SaaS Notes

Organizational Leadership - Preparing Leaders for Virtualizing the Business

Virtual business success begins at the top with Internet savvy leadership. A previous blog provided a short list of questions to help determine leadership readiness for executing on a virtual business strategy. What do you do, then, if after reviewing the leadership readiness questions you discover the firm's leaders are not ready to go virtual? This post explores a few of the most common hurdles of leadership readiness and how to overcome them as you build your busienss case for taking the firm virtual.

1. Leaders cannot move to virtualize business processes if the processes are broken.

This may seem obvious, but it is amazing how many companies are limping along with broken processes. Some examples I've seen include multiple order entry systems, disjointed service support systems and disjointed sales and service systems. When sales associates are required to input the same information into different applications, there is a serious problem. When service cannot proactively reach out to customers to renew maintenance contracts and add the recent purchases to the contract, there is a problem.

Before a firm can even consider virtualizing its business processes, the processes must be cleaned up. Incrementalize the clean up to ensure the project is small, manageable and quick. Build on small rapid successes. This is also the time to ensure the business issues are integrated with the technology. For example, improving the company's billing cycles by tying billing into spare parts ordering. As you work on cleaning up broken processes keep two critical questions in mind: Does the solution improve customer satisfaction? Does the solution improve the business in some manner?

2. Leaders need to create a culture of communicating information.

The difference between data and information is that information is actionable. Leaders who take advantage of the vast body of knowledge within the organization are better informed on process friction points and the variety of solutions available to address them. Those employees that are in the middle of the process flow and experiencing the hurdles are the best suited for seeing opportunities to improve the flow. Middle management tends to impede upward communication. Their removal, while widely desirable, is highly impractical for a plethora of reasons.

This is the perfect application for implementing internal social networking. Social networks only work when all the parties involved have a vested interest in the topic. In the case of process improvement, those involved in the process are anxious to have the friction points resolved. It benefits the leaders and the company to implement process improvements. It also enhances employee satisfaction, in turn, increasing employee retention when they feel like their suggestions for company improvements are being heard and addressed.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world