Navigating Digital Complexity
The 21st-century digital revolution has led to a significant increase in the adoption of digital business tools. As businesses evolve, they need to invest in technologies and tools that support unique process landscapes in ways that are both efficient and effective.
A report from 2021 suggests that company-wide departments, such as engineering, IT, marketing, and finance, use over 200 apps on average – a number that has significantly increased in the last five years. However, decision-makers still face an imminent question before adding more tools to their company’s technology stack: Does adding more tools to your technology stack improve business operations or can you do it without increasing your tools counter?
New tech is flashy, tempting, and can indeed help modernize business if implemented correctly, but it presents significant challenges, such as costly upgrades, steeper learning curves for employees, and inefficient use of time and resources during the transition process.
The oft-not-told industry secret is that instead of investing in new technology, businesses can optimize their existing technology ecosystem to maximize its benefits and productivity, effectively addressing their business challenges that seem solvable only by new apps. Let’s take a deep dive!
Factors That Drive Business Performance
Technology must be viewed as one aspect of a comprehensive digital strategy for driving business growth. A holistic approach that considers organizational culture, customer satisfaction, financial stability, change management, and employee training is more likely to lead to sustainable business growth and success.
The key word in all of this is holistic.This is something we strive to impart upon our clients: There is no one app that will solve every problem, fit every process, or make every employee happy. What this means is that if your company is struggling with monthly close technology, it’s unlikely that a new off-the-shelf accounting app will fix the problem. What’s needed is a close look at how the app you have now fits into the overall business/technology landscape, how well it’s been adopted and how well it plays with other tech used in the business.
Smart Adoption of Technology
Our first rule: your tech should work for you, not the other way around. 94% of UK employees express frustration with workplace technology, and 1 in 5 consider job change due to tech dissatisfaction. Much of this experience comes from having to use multiple tools across the day, remember multiple logins, and still fill gaps where the tech falls short. Certainly this calls for reevaluating the software strategy. If employees are spending more time searching for information, reorienting themselves, and copy-pasting than they are working on productive tasks, that’s a major problem.
Here, smart technology adoption plays a critical role.
What we’ve learned over many projects, working with many clients, is that optimization can go much farther than brand new implementations. Which means we’ve learned to support business initiatives that optimize a company’s existing technology ecosystem with better integration and reporting.
By addressing the miscommunications between different software/processes in the company’s ecosystem, or integrating more familiar tools to provide interface familiarity for employees and utilize the same data at a lower cost, companies can increase the longevity, functionality, value of tools they’ve already invested in. This is key terminology. Viewing tools as long-term investments means thinking twice about the strategy of replacing apps that don’t go the full mile, and instead developing a strategy to help those tools get there.
For instance, companies having outdated ERP systems – not well integrated with other business software – may believe that replacing the ERP is the solution. However, the issue is often a lack of communication between apps, not the ERP itself.
That’s where our approach comes in. Instead of replacing the ERP, which a company has already invested in, we propose an intermediary system that integrates the important data and processes from multiple apps into a single workflow. There are other successful examples and methods, but the point is doing more with what you already have.
Steps to Improve Existing Technology
Here are some major steps to improve your company’s existing technology performance.
Understand the Business Need
To optimize technology and develop a successful digital strategy, it’s important first to define what a business success actually is. Increased speed to close? Rooting out manual data work? Mitigating inaccuracies in reporting? Your technology plan should be mission-centered, clearly defining goals far more specific and granular than “digital transformation”.
Run a Process Audit
Running an audit is crucial in optimizing your business’s existing technology. Where are your bottlenecks? A system audit helps identify areas for improvement, redundant or outdated systems, and any potential security risks. A comprehensive review of your technology infrastructure can show you exactly where you’re falling short, and where you can get by for a little longer, helping you prioritize where to spend.
Research & Planning (Shopping!)
Once the system audit is conducted, it’s time to gather information about available technology solutions and determine the best approach to address the issues identified in the audit. You can go this process alone, but often it’s valuable to consult with experts, whether that’s a tech company like Interject or a consultancy that works with a number of vendors. Obviously we’d love to work with you, but this isn’t a sales pitch.
Launch a Pilot
Launching a company-wide implementation of a brand new software rarely goes as planned. Adoption is usually bleak. There’s almost always a big learning curve. For these reason, running pilot programs–either to a specific department or, better, a specific team–will lead to much better outcomes. Pilots allow you to vet a solution, iron out most of its kinks, and establish a sense of the learning curve all before rolling it out to a larger user-base.
Evaluate & Incorporate Feedback
Once the pilot is launched, evaluate its performance and incorporate feedback from relevant stakeholders and staff. Usually bugs and hitches will be readily apparent, but staying in communication with your end users will uncover more subtle annoyances and bottlenecks that wouldn’t otherwise turn up. It’s absolutely key.
Launch Company-Wide
After careful evaluation and multiple iterations of feedback, you can start taking the solution to a wider base. This is called a roll-out for a reason, though. Slow and steady wins here
Benefits of Improving Existing Technology
This is where we plead our case. There is so much more to be gained from your existing software–we promise. Here again the emphasis is on ROI. You spent a lot of money and time on your tech. Unless it’s utterly unsupported, there is a case to be made for solutions that lean into your existing tech before buying new.
- Increased operational efficiency: Often after a certain amount of time, your users will know the software really well. They’ll know its holes, they’ll know its strengths. If some things are not going well, like say reporting is too rigid, a firm like ours can step in and make those improvements without jettisoning the tech altogether. Because the team already knows the app, efficiency goes through the roof once the app is optimized.
- Enhanced employee productivity: This is pretty clear: improving rather than replacing enhances employee productivity by enabling users to utilize existing tools with higher efficiency and performance. For instance, you can automate some or all of your company’s ETL processes without replacing apps, and you gain new, fast functionality in an app that everyone already knows how to use and is comfortable in.
- Reduced costs: The first and largest cost reduction here is that you won’t have to buy and implement a whole new tool. Second, though, is that what you spend on automation and optimization will significantly reduce labor hours and mistakes, which both equal money.
- Better employee retention: Optimizing existing technology contributes to better employee retention, as it relieves employees from the burden of learning new technology and adapting to unnecessary change.
How Interject Helped HP Improve Existing Technology & Get Rid of Their Data Bottlenecks?
Hewlett Packard’s 3D printing division faced challenges in managing and analyzing data from multiple sources and locations. Interject improved their business processes significantly.
- Why HP turned to Interject?
Interject allows companies to quickly create tailored reports and applications across multiple sources and collect user input, removing the dependency on manual spreadsheets.
- How Interject helped HP?
Interject’s unique approach to automation solved HP’s problems using its existing process, reporting, and data management. It allowed the team to pivot quickly and keep management updated on the health and outcomes of its research programs.
- What impact did Interject create for HP?
The solution implemented involved automating the data transfer process between multiple sources and spreadsheets, which previously was a manual and time-consuming task. The time for delivery was cut down from almost a week to about 4 hours.
This significant improvement in efficiency had a positive impact on the company’s overall productivity and allowed the employees to focus on more value-adding tasks. Read the complete case study here.
The current landscape of products continually pressures leaders and users to abandon what they know for what’s new. What we’re proposing is to make new ways to use what you already know.
Surely a time comes when new technology is mandated. But those times are far less common than the market leads us to think.
Contact the Interject Solutions Team at info@gointerject.com