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Our Love-Hate Relationship with Technology

Technology – most of us continue to have a love-hate relationship with technology. Whether it’s simply your phone that choose to update itself and cancel an important alarm, enterprise technology that does not meet your needs or creates a clumsy user experience, the various components that we rely on rarely seem to be operating in a manner that makes our life easier.

Regardless of whether you are playing a key role at a growth-oriented corporation or within a thriving university, there is a great chance that when it comes to technology, you may be experiencing one of the following emotions:

Frustrated with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Systems (ERP), Finance and Accounting, Student Information Systems, Order Management Systems and others that are in place. And on top of that, you are starting to think about your next move as you are losing confidence in vendors/solutions ability to meet most of your organization’s needs.
Overwhelmed because your organization has acquired many applications over the years. Perhaps the excessive applications were the result of an acquisition. Regardless of the cause, the effect is that there are too many to work with and they do NOT work together.
Confused and Stuck as your organization may have implemented a new system in the last 5 years, give or take, but for some reason, your organization is NOT that efficient. You still rely heavily on spreadsheets and information resides in quite a few locations.
Cautiously Optimistic with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Systems (ERP), Finance and Accounting, Student Information Systems, Order Management Systems and others that are in the process of being implemented. You feel the process and participation has been effective and you are holding out hope that when it comes time to “go live”, you can realize the benefits that have been anticipated.
Excited with the new system; it is up and running and you are seeing the value already.
Let Down with the new system. You have “gone live” and it’s not what was promised. The results are very disappointing.

Take Action to Take Control

As context, during any given year, Transforming Solutions is involved with a few dozen projects that surround mapping processes, defining requirements, creating use cases, assembling business requirement documents (BRDs), performing software evaluations and selections, reviewing software and services contacts, assessing complex technology portfolios and application architectures. We have been assisting our clients in these areas for over 20 years. It the risk of sounding boastful, we evaluate more technology in a year than most professionals do in their career.

The purpose of this blog is to share a few best practices and trends that we see (or in some cases, don’t see), in the hopes that you can take control of your situation and drive greater alignment, efficiency and quality to create a better user experience and realize the intended benefits.

Here are the Top 5 Actions that frequently get discussed but rarely get executed properly.

Using Process as a Differentiator – Surprisingly, we still see few organizations map out their processes and think about how they want their processes to work. I know, I know- this is basic, but few dive into the important detail and think through how the underlying technology should make that process come to life in the most efficient and effective manner possible.

There have been numerous, well-circulated white papers and case studies, yet this shortcoming persists. Of course, this task takes time and discipline. But as we say, “an ounce of process design is worth a pound of implementation”. Organizations that invest in spending a handful of hours doing this activity realize a payoff in having a cleaner, more aligned process and application design.

Define a Business Case and Follow up the Expected Benefits – it seems that most frequently, organizations estimate costs to acquire software and implement the various products that are associated with that implementation. Based on our experience, more time is spent on the cost estimation side than the potential benefits. The reason costs, rather than benefits, are an area of emphasis is logical – costs will be defined and included in a contract, benefits will not. Benefits are harder to estimate, and, in many areas, they are “squishy” – hard to nail down and quantify. There is an overall reluctance to define these, for the natural fear of senior executives wanting these benefits to be guaranteed.

From Transforming Solution’s perspective, as hard as the task of estimating benefits is, it is one that, without turning it into an incredibly time-consuming process, is essential. At least categorically, we need to define answers to these questions below.

1. How do you envision the processes should become more efficient?
2. How will quality and/or accuracy improve?
3. How can speed or response time get better?
4. How will the lives of prospective customers, customers, other constituents and employees improve?
5. Will costs go down?
6. What legacy systems can we retire?
7. How will the new system help us scale?
8. What other benefits (e.g., increased revenue) are fair to expect?

The primary reason for this centers on the need to have a clear “definition of success”. When we do that, after the implementation is completed and the users have overcome the natural learning curve, we can revisit these questions to assess how successful we were.

Establish a Partnership with the Primary Vendors – A great implementation is a function of many factors, not the least of which is the role played by the primary vendor or vendors who provide and implement the software. Many of the successful implementations we see and, at times are part of, have a fair agreement that covers expectations (at times in the form of a service level agreement) in many areas.

Here are a few questions that often get missed:

- When will vendors and project participants be onsite?
- How detailed are the requirements and what is the format of the BRD?
- Is this oriented on the current or the future state of the processes and organization?
- Who from the client will arbitrate differences in direction and requirements that naturally exist between different key stakeholders? How quickly will these issues get resolved and what latitude do you give the vendors with respect to deadlines and milestones?
- Who is taking the lead for data conversion? What and how is this occurring?
- How will turnover, both for the client and the vendor, be handled?

Leverage the process work in Design Sessions, Training and the Business Case and as part of Organizational Change Management (OCM) – Well-documented future state process work can be an important asset for months and years to come. We are seeing (and recommending) this documentation be used as an important input to design sessions and to help set the context for training sessions. Utilizing BOTH the process work and answers to the eight questions above within training and as part of the OCM plan (addressing the “what’s in it for me”) is incredibly important to answer the natural “why should we do it this way” questions that will arise.

Treat the Project with the same energy and enthusiasm as a major new product, service or division launch – So often, when folks start talking about assembling a team for an effort to support a major system replacement, it parallels the impending fatigue similar to a journey around the world….on a mule…while dragging an anvil…through the desert. You get the picture. People are NOT leaping for joy – especially those that have been through a similar project that has gone awry.

Instead, what if we treated this type of project with care and intent, like one planning the launch of an exciting new product? We almost NEVER see this, but slowly, with some progressive organizations, we are starting to see a shift in their mindset. Taking a “launch” mindset can have a major impact on the OCM culture and mindset along with the entire project approach.