Making work flow in a digital world

Darren Spence says organisations must be helped to evolve digital processes and workflows

Smartphones, tablets and cloud computing adoption are accelerating so fast organisations now rely on IT to underpin their business strategy. But I believe, despite many companies introducing mobility, few have taken the time to consider if their workflows can keep up.

Most companies still operate workflows built for a relatively static workforce. This just doesn't work well enough.

Time and again, those that have moved the fastest to go mobile or adopt remote working have not duly considered the impact on their legacy workflows.

So there is an opportunity to offer business transformation services – although I believe few resellers have found a way to industrialise a profitable offering, and few have the skills or resources to properly deliver such services.

Day-to-day processes must be made relevant to a largely distributed, remote workforce. The best way to approach this is systematically, process by process, starting with those most important to the business and easiest to modernise.

It may seem a huge task. However, paper-intensive order processing or accounts receivable processes are often the easiest and quickest to transform, followed by accounts payable and HR.

Organisations that have traditionally been the most reliant on printed documents have the most to gain.

Benefits include data integrity and security. Once confidential information has been printed there is more chance of it being compromised.

Also, if paper documents are used to plaster over business processes, those processes become inefficient and slow.

While data storage is not free, it is cheaper and more accessible than storing paper documents. There is nothing efficient about off-site paper mountains.

A services-led, technology-driven approach here can bridge the old and the new, and is an unavoidable step as business processes evolve.

Darren Spence is managing director of Bytes Document Solutions