Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As businesses continue to leverage digitalplatforms to maintain competitive advantage and improve the buyer journey, we’re seeing an alarming pattern that harms legacy organizations in Baltimore who’ve been working with the same processes and technology for years.

When businesses begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to concentrate on customer-facing departments like Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s critical to improve the customer experience and accurately market your offerings, ignoring certain areas that also support customers, suppliers, partners, and staff can hurt your capacity to provide a seamless experience for everyone involved.

Our View

In our humble opinion, the Back Office is the heart of your business. If your process flow creates inefficiencies, the productivity of your entire business deteriorates. For example, let’s say a company brings on a new customer in minutes but requires a month to onboard a new employee or vendor. That’s an issue because both your employees' skills and your partner’s products play a vital role in providing exemplary service to the customer. Therefore, if those pieces are not operating smoothly, your customer is ultimately the one who pays the price. Your Front Office can only be as efficient as your Back Office, and both must be considered during a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are connected logically to aid in the user experience for your workers, making it smoother for knowledge workers to use more than one tool. By arranging systems so that they’re communicating with one another, knowledge workers can avoid double work, make better decisions, and prioritize more critical priorities.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing things the way you always have is no longer a valid reason for shunning change in your business processes. This stubborn mentality is harmful to any digital transformation or modernization goal and should be confronted through education on creating task expertise and change control. Every job should have a designated objective, require minimal effort, and be aligned with this strategic initiative.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as important for your staff, partners, and vendors to have a pleasant user experience as it is for your clients. Eliminating unnecessary tasks should be your first objective, particularly when hiring new hires. In the era of digital transformation, a complex hiring process could hurt the livelihood of your entire organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS tools are increasing in adoption, companies are moving more and more to Cloud and Hybrid architectures and pulling out legacy systems to remain under cost and productive.
Security Expectations

Your customers, employees, vendors, and partners all expect you to have state-of-the-art security protocols implemented that reduce the risk of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital generation and your company will be expected to protect it without hurting the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Businesses should make data-centric judgments while employing Business Intelligence applications that empower decision-making with a 360-degree view that leverages multiple data authors and tools.
Task Automation

In the age146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, processing invoices or purchase orders should need nominal manpower. Day-to-day jobs should be automated so that human assets can focus on the most vital jobs.