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Home » Solutions » TeamConnect Enterprise » Why Build on TeamConnect?
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Why Build on TeamConnect?
TeamConnect is the first choice for developers looking to build powerful applications that require collaboration and accountability in equal measure. The Java EE platform’s open infrastructure and toolkit make it easy to productize domain expertise into an enterprise application. Developers find that, on average, it reduces development time by 60%.
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Adapt to constantly changing business requirements with an open platform
TeamConnect is best-known by the legal and compliance operations applications offered by Mitratech under the TeamConnect brand. But these applications rest on and depend upon underlying collaboration and accountability capabilities embedded in our supporting platform, TeamConnect Enterprise. Clients and application partners have discovered the versatility and power of leveraging TeamConnect Enterprise for building their own Collaborative Accountability Applications infusing the domain expertise resident in their own organizations into custom process automation vital to their operations.
TeamConnect Enterprise is uniquely designed to support application functions necessary for two critical, yet opposing operating requirements. The first is a rapidly increasing demand for effective, fluid collaboration across teams, not just within a department, but across business units, and among extraprise participants. Collaboration in business has always been necessary, but there are a few drivers that make it even more critical today, including pressure to do more with less. Every year your organization needs to be more competitive in a more complex business environment while your access to resources at best increases slightly or more typically stays flat or shrinks. Successful organizations have responded to this by being very judicious about each dollar spent both internally and on ad hoc external resources, like outside counsel.
For example, conducting an internal investigation of a matter that’s being scrutinized by the SEC or U.S. Attorney’s office requires the collaboration of inside and outside counsel, forensic experts, internal audit, and the CFO. Addressing industrial and environmental disasters such as the BP oil field leak in the Gulf of Mexico are particularly important examples of an extraprise team operating in a high-liability function.
A system that promotes open participation by a diverse set of professionals is necessary so that these extraprise teams work together seamlessly in fluid collaboration, free of barriers with unfettered participation across geographical boundaries. And where information security and long-term traceability of high-liability actions are vital, everyone must work as though they are employed as internal staff.
Collaboration isn’t just a defensive measure. Efficient workgroup practices yield competitive advantage gained by being more agile and responsive, and improving the level of service to your clients. If facilitated for certain execution and retention of knowledge and actions, command centers gain visibility into and can better manage the end-to-end processes and workflows required for your mandated collaborative functions.
The other equally important, yet opposing requirement placed on your organization is the need for thorough accountability and event forensics. This is driven by the ever increasing scrutiny placed on businesses by regulators, by the court of public opinion, or by more strict self-imposed policies aimed at reducing risk exposure and ensuring good corporate citizenship. So you’re faced with the challenge: How to foster open collaboration yet ensure responsible execution for traceability and control? That’s the accountability aspect which requires an ability to restore an information state from a prior point in time. Essentially you’re tasked with being prepared to answer the question “Who knew what, when?” at any point a court or regulator asks.
Equally important are proactive measures aimed at improving operating accountability on an ongoing basis, such as the adoption and dissemination of policies, and being able prove policies authored, effectively implemented, enforced, and measured. TeamConnect Enterprise offers a platform for developing collaborative applications that hard-wires intrinsic accountability measures alongside facilities for unfettered participation in collaborative teams.
Of course, teamwork and flow of information in the extraprise presents security risks, especially for businesses-driven by high-value intellectual property or operating practices that are trade secrets. In today’s decentralized businesses, product development, R&D and customer service practices are highly IP-dependent yet their development can’t be competitively executed without assembling and enabling extraprise teams. Security allows the entire extraprise team to collaborate while keeping specific information secure, such as client Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Data security protecting the confidentiality, the integrity and the accessibility of your extraprise information, is an integral part of all versions of TeamConnect.
Mitratech designed TeamConnect Enterprise from the ground up to be a platform for developing Collaborative Accountability Applications (CAA). Any application built on the TeamConnect Enterprise platform, will inherit things such as comprehensive fine-grained security, traceability and full audit trail, accessibility for open participation, collaborative functions for extraprise teams, and the command center to oversee and manage all functions and workflows.
Only a platform approach ensures uniform practices
The traditional approach to deal with the numerous requirements of a business unit, whether legal operations, compliance or other, has been to isolate each problem, look at its specific requirements, and implement a system that meets the needs of that specific area. Point solutions in software applications might seem sensible on the surface, but they present numerous liabilities. Dissimilar point solutions require operating and data integrations which complicate maintenance and tend to make technical infrastructure more brittle, expensive and incomplete with respect to holistic workflow, accountability, security and discovery in investigations. Records are more likely to be polluted by duplicate entries, often with differences in data entry and errors. And multiple user interfaces elongate training times and raise likelihood of user mistakes.
The better approach is to provide a holistic view of legal and compliance operations and strategies, and address them together with a platform strategy. Now, the liabilities of point solutions vanish, replaced by a single comprehensible user interface, intrinsic application integrations, lower costs and when customizations are necessary, the focus can be on adding domain-mandated features without the time, cost and complexity of programming infrastructure functionality.
The benefits of the TeamConnect Enterprise platform for Collaborative Accountability Applications begin to multiply when you take a long-term holistic view of an organization's strategic needs. It becomes possible to address multiple needs with the same software and engineering investment. You have a platform that frees you from dependency on a single vendor since Mitratech’s TeamConnect applications can co-exist with third party ISV applications and your own internally-developed domain-infused applications, with no complications.
For example, a Mitratech client recently took a holistic approach with the TeamConnect platform to examine and address Risk and Legal needs together after evaluating the problems associated with having legal and risk operations managed in disjointed point solution applications. By unifying legal and risk operations in TeamConnect Enterprise applications, they found immediate benefits, including improved effectiveness of policies, better ability to negotiate insurance coverages, and much better insight into the velocity of litigation so coverage evaluations could be correlated to legal costs.
Another customer found utility extending the intrinsic collaborative accountability processes of TeamConnect legal automation to managing their inventory of desktop and notebook computers, and the policies associated with data management, data disposal and refresh policies when computers are assigned to new hires. For any organizational process requiring extended workgroup accommodation, repeatable practices, holistic communications and participation records and that expose your company to liability of any kind, TeamConnect Enterprise if the only development platform fully supportive of CAA requirements. Consider these examples:
Post meltdown credit crisis. The worst recession since the Great Depression has caused regulatory bodies such as the SEC to take a hard look at their internal processes and determine what went wrong. In some cases, companies such as Goldman Sachs are under the microscope by the SEC and the Department of Justice with respect to their involvement in the crisis. Being able to demonstrate exactly what happened, when and by who is critical if these companies are to defend their actions and ultimately prevail.
Social media. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The Internet took four years to reach 50 million people. In fewer than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users and had nearly half of a billion in 2010. Nearly all Fortune 500 organizations utilize social media in one form or another, and with it come a growing need for social media-specific policies and the means to enforce them.
Globalization of regulations. Since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, we have seen other countries adopt their own version of our corporate governance regimes, accelerated by a new round of regulation prompted by more recent crisis in credit and banking. Conversely, the U.S. has cooperated with other countries in addressing their compliance needs—the creation of the Safe Harbor program for transmitting personal information subject to the EU Data Privacy Directive comes to mind. This globalization of regulations is undoubtedly going to continue, exposing organizations operating across borders to increasingly complex liabilities.
Small ‘c’ compliance, such as protection of IP and consumer data. EU regulators promised new consumer privacy regulations after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerman essentially said early in 2010 that “privacy is dead.” What those regulations will look like is unclear at the moment but you can expect more compliance efforts on your part.
Migration to the Cloud. Cloud Computing is getting a lot of aattention, and if the enthusiasts are to be believed, everyone will be in the Cloud in just a few years. For enterprises that move their data to the Cloud, there must be a means to get data off dispersed servers in the event of litigation and it has to be via a method for proven integrity that courts will approve of. Right now, enterprises that are hosted in a multi-tenant environment will be challenged to fulfill routine discovery mandates in the event of litigation. Our TeamConnect SaaS clients, on the other hand, already have that means since they each have their own schema.
Bad guys are innovating and collaborating, too. Criminals are rapidly taking advantage of new Internet technology, in more ways than threatening Intellectual Property. There are endless pitfalls to becoming a victim of crime on the Internet. Social Media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter are being used to deliver malicious programs and attacks against websites as a daily occurrence. Information security professionals have their own discipline to address this problem, “incident response,” and you can expect other professionals to develop their own version, out of necessity. Incident Response is yet another process requiring the workgroup inclusion, repeatability and capture of participation that underlies all Collaborative Accountability domains.
Corporate disasters. It’s always something. In the spring and summer of 2010, BP’s disastrous blowout of an undersea oil well in the Gulf of Mexico dominated headlines. Whether considering the Collaborative Accountability undoubtedly associated with the cleanup effort, or eliminating the leak from the sea floor, or managing the legal and public relations aspects of the disaster, it’s truly a breathtaking challenge demanding vast extraprise collaboration with floodlit traceability of actions and knowledge. Disasters of this magnitude happen in an unending string of errors, mishaps and natural phenomena. What’s unknown is how fast and how effectively will the affected enterprise involved be able to understand what went wrong, and intelligently respond?
Collaborative Accountability Applications built on TeamConnect Enterprise can power that response in two ways: First, it will become the foundation for addressing the symptoms and getting at the root of the underlying cause. In the case of BP, CAA can be the command center for incorporating all of the extraprise knowledge and communications from team members. Second, CAA can provide a comprehensive and accurate history of all actions taken and who was responsible for what. Because security is built in and largely invisible, the integrity of that history will be able to withstand mandated scrutiny during legal proceedings.
All of the examples of CAA require accurate and actionable information (as opposed to just data), that travels through the extraprise transparently, and the actions taken on the strength of that information need to be reliably recorded for later review. Only TeamConnect Enterprise supports efficient development of CAA applications that inherit those strengths without additional programming.
We rely on TeamConnect, too.
We take CAA so seriously that we use TeamConnect Enterprise in our own business, leveraging its ability to support any end-to-end process for managing incidents and routine organizational functions. For example, we use a TeamConnect application to manage our software development process. By using case management in the product development process, everyone in the process has visibility into what’s working and what’s not and as a consequence, flaws and limitations are readily discovered by the company, not by the customer. TeamConnect can be used to manage and document security incidents, such as when hackers attack a network or a laptop is stolen.
Independent developers enrich our ecosystem
In looking at the most successful products and services to be introduced in, say, the last 30 years, you will find that nearly all have a rich ecosystem of users that expand and customize the product or service. TeamConnect is no exception. Our customers and third parties are free to bring their vision of what the system can do for them to life. In fact, it’s not uncommon for clients to develop solutions on TeamConnect. We’ve found that being able use industry-standard tools resonates with clients and inspires them to want to further develop the capability of TeamConnect. It’s not often that you can provide someone with a solution that inspires them to do more work, but that’s just what TeamConnect instigates.