Digital processes for an agile organization
Best practices from Farmers, Wiley, Procter and Gamble and Vestas
For IT leaders to succeed in today’s culture of disruption, they have to close the gap between business and information. They have to unite people, information and applications and ultimately create a digital workplace and a digital business.
For some companies, the Cloud Content Management journey begins with small steps. For others, a radical shift in perspective is necessary in order to compete in a highly digitized environment, where information is everything and the customer king.
At BoxWorks 2017, five technology leaders at major enterprises sat down to discuss how they’ve used Cloud Content Management to secure, manage and govern their information with Box and other best-in-breed technology solutions. Together, they framed a conversation around customer-centric business and meaningful work. Here are the dispatches and highlights from their journeys to digital transformation.
1. Digital by design, not as an add-on
The way people consume information has changed. We won’t settle for getting news or information once a month when a journal comes out. We expect it instantly. The world’s largest publisher of higher-education books and peer-reviewed scholarly research wasn’t going to remain competitive by simply tacking on some digital products to its traditional line of printed books.
At John Wiley and Sons, transformation is about being “digital-first.” It wasn’t always this way. In the beginning, Wiley’s goal was simply to work more electronic content into its repertoire of traditionally printed books. For a half dozen years, that strategy gained little traction.
Then, under the direction of SVP and Chief Product Technology Officer Peter Marney, Wiley began to make a strategic shift. Instead of simply evolving, the company decided to transform. What this looked like was new standalone digital products for customers, built on a radically new internal workflow that would help the company get products to market faster.
“Putting books and journals online doesn’t make you digital.”
— Peter Marney, SVP and Chief Product Technology Officer at John Wiley and Sons
Wiley brought in UX people and designers to illustrated in advance what an all-in investment in digital could look like. What emerged from that was a publishing platform, built on Cloud Content Management, that’s digital-first from inception to final delivery of a particular product.
Marney’s advice on how to pursue digital transformation? “Demonstrate the art of the possible to get buy-in from the board on down.”
2. Differentiated customer experiences driven by rapid digital transformation
The insurance industry had been notoriously beholden to paper processes. The ongoing digital transformation for companies like Farmers Insurance® has much to do with replacing legacy processes with newer, innovative digital processes both internally and customer-facing. Marlo Donate, VP Digital Technology at Farmers®, has helped build out the digital channels for agents and customers.
Internally, Farmers currently uses Box, Okta and Workplace by Facebook to help transform the employee experience with cloud content management. These are tools that make it easy to collaborate with colleagues, in turn helping to better serve customers. They build on or enhance the interfaces we’re already using at home, so adoption is easy in the workplace.
“The more you can bring the simplicity of use of technology from our personal lives into occupational use, the easier it will be to see the possibilities”
— Marlo Donate, VP Digital Technology at Farmers Insurance Group
And for customers, new apps and services built on digital platforms are helping to transform and better the overall customer experience, too. For example, Farmers launched in 2017 a roadside assistance tool designed to alleviate some of the frustrations associated with waiting for roadside assistance to arrive. The tool uses advanced technology to locate customers quickly and efficiently, identifies and dispatches the closest service vehicle instantly and provides real-time notifications, updates, and a live progress map customers can follow conveniently from their smartphones.
And, during Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Farmers dispatched a fleet of state-of-the-art Mobile Claims Centers, as well as established a literal village so its claims representatives could better serve customers by not taking up much needed hotel space. In addition, Farmers deployed drones and other new technology to help expedite the claims review process for customers.
It was huge for us,” says Donate, “just to see the power of technology come to play in our response to that crisis.”
Donate’s advice on how to pursue digital transformation? “You have to be fearless about radical collaboration.”
3. Digital by innovating shared services companywide
Procter and Gamble was one of the first organizations to innovate an enterprise’s operations with shared services. It introduced Global Business Services almost two decades ago to help drive strategies around standardization of operations, offshore service centers, and large sourcing deals, and to drive one ERP across a global company.
For Tony Saldanha, VP of IT & Global Business Services, Procter & Gamble, the accomplishment of being an early leader in shared services was not enough. That nagging voice in his head kept asking “What’s next?” Digital disruption hadn’t yet hit the shared services organization, but it was inevitable that it would. After all, shared services is a data and information industry at its core.
“Your job is to actually drive the transformation of your core business model, because IT and technology is like oil. Every part of your business is going to get digitized.”
— Tony Saldanha, VP, IT & Global Business Services, Procter & Gamble
Saldanha presses for digital disruption within the existing ecosystem using the company’s 160 shared services as a test bed. He envisions a day when, using Cloud Content Management, employees no longer have to manually file expense reports, since all the data that matters is theoretically “already in the system.” It’s about empowering the individual user with automation and machine learning.
As an IT leader, Saldanha says, “The worst thing you can do is make everything in IT go through you. Your job is to enable the entire company to become a digital company. You have to redo every process in the company.”
Saldanha’s advice on how to pursue digital transformation? “Disrupt yourself, your own products and services. Technology has reached a point where incremental improvements are the kiss of death. You have to go big.”
4. Digital means more than email on mobile
David Woodard, Lean Systems Leader, came from a smaller wind energy company called Upwind Solutions that was acquired by Vestas Americas. He was fully familiar with the struggle of trying to visualize where all the wind farms in a dispersed fleet stood in terms of operations and maintenance. Reporting was reliant on technicians in the field, who would trek to remote turbine locations and then slog back to make paper reports. For a technician taking a snowmobile to a turbine farm in remote Canada, that was no small commute.
When he joined Vestas, Woodard pushed for mobile reporting enabled by data. Now, all of Vestas’ wind-farm data is uploaded instantly from the field and available to every stakeholder to assess maintenance needs, order parts and analyze cost scenarios. With this global view of content and analytics, and the ability to protect IP with specific access parameters, across North America, everyone at Vestas is now on the same platform of content management.
Woodard’s advice on how to pursue digital transformation? “Leverage your employee genius. Get their ideas on how to improve the process.”
The blueprint for digital agility
- Build digital products and processes from the ground up, not as an add-on to what you’re already doing.
- Create a culture of disruption within your own company, with the audacity to envision and implement big change.
- Replace paper processes with applications and services that boldly reimagine customer and employee experience.
- Make privacy the backbone of everything you do.
