Most accounting and consulting firms embraced the cloud and Microsoft Teams during the pandemic, allowing their staff to collaborate remotely. But if your firm’s efforts to promote digital collaboration stopped there, you’re missing an opportunity to make your firm more competitive in every way.
When you further optimize Microsoft Teams and related Microsoft 365 tools, your firm can further increase its productivity, profitability, and success.
So what exactly does optimizing Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 involve? It helps to look at the full spectrum of digital transformation your firm can make and what your firm gains with each successive stage of evolution.
Taking an incremental approach to optimizing Microsoft 365
Chances are your firm is at this stage of digital transformation: You’ve discovered how cloud-based Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint enable remote or hybrid collaboration and facilitate online chatting and videoconferencing. You’re no longer tied to the physical office or dependent on Zoom.
But perhaps you’re encountering Microsoft Teams sprawl — the proliferation of unused, disorganized Teams channels and data. Maybe you’re also experiencing too many disparate communication channels for each engagement within Teams, and finding none are set up for the way the engagement team needs to collaborate. You can avoid these problems by moving to the next stage of digital transformation.
Improving efficiency with purpose-built workspaces for accounting and consulting firms
Once your firm has begun working in the cloud, you can gain greater efficiency by optimizing the Microsoft 365 apps for the needs of your industry. Intapp Collaboration & Content solutions provide partners and professionals with secure hubs for each engagement that unify all relevant documents and communications from across Microsoft 365 and business systems.
In particular, Intapp Workspaces optimizes Microsoft Teams to create a customizable dashboard from which you can access all information about a particular engagement within a single pane of glass. As a result, your professionals don’t waste time navigating between Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and other firm systems trying to track down shared documents and information related to each of their engagements.
Saving this time helps your firm avoid cost overruns on engagements and increases your firm’s ability to take on new clients and engagements.
Although optimizing Microsoft 365 in this way is just one improvement in your overall digital evolution, it has significant benefits. In fact, research shows that an incremental approach to improving digital performance not only is more affordable than a radical digital transformation but also results in nearly the same revenue growth as a dramatic overhaul.
Optimizing knowledge capture and knowledge surfacing with AI and automation
Once your firm has created a single plane of glass through which it can more efficiently work on an engagement, the next step in your digital evolution is to improve your ability to capture knowledge and automatically surface it for related projects, saving your team from having to rediscover insights or recreate work.
For example, “Let’s say one of your professionals has written a document that provides particularly good advice on a tax issue,” explains Gary Palmer, Intapp Practice Group Leader for Intapp Collaboration & Content. “With Intapp solutions, you can capture that information in a workflow to establish a best practice in the firm’s knowledge base, stripping out any specific customer information.”
Once that information is captured, professionals within the firm might nevertheless forget about it — so how can you ensure the knowledge automatically surfaces for any subsequent work on equivalent engagements? With Intapp and Microsoft Viva Topics and its AI capabilities, “You’ll receive a prompt that says, more or less, ‘Here’s a piece of content in your knowledge management database that could help you with this engagement,’” explains Palmer.
“Accounting and consulting firms are fundamentally offering knowledge and expertise, so a system that better captures and automatically surfaces that knowledge and expertise is the natural next step in digital evolution,” says Palmer.
Taking the next step in your firm’s digital evolution
No matter what stage of digital transformation your firm is in, the next incremental step will result in significant benefits that help your firm in a competitive market.
If you’d like to learn more about how Intapp Collaboration & Content can increase your firm’s productivity and profitability, you can read more here and request a personalized demo.