Now, more than ever, our businesses must navigate new pathways toward optimization amongst shifting behaviors between our customers and employees in an increasingly technology-dependent world.
Although the technology automation landscape offers many tools and solutions for meeting the demand, it can be a hard world to navigate. And equally important – a business’s processes must lead toward optimal efficiency, business growth, and measurable outcomes to protect the bottom line and competitive edge.
Consider these 8 important strategies as you plan and enact your Digital Transformation journey!
1. Focus on the right mix of digital transformation and process optimization strategies.
Digital transformation never completely ends, and no organization has the time, resources, or budget to transform its technology and business processes every year. Instead, optimizing your business processes and augmenting them with automation will enable your IT team – and everyone else – to grow your organization with intention in the long-term.
Prioritize and optimize the right processes that will bring value to the enterprise. A bad process, once automated, will simply produce bad results faster.
Focus on deploying the right technology solutions that will move your key business initiatives forward, like producing faster processing times, or freeing up your staff for higher value work.
Work with your leadership and key stakeholders to take an always-on approach to fine-tuning business processes, and exploring intelligent automation solutions that align with your business priorities.
2. Centralize your processes and data with a content services platform.
A content services platform will unite all your systems and data with all your teams’ efforts. Traditional business processes rely on paper documents, manual hand-keying of data, slow document deliveries, and more that introduce roadblocks into your operations. You can reduce processing times, increase collaboration, and streamline interactions digitally with a tailored Enterprise Content Management system, and incorporate other intelligent automation technologies to extend the value of your content services platform.
Provide a central, accurate, and up-to-date platform from which employees are able to quickly and easily retrieve and work with content in a modern, seamless way – across devices and organizational boundaries.
Explore document and data capture, content management, robotic process automation, powerful search capabilities, and analytics as part of your end-to-end content services platform.
A content services platform should tightly integrate with important business-level systems, so all documents and data are quickly accessible for a comprehensive view.
3. Improve efficiency and productivity.
There are certain activities in every organization that must be completed regardless of how long they take, like reporting and responding to customer inquiries. These can often be done much faster and with greater accuracy utilizing solutions that automate your important processes. And your staff will be glad to focus their expertise on the higher-value work that they’re capable of.
Identify which processes are ripe for automation at your organization – those that are rife with structured and unstructured content, are prone to manual data entry, and have the potential to introduce errors into your business.
Invest in a seamless automation approach, prioritizing efficiency and productivity. Tools such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can serve lightweight use cases, like easily augmenting an employee’s daily work with a software robot. Take a holistic approach in your automation roadmap, considering your user base and their needs.
4. Manage regulatory compliance seamlessly.
Compliance standards are detailed and ever-changing, but there is so much on the line for heavily-regulated organizations that a solution that gets it right – and makes compliance easier – can prove invaluable. Audits, fraud cases, and new requirements can be automated, managed, ad monitored with ease.
Give your team complete visibility into your processes, from document tracking to retention to storage, and ensure that access is managed appropriately.
Integrate with your core business systems to minimize the IT stack and limit information access to the appropriate individuals.
Incorporate flexibility into your automation solution, enabling your team to quickly and easily adapt to regulatory changes.
5. Bring speed and agility to your technology strategy.
Agility wins, and your competitive edge relies on it. Regardless of industry, an organization must be adaptable, quick, and able to rapidly respond to an environment that may be volatile and highly competitive as the pace of business accelerates.
Today’s “low code” capabilities can cut the average number of weeks required to develop and deliver an application for your user base.
Enabling your teams to expand quickly within a suite of flexible, cloud-based, and low-code applications lead to increased collaboration, better communication while maintaining tighter platform-level security.
6. Get your cloud strategy off the ground.
A proven cloud solution is more than just storage for your business content – it’s business continuity, enhanced visibility, improved resilience and security, and an opportunity to scale your growth in a strategic, modernized IT infrastructure. This is especially true for already-burdened IT teams, who may not have the time or resources to dedicate to your automation journey.
Focus your business development case on how your organization will leverage cloud-delivered solutions to increase your user insights and experiences, reduce load on IT resourcing, and ultimately grow revenue and lower operational costs.
If a cloud-based system is replacing an on-prem piece of software, work with a trusted partner to ensure successful migration, transfer, and upkeep of your important data.
Select a hosting partner that fits your organizational needs – considering future enhancements, solution upkeep, server access, and compliance.
7. Use technology to focus on your people.
Technology should make the quality of conducting business better for everyone that encounters it – both your employees and your customers or members. The right process and automation tools will make your employees’ days more productive, customer interactions more enjoyable and personal, and outcomes swifter and more accurate.
Utilize technology tools to meet your customer where they stand – be it onboarding, document processing, in-person interactions, or more. Technology will help ensure your employees are working with up-to-date, accurate, and personalized information.
Automated communication tools help your employees and customers get the info they need, when they need it, where they need it.
Seek to eliminate manual, boring, and labor-intensive tasks from your team’s plate – leaving your employees happier and more productive.
8. Keep your eyes open for the next bend in the road.
The pace of change in today’s business climate demands constant evolution and adjustments to our processes and technology. Keep an eye to the horizon for new forks in the road, and seek out a trusted partner, such as Shamrock Solutions, that can help you plan your digital transformation roadmap for the future.
Facilitate a corporate culture supportive of digital innovation, including key stakeholders and business advocates that can help convey the need for improved business processes.
Garner input from your team throughout the process – the people who will actually be using the software.
Connect your highest-value business processes with agile technology to meet today’s demands and mitigate tomorrow’s risks and concerns.
Venture forth!
Have questions, concerns, or need a hand prioritizing your automation roadmap? We’re here to help! Talk with us today about your digital transformation needs.