Campaign for Real SaaS - Introducing Matter Management as a Service

Large established legal IT vendors with an on-premises customer base face serious challenges retaining customers as they attempt to move legacy applications to the cloud. But what about new smaller vendors? Vendors who have no legacy and live in a 'cloud-first' world?

Uninhibited by the effects of inertia, they will be the ones to drive innovation and force the big players to change. The implications of the Legal Services Act, combined with the cloud computing era, represents an unprecedented catalyst for innovative new technologies to emerge. But in order to capitalise on this opportunity, smaller vendors must be enablers of change. Leaders of such companies must cast aside the principles and values that once brought them safety inside corporate super tankers of old and make bold new decisions that reflect the agility provided by their new leaner vessels…

How do we get there?

Dealing with the headache of legacy assets, portfolio consolidation attempts and the need to support multiple product versions for many existing customers makes cloud adoption an uphill struggle for incumbent vendors. Smaller vendors on the other hand, find themselves in the luxurious position of being able to make bold decisions that not only drive innovation, but also set a precedent that established vendors must meet in order to survive.

Here's a thought...

The legal industry has become a beacon for innovation and high productivity enabled through a shift from complex, time consuming and costly software projects to a thriving market place for commodity services consumed by law firms in the cloud.

Sounds good? We all want to get there, but we need to accept a few harsh realities first:

• Vendors can't host legacy applications in a data centre and call it 'cloud computing'. True cloud means elasticity, broad network access (e.g. mobile), resource pooling and self-service. See the definition of cloud provided by NIST.
• Law firms can't expect SaaS to deliver savings if they demand an end-to-end environment all to themselves. Multi-tenancy is the key to significant cost savings. Law firms and vendors must work together to analyse data storage and processing at a more granular level to identify candidates for cloud resource pooling.
• Data is not necessarily safer in the law firm than in the cloud. How 'safe' is a law firms on-premises infrastructure compared to the multi-billion dollar cloud data centres operated by the likes of Microsoft and Amazon? Security is multi-faceted – people, hardware, networks, buildings. Very few firms can compete on all these levels and should they even try when it is not their core business?
• Diehards should not stifle innovation. If mid/large law firms continue to insist that the PMS system must remain on-premises this should not hinder adoption of cloud elsewhere. Enhanced connectivity scenarios and higher user volumes make front-office systems perfect candidates for migration to the cloud. It shouldn’t be all or nothing.

The clue is in the name

When you hear the term Software as a Service or SaaS, what do you think? Most people concentrate on the hosting aspect as being the 'service'. To drive SaaS adoption in mid/large law firms, we must concentrate on how SaaS improves the lives of end-users not just IT professionals. 

Ultimately it is the software and the way functionality is consumed by users that should constitute the service. With that in mind, I propose the following new principles for vendors of modern legal SaaS offerings:

• Don't sell a product, sell a service. Better still… an experience.
• There is no such thing as a version - all customers are on the same version... the current version.
• Allow services to evolve continuously in direct response to customer feedback. 
• Allow new features to be configured so users can manage how and when they receive them.
• Identity components fit for multi-tenancy to maximise resource pooling. 

So what does this all mean? It means we are on the verge of a new era of legal technology, where the end user is in much closer contact with the vendor.

Introducing Matter Management as a Service from Ad Coelum Technology

Users of our cloud-based Matter Management solution will experience something drastically different. They will consume Matter Management as a Service:

• Continuous delivery of new functionality. Why should users wait months or even years for essential matter management features? We keep users productive and competitive by ensuring our service accurately reflects the current needs of the legal profession. No scary big bang upgrades. Continuous smooth evolution where the user remains in control.
• Users own the roadmap. We will use technologies such as UserVoice to manage feedback from within the service itself, allowing users to suggest new functionality and/or vote for functionality proposed by others.
• Same day bug fixes. If an issue is identified with our service, all users receive the resolution as soon as a fix has been identified and deployed. Because everyone is using the same service, many users will not even notice the issue existed.
• No long-term tie in. We must all learn to live and die by the quality of service we deliver. The days of large capital-led deals are over. Need some service guarantees for a period of time? No problem – let’s talk, but we won’t lock anyone down who desires the freedom to switch off at will.

A law firm’s matter management needs, addressed through a single service. That's what real SaaS is all about. 

Paul Payne, CTO
@paulpayne1

Continuous Delivery - iteration and the importance of early feedback

A month has passed since I joined Ad Coelum Technology and it's been great to sit down with law firms and discuss the merits (and challenges) of cloud computing. One thing we have covered at length is the notion of continuous delivery and the opportunity it presents for delivering a significantly better experience to customers.

To help explain why I will be making continuous delivery a key aspect of our cloud-based Matter Management service, but let's quickly change gears and talk about...cars.

The car in front is a Toyota (but why?)

In the 1950's, American quality guru W. Edwards Deming set out to help Japan rebuild its manufacturing industry in the wake of the second world war. His 'Plan-Do-Check-Act' philosophy centered around the notion of continuous iteration and the importance of early feedback in the engineering process. This agility gave Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota a distinct quality edge over the traditional production processes of western counterparts, allowing them to dominate manufacturing through the late 70's and 80's.

This is the single most important lesson we can learn when it comes to quality and engineering.

In 1991 James P. Womack coined a new term for this approach following a $5m study of Toyota. He called it 'Lean'.

The software industry, perhaps distracted by the looming millennium bug, took a further decade to catch on...

'Agile' - easy to say, hard to do

The Agile Manifesto (2001) marked a turning point in software development and a much needed departure away from waterfall as the dominant approach. We have since attempted to apply all the great lessons of Japanese car building to software development. KANBAN, Kaizan, Just-In-Time - you name it, we found a home for it, most recently under the banner of 'Lean Software Development'.

The problem however, is that all too often we still revert to waterfall because it feels easier and safer. It is almost always the path of least resistance - exec sponsors feel safer because they can see a well defined plan and manage through conformance to it. Customers can't object to the requirements or design because they aren't involved, and reputations can't be damaged because no early software is released for feedback.

Fortunately, opportunities to revert to type are being eroded by the nature of cloud-computing.

Continuous delivery, enabled by the cloud

At Ad Coelum Technology we have the luxury of no legacy software, no existing processes and no existing culture. This represents the perfect opportunity to adopt continuous delivery from the get go. Building on a cloud PaaS like Windows Azure means that the deployment issues surrounding on-premises deployments are a thing of the past:

If we fix a bug, ALL customers benefit from that fix as soon as it is deployed to the cloud. In most cases, a vast percentage of users will not even notice/be impacted by the change.

If we add a new feature ALL customers can make use of it as soon as it is deployed to the cloud. We will also offer customers/users the choice of how they adopt major new features:

• Early adopter? Great! You can use preview versions of the feature as soon as it is deployed and help us to improve functionality through continuous delivery and feedback.
• More conservative? No problem. You will only receive the feature once it has been fully tried and tested

I'm not about to commit to any kind of release cadence at this stage, but every 3-4 weeks for new features is where we need to be to ensure our development efforts are fully aligned with the needs of our customers.

Make no mistake - putting continuous delivery at the heart of our philosophy will bring a whole new set of pressures and challenges. It requires a development operations rethink that will push the quality bar to new levels and inject much needed intensity and pressure into the development process.

But these are good pressures and exciting challenges. Continuous delivery has started...

Paul Payne, CTO.
@paulpayne1