Interconnect Your Organization
Breaking down departmental silos is not for the faint of heart.
Each group within your organization has complex processes and one-off technology platforms. Digitally transforming processes within a single department can be difficult, but bringing those groups together to break down silos across your organization requires change management, clear vision, and possibly a little bit of patience.
Not only can this improve your stakeholders’ experience and save countless internal hours, we often find that organizations are significantly overpaying for various disparate software solutions, proving a hard return on investment in early stages.
How to Get Started
Strategic Planning Sessions
It’s important to get key team members on the same page from day one. Strategic planning sessions can help you understand cross-functional strengths and weaknesses. Areas of opportunity are outlined and each team can outline areas of concern. This process helps you land on unified objectives and set clear expectations.
Map Data Ecosystem
In conjunction with the strategic planning sessions, all existing systems, data inputs, and outputs should be mapped to understand your organization at a macro level. This process helps to set priorities for the cross-functional team. Once outlined, this ecosystem map will guide decisions throughout the transformation initiative.
Understand Your Processes
It is critical for teams to understand the work of their colleagues. We have found that efficiencies can be created through this exercise alone. Team A realizes that team B is taking several of the same steps they take, duplicating work each day. Through process mapping, we have helped countless clients better understand their current state. Lifting up rocks to see the creepy crawlies can feel painful, but sustainable change requires it. Our industry-specific process engineers lead discovery sessions to map, then re-engineer core processes, identifying time and money-saving improvements.
Improve Data Intake
How are your various teams intaking new data in their processes today? Far more organizations that you would think still rely on paper-driven forms and processes. Even “digital” processes can be antiquated and require more manual work than necessary. Our focus here is to cut off day-forward paper processes by building custom digital forms or collaborating with one of our software partners, like Nintex, Bottomline, or Hyland, to shut off your paper at the source. For natively digital intake, we look to partners like AWS and KnowledgeLake to more accurately extract and make use of the information trapped inside emails, documents, and attachments.
Aggregate Data Across Teams
Normalizing and aggregating data across disparate departmental systems is one of the most impactful changes to prioritize. In order to truly connect your teams, you have to start by looking under the hood. What identifiers can be utilized across various systems to aggregate and normalize your data? Tactics such as data lakes or data warehouses can be utilized to bring this data together, drastically increasing the value it presents to your organization.
Unify Data & Content Management
Moving toward an enterprise-wide content services platform is often an impactful early-stage change. Teams across your entire organization can access, route and automate critical content for daily processes. Content services can easily scale. Starting with a single department can be a more feasible approach. Understanding the system and gaining power users helps to drive change as you work toward an enterprise-wide implementation.
Plan for Change Management
Change is difficult, even for those of us who build our careers on it. Planning ahead for the pain that some individuals in your organization may experience is often undervalued by change drivers, but we can assure you that any time spent to make this flow more smoothly will be paid back in dividends upon implementation. People want to feel like they are part of the change, not simply ordered to create new systems and habits. Change management tactics, including organizational change management, should undoubtedly be included in your roadmap.