thought leadership

As technology advances, many businesses may find they need help to keep up with their competition. To safeguard your business from falling behind, embracing digital transformation and understanding how it can benefit your organisation is essential.  

So, what does this involve? Digital transformation is using digital technologies to fundamentally change how an organisation operates and delivers value to its customers. It incorporates digital technology into all business areas to increase value through innovation, invention, efficiency, and improved customer experience . 

Adopting digital transformation throughout your organisation can be daunting. Here are some steps to help you successfully implement digital transformation in your organisation for 2023.

Define your goals 

Before you begin the digital transformation process, it’s important to understand what you want to achieve. For example, do you want to improve efficiency, reduce costs, or increase customer satisfaction? Clearly defining your goals will help you determine the best course of action and measure the success of your efforts.

Assess where you are currently in the digital landscape 

It sounds too obvious to mention, but this vital step can quickly be forgotten. Understanding your existing technology infrastructure, processes, and customer needs will provide valuable insights. Conduct a thorough assessment of your organisation to identify areas that need improvement and where digital technologies can be used to drive change.

Gain feedback from your employees

Digital transformation is not just about technology; it also involves changing how people work. Engage your employees in the process by involving them in planning and decision-making. This will ensure that the changes you implement are embraced and supported by your team and they are, therefore, more likely to help make it successful. 

Develop a roadmap 

Once you have defined your goals and assessed your current state, it’s time to develop a roadmap for achieving them. This roadmap should outline the steps you need to take, including which technologies to adopt and how to integrate them into your organisation.

Implement and test

With your roadmap in place, it’s time to start implementing the changes outlined in your plan. One way to help mitigate some inevitable teething problems is, to begin with, a pilot programme. Test the changes on a small scale before rolling them out organisation-wide. This will help you identify and fix any issues before they become widespread.

Measure, track and optimise 

As you implement a digital transformation, it’s prudent to record your progress and measure the results. It is always worthwhile measuring begore you implement change and after.  This will help you understand the impact you have had, what’s working and what needs improvement. Use this information to capitalise on your efforts and continue driving change throughout your organisation.

Keep up with evolving technologies 

Digital technologies are constantly changing, and staying up-to-date with the latest trends and developments is essential. Make sure to allocate resources for ongoing training and development to ensure your team is equipped to handle new technologies as they emerge.

Help is at hand 

Businesses often rely on their IT departments to implement new processes and technology, but AUTTO is a tool that can be used by anyone, regardless of department. It allows teams to easily and cost-effectively set up and adopt digital transformation. Using AUTTO, teams can digitise business processes, connect existing tech tools to a process, and scale up to run a fully operational system. With customisable templates, your specific needs can be fully met. 

One of the benefits of no-code tools like AUTTO is that they can help with Digital Transformation by allowing even non-technical team members to see and participate in the transformation of their work, which can be necessary for change. 

Final thoughts

Adopting digital transformation throughout your organisation can be challenging, but the benefits are well worth the effort. By following these steps and staying flexible, you can successfully navigate the process and flourish as a robust, more competitive organisation in the digital age.

Lawyers have enough legal work on their hands without needing to juggle the business side of their practices too. Yet, for too many of us, 23% of our work involves mundane tasks like creating contracts, producing monthly newsletters and drafting, adjusting and approving notes for billing.

New lawyers tend to ask themselves questions that include the following: How can we handle 200 or more clients calling us per week? How can we reduce the length and cost of judicial proceedings? How do we simplify billing? How could we get to the next level? 

Automation’s the answer. Here are three ways automation can transform your law firm. 

1. Onboarding and Legal Communications

New staff have to be led through an extensive onboarding program where you produce, check and process intake forms, welcome emails, consultation notes, contracts/ NDAs, case sheets, case templates, draft documents and signed packages, among other forms. Lawyers told us that onboarding new employees typically takes at least three months.

Automation can slice that time to 99% by automating tedious manual workflows and scaling their operations.

Tasks you can automate include:

• Template intake, where you simplify your intake process with a legal client intake form template to save time and standardise your onboarding process
• Partnership agreements
• Shareholder agreements
• Contract signing system that’s where you upload a generic contract, have the client’s name automatically inserted, and the client can sign with encrypted electronic signatures
• Non-disclosure agreements

Check out how AUTTO helps you accelerate these contracting processes through its simple no-code solution.

2. Legal Operations 

Legal automation helps you boost your productivity and get the most ROI from resources like law firm partners and in-house general counsel, by relegating them to high-value work. (Automation does everything else). No-code automation builders like AUTTO, help legal teams and law firms stitch together manual processes to make common workflows scalable. Examples include processing legal intake, prioritising legal cases, and assigning the right cases to the right people at the right time.

