Peer to Peer Magazine

29 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Considering a Transition from On-Premise to SaaS-based DMS? FEATURES Cost IT time and costs associated with maintaining and upgrading systems is an important consideration. Upgrading and maintaining on-premise systems require a lot of in-house work and expertise whereas SaaS or cloud systems include this in the price paid to the vendor. Of course, you also have to look at the costs associated with migration from an on-premise system to the cloud. Migrations are hey investments requiring significant capital and time depending on how large your firm is. Still, over time you could be spending less to maintain a SaaS system, even considering migration costs. Additionally, going from an on-premise DMS with large license fees to a SaaS or cloud DMS could also shi costs from capital to operating expenses. This could provide a tax benefit to your organization and be more favorable to stakeholders, a move that might be more aractive to corporate legal departments than smaller firms. Change Management One of the reasons smaller firms are adopting cloud systems more quickly than larger ones is that they are generally more flexible and open to change. Larger, more established firms have invested heavily in personnel and hardware and changing to a cloud- based DMS might mean leing people go or feeling that they have wasted resources invested in their on-premise systems. Small firms, meanwhile, are likely to outsource most or even all of their IT maintenance due to a lack of resources. These firms find SaaS solutions extremely beneficial, allowing them to focus on serving their clients rather than maintaining various business systems. In addition, firms with seasoned senior partners who have been practicing for 20 or more years may not always see the benefits of transitioning to cloud systems. In just a few years, the millennial workforce is going to take over the majority from both Baby Boomers and Gen X, and this change brings with it differing expectations. As I have previously wrien in our SeeUnity blog, millennials want to be unchained from enterprise, preferring to work on the go and expecting mobile access to content. Firms wanting to stay competitive with regard to hiring and aracting talent should seriously consider a SaaS DMS. DAN ANDERSON Dan Anderson, CEO of SeeUnity has 20+ years of experience selling enterprise software solutions within the enterprise content management and content integration markets. Prior to co- founding SeeUnity, Dan was the Director of Business Development at WindFire Technology. Through Dan's leadership, WindFire was positioned as an early leader in the emerging enterprise content integration market. As a National Account Manager at OpenText for 5+ years, Dan was consistently a top sales performer. Moving to the cloud is the way to go for firms wanting to stay innovative, attract the best workforce and maintain their competitiveness in the market. Other considerations Think about all the third-party integrations you have with your current system. Will the same kinds of integrations work with a cloud DMS? Are you going to lose any functionality? What is the total impact of migrating to the cloud? Users need to be your main concern here. Not only is user adoption a consideration, but you must also think about the user experience. If loss of functionality and integrations are going to be an issue, it may not be the best idea to move just yet. Another user-centric consideration has to do with clients. Your clients might have access to an extranet or collaboration platform like HighQ, which means they are also users but with a different set of needs. Their main consideration will be security and they might also expect 100% uptime. With a SaaS DMS and other business applications, uptime will be maintained by the hosting organization, making your clients happy. Finally, firms need to consider whether their IT department is ready to give up control of their DMS. This is a rather large consideration for firms with very customized systems. They are going to lose the ability to make instant changes to the system and will be limited to the types of customization allowed by the provider. Looking Ahead I believe the trend to cloud and SaaS DMS is going to continue for years to come because law firms and large organizations want to get out of the business of maintaining these systems. The amount of content stored in these systems has grown exponentially over the past few years alone; imagine what that will look like in 10, 15, even 20 years. The cost associated with hosting data locally might become too great a burden for some firms. Firms will always need to focus on providing the best service to clients and trying to maintain a continually growing on-premise DMS that takes more and more resources does not sound effective. Moving to the cloud is the way to go for firms wanting to stay innovative, attract the best workforce and maintain their competitiveness in the market. P2P

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