Embracing Digital Transformation Without Disruption

With the right steps, a digital transformation doesn’t have to mean a digital disruption

Confronting change and upheaval around almost every corner has been something of an unofficial theme this year, as 2020 - still only around halfway through - marks one of the most unusual time periods on record. Accepting that most established, everyday routines have had to change is difficult enough on an individual level, but for businesses, the struggle is amplified significantly. Even as both demand and necessity peaks for new workforce modernization objectives like digitalization, very few look forward to the process of implementing vast, sweeping reforms across an entire organization - especially when these changes almost always guarantee a major disruption of the existing infrastructure, often composed of multiple ERP, HRMS, Payroll, or proprietary systems. 

It’s become increasingly clear that businesses must enable a digital transformation in order to move forward, but many balk at the notion of messy, drawn-out change management. But progress doesn’t have to come at the expense of countless headaches and pricey fixes. It’s time to think beyond ERP - when businesses equip themselves with the right defenses, they can embrace digitalization and forge ahead without jeopardizing their carefully crafted ecosystems. And what, exactly, are the right defenses? 

Moving forward, businesses will find that all roads eventually lead to the cloud. Increasingly siloed manual and on-premise hodgepodges can no longer make the cut, as these legacy systems don’t offer the security and accessibility found with cloud adoption. Tracking every minute of employee time provides businesses with incomparable insight into productivity and performance, and without the ease of cloud-enabled capabilities, this data can easily go missing. Cloud-based ecosystems will only become more mainstream as companies continue to implement remote work policies, track time, and accelerate automation, and those hesitating to make the jump should take note. Risking delays, data loss, access complications, and expensive, time-intensive upgrade requirements are damaging and frankly unsustainable. After long enough, these hesitations can inhibit performance, productivity, and profitability as the rest of the world continues to evolve with new technologies. 

Supporting each worker effectively in today’s unique climate requires the implementation of modern, mobile-first solutions - especially as remote and deskless workers continue to dominate the workplace. No one knows exactly what the future holds, but we can be certain that a society still reeling from the abrupt shift to remote work will require intuitive, mobile-ready capabilities to drive the capture of accurate, up-to-date project tracking information in real-time. Visibility into employee time and productivity can be enabled by modern mobile capabilities such as AI, zero-touch time tracking, GPS-based geofencing, intelligent approvals, and smarter workflows for enhanced decision-making and control as employees remain dispersed. 

From project to project, business must enable employees to work together. Supporting seamless collaboration and open communication between team members, departments, and leaders ensures everyone stays on the same page as information comes in, and helps supervisors track progress and keep promises. Shared metrics and built-in intelligent workflows can help set expectations and promote consistency for a more standardized process across the board. When teams join forces, they can avoid frustrating setbacks and keep operations streamlined every step of the way. 

Many enterprises and businesses with complex processes hesitate to implement big changes, finding that most modern systems simply don’t meet their needs out-of-the-box. But launch-ready, cloud-based systems may seem like the opposite of configurable, despite remaining a necessary feature for enterprises and organizations with unique or complex process requirements. Investing in a platform developed with configuration as a guiding principle will naturally incorporate agility and flexibility from the start, enabling businesses to meet all localization needs and accelerate modernization. By combining the benefits of a cloud-based system with advanced configurability, businesses can skip the complicated third-party customization process and meet all localization and complex requirements necessary for driving a digital transformation. 

Now, more than ever, businesses require the ability to seamlessly integrate and share data between multiple complex systems in order to gain real-time visibility into clients, projects, resources, and billing. Change-ready, integrative technologies can fit within an organization’s existing ecosystem and meet new challenges as they happen, rather than turning everything on its head. Enabling the many moving parts of an organization’s ecosystem to talk with each other through the plug and play capabilities provides invaluable information to the right people when they need it, without breaking processes. 

With the right steps, a digital transformation doesn’t have to mean a digital disruption. But as long as businesses shy away from the next generation capabilities that will revolutionize their core competencies, they may find themselves ironically inhibiting the growth they were trying to protect. By taking action, business leaders can welcome innovation and supercharge profitability as the world approaches a new tomorrow.