Creating a strategic vision for your technology: Adopting your business process

When your organization makes the decision to start down the path of a strategic vision for it’s technology infrastructure future, you’ll be faced with a flood of questions:

• Where do we start when it comes to implementing new software?
• Why isn’t what we have good enough?
• Why do we need to invest in technology?
• How can we ensure that we will be successful?
• What’s the right technology for us?

While these are all important questions, they start with the technology and end state in mind. In order to be successful, an organization must begin by examining its people, then be open to critical thinking about their processes, before moving to implementation. Without these two components, the technology is at risk to fail due to low adoption and employee buy in.

<hr></hr>This is the second part of a three-part series, which reviews the critical components that make a digital transformation successful: people, process and technology. Keep reading:

• Creating a strategic vision for your technology: Building your team
• Creating a strategic vision for your technology: Leveraging your technology

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Enabling change in your processes and workflows

Once your team is ready to start the journey of digital transformation, it’s time to examine your operations and processes. Legacy systems lead to legacy processes that include workflow and workarounds that were implemented with a previous system in place.

As you’ll hear echoing in the halls of Traction Rec and our clients, “Just because it made sense, doesn’t mean that it makes sense.”

But where do we start?

Structure

‍Identify the key business units in your organization that own various business processes. From program staff such as camp department, fitness center, children’s programs, early learning, to member services and sales, to administrative support staff such as marketing, accounting, fundraising, and business services. These are key departments that ensure that your business runs every day and serves the needs of your stakeholders.

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Functions

‍Once you have these department structures identified above, the next step is to identify the key business functions that each of them owns and manages. It can be helpful to map this out in a mind-mapping or chart-building tool such as MindNode or LucidChart.

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Processes‍

After you’ve identified those critical business functions, you can then document the step-by-step process that your organization takes to complete the function in its current state. Focusing on the actions, roles, and task owners, you can now look at how your org currently completes this process and how your current technology plays a role as well as how many staff it takes to complete the process. After you have the process mapped out in your current state, this is a great opportunity to identify which business processes could use a fresh look to find efficiencies and identify areas where technology can enable you to improve efficiencies and levels of service to stakeholders in your ideal future state.

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Extrapolate Business Requirements

‍By mapping these processes in your current state, and starting to dig into the evolutions that need to take place to achieve an ideal future state, we can begin to identify the key business requirements that need to be communicated in a technology implementation plan to provide the greatest possible value in your digital transformation.

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Setup for Success

Taking these steps to map out the structure and functions of your organization, their processes, and business requirements will arm you with the vision you’ll need to be successful in your digital transformation. These insights will provide a roadmap to your technology implementation partner to ensure that you’re on the same page and set you up for success during your project implementation.

If your team is lined up and ready to tackle the challenge to implement change, connect with us to take a deeper look at your vision.