You have a vision for how you’d most like your business to be. Just about every successful business leader, whether entrepreneur, owner, or executive manager, has such a vision. You see your people being completely motivated, inspired to achieve more every day, loving the work they do in your company. Customers are inspired, too, by the quality of the services they receive from your people and the products you provide. Answers are always at your fingertips and every decision you make is well supported by data. Profits are high, and problems are low.
You Can Get There
If you see it in your mind you can make it happen in your company. Remember, there are other companies out there that are living the experience you want for yours. All of them began with a vision not unlike your own. You simply need to do what they did when they had their vision.
That begins with articulating exactly what your ideal company looks like. Write it down. Get help from anyone on your team you feel should be sharing this with you. Explore everything.
Operations, how you get things done. People, how you manage, develop, and motivate them. Do each of your people have a clear career growth path with you? Are they doing what they do best and enjoy most? Are your products and services of the level of quality you expect for them? Think about how your processes could make them better.
Feel free to be audacious! There’s no reason you should not want the ultimate best for your company. What kind of systems need to be in place to support it properly? Customer relationship management (CRM)? Enterprise resource planning (ERP)? Communication and collaboration tools? Human resources (HR) management? What else? What other investments would be needed to fully realize your vision? How could you fund that?
Talk to friends and acquaintances you consider to be effective business leaders. What are they doing? What could you learn from them and adopt from their playbook? Set your mind free and enjoy the ride.
Turn Your Vision into a Plan
Our company, Algorithm, applies technology solutions to business challenges. That’s what we do. As a result, we tend to think first about how technology can help solve any problem, create any advantage, or otherwise contribute to positive change for any company.
You’ve heard the phrase “digital transformation” probably many more times than you’d care to. While it is overused, almost nobody explains to you that it’s not just about technology or converting manual processes to automated ones. That’s part of it, but only part.
Digital transformation (DX) is primarily about people and how we can apply technologies to help them do what they do better, faster, more accurately, and more enjoyably than ever before. In some cases, DX automates routine, repetitive, low-level tasks so people no longer have to do them. This makes more time available for those people to achieve more gratifying goals and objectives, to do more stimulating work, and to find greater satisfaction in their job.
Removing the Technology
The popular expectation is that DX involves replacing current technologies with better ones, and adding more technology to take on more tasks in an effort to reduce the company’s dependency on people.
But true DX actually involves the removal of technologies and their required infrastructure from your office, your premises, your operations, and your workload.
If you are reading this, it is very likely you are not in the technology business yourself. Yours may be a manufacturing business, professional services, distribution, automotive or other business. You never intended to hire and manage technology professionals, yet you found yourself needing them to manage the various computer services, storage, and other systems you need to run your business. You may even have a whole data center you never really envisioned when you started or entered your company.
You’d really love it if all your employees could focus on the core business.
The advent of cloud computing has made that possible. You may already have some or all of your information technology assets and operations in the cloud. You may be in the midst of migrating from your on-premise systems to cloud services, or planning to start doing so soon.
Here’s the paradox: The more technology you remove from your own premises and management the faster you can realize the benefits of digital transformation.
LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO REALIZE YOUR VISION PART 2
March 12, 2024