Most law firms are represented by legal innovation teams at industry events and have early adopters that buy their products. But actually achieving adoption at scale within a hierarchical environment like a law firm is a different story.

It’s also been notoriously difficult for in-house GCs to persuade decision-makers to invest in automation, although more recently that’s changed, where high-growth tech companies have come to appreciate that these legal teams use automation to patch up inefficiencies and maximise company productivity – and that investing in legal automation is just as profitable as investing in product marketing and sales.

No-code solutions like AUTTO’s automation platform makes it even easier for GCs to persuade their decision-makers to adopt automation since it cuts the cost of digital transformation by 99%. There’s no need to hire IT experts or invest in ongoing IT maintenance, among other costs. The headache at the thought of investing significant money, time and effort disappears. The timeline is hacked from four to six weeks to mere hours. You don’t need to learn to code. All you have to do is connect to a modern browser and your legal team could automate their work processes and forms on the same day.

Check out how AUTTO helped UK law firm Burges Salmon develop their own automated NDA within a few hours and at a minimal cost. No code was involved.

3. Legal Billing

Lawyers can lose as much as 50% of their revenue because of billing mistakes. With automated billing, you can reduce write-downs and write-offs through task-based automation.  For example, you can insert parameters into certain petitions or cases, specifying conditions like cost or time. 

Automated billing eliminates errors. Using systems such as AUTTO for billing not only standardises your invoices but also prompts clients to pay you faster.

Automated billing also provides the transparency that’s critical for auditing and conflict prevention. You can automate this billing to integrate with Quickbooks and your lead tracking system to improve collections.

Also, Law firms can set up prescheduled payment reminders to notify clients with overdue accounts. Automated UTBMS/LEDES coding that organises and standardises legal work. These make it easy to capture and communicate meaningful billing data, leading to a higher rate of claims acceptance and less time spent on correcting and resending invoices. Unfortunately, legal staff have to manually search for and insert the correct code for each entry, resulting in a process that’s tedious, drawn-out and prone to human error. Automation automatically assigns the correct codes.

Check out this case study about how AUTTO is used for automating invoices.

Save Time, Money, and Aggravation By Automating Legal Processes

AUTTO is an automation platform for law firms, legal departments and GCs, helping you automate everything from file sharing to signing documents. Its no-code tool helps you build automated workflows for routine tasks and build conditions in data and documents. No coding skills are needed. The tool plugs into your system and doesn’t need IT maintenance. All you need is a browser and you’re good to go. 

Fancy trying it out for free? Sign up to our 14-day FREE trial here

How your business can survive (and even thrive) through digital transformation?

Digital transformation (DX) is currently the single most important force in business and innovation.  Leveraging its 13,000 agencies-strong network, DesignRush reported that companies with digital-first strategies are 64% more likely to achieve their business goals than competitors and to succeed in the Future of Work. In contrast, as many as 55% of companies that have yet to digitise believe they have less than a year before they suffer financially and begin losing market share. 

How can you be Digital-First’?

Well, there’s a method to successful digital transformation which McKinsey encapsulates in  five key factors: 

1. Leadership factors

Impactful leaders are committed, enthusiastic, wholly change-driven and digitally-savvy. 

“Top leaders realise that it’s imperative for senior management to keep up with everything from AI to e-commerce to data analytics, or they risk the company’s viability and their own careers,” says the Executive Monitor report from Boyden Global Executive Search that surveyed 1,200 CEOs. 

You need leaders who are agile, committed to change, and ready to invest – recognising that investments do result in payback over time. Research by both McKinsey and Boyden demonstrates that organisations that hire digitally-savvy leaders into the C-suite, such as chief technology officers, are more likely than competitors to report successful digital transformations. 

2. Creating the workforce of the future

PwC suggests that by 2030 we’ll see four possible “worlds of work”. There’ll be the Red World of innovation; the Blue World where corporations dominate; the Green World of a strong social conscience; and the Yellow World where companies recognize that humans come first.  To succeed in this Future of Work, PwC insisted that:

“Leaders need to own the automation debate and realise that Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will affect every level of the business and its people. It’s too important an issue to leave to IT (or HR) alone.” 

 Indeed, McKinsey found that companies that digitised for this world of the future, not only hired digitally-savvy persons, but also upskilled their staff to align with the goals of their transformations. Most companies also had “integrators” who served as bridges between the company’s traditional past and its digital future, integrating new digital processes into existing ways of working. 

3. Facilitating new ways of working

Digital transformations require cultural and behavioural changes in areas that include accelerated collaboration, calculated risk taking, continuous learning and open environment.  As McKinsey found, organisations that reported improvements in even one area, such as customer centricity or agile business processes, were more likely than competitors to report successful transformations. That was particularly so when stakeholders and employees were encouraged to contribute their own ideas on where digitisation could support the business.

