Post-Pandemic Success: The Technology Roadmap
This year our society has changed at unprecedented rates, an extraordinary challenge to manage in the marketplace. To adapt to the uncertainty, the tools & technology commercially used have also changed along with it. Survival may be a powerful motivator at this time, but even so, companies must remain focused on revolutionizing the way they operate to position themselves for a more prosperous future.
How companies address people, plans, and priorities will drastically alter their success moving through COVID-19 and beyond. By examining these in varying degrees of detail, organizations have been able to shift perspectives on uncertainty from fear to opportunity. Developing the right roadmap is key.
The following explains just how to look at people when defining success, how to develop a plan for technology success, and how prioritize rapid digital transformation enabling a roadmap to success for today and tomorrow.
People
The needs of a few often explain the changes, motivations, and needs of many. At any organization, thought leaders should do their best to define precisely who those people are at the outset.
Who is your customer?
Today’s customer may be drastically different than who they were just one year ago. Addressing this immediately seeks to illuminate unnoticed areas of value (i.e. revenue) to any organization.
What are your customer needs? How has this changed?
A customer in 2020 may have an entirely new set of needs that make prior products / services nearly irrelevant. In other ways, that new set of needs may be drastically under-served. Identifying these needs and how they have changed will clarify precisely why an organization should be prioritizing some things over others.
Who is my workforce? How are they valuable?
Having defined the previous points, organizations should be assessing whether they have the human capacity to deliver to these needs. When making that assessment, it’s important to remember that the workforce of any organization has been the key to the success up until this point. Valuable characteristics should be highlighted at every opportunity. Identifying this invaluable capacity will ensure no strength goes unutilized.
Plan
Having crafted these key definitions, any organization will now be positioned to draft a real roadmap to success. Gaps should not exclusively be seen as concerns with people, but rather concerns with the tools people are provided to succeed.
How can your customer be empowered and engaged?
Every customer is their own perfectly imperfect person, and no organization seeks to lose any customer opportunity. Given the customer needs examined earlier, what customer tools are currently not being leveraged? What customer tools are? List these out.
How can your employees be empowered and engaged?
Remembering that employees are the main cause for the success that lead to today, every organization should be assessing what tools are available to their workforce. When employees strive to meet customer needs, which of today’s employee tools are not being leveraged? Which are? List these out.
After answering these simple questions, any organization should be able to see what tools are empowering their current success and what tools are unnecessary costs. Those same questions should also provide organizations with the ability to map capabilities to customer needs. Then comes the process of addressing gaps. These may require entirely new solutions or simple add-ons to existing tools.
Prioritize
In today’s world, digital transformation happens fast. That said, every sprint starts with a step. Technology leaders are highly skilled at taking what has been mapped out and putting it into a logical step-by-step journey. With the right initial assessment as outlined earlier, everyone can recognize where gaps need to be closed. The key first step in prioritizing is understanding where high-value, low-complexity solutions exist, putting these ahead of all else. Utilizing this experience, client organizations should be experiencing positive returns within weeks. A simple Robotics Process Automation (RPA) bot might suffice. The reworking of technology interface may generate drastic positive returns.
“As they reinvent their business, nearly one-third of CFOs (32%) look to tech-driven products and services. PWC
As for the next set of high-value, high-complexity solutions – breaking these down into logical phases is essential. A high-complexity solution is merely the combination of many simple solutions, and recognizing this goes a long way. There’s no reason an agile methodology shouldn’t be generating speedy, positive results within an automated technology solution or broader data architecture. The solution might even present itself in how valuable insights are captured and maintained just within Salesforce.
Whatever the roadmap may present, Apexon understands precisely where value lies and how to achieve it. Within the broader (post) COVID-19 marketplace, organizations can not afford to operate on the assumptions of yesterday.
Think of how quickly many workforces went entirely remote. Think of how quickly new orders needed processed across the manufacturing spectrum to meet the safety demands of 2020. Think of how quickly business moved from “just another cash transaction” to a B2B e-commerce enterprise. The market landscape is changing, and it’s been proven just how rapidly that change can and will occur.
It is indisputable that some changes will be temporary, but those will be few, and temporary may be a very long time. Organizations positioned for both short and long-term success should view digital transformation with eager eyes. If recent history has proved anything, rapid changes in technology are possible and cost effective. Thankfully, with a history of success, Apexon is positioned to deliver that transformation today.