October 22, 2021 | by Mohammed Jarood Mustafa

Do Your Business Users Love Your Enterprise Technology Strategy?

If you want to drive business innovation, you need to establish a technology strategy and roadmap that aligns with your business goals and accelerates transformation across your organization. That apart, one of the most crucial aspects impacting success is how the technology you adopt resonates with your users.

The suite of technology assets that you curate should be at par with the latest market trends, meet user workplace needs, and scale as your business scales. A failure on any front can make your business slow to adapt to market forces and attract high costs as you attempt to capture new opportunities.

Although building a sustainable enterprise technology strategy is critical to survival in today’s digital age, chances are your business users are not in love with your enterprise technology strategy. Do you hear people complaining about the tools they are working with being hard, illogical, or counter-intuitive? Are your workflows disjointed and prone to breakdowns that need manual intervention? Does your IT team complain that it’s hard to onboard new users to enterprise systems and harder still to get them to use those systems properly? It is common for your business users to ask for new features or capabilities in the applications or systems they use or to wonder aloud if something could be changed? Those are all signs of user disenchantment with the systems you have provided them.

Here are 5 tips to turn the relationship around and make your business users love your enterprise technology stack:

Cultivate a low-code culture:

One of the best new ways to get your business users to love your enterprise technology strategy is by cultivating a low-code/no-code culture. The technology makes it easy for non-tech users, with limited or no programming experience, to build the applications they need for both web and mobile. This means they can spin up solutions in a jiffy and streamline their day-to-day tasks for improved productivity and efficiency. This not only helps quicken the prototyping process by lowering the barrier to entry; it also drastically brings down the cost and time of deploying solutions that users need and like. What’s more, a low-code/no-code approach can also accelerate enterprise-wide automation and integration, paving the way for better data sharing, visibility, and transparency. In the long run, such a culture can help speed up innovation while offering the freedom to focus on business development.

Build business outcome-focused tech initiatives:

Another way to improve the experience your users have with the technology systems you offer is to focus on building business outcome-focused tech initiatives – instead of just joining the “latest technology trends” bandwagon. Understanding your business goals and then choosing technology solutions that help you meet those goals is a more practical (and effective) way of maximizing the efficiency of your existing technology assets and the overall productivity of your workforce. By planning and implementing solutions that allow you to accomplish your business objectives more easily, you can be sure to provide your users with the tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently and more easily meeting their personal, team, and departmental goals.

Embrace RPA:

Adopting RPA to automate routine and error-prone processes can also enhance user experience. Since everyday processes are rife with manual checkpoints known to result in high turnaround time, they tend to reduce the efficiency of the workforce. Intelligent automation can not only free users from mundane activities; it can also improve the accuracy of tasks while allowing them to focus on aspects that demand human cognition and creativity. RPA solutions that replicate the human way of working on a given case scenario by creating a similar digital environment can help in automating repetitive, data-heavy tasks while saving your company time, money, and effort. Such automation can increase the flexibility and scalability of business processes and allow you to offer improved customer and employee experiences – and eventually better ROI.

Establish a COE team:

Having a robust COE team focused on your specific scenarios in place is a great way of planning, building, and maintaining solutions that your business needs and your users love. This team, comprising expert technologists, will have knowledge and expertise in the latest development tools, platforms, and server technologies – so you can have customized solutions implemented that align with your organizational goals. Right from application development proficiency to business process automation, governance and compliance and reporting and BI – a qualified COE team can design the ideal IT strategy roadmap that works best for the unique needs of your business users, so you can boost employee productivity, ensure business continuity, and drive business agility.

Constantly unearth business insights:

Leveraging modern analytics capabilities to unearth insights into user experiences is also critical to ensure your users are happy and content with the technology tools and systems provided to them. Investing in a structured BI platform that provides innumerable insights through self-service and data-visualization frameworks can bring extraordinary improvement to user performance. The right tool can help users by making decision-making more data-driven, while also helping you drive high returns on the technology investment. Since data lies at the core of all business operations, a focused and structured data strategy can help you fix the most pressing issues and challenges your users are currently facing in their jobs while empowering you with intelligence on existing system enhancements and new system development initiatives.

Defining and executing a robust enterprise technology strategy is key to achieving high levels of employee productivity and efficiency. Technology is a key enabler for business success. Cultivating a low-code/no-code culture, building business outcome-focused tech initiatives, embracing RPA, establishing a COE team and constantly unearthing business insights are all great ways to ensure your users are making the best use of technology assets to support their current and future activities while ensuring greater agility in adapting to evolving opportunities. It’s true that none of these choices are easy. If you need help defining the way forward, get in touch with us. We offer a range of consultation services, including defining tech strategies and implementation to enable powerful enterprise tech ecosystems.