Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As companies continue to leverage digitalsoftware to maintain competitive advantage and improve the customer experience, we’re seeing an alarming tendency that harms legacy organizations in Chicago who’ve been working with the same protocols and technology for decades.

When organizations begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to prioritize customer-facing departments like Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s important to improve the buyer journey and correctly market your services, forgetting about certain departments that also help clients, suppliers, partners, and staff can inhibit your capacity to provide a efficient experience for all parties.

Our View

In our humble opinion, the Back Office is the heart of your company. If your process flow creates bottlenecks, the capacity of your entire organization pays for it. For example, let’s say a organization brings on a new customer in minutes but requires several weeks to onboard a new employee or vendor. That’s an issue because both your employees' abilities and your supplier’s products play a critical role in providing exemplary service to the customer. Therefore, if those components are not operating efficiently, your client is ultimately the one who pays the price. Your Front Office can only be as capable as your Back Office, and both must be included in a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are unified logically to facilitate the user experience for your workers, making it easier for knowledge workers to access more than one platform. By organizing systems so that they’re talking to one another, knowledge workers can avoid extra work, make wiser decisions, and concentrate on more important tasks.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing things the way you always have is no longer a valid reason for dodging change in your organization processes. This inflexible attitude is detrimental to any digital transformation or modernization initiative and should be confronted through education on creating task competence and change control. Every process should have a designated purpose, require minimal effort, and be aligned with this greater goal.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as critical for your employees, partners, and merchants to have a seamless user experience as it is for your customers. Eliminating unnecessary tasks should be your first goal, particularly when staffing new staff. In the age of digital transformation, a tedious staffing experience could threaten the livelihood of your entire company.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS tools are increasing in use, businesses are switching more and more to Cloud and Hybrid architectures and pulling out legacy systems to remain cost-effective and efficient.
Security Expectations

Your customers, staff, suppliers, and partners all assume you will have modern security protocols active that reduce the chance of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital generation and your company will be expected to keep it safe without hurting the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Organizations should make data-based decisions while utilizing Business Intelligence software that facilitate decision-making with a 360-degree view that utilizes multiple data authors and tools.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, preparing invoices or purchase orders should involve nominal effort. Day-to-day jobs should be automated so that staff can prioritize the most important work.