This is the second of three articles expanding on comment we gave to South East Business Insider for its October feature on digital restructuring. The first covered the warning signs and what to modernise first.
The gains come from connection
The biggest gains we tend to see come from connecting different parts of a business together.
A CRM on its own can be useful. An accounting system on its own can be useful. An operational platform on its own can be useful. The real value starts to appear when information flows between all of them and people no longer have to move data around the organisation by hand.
This is the least glamorous part of any programme and almost always the highest return. Nobody writes a press release about getting their systems talking to each other, but it is usually where the hours are hiding.
Automation, where it is genuinely repetitive
Automation is particularly powerful in areas involving:
- Repetitive administration
- Customer communications
- Sales follow-up
- Reporting
- Document creation
- Operational workflows
The test is simple. If a person is making no real judgement — they are reading a field, applying a fixed rule and typing the result somewhere else — that is automation work. If the step genuinely needs judgement, the answer is usually not to automate it away but to put better information in front of the person making the call, sometimes by building the tool into the record they already have open.
Visibility changes decisions
The other major area is visibility.
Giving management reliable, live information about sales, performance, workload and profitability can fundamentally change how quickly and confidently a business can make decisions.
The difference is not really the chart. It is that the number is available when the decision is being made, rather than three days later when somebody has finished compiling it. We build live dashboards over the systems a business already runs for exactly that reason — the reporting layer is worth very little if the underlying data still has to be assembled by hand.
Why projects fail to deliver
One of the biggest mistakes is starting with a predetermined technology rather than a clearly defined business problem.
Another is trying to transform everything at once. Businesses create enormous specifications covering every possible requirement, spend months implementing them, and then discover the people who actually need to use the system find it too complicated.
We generally advocate building around what the business genuinely needs, getting the foundations right, and then developing the system as the organisation learns from using it.
You also need to define what success looks like. If nobody has established what the project is meant to improve — whether that is reducing administration, increasing conversion, improving customer service or providing better management information — it becomes very difficult to determine whether the investment delivered value.
The people side is the most underestimated part
It is probably the most underestimated part of the entire process.
You can build an excellent system, but if the people using it do not understand why the change is happening, or feel it makes their job more complicated, adoption will suffer.
The people doing the work every day also tend to know where many of the real problems are. We try to involve users in the process rather than imposing a new system on them.
Good digital restructuring should remove unnecessary work from people, not just give management more data.
Leadership has to support the change consistently. If the organisation introduces a new system but senior people keep asking for the old spreadsheet, or allow people to work outside the new process, employees revert to the old way very quickly.
A roadmap for an SME
I would not recommend an SME begins with a huge transformation programme.
- Map the important processes in the business and identify what consumes the most time, creates the greatest risk, or restricts growth.
- Prioritise a small number of improvements where the commercial benefit is clear.
- Establish a good digital foundation and connect the core areas of the business.
- Automate progressively from there.
The advantage SMEs have is that they can often move much faster than larger organisations. They do not have twenty years of systems and departmental politics to unravel. For many, a consolidated platform removes more friction in a month than a bespoke programme would in a year.
Measure it practically
- How many hours of administration have been removed?
- Are enquiries being responded to more quickly?
- Has sales conversion improved?
- Can invoices be raised sooner?
- Are fewer mistakes occurring?
- Can management get information without asking three people to produce it?
Digital restructuring has worked when you can demonstrate the business is operating better as a result. The technology itself isn’t really the outcome — the improvement in the business is.
It is not a one-off project
One point I think is important: digital transformation shouldn’t really be viewed as a one-off project any more. Technology and businesses are evolving too quickly for that.
The organisations getting the most from digital investment tend to treat their systems as something they continuously improve. They establish the right foundations, measure what is working, and then keep identifying opportunities to remove friction, automate work and make better use of their information.
What Digital Scientists® does
We connect the systems a business already runs, automate the administration that does not need a human, and put live information in front of the people making decisions. We scope the first phase around a small number of changes with a clear commercial case, rather than a specification covering everything.
Book a free discovery call and we will tell you honestly where the return is likely to be — and where it isn’t.