Developing an Enterprise Vision for Your IT Solutions: How to Avoid the Common Pitfalls Associated with Process Improvements

By Harold Hockman, Director of Professional Services and Laurel Sanders, Director of Marketing, Optical Image Technology, Inc.

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In the business world, rapid and accurate communication of information is critical—especially for organizations seeking to offer first-rate service and gain a competitive edge. Some organizations pride themselves on advances in departmental efficiency achieved through their implementation of electronic storage and automated workflow. However, few have realized the power of enterprise vision in planning and implementing their IT solutions.

Many organizations that decide to deploy digital workflow and business process management solutions are driven by one or two departments whose information needs can no longer be ignored. For these departments, automation is often viewed as their ‘saving grace’. Those who have the vision for enterprise-wide workflow and the interdepartmental improvements it provides may still find planning for an enterprise solution baffling and intimidating. Planning involves a thorough evaluation of infrastructure, the participating departments, interdepartmental and enterprise-wide communication, security, and rights of access.

Enterprise solutions recognize the structure within an organization, tying diverse areas together in appropriate places. Ideally, they bring the critical communication touch points together, ensuring that the right information is delivered to the right people at the right time, within all departments and at all levels within the enterprise. Management and IT have to understand the overall enterprise and its various units in great detail before designing a solution. The alignment of business areas and IT goals, a candid evaluation of proposed process improvements, organizational hierarchy, infrastructure, integration, and realistic goal setting are critical from the start. Prioritizing the implementation, intelligent document indexing, cross training, and continual re-evaluation are key issues that need to be considered as the vision is given a reality check.

Aligning Business and IT Goals

Ideally, software vendors and IT departments aim to implement solutions that address each organization’s business challenges and ultimately improve their efficiency. In order for this to happen, the pain points in each business area have to be thoroughly understood. Which tasks are mundane? Where is time routinely wasted? Where could staff skills be put to better use? What are the regulations with which a department, or even the enterprise, needs to comply? What data is common to various areas of the enterprise or might benefit other areas? Is there data that may not need to be retained for one area of the enterprise, but may be needed for compliance in another? (As an example, while a policy may no longer be valid, a claim against it may require keeping the policy on file for years.) Which data is re-entered into multiple systems that do not communicate with each other, promoting inefficiency and increasing the chance of errors? IT staff needs to understand the pains, objectives, and priorities in order to deliver meaningful solutions.

In order for the vendor and IT staff to deliver what each department is looking for in the automation of their processes, IT has to understand each of the steps in every process, and in great detail. This is best achieved by a combination of the following:

Interviews with end-users to understand each person’s role in every business process;
Departmental or unit meetings to talk about processes as a group, as well as discussing aloud the various ways that individuals on the team normally search for information;
Interdepartmental meetings that reveal data that might be of value to other departments;
Meetings with management to understand the overall vision for the implementation, and interdepartmental communications that should be happening from a management perspective.

After IT has gained a thorough overview of the organizational and departmental needs, it is helpful, and indeed vital, to create a diagram of all of the documents, processes, and information that needs to be shared interdepartmentally and across the enterprise. Diagramming reveals the relationship between business processes and the metadata that describes the documents pertinent to each process. Without visual diagrams and outlines, the critical relationships can be missed.

Evaluating Process Improvements

Although many processes have potential for improvement, it is important to determine which have the greatest potential for saving time within as well as among other departments. Invoicing and Purchasing are departments that are often viewed in isolation, yet nearly every department within an enterprise is involved in some aspect of billing and/or buying. Some of the data stored within the invoices and purchasing paperwork may be of value to them. By digitizing the information and envisioning which parts of the documentation and processes might be useful to other departments, secure access of data can be planned from the start.

Each department can be provided access to see or annotate the data and documents they need, while being denied the right to view proprietary information. By approaching the IT implementation with the enterprise view in mind, departments can eliminate the need to research and re-key the parts of the processes from other departments (such as invoicing and purchasing) that are pertinent to their own records. Careful process planning can result in considerable time savings.

Understanding Organizational Hierarchy and Politics

Another relatively common pitfall to IT implementations can occur when the hierarchy of decision making is not clearly established or understood. Large organizations often have higher levels of job specificity; this can complicate and delay the planning process because of the ladder of approvals that are prescribed.

In some cases, power pulls exist between departments and even within a chain of command. The vendor and IT staff are wise to understand and respect the organizational pecking order, while making an honest effort to understand departmental and individual IT needs. In a very limited number of situations, management may purposefully exclude end users from being interviewed because their processes are deemed to be extremely inefficient and not worth replicating. Such cases warrant additional examination to ensure that the important details within their procedures are properly understood. This ensures that consistent and logical streamlining of processes can take place without missing any critical steps.

Mapping the Infrastructure

It may seem like an obvious statement that an enterprise approach means surveying the current infrastructure and the additions and upgrades that will be necessary to support the software. However, since most organizations begin an enterprise rollout by focusing on one or two key departments, the need to thoroughly consider the entire organization while making decisions is often overlooked. Management should have a clear view of what upgrades or purchases will need to be made in the future to support the entire enterprise as well as these departments. This may be easier and less expensive if multiple departments are serviced simultaneously.

Planning for Integration

Quick and accurate communication is vital to minimizing duplication of efforts and maximizing the value of information across the enterprise. Are you using imaging, bar code readers, automated calling, or other technologies within your organization? Have you considered whether technologies that you already own might benefit other areas within and across the organization? When implementing effective business process management horizontally, the integration of automated workflow with other key technologies will enable you to leverage your investment in existing technology.

