INTRODUCING SINGERLEWAK BUSINESS INFORMATICS
Business profitability and productivity rely heavily on informed decisions and efficient processes. Better decisions result from a foundation of timely, accurate and meaningful information, delivered through efficient business processes and systems. Our role is to architect that foundation.
That’s Business Informatics.
Digital Transformation is the vehicle used to achieve a solid Business Informatics foundation; it is now a component of most business plans. Why? Because today’s business climate mandates regular measurement of the effectiveness of business processes, information architecture and your technology environment. Considering how extensive its impact can be, Digital Transformation success requires strategy, planning, technical skills and effective governance - as well as the identification and mitigation of project risks and organizational challenges. Without these behaviors and the skills to deploy them, your Digital Transformation project - according to industry analysts - will likely fail.
Our team has worn many Digital Transformation-relevant hats and possess the skills needed to avoid failure and achieve success – from program manager to implementer, reseller, customer and change agent. We’ve held these roles: CFO, CPA, Operations, Strategy, IT Leadership, Organizational Development, Change Management and more. We recognize why and how Digital Transformation projects go off track. We’re retained to keep your Digital Transformation on the rails towards success. How? We apply our skills to deploy SingerLewak Business Informatics’ proven SLBI:6 Strategy. It works. Just ask our clients.
The AICPA asked SLBI Partner, Bob Green, for insights about ERP and other software. Watch here…
SUCCESSFUL ENDINGS START AT THE BEGINNING
If your Digital Transformation project starts with someone in the organization meeting with software vendors without having defined requirements and an implementation and adoption strategy - STOP! Your project is likely to go off course from the get-go. We know. We’ve been introduced to these circumstances after the fact too many times. How do you prepare for success? Working collaboratively, we execute 6 strategic, sequential steps in the SLBI:6 Strategy.
The SLBI:6 Strategy ensures your organization is ready and prepared for a Digital Transformation and can demonstrate you’ve considered all salient angles that can assure success. We help you navigate through a successful adoption of your new systems and process environment – including providing the needed horsepower to ensure you properly communicate your project strategy and help users adopt the tools they will receive.
While many firms focus only on shopping software vendors for you, the SLBI:6 Strategy provides a comprehensive Digital Transformation map to enable you to assess where you’re going and ensuring that you’ve arrived.
EVALUATE READINESS
Successful outcomes start here. The first mandate for Digital Transformation success is to evaluate and define the many factors that can impact the outcome of your project. Our Evaluate Readiness phase allows us to collectively define and rationalize what’s to be accomplished, affirm the scope of the transformation sought, and to identify other key project parameters (e.g.; risks, personnel, etc.) vital to governing the project, going forward. Think of it as the most prudent insurance you can procure, allowing your management team to be confident that they’re tackling a complex change with eyes open and a path to success in hand.
MITIGATE RISK
It’s time for introspection, leadership and action plans. The key factors to managing towards a successful outcome were identified in our Evaluate Readiness phase. Now we collaborate to define initiatives that will mitigate challenges and address other considerations needed to ensure that the project goes smoothly from all angles, starting now. We’ll involve your leadership and your staff in this process and consider the impact of these initiatives on your staff, your data and other relevant resources and constituents. An infrastructure is created to help manage these initiatives as the Digital Transformation project continues, allowing your management team to assess progress towards completion. And, we help you deploy the vital discipline of Change Management to strengthen your team’s ability to adopt and embrace the change that’s underway.
ANALYZE AND OPTIMIZE
Now we move into deeper assessment, evaluation and creativity. Your best minds will share and re-think current business processes, structure, data, reporting and other factors. The goal: optimize these current factors into a more effective future state, transformed environment. Collectively we’ll identify changes that make sense to consider, and further prepare the organization and environment for the eventual implementation of a solution down the road.
Solution and Select
Once we’re quite familiar with your future state transformation objectives, we prepare requirements and business case documentation that effectively tells your story, your needs, and your expectations. We architect prudent solution alternatives and select the right combination of Digital Transformation technology solutions and the implementers capable of bringing your future solution to a reality. Next, we orchestrate a comparable and meaningful solution evaluation process and contribute our acumen to the vital scope and contractual negotiation effort.
IMPLEMENT AND TRANSFORM
Time for heavy lifting from all angles, bringing together the value of what’s been accomplished so far. Your team has made progress on the important mitigation initiatives as committed in Phase 2 and is now prepared for the arduous process of implementation and adoption. During this stage we provide seasoned guidance to your team and to the vendors – focusing on accountability, scope governance, adoption and other success factors that focus on getting your project done.
RE-EVALUATE AND ENHANCE
Once the transformation effort has completed and things settle down, together we look back and assess the level of achievement of the measurable outcomes originally sought in Phase 1. Course corrections and optimization plans are now defined, seeking to maximize the value of the investment you’ve made. We also look to the future to determine what additional transformation opportunities there might be as your business and the digital world continue to evolve.
INTEGRATED CHANGE MANAGEMENT
SCOPE. TIME. BUDGET. PEOPLE.
Traditionally, managing Digital Transformation projects has been about the relentless pursuit of accomplishing 3 hard, constraining factors: Scope, Time and Budget. At SLBI we add what may be a most important 4th (soft) factor: “People”. It is proven that success with soft factors will lead to a successful project outcome. These factors include leadership, commitment, training, communication, sharing and managing expectations… these all stem from actions of our 4th factor, People. Preparing and guiding your leaders, managers and staff for (and during) the transformation process will pay dividends – most evidenced by the many projects we’ve been introduced where failure is already being experienced with the root cause being weak execution of the soft factors. Our SLBI:6 Strategy integrates the Change Management discipline from beginning to end, enhancing its value and your likelihood of a successful outcome.
Our professionally-trained Change Management team wields an extensive and diverse toolkit of many years and experiences in the making. Our clients embrace this discipline and guidance, executed in a manner to keep the People facet of their project well informed and eager to adopt.
IN THE MIDDLE OF A PROJECT GOING SOUTH?
You’re not the first. Well-intentioned Digital Transformation projects go off the rails for numerous reasons. They include lack of preparedness, ineffective governance, ill-defined requirements, weak technical contributions, software deficiencies, vendor performance, inadequate communication and many more. In short, these failures happen because of the lack of deployment of the very practices we recommend in our SLBI:6 Strategy.
To remedy a project that has failed (or one that’s in the process of failing) we deploy a variant of our SLBI:6 Strategy designed to quickly ascertain what went awry, and how to get things back on track. We empathize that an investment in a re-think and remediation plan isn’t easy to swallow. Our experience shows that it is far better to invest in the rescue of a project than to continue down a failed path and expect materially different results. Our mission is to help our clients get their projects back on track, define successful outcomes, and bring the project to an effective conclusion. And if you are so far down the path that threatened or active litigation is your only option, we can be retained for expert testimony as well.
