Every organisation revolves around people, assets, finance, and time. These must collaborate to produce information, and that information requires governance.
Every organisation consists of four fundamental components – people, assets, finance, and time. These collaborate to product information, and that information requires governance. At ContinuSys, we use the acronym PAFTCIG to describe how these elements work together to deliver uninterrupted business operations and increase resilience.
All but the smallest companies are typically structured into multiple departments. Department leaders are responsible for their people, assets, finances, and how they allocate project time. As such, each department generates its information.
While this may sound straightforward enough, business operations are becoming increasingly complex and multifaceted. Customer expectations continue to evolve rapidly, driven by the rapid advancement of technology. Employee expectations have also changed in recent years with increasing emphasis on flexible work models.
With these changes come both risks and opportunities. However, many organisations struggle to keep up in a time when the only constant changes. As a result, most department leaders and their teams do not fully understand the goals and processes of other departments. Some departments do not interact with customers at all, while others do not have financial targets of their own, or lack an adequate understanding of critical factors like compliance and information security.
These challenges create information silos, where different departments end up operating in a bubble and are unable or unwilling to share mission-critical information. This can quickly end up stunting business growth, reducing efficiency, and greatly limiting an organisation’s ability to adapt to evolving markets. These problems, in turn, have a detrimental effect on customers and employees alike. More troubling is the fact that these situations can pose governance and compliance risks with far-reaching consequences.
The need for fully integrated business management
Many businesses still rely on email or even verbal conversations or post-it notes for sharing information between departments. Others use different software systems, which may not work well together when it comes to accessing and sharing mission-critical information.
Fully-integrated business management systems (IBMS) seek to break down these information siloes and facilitate seamless interoperability across all key operations. Modern solutions offer centralised databases with role-based access controls hosted in the cloud to ensure complete business resilience and compatibility with today’s distributed, work models. In other words, all employees have access to the same data, provided it is relevant to their roles and workflows.
Moreover, an IBMS ensures that many routine workflows can be fully or partially automated, freeing up time for employees and business leaders to focus on more strategic tasks. In such a scenario, people will no longer need to waste time chasing up emails, catching up in tedious and lengthy meetings, or conducting compliance audits for each department.
An IBMS brings together people, assets, finance, and time management. All of the information generated by these elements goes into a single, centralised database for easier governance.
1: People
Managing customers and human resources
Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions about digital transformation is that it is all about technology. Business leaders often approach technology as a way to replace low-skilled workforces and automate routine operations. The reality is that people are, and always will be, the single most important element of any organisation. Instead of being viewed as a way to replace people, technology should be seen as a way to empower employees to do their jobs better and deliver an improved service to customers. In other words, it is time to start looking at technology as an enabler of better business, rather than a replacement.
Human resources
Your employees are your most valuable resource, which is why we believe in distinguishing them from other business assets. That being said, from tracking applicants to onboarding to allocating work roles and tasks, managing people at scale can become a significant burden, especially when factoring in distributed work models.
HR management software should help streamline the hiring and onboarding process, make it easy for employees to book time off, and help administrators keep track of the various roles and responsibilities across the business. With the rapid rise of the freelance gig economy, the system should ideally be able to accommodate external human resources too.
Supplier relationships
No organisation exists in a bubble. Every company has a unique supplier portfolio consisting of critical strategic suppliers and long-tail suppliers. Given the rapidly increasing complexity of today’s supply chains, it is especially easy to lose oversight of the latter. In many industries, supply chains have become ungovernably large for those relying on manual processes alone.
Supplier management solutions help procurement teams manage their vendor relationships at scale. They can automate the onboarding and maintenance of long-tail suppliers, which are those your company only does business with on occasion. This can reduce maverick spending, minimise supply chain risk, and free up time for procurement to focus on strategic suppliers.
Customer relationships
For any business to be successful in the ‘Age of the Customer’, sales, marketing, and support teams must achieve seamless interoperability to ensure a frictionless customer experience. The marketing team needs to target the right people, sales teams must remember and contact the right leads, and support teams need to address customer concerns promptly.
Customers have multiple points of contact, and the buyer journey must be viewed as a holistic one in which sales, marketing, and support work together. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is vital for making that possible, especially for larger businesses with lengthy sales cycles or those operating in B2B sectors.
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