Update legacy systems and focus on implementing new technologies to stay ahead.
Dynamic shifts have come to define the modern business environment. Staying relevant, ahead of the curve and at the forefront of innovations are the current divers for successful business. With the biggest challenges being changings in expectations by consumers and employees. Due to the covid-19 pandemic a reliance and comfort in digital tools was established by all individuals interacting with an organization. Creating a need for good technology integration within organizations to best enhance their reach and better preform their tasks.
Resulting in the best businesses adopting hybrid ways of working to drive growth, efficiency, and new ideas. Within this new reality to compete, comfortability with digital tools and technology must be the goal for future thinking leaders of organizations. Yet, how does an organization with digital ambitions maintain its digital relevancy is a revolutionary world?
The fight for technological relevance is an uphill battel that creates vast disparities between winners and losers. Making it vital to understand what the winners are doing to succeed. To help Finsys has identified the four primary habits that drive technological success.
1. Investing in new capabilities
Investing in new organizational capabilities is the key to continuously allowing the talent to grow. Enabling the talent to gain new skills requires that they are provided with the resources to learn, a culture that wants to grow and by challenging people to accelerate their learning. Vitally, giving chances for the people in an organization to push themselves will drive them to better the abilities unlocking their potential to contribute more to the wider organization.
- Examples (resources for learning): mentors, workshops, guest speakers, in house seminars, providing tools that facilitate learning, granting access to information that can be used for learning and digital libraries.
- Examples (culture): have a driven, slightly competitive, team-oriented culture focused on collaboration and problem solving will breed individuals that are smart, curious and solution driven leading them to want to gain new skills to overcome obstacles.
- Example (challenge them): some people learn best under pressure and others need to be able to put their skills to the test to realize what they are both able and unable to do. By challenging the talent, you both present them with practice to improve current skills and take not of the skills they need to learn.
2. Future proofing technology
Investing in technology is pivotal for organizations to keep up and take control of their future abilities to compete in competitive spaces. Therefore, ensuring that the technology invested in today is future proofed and relevant tomorrow is a resource priority. Finsys has identified three main points to keep in mind; 1. Follow industry standards, 2. Scalability, and 3. Flexibility.
Follows industry standards
Technologies that reach the level of being considered an industry standard typically receive widespread support. This stems from a larger number of stakeholders that would rather benefit from having updates, support, and new iterations for familiar technology. Good technology follows industry standers to ensure the highest chances of being relevant tomorrow. Additional benefits include stability, lower prices and higher chances of the technology evolving positively over time.
Scalability
Technology must be scalable if organizations want to see the returns and growth they expect when making the investment in the first place. The biggest risk is acquiring systems that are suited for a small firm just to use it to grow the company, higher more people and have the system become redundant. Non-scalability is buying a problem for another day. Other issues with non-scalability-based technology include: the need to retrain when updating to a new system, not being able to pivot and higher future costs.
Flexibility
Flexibility should be a main consideration when implementing new technologies. The goal of organizations is to get the most value out of their technology for their money, so they maintain more resources for their core operations. Flexible technologies aid in this endeavour by providing multiple uses and use cases allowing them to add value in multiple ways at the same time. Regular updates for technologies that don’t have built in opulence are also vital for perpetual use with an organization.
3. Establishing business continuity
Business continuity is the proper execution of a grander organizational vision to ensure that all elements and sections of the business use compatible tools, systems, and technology. The aim is to generate more and easier cross sector collaboration; it streamlines workflow and allows for employees to transfer between departments smoother. Creating more agile abilities and the more creative utilization of talent for different departments working together to create more value through different perspectives, experiences, and insights.
4. Building digital and data platform
Building digital and data platforms should be developed to meet your needs and can address your issues and/or increase your ability to complete tasks effectively. For instance, in the modern environment employing data and analytics platform is needed to act as a central repository, support scaling, identity sources of business value. Data Assets, Architecture, and Democratize data are key elements that must be understood to best develop the strongest in-house tools to leverage data and create a solid digital foundation.
Data Assets. Identifying the data that holds the most value to an organization is vital. Valuable data can become a competitive advantage, add value, and enable digital transformations. However, not activating the data at an organization’s disposal can hold back their potential, strategies, and business outcomes.
Architecture. Re-organizing a company’s technology architecture should be focused developing modular systems that enable the full potential of their data and technology. However, the core goal of a good platform architecture is to be more efficient, liberate data, power business systems, reduce costs and improve agility. These elements allow for the better adoption and utilization of artificial intelligence, machine learning and agile ways of working.
Democratize data: The key to unlocking the full value of data internally is to fully democratize it. Giving all the talent access to data and information is a driver for innovation, allows for the crowed sourcing of idea and ensuring all members can learn. Resulting in a more vibrant workspace with the talent having a deeper understanding of their organization, customers, industry, and market.
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