Executive Insights

Insight

Successful Digital Transformation

As digital and cloud technologies reshape industries and almost every aspect of our life, many companies are pursuing large-scale digital transformation efforts. Digital transformation efforts are going to be harder and more expensive to pull off than any other traditional business transformation effort. There are several success stories in every industry to draw lessons from and many different factors contribute to a successful transformation. The biggest factor is having digital savvy leaders in every functional area which will lead to an empowered workforce building capabilities for the future.

Insight

Are we overspending on IT or underinvested?

This is a common question from CFOs and CEOs and its often because the value of IT is not clearly understood. Communicating the financial story of IT is one of the most important responsibilities of a CIO. Successful communication here will pave the path for increased funding for future initiatives. Having a structured budget to easily benchmark and report the financial metrics and IT costs to run, grow and transform the business is a good place to start. This is likely to result in very productive and meaningful discussions between the CIO and the entire executive team.

Insight

Efficiency and Effectiveness

The general phrases of “efficiency is important for profitability” and “effectiveness is important for growth” are applicable to the general business. However, they are slightly different for technology. Many areas come into play when measuring technology efficiencies: cost, maintenance, training, upgrades. Effectiveness is best measured by the stakeholders of the relevant technology. AKA, does the finance team feel like their current accounting package is performing their task correctly.

Insight

Culture: How to Build a Team

Building a high performing team requires many things but the very first step is to get some training for the team in Active Listening. This should be a hard requirement for all people, groups, or businesses. It can be as simple as an Active Listening seminar. This training begins to foster a culture of listening and understanding the other perspective. Goal is to ensure everyone on the training has a similar understanding of what active listening is, how to use it, and how to better engage with others (not just in business).

Insight

Solving Business Problems With Technology.

Oftentimes organizations recognize some sort of business issue and quickly jump to applying the newest “technology tool” or the newest app to the problem. It is very important to understand how the new app fits in with the rest of their infrastructure, workflows, and the way people work and take decisions. Implementing a new tool/technology can be very rewarding but it’s critical to ensure there is a plan for businesses to adopt it and be successful with it.

Insight

Human Asset Management

This title or description understates its importance for the most critical component of any business…ever. This title covers the ability of the organization to influence and improve the lives of the employees. This is a very different statement than “maximizing the value received from human capital”. These two definitions can be used for the same thing, but the intention is very different.

Insight

Overall Wellness

Organizations historically have not paid enough attention to the total wellness of people. As more demands have been created and more things are competing for the time and attention of people, it’s become more critical that organizations provide for employee’s overall wellness. By directing more assets towards this program, they will gain a more effective and higher performing workforce. In today’s market when employees can be selective, organizations have to be very smart and more tactical in this arena.

Insight

Technology Optimization Comes In a Wide Variety of Flavors

Every organization uses technology differently; including similar sized firms in the exact same industry will use the same technology tools differently. With that, each organization needs to learn how to best implement, maintain, and optimize the various applications and the infrastructures on which they reside.