It’s time to change the way Enterprises manage their Employee operations using technology.
Having worked with global Customers in the US, Japan, China, Australia and India, we understand that Organizations become very complex as they grow and loose flexibility. Everything takes a long time and more and more Employees get disengaged as even to get simple things done, they need to put in so much effort.
The Processes and Technology tools that get introduced in to the Organization will bring in predictability and consistency to manage the increased size of the Organization, and they also take away opportunities and motivation for people to innovate and collaborate to come up with new ways of doing things.
How many times we have heard the story of an idea that is debated and agreed upon by various stakeholders doesn’t become a reality because it takes 6 months and a few thousands of dollars to make the changes to the ERP system to implement that. In a strict sense, the process and technology will no doubt bring in efficiency, but completely eliminate the opportunities to innovate and improvise.
Time to change all this, as the Enterprise and Society context has completely changed in the last 35+ years since mainframes made their way into the Organizations’ IT rooms.
Then, only very few highly skilled people had access to the primitive computers and the initial automation circled around those ‘admin’ users and the focus was how to get their manual jobs done faster. This philosophy became the foundation of the Enterprise software – Department or functional based, Admin-user centric focused on standardization and efficiency.
Now, knowing how to use computer device is a very common skill and the devices themselves have become far more sophisticated. Consumerization of technology has had a big role in democratizing it. A 15-year old kid probably has a better computing device than the computers that many companies give their Employees. And the focus in context of people is no more standardization, efficiency and conformity. All those things are taken care by Computers and Robots. We need people to innovate, solve problems, learn new things, collaborate and share with their co-workers.
Here is the hard question – ‘can the departmental/functional centric legacy ERPs support people centric organizational operations?’, for which we need to consciously acknowledge the answer, which is a big ‘NO’.
So, its time to rethink how Enterprises function, how they define their processes, what technology and architectural philosophy they adopt – and more importantly do they have the courage and conviction to understand the changes that are happening in the way people want to get their work done using technology (preferences driven by consumer technology). With these new paradigms emerge and enterprises can step in to the future-of-work phase of transformation.
This is the question I ask in my meetings and discussions – ‘can you imagine if getting your office work done is as easy as ordering pizza or booking uber?’ Almost all the time, the eyes pop-up, mildly indicating that I am a crazy person.
Its been our exciting challenge at Employee Experts to reimagine the way Enterprises operate using technology architecture derived from the consumer world, in which People, everyone in the ecosystems, are in the centre, and not any department/functions and just Admin users.
We understand that it’s time to change how Enterprises manage their Employee operations and we are helping them transition from their legacy, industrial age defined processes and technology to digital operations platforms built for the future.