Organizational Readiness, Leading System Selection and Requirements with Business Need
The technology roadmap...a beautiful sight! It's exciting and highlights the goals of a future state organization that is efficient and modern and takes advances toward the latest and greatest in technology. But sometimes, the latest and greatest can overshoot the needs of your business and lead to complexities that slow down and delay the implementation of the roadmap. Avoiding that takes a bit of time to assess the current operational maturity of an organization and a strategic look into your business requirements to capture the process roadmap before diving into the system requirements using a methodology such as Agile.
It is important to have a thorough understanding of your processes and business needs to inform system selection but also before you dive into an implementation of a COTS product, such as Salesforce. Providing an overview of what problems are to be solved when the System Integrator steps into the door is critical to right sizing and right timing an implementation project. System and data architecture decisions still need to be made – out of the box is great, except when it isn't – so leading with a documented and clear view of the business needs that new technology will enable is critical.
What does that mean to your project? It means investing upfront to get an understanding of business needs, the processes that enable them, and the areas where efficiencies are ripe for the harvesting. It also means having an understanding of the specific characteristics of your business that cannot be changed. This does not give permission to accept 'but we have always done it this way,' rather, it provides headlights into those areas of the business that are unique to the organization either due to statute, regulations or to how the customers and constituents are served and to maintain the relationship with them.
Going into a system selection and defining high level requirements with this view may require an investment of resources upfront, but this is a minimal investment considering the costs and time savings gained to support the end-state goals of selecting and implementing the right system for your business. Technology is the enabler of your business delivery and ensuring your technology solution supports the processes and people providing the business value is critical to ensuring the organization is ready to for it.
To learn more about how VSTI-Partners can help you get your organization ready to take full advantage of the IT Roadmap, Contact Us.