A former supervisor once told me you can all have the technology in the world, but if you don’t have the right process in place to use it, you’re just wasting money. As I have reflected on this saying, I believe there is much truth in it. It’s in effect what people like to say as “throwing money at the problem”…you buy a ton of technology solutions to fix problems and end up with no change and a lot of extra expense and systems to maintain. Let’s consider a few examples.
First, let’s talk about an email and collaboration suite. Many times organizations spend a lot of money on purchasing Microsoft365 or G Suite as a collaboration tool for their organization. The goal is to increase online collaboration amongst peers. These suites have a huge variety of tools in them that make sharing, editing and commenting on excel sheets, documents, and other files easy and fast. But guess what happens without an intentional plan to use these new features? Employees default to editing Office documents on their computer and emailing them to others for comments. Because nobody defined the process of how collaboration should take place in the organization, and implemented the right training to accomplish it, employees reverted to what was familiar and the money spent on the platform was wasted. Or even worse – the organization decided to spend money on another collaboration platform to fix the problem!
Or take the example of your organizational data. Employees left to their own devices will store data in the location they feel most comfortable. This may be files stored on their local machine, file shares, collaboration suites, organizational database, or even in the wrong place in the database. This slows down leaders and employees from getting quick access to information they need, and negatively impacts data security efforts. Oftentimes the easy answer is “we need a better database system!” and a lot of time and money is spent changing databases but with no real impact because the process wasn’t changed. Nobody stopped to develop the process for where data is input and stored, train employees and enforce it.
Finally consider digital communications. With the myriad of options for digital communications today, there are a lot of ways that employees can communicate with each other, the organization with its constituents, and vice versa. So many organizations allow employees to communicate using whatever method they prefer, which can be email, voice, text, messaging app, websites, or even regular paper. When leaders get to a point where people are saying “I didn’t get that information” oftentimes the sense is “we need to buy a different messaging platform to help us communicate!”. While having the right platform is key, not defining the process of what information should be communicated in what way, you’ve added yet another layer to the communications puzzle and complicated things further.
In all of these examples, you are looking at a purely functional problem to be addressed, which is important. However, organizations are made up of people and not computers, so changing processes is not always easy. At LeadershipOne Technologies, we can help you identify and develop processes that will meet your needs and help you with an implementation plan that won’t shock the systems of your employees. We can also help determine if you have the right technologies to support your processes, if you need a different piece of technology to meet your needs, or if perhaps your process may need a bit of tweaking due to limitations of the available systems. Contact us today to improve your processes and save money on unnecessary technology!