Review the entire organizational infrastructure and its needs prior to starting a project. Even if you only intend to implement one or two areas initially, this information may cause you to consider reprioritizing your hierarchy for the rollout. Multiple consecutive upgrades can be costly. Even if you are only starting with one area, engage in enterprise thinking from the start.

Setting Realistic Goals for the Enterprise

We’ve all heard the saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing right.” This is definitely true with enterprise business process management and workflow solutions. Although management should have the same clear vision of an entire enterprise and its needs, it is not necessarily practical (or advisable) to build everything at once. Rome was not built in a day; an enterprise IT implementation should not be too hastily planned or executed, or it may fail.

One of the common mistakes organizations make is trying to create a model implementation in one department and forcing the others to fit into a mold that does not work for them or does not make sense. Although there may be a lot of information that is common to (and needed by) diverse business areas, it does not always fit neatly into a universal mold.

Attempting to implement multiple departments simultaneously can lead to larger problems unless due diligence is given. Integration, infrastructure, training, and many other areas have to be thoughtfully considered.

Prioritizing implementation

Another challenge that is commonly faced is the difficulty of deciding which department or business areas should be automated first. Department size and volume of documents should not be the only criteria that determine which area to automate first. Ask yourself the following questions as you consider your enterprise implementation:

Which departments store information that may be of value to multiple departments? Automation in these areas has the potential to save time and staff resources by eliminating the incidences of unnecessary multiple data entry and its related errors. For example, the human resources department in many companies may be smaller than other departments, but some of the data in their documents may be important to many (or all) areas of an enterprise.
Which departments are struggling most to provide quick and accurate information to customers? Without good service, any enterprise can crumble quickly. Departments that are struggling to keep pace with customer inquiries and needs may be ripe for the IT implementation priority list.
Which areas of the business have already streamlined their manual processes and are currently operating as efficiently as possible? These departments may be logical leaders in the enterprise roll-out.

Indexing Intelligently for the Enterprise

Cataloguing data efficiently so that others can find it quickly and easily is an elusive challenge. Most people do not have the same level of knowledge about other departments or their documents and processes as their own. This makes it nearly impossible for them to know how others need to index information for future retrieval. When information is stored digitally, users may be given different rights to access it, resulting in searches that do not disclose information that a user needs to perform his job. Careful planning is critical.

By mapping out who needs access to which information and how they need to find it, a person tasked with the job can find commonalities that cross multiple departments.

Some tips include:

Determine what data and documents need to be accessed by all departments, as well as information that should only be accessible to a subset of users. If a large company needs to search by name, for example, the name John Smith might pull up 200 records, whereas only ten might be important for a designated department. In contrast, a global indexing scheme with a policy or other unique identification number might pull up a document that multiple departments need to access. The viewing of non-critical information can be blocked so that only the appropriate departments can see it.
Do not ‘over index’; a lot of time can be wasted indexing terms by which no one will ever search, and the storage of this information can lead to inefficiency and slowdowns in retrieval times.
Do not ‘under index’; this leads to a staff’s inability to find the information that is needed. (Think of a cookbook – carrot cake is valuable as an entry under carrots AND cake, and people search for it both ways.) In the case of bank statements, if you only index an account number and statement end date, you may receive correspondence from a customer with an incomplete account number, in which case you will not find it. Had you included secondary information such as the person’s name, company name, or a PIN number, finding the record would have been a cinch.

Once the commonalities have been defined and the indexing schemes have been mapped, automated capture (such as bar code reading of materials) should be seriously considered. When humans make indexing decisions that are character based (such as names, addresses, and other common information), errors and inconsistencies often appear. Automated capture of information, once the indexing schemes have been laid out and communicated, helps an organization to avoid compromising the integrity of its critical information.

Cross-training and Aligning Business & IT Staff

Another common challenge is that IT staff and people in the various areas of business often seem to speak different languages. IT staff may be determined to deliver what the business people need, but may not know the types of documents, their purpose, or the processes in enough detail to help them think through potential challenges and possibilities for their solutions. Taking IT staff out of the IT department and empowering them to learn about the departments within the enterprise can be a costly undertaking in the short term. However, in the long term it results in better-informed IT staff, able to deliver what employees and management need. This can reduce the long-term costs of the implementation.

Re-evaluating the Need and the Solution

As the philosopher Heraclitus and many subsequent followers have quoted, “The only thing that is constant is change.” Even well-laid plans require constant reexamination. Businesses and their processes change; the infrastructure has to respond quickly or it will collapse. New variables such as the addition of another technology, system upgrades, reorganization and reallocation of duties, changes in regulations, and other variables may mean that the IT solution needs to be altered periodically to accommodate the changes or to incorporate expanded visions.

Reports on communication bottlenecks and both departmental and individual productivity reporting can have an impact on solution adjustments, too. An IT solution is not something that should be set in stone. Rather, it should be checked and re-checked as new elements of change enter the enterprise, or even specific departments.

Summary

Enterprise planning requires careful examination, open minds, thorough communication, constant reevaluation, and all of the considerations outlined above. By taking the time to plan well, you can design and implement an IT solution that has the security of Fort Knox while enabling the flexibility required for continued change and growth. Enterprise vision, from the start of the planning process through each step of the implementation, puts the keys to your corporate information in your organization’s hands and helps to ensure that you are getting the most out of your investment in technology.

To find out more about Optical Image Technology’s enterprise document management and workflow software solutions and services, please visit the website at www.docfinity.com, contact Optical Image Technology at 814.238.0038, or email us at info@docfinity.com.

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