Interwoven Trends and Practices in Worksite Deployments

Rizwan Khan talked about change management, in particular in moving to matter centricity. Moving from DocsOpen to iManage was a change in the technology not a change in process. Matter Centricity is a dramatic change in process and user behavior. Attorneys are willing to share files but not as willing to share structure. People want to organize documents in a way that makes sense to them.

Simplicity is key. The change is going to be severe, so make it easier for the attorneys and legal staff. Only push out a few folders at first. One firm said that the have selection process at matter opening to pick the folder structure. Another firm said that they allowed the attorneys to create their own folder structure.

Communication and training is key. Communication up front is key to clarify the business need and convey those needs to the firm-wide audience. You need multiple trainings. People will remember some features and not others. They will have questions.

Rizwan showed an eLearning tool for the Interwoven products. Unfortunately, I could not find it on their website. (Hmm! Why not?)

Rizwan pointed out how the Universal Search can used to deal with centralization, or lack there of. The Universal Search can pull from the disparate systems. Centralization benefits the IT staff, but provides little benefit to the attorneys.

(Universal Search would be very useful tool for mergers. Just point the search at the two firms DMS systems. You can work on merging the systems later.)

One plan for Universal Search is to also incorporate external repositories.

The indexing and search results is much faster in 8.3. A repository of 9 million documents took 30 days in 8.2 and 5 days in 8.3. The search results are much faster in 8.3 (I found this to be very true in our testing.) There were some charts that the user experience for tolerating delays is about 5 seconds. Anything longer than that rapidly becomes unacceptable.