4. Upgrading tools the workforce uses every day

Almost all organisations that reported success told McKinsey how upgrading their day-to-day tools contributed to structural change. Examples include streamlining repetitive tasks and paperless processes with automated processes such as automated emails, NDAs,  legal forms, documents, approvals and so forth across desktop, web and mobile. You can create and manage all aspects of your automations from a central portal, across stakeholders and on the go. Businesses that use AUTTO’s no-code automation platform report that it helps make information more accessible across their organisations, gives them more time to market and innovate, supercharges their services, and removes human error from their processes, among other benefits. British-based financial crime consultancy, FinTrail, for instance, said that AUTTO’s no-code solution helped triple its membership and reduced their workload by 75%.

5. Communicating via traditional and digital methods

Effective communication may well be one of the single most important factors when it comes to digital transformation. The same 2018 McKinsey report found that successful transformation was at least three times more likely when staff were fed a compelling change story that dramatised why digital transformation would generate profits. McKinsey’s survey also showed that managers influenced when they communicated with a sense of urgency, providing teams with clear roadmaps and accompanying metrics. 

Wrap-up

Digital transformation is one of the biggest risks your business will ever face – and one of the biggest opportunities. Over the past six years, it has mostly been the traditional companies like travel agency Thomas Cook, Revlon and retailer Arcadia Group that filed for bankruptcy. Those that embraced digital transformation – consider Vodafone, Shell, Bayer, and Audi – reported they made tremendous strides forward. Change is risky – but clinging to dated methods and processes almost certainly augurs disaster. 

Digital transformation is here to stay. Embrace it, and you will be rewarded with faster revenue growth,  customer loyalty and a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Using tools like AUTTO’s no-code automation platform is one step closer to becoming digital-first.  

With the rise of no-code platforms, we are seeing a shift in how organisations develop and use technology. Gone are the days where all IT infrastructure sits within the IT departments – we’re all technologists now and all have access to tools to make our day jobs easier. But what impact does this have on the business if it is not managed correctly?

Platforms such as AUTTO puts power at the fingertips of knowledge workers to help develop business solutions. They give organisations a quick and easy start to becoming digital-first and put the user in control.

No-code brings a shift in how technology is delivered to the business – and that means there are a number of risks if left unchecked. With governance and security the primary areas to focus on, the role of the CIO has to change and adapt to prevent a free for all, where IT activity becomes siloed and ad hoc. 

Get it right though, and no-code tools will be an enabler. Businesses don’t have to worry about having big teams of developers, they don’t have to worry about version control, because that is handled by the platforms themselves. The days are long past when almost any IT project required coding from scratch: slow, difficult to build and with painstaking testing and iteration.

Now, it’s possible to access a single tool with multiple functions and functionalities all from one central platform. Tools like AUTTO, help businesses automate repetitive tasks by digitising business processes through workflows – freeing up the one thing that is most important – time.

In short, through no-code, technology has become simple – it’s how you apply it that brings it to life.

Barriers of Adoption

While it solves many problems, no-code does raise other challenges – like how you fit it all together. A big part of the task is how you integrate these platforms with your existing legacy systems. You need to ringfence legacy so that you don’t break it. So finding a tool which allows you to connect to existing technology is key. 

What all of this means is that the skills needed have changed. It used to be about having lots of coders and developers. Now, it’s about how you fit everything together – so there’s a much higher need for enterprise and business solutions architects. It’s given rise to a new term as well – Citizen Developers.

It also opens a new doorway into technology careers for people who may have been put off by the highly technical nature of many tech roles. Apprenticeships and boot camp-style skills programmes, such as the PMI’s dedicated Citizen Developer certification program, can equip talented individuals with the tools they need to implement no-code solutions quickly, without compromising on responsible design and governance methods. 

Where does No-code sit within an Organisation?

In the past, the CIO or IT director would have focussed on overseeing complex multi-year projects. Now, the role is about overseeing more rapid iterative changes and governance – ensuring there is a clear framework for activity, that activity is coordinated, and that there is connectivity between applications.

A lack of control also introduces security risks. Given today’s alarmingly prevalent cyber threats, it has become simply imperative that strong and consistent security protocols, resilient infrastructure, and robust data protection and privacy processes are in place.

Meanwhile, it is Citizen Developers who are driving the business forward in terms of new capabilities, functionality and solutions. It is the role of the IT department to safeguard the way that business owners adopt new tooling, providing oversight and ensuring no-code development is safe and responsible.

The Future of No-code Solutions

The covid-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for change. This acceleration of digital transformation through no-code, the move to cloud and other major trends mean there is still much to do for IT teams in building a robust and safe digital enterprise.