of Pennsylvania

A challenging business environment characterized by pervasive volatility ranging from the economy and shifts in commodity pricing to changes in the regulatory environment and increasingly demanding customers, has created a need and appetite today for business process management (BPM) across industries and geographies.

Value-driven BPM, which my colleague Peter Franz and I defined in our book, Value-Driven Business Process Management The Value-Switch for Lasting Competitive Advantage, is the management discipline that uses process as the critical link that can translate business strategy into execution.  Approached correctly, it can help focus initiatives based on an organization’s strategic objectives.  Consequently, the processes can become real assets that deliver competitive advantage as they become more adaptable, giving organizations the agility to rapidly respond to change to achieve outcomes.¹ And, it is the outcomes that ultimately matter.

So as businesses continue to face rapid change, value-driven BPM may become increasingly important in companies seeking to create dynamic operations that have the ability to sense and respond to changes as they occur.

But you might ask: How can value-driven BPM be applied and gain respect equivalent to other management disciplines?

Organizations that succeed with value-driven BPM typically drive it into their organization’s culture from the top down.  Someone at the top of the organization takes responsibility for the process management whether it is a chief process officer or someone else – preferably at the C-suite level.

Ultimately, value-driven BPM is about more than putting tools or a repository in place.  It is rooted in a process-centric culture. There is a shared awareness of how process organizes the way work gets done; work is analyzed and organizations react to the problems found in those processes.  As a result, individuals become keenly aware of the effect on their colleagues’ work as well as their own.

A structure is placed around the management of processes within a BPM Center of Excellence from which the BPM organization can fulfill process management requirements.  That is where the process repository management occurs. The center also assists with running process improvement projects.

Addressing BPM this way can enable organizations to create immediate value as processes become transparent, giving management greater insight into various functions across the enterprise.  It can also allow for the continuous change that typically occurs within organizations today.

In my presentation at Optimize 2012, I will delve further into the key enablers of value-driven BPM, such as the BPM roadmap, strategy, governance, centers of excellence, repositories, automation approaches and managed services in the context of undertaking the effective process of process management.

This is just one of the many thought-provoking sessions at the upcoming Casewise Global Summit, Optimize 2012, September 26-27. To learn more, go to http://www.casewise.com/optimize2012/ or join the conversation on Twitter at #optimize2012.

[1] Value-Driven Business Process Management The Value-Switch for Lasting Competitive Advantage, Peter Franz and Mathias Kirchmer, McGraw-Hill, 2012, pg. 4.

Casewise customer HMRC has one of the largest IT estates in the public sector, spending hundreds of millions of pounds every year on the technology that gathers the tax income that funds the UK and pays entitlements to those who need them. But like every area of government, HMRC is facing huge challenges to cut costs and be more efficient. The last UK government’s Spending Review Settlement (SR10) tasked HMRC with not only reducing their costs by 25%, but also increasing their yield by £20+ billion and improving the service for their customers.

In her presentation at Optimize 2012, titled: “IT Innovation & Cost Reduction through Simplification” Louise McCarthy will talk about IT as a key enabler in delivering the cost reduction targets and some of the challenges faced and solutions delivered to significantly drive down costs, modernise and streamline the IT estate and most importantly make it sustainable.

As Finance Director, Louise provides agreed levels of financial and performance management services to IMS especially in respect of budgetary management; scorecard management; financial governance; and risk management. She is accountable for supporting the Departmental Strategic Objectives delivery; maximising the value of the IMS Finance, Performance & Control team; and operating as a member of the HMRC finance community. Louise has recently expanded her role to take on responsibility for managing HMRC’s Change Programme team finance, control & performance. Louise has over 20 years experience in both the private and public sectors; she joined HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) in 2009.

This is just one of the many thought-provoking sessions at the upcoming Casewise Global Summit, Optimize 2012, September 26-27. To learn more, go to http://www.casewise.com/optimize2012/ or join the conversation on Twitter at #optimize2012.