Knowledge workers know all too well the struggles of legacy document management systems: reduced productivity, inadequate security, and inhibited collaboration.
We built iManage Work specifically to help overcome these issues. Our technology offers a better way for knowledge workers to create, collaborate, and secure high-value documents—but the exact value of “a better way” can be hard to quantify. That’s why we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the return on investment our customers realized by deploying iManage Work.
The challenges of legacy systems
For the 2023 study, Forrester interviewed four iManage customers in depth. These customers were global organizations in the Financial services, Oil & gas, Consulting, and Technology industries. The core users of iManage in these organizations were the Legal department along with their key stakeholders across the organization, and related departments who work with sensitive or high-value content.
Before investing in iManage, these customers struggled with information silos. As an Information Manager in the Consulting industry put it:
“The biggest pain of [our legacy document management system] was around permissions. We’ve got 730 law function colleagues working different little [legacy system] carve-outs. There was no single repository the whole law function had access to. It was like people were lifting a few small rocks randomly around the surface of the moon. Everything was so super siloed. Eliminating silos, even for a single document, took reaching out to IT to get permissions, and that took a day or two. Everything was full of obstacles to get to knowledge.”
Collaboration was also a challenge, as indicated by a Manager of Information and Services in the Oil and Gas industry:
“There was a lot of frustration in the law function around using [legacy document management solutions]. The lawyer’s knowledge and their documents were locked up in either personal drives or shared drives. Everyone wanted to upload knowledge, find knowledge, and collaborate both within the law group and with external business clients more easily.”
Likewise, security was a point of concern. Interviewees noted that their document management systems lacked “secure self-service means for staff to access and exchange documents” as well as “controls and an audit trail for who could access documents and how those individuals could work with that content (e.g., make changes vs. read-only), both internally and externally.”
The benefits of iManage Work by the numbers
After deploying iManage Work, the customers in this study saw significant benefits. The Information Manager in the Consulting industry noted they saw savings worth millions of dollars:
“The standardization of working was our top benefit. Before we deployed iManage, you can imagine 30 offices having 30 different people pulling and storing information in their own location. First, they must search for it, click on it, and then copy that file… again for the next one, which takes forever. We tallied that the number of hours saved over a period of time counted to approximately $3 million worth of savings.”
To better understand how other organizations may benefit from adopting iManage Work, Forrester created a composite organization based on the interviewees to illustrate the business outcomes delivered. This composite organization was described as:
[A] multibillion-dollar organization with dual headquarters in North America and the UK and serves businesses and consumers worldwide. The organization operates in the highly-regulated financial services industry and must adhere to FINRA regulations, Section 404 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, and the ISO/IEC 27001. The organization boasts 50,000 global employees, 350 of whom are from the legal department. Its documents span a diverse range of the organization’s high-risk or high-value intellectual property and other sensitive documents (e.g., contracts, litigation, human resources documentations, financials, methodologies, patents, and executive transition materials).
Based on the results of this study, the composite organization saw the following benefits:
- 370% ROI after three years with payback in less than six months
- $8.1M Net Present Value
- 240 hours per user saved annually
- $720,300 of value from improved collaboration internally & externally
- $4.7M of value from risk mitigation and security
Discover the impact of iManage
It can be difficult to quantify the benefit of a better way. With this study, the impact of iManage Work is clear. Learn more about how our customers saw improved productivity, faster collaboration, and enhanced security protections with iManage Work by reading the full study.
