Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As businesses continue to leverage digitaltools to remain competitive and improve the customer experience, we’re starting to see an alarming trend that negatively impacts legacy organizations in Columbus who’ve been using the same protocols and technology for decades.

When organizations begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to focus on customer-facing departments like Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s important to improve the customer journey and correctly market your products and services, neglecting other parts of the company that also help customers, suppliers, partners, and staff can hurt your ability to provide a seamless experience for everyone.

Our View

In our humble opinion, the Back Office is the cornerstone of your company. If your workflow creates bottlenecks, the productivity of your entire organization deteriorates. For example, let’s say a company acquires a new client in minutes but requires several weeks to spin up a new employee or supplier. That’s an issue because both your employees' talent and your partner’s products play a crucial role in providing excellent service to the customer. Therefore, if those components are not operating efficiently, your customer is ultimately who pays the price. Your Front Office can only be as seamless as your Back Office, and both must be included in a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are connected logically to support the user experience for your staff, making it smoother for knowledge workers to utilize more than one platform. By aligning systems so that they’re communicating with one another, knowledge workers can avoid extra work, make better decisions, and prioritize more important priorities.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing it the way you’ve always done it is no longer a good reason for shunning change in your company protocols. This inflexible mindset is harmful to any digital transformation or modernization endeavor and should be challenged through education on creating job expertise and change control. Every task should have a specific goal, require the least amount of effort, and be aligned with this strategic initiative.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as critical for your workers, partners, and merchants to have a pleasant user experience as it is for your clients. Eliminating swivel chair tasks should be your first priority, particularly when onboarding new staff. In the time of digital transformation, a tedious hiring experience could hurt the livelihood of your whole business.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS applications are increasing in utilization, organizations are migrating more and more to Cloud and Hybrid frameworks and removing legacy systems to remain cost-effective and dynamic.
Security Expectations

Your customers, workers, merchants, and partners all assume you will have modern security protocols active that reduce the possibility of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital era and your organization will be expected to keep it safe without diminishing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Organizations should make data-driven choices while utilizing Business Intelligence tools that empower decision-making with a full view that uses multiple data authors and tools.
Task Automation

In the age146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, processing invoices or purchase orders should involve minimal effort. Mundane processes should be automated so that human capital can prioritize the most vital work.