Creating a strategic vision for your technology: Leveraging Technology

You’re now ready to no longer look at your software as the anchor holding you back, but instead a tool to allow you to achieve goals never before possible.

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.

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This is the final 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: Adapting your business process

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The Plan

Principles and Vision

Now that we’ve discussed the People and the Process, we turn our attention to the technology itself and how we drive the adoption of this technology once we’ve determined its fit and value for our organization.

Our principles and vision will act as the cornerstones to our technology stack that we’re building. To set our cornerstones, we need to start by ensuring that our vision of what we’re accomplishing with our technology is aligned with what the stack will deliver.

• Why do we need this technology and what do we need it to accomplish for us?
• What do our users need from this software and how can we ensure that those needs are met and drive successful adoption?
• What do we want our constituents to experience? Ease of use, accessibility, self-service, reliability, etc.
• Are our internal teams ready to adjust business processes and practices to fully leverage this new technology?
• With a focus on outcomes, not outputs, what does success look like 6 months, 1 year, 3 years and 5 years down the road.
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Evaluation, Feedback and Reviews

With our Principles and Vision outline, it’s time to evaluate our potential new technology to make sure we made the right choice. You’re likely not the first to take on this transformation. What can you learn from those that have gone before you and what’s their experience been? Gathering feedback and customer reviews can not only reassure you that you’ve made the right choice, or not, but can also lead to insights on what others who have been through this process have learned and how you can avoid common pitfalls. Collect this feedback often, not just at the beginning of the process, but before implementation, mid-implementation and post go live.

Your technology can become a differentiator instead of a liability to your business.

Roadmap and Architecture

Using the Principles and Vision that you’ve started to outline from the questions above, now it’s time to think about how you’re going to realize that vision with your technology by putting together a roadmap and structure of how to get there.

We’ll start by looking at our current technology and the vision, and think a moment about the gap. Consider your current software(s) and its components that are already in place and then what is going to need to be added or replaced for the new technology. It’s important to not only think about the software that you’re implementing, but the company and the team behind the software.

• Is the software being actively developed?
• How many releases a year are deployed?
• What are the features on the roadmap for development for the next 6, 12, 24 months?
• How does the team determine what features to develop?
• Will the team be a collaborative partner in developing the software and evolving with your business?

Next is to lock in your perfect stack. YMCA, JCC and Rec Centers have complex business needs. When one software is trying to do everything, it will end up not doing anything very well. So you will very likely require a stack of software that will be tightly integrated to ensure a smooth user experience and provide a single source of truth for your data, while allowing for apps and extensibility to leverage 3rd party tools that bring the best of bread to your perfect stack.

By leveraging the business functions and processes we outlined previously, we can use that as a tool to ensure we’re building a stack of software that meets your every business need. And if you’ve identified a vendor that is truly a collaborative partner, they’ll be able to guide you and engineer a stack of integrated solutions to meet all your needs, principles and achieve your technology vision.

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Team Skill Sets

We’ve previously talked about key leadership in our implementation team, and as we approach the implementation stage, it’s important to start thinking about our larger team’s ability to take on this project. Do we have the people power along with the right skill sets that can implement this technology and fully leverage all the potential it brings to your organization? It’s likely that we need to develop a plan to address any skill gaps, coach staff who are not seeing and buying into the vision or not aligned on principles and goals, and providing any necessary trainings and skill development.

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Implementation, Metrics and Delivery

Think about how and what data you will collect to ensure that this implementation is successful and meeting your goals and vision while maintaining your principles. How will this data drive you and your team and how will you know when you need to course correct? This data, a plan for collection, and analysis will be critical to have at the outset because as you begin implementation, the project can take over the focus of the team and tunnel vision will start to set in. A laser focus on task completion will begin to set in, so having a predetermined plan for data and analysis with regular check-ins will help to ensure that the team will have opportunities to pause and reflect and their progress and make any necessary adjustments to the the implementation plan.

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Summary

And there you have it. This three part blog series will give you a fundamental outlook on how to prep your organization for change, identify and improve critical business processes, find a collaborative partner in your digital transformation, and lock in your perfect stack of integrated software to ensure that your organization is setup for success for many years to come.

With empowered staff who are adapting processes and workflows to find a new way to work to better serve your members and stakeholders and reduce the friction points in doing business with your organization, your technology can become a differentiator instead of a liability to your business.  

Are you ready to see how Traction Rec can revolutionize your organization?

Now that you’re team is lined up and ready to tackle the challenge of a Traction Rec implementation and revolutionize your organization's data and operations, let’s take a deeper look at Traction Rec and the Salesforce Platform that it’s built on.