Adaptable for the future — solutions for flexible working

The human tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic is incalculable and growing daily. The priority right now is to ensure every human life is cared for as best we can. We know there is not a single business or employee that is not concerned about the impact on entire industries. And we want to reassure people that it isn’t superficial to be talking about keeping industry wheels turning when workers need to be paid to keep their homes running. The situation is currently unpredictable, and many of our clients and people in our network have been asking us how they can get ready for the future by becoming more flexible and proactive, rather than cumbersome and reactive.

The practical reality is we need to drive industry as much as possible, for the good of everyone. So we have allocated resources this week to prepare a service to respond to more of you, free of charge. We hope to have it ready and available on our website next week. Now is the time for software providers like us to use our expertise to strengthen others. We have a working knowledge of almost all types of software, including remote collaboration tools, secure endpoint solutions, cloud-based storage, and CRM systems. At Eli5 our day-to-day projects are all about making our clients internal- and external-facing processes and services more adaptive.

How can we be adaptable to change?

“By developing a culture and mechanisms that support superior adaptive capability, companies will inoculate themselves against a range of threats, not just pandemics. They’ll become more resilient and competitive in the complex and uncertain business of business.” Nitin Noharia, Dean of the Harvard Business School.

• Up to 80% of businesses use social collaboration tools for enhancing business processes. McKinsey
• 83% of professionals depend on technology to collaborate. Alfresco
• 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures. Salesforce

The good news is, it has never been easier to find digital solutions, or build a product tailor-made to a specific need. The current crisis has been a reminder that organisational preparedness for predictable events is good, but a responsive business is the one that will survive the best. These are the one’s ready to answer events that you can’t anticipate and many companies are now planning to fast track their innovation workstreams.

This is not about having a risk management team. Adaptability should run through your whole business so you can rapidly evaluate and react responsibly to simpler day-to-day issues like power or internet outages, and complex issues arising from the loss of both physical and human resources. These should be living, digital response efforts that flex throughout the day. overly managing communications can be damaging when situations can change dramatically by day or by hour.

© Harvard Business Review, Nitin Noharia

There is a clear need to streamline operations and develop technology to keep up during a crisis, but also with changing and growing demands from your users and the competition, to investors and regulators.

We have done our best to use our expertise to offer people and businesses useful advice for now and the coming months. Here, we will cover the most helpful solutions.

Tips for being an adaptable business

You cannot predict the future. There are many reasons to accommodate flexible working; better communication and collaboration for workers. By offering flexible working options and hours, you can also be more inclusive and attract a wider range of talent.

Manual tasks can be automated and knowledge quickly shared, all making for a happier and more productive team. For example, we recently built an online-accessible collaborative working environment for a corporate compliance team. This solution was designed to cut down the time span of compliance trajectories from 2 years to only 6 months — but now it has also meant their team of 60 members have been able to seamlessly transition to working from home with minimal disruption.

1. Have proactive cycles for finding and anticipating threats, coordinating, responding, and then finding them again. This should be an ongoing and consistent, but structured effort. This system also works for seeking out new opportunities too.
2. Enable creative and collaborative problem-solving. A small team of trusted staff will reduce bureaucracy and give them enough space to make quick decisions in critical moments. When tough issues are handled by a host of functions with a variety of suggestions you have a slow process with a generalised outcome.
3. Be open source for co-developing. Be prepared to find new ways to apply your capabilities and cooperate with others.
4. Invest in technology that enables remote and collaborative working. There are various layers to this which we will now go into greater detail on. But to summarise these are communication tools, online co-working spaces, shared documentation tools, cloud storage solutions, and data sharing tools.

Communications: Dynamic workspaces so employees can collaborate remotely

Technology can bring people within organisations together and provide more intuitive and dynamic spaces to collaborate and work in. This means human beings spending less time on manual work and more time adding genuine value and growth. Technology can also bring different departments together, to avoid duplicating work and create more time for other things

1. Develop a real-time collaborative environment for your team to work within — and share your services, documents and data. These can be application or browser-based.
2. Choose one system for everyone, but have a back-up too.
3. Ensure there is a form of version-control or edit history so you can audit processes and recover documents.

Shared documentation tools: Technology that helps turn static documents into living ones

Innovation can improve data handling, the length of review cycles and other inefficient manual processes. You can:

1. Turn typed, handwritten, and printed documents into electronic versions with Optical Character Recognition. This means you can then turn documents into data.
2. You can then use Natural Language Processing to analyse and segment documentation.
3. Create dynamic smart documents to turn your data into business insights. Part of processing the language means making it into data that a machine (computer) can understand. This means that your documents are no longer static and manual, but living documents.

Data sharing: Structured data for improved access, portability and processing for real-time business forecasting and tracking

“Unstructured data makes up 80% and more of enterprise data, and is growing at the rate of 55% and 65% per year. And without the tools to analyse this massive data, organisations are leaving vast amounts of valuable data on the business intelligence table.” Datamation.

Most of us understand the importance of data. However, a lot of companies have focused on setting up ways to gather as much data as possible. Often this will be collected in various formats across many different programs, platforms and services. The problem is this data is unstructured, so it can’t be interrogated or used for analysis. It can’t easily be stored in a database, and it has attributes that make it a challenge to search for, edit and analyse. You need to:

1. Get control of your data. Document where and what everything is.
2. Change the way a company treats its documents, policies, and standards. Structure your data, so you are using only what is relevant and insights don’t get lost in the noise.
3. Create an Integration Hub. This is a centralised place that orchestrates all internal and external connectivity between users and the various different services they employ. It also acts as a singular point of access, where developers can connect new tools, platforms and applications. [We go into detail on this in our free eBook]
4. Improve data portability. Use high-quality open API’s that extend beyond your internal IT landscape to bring in data from any other service you want to build or external services.

Ecosystems: Moving from a ‘patchwork’ of services and solutions to an integrated ecosystem

Technology offers a lot of ‘quick fixes’. While we use some of these ourselves, buying into too many or the wrong ones can leave your services and solutions in silos, which means you are only adding more loops to a process. In trying to make tasks more simple on the surface, behind the scenes you are making your IT more complex.

“Nearly half of all companies reported using external data in their analytics activities…organisations in industries, including financial services, are using external data to gain new insights that can help increase efficiency and revenue…92% of data analytics professionals said their firms needed to increase