iManage Announces Roadmap and Vision for Work Product Management
Las Vegas, Nevada (PRWEB) September 01, 2015 -- iManage, the leading provider of work product management solutions for legal, accounting, government and financial services firms, today announced its strategic vision and product roadmap for delivering the next generation of Matter Centric Collaboration (MCC): Work Product Management. This innovative platform will comprise software and best practices to enable today’s mobile and tech-savvy “new professionals” to manage all aspects of their work with greater productivity, agility and service while maintaining the highest levels of governance and stewardship over clients’ sensitive information.
Pioneered by iManage over a decade ago, MCC has become the best practice for managing documents, emails, and other matter-related communications in an integrated manner and today the company’s MCC platform is the standard for information management at 80 percent of AmLaw100 firms. Based on data from over 2,000 professionals and supplemented by deep research into how attorneys at the top 100 firms really work, iManage Work Product Management will deliver a completely revamped, intuitive user experience that removes friction between different devices and applications and enables professionals to perform their daily tasks in a more streamlined fashion. These new capabilities will be introduced to users progressively over the next 24 months, and delivered so that existing customers can adopt them with minimal training and disruption.
“Professionals today have a new relationship to technology, using it in more ways and with ever increasing expectations of how it should enable their work,” said Neil Araujo, CEO of iManage. “To design a user experience to meet these expectations, we have engaged dozens of professionals to study how they interact with our products. We will continue to lead the market by delivering a user experience unlike any other, created from the ground up around the needs of the new professional.”
Mobile, always-on channels, security and consumerization are reshaping not only how the new professional works, but the nature of the work itself. Today, communications (including email, text instant messages, videos, and voicemail) constitutes more than 70 percent of the volume of items stored, making simple “document management” seem almost irrelevant, and contributing to the growing fragmentation of how professionals view and use information. New types of files from products like Microsoft Vizio or One Note, coupled with the myriad of devices used — from smartphones and tablets to desktop computers — and environments in which professionals find themselves working (high, low, or no bandwidth) means that vendors need to completely rethink the experience how people connect to and work with information. Only iManage’s next generation MCC roadmap addresses these new challenges.
Introducing Work Product Management
iManage Work Product Management will increase the new professional’s productivity, enhancing the quality of work delivered with automated and integrated workflows that don’t restrict what devices and applications may be used, while providing the security and governance that iManage customers expect. Moreover, this new platform will fully support existing iManage FileSite and DeskSite interfaces, giving users the option to use whichever interface they find best, and reducing the burden of change management for IT professionals struggling to support both new professionals and more traditional users. Key features and benefits will include:
Rich User Experience: Work Product Management will support and automate the complete work creation lifecycle with an intuitive, consumer-like user experience that delivers anytime, anywhere access across all devices, and that can operate in low bandwidth and no bandwidth scenarios that professionals encounter when on a client site, or in a courtroom. The interface replaces complicated file trees with a search-driven interface that rapidly filters large results and efficiently cuts through organizational confusion. In addition, new analytic and search driven intelligence, will provide professionals with deeper insights into what is happening in a client’s world, or around a particular engagement, to make them more effective in serving clients from any location, at any time. New content states that emerge as being critical to professionals (such as information sent to or received from a client) can be used to visualize key milestones in engagements and search more effectively. This new user experience will be consistent across all devices and screens, and will be available in beta for mobile devices in Q4 2015.
Seamless Integration: Customers told iManage that professionals today spend too much time clicking between apps and data types. The new Work Product Management will deepen integration with key authoring editing and review technologies such as metadata scrubbing, document comparison, ethical walls, time and billing, and much more. By enabling streamlined workflows across these different applications, Work Product Management eliminates friction points for the new professional, making professional tasks possible with consumer-like ease of use. iManage is already demonstrating this principle with iManage Share, which offers one-click secure file sharing and collaboration from inside FileSite or DeskSite, and integrating security, metadata scrubbing, document comparison, collaboration and cloud-file sharing in a single integrated workflow. The result is saved time, fewer errors and rapid adoption of the desired file-sharing solution.
Re-architected Onboarding and Training: The new professional does not have the patience or personality for traditional software training sessions to use their system of record. The new platform will remove that friction, making the onboarding, training and upgrade process as intuitive as consumer apps. Over the coming months, users can expect capabilities such as new feature introduction integrated within the application, with introductory wizards, in-line help, and ultimately a standard library hosted training videos, which organizations will be able to adopt or extend to their own needs.
“The changes are exciting,” said Vic Peterson, Chief Information Officer for Stinson Leonard Street LLP, an iManage customer. “Introducing analytics into Work Product Management, for example, has the potential to turn information from our core systems into actionable insights delivered to attorneys and available for legal process improvements. I very much look forward to iManage’s next generation platform.”
“Customers and partners still have a strong brand recognition of ‘iManage’ despite being covered under layers of rebranding through multiple acquisitions over the past decade,” wrote Cheryl McKinnon, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, in a recent blog post (1). In a separate report, she wrote, “iManage has long had traction in the legal, consulting, and professional services markets and set its sights on being an innovator in work management beyond just document management." (2)
About iManage
iManage is the leading provider of work product management solutions for legal, accounting and financial services firms and the corporate departments they serve worldwide. Every day iManage helps professionals streamline the creation, sharing, governance and security of their work product. Nearly 3,000 organizations around the world—including more than 1,800 law firms—rely on iManage to help them deliver great client work. Headquartered in Chicago, Ill., iManage is a management-owned company.
(1) The Rebirth Of iManage: A New Company With A Familiar Name Re-Enters The ECM Market, Forrester Research, Inc. blogs, July 21, 2015
(2) The Forrester Wave™: ECM Business Content Services, Q3 2015, Forrester Research, Inc., August 28, 2015
Maria Bradley, Kickstart Consulting, +1 818-704-8481, [email protected]
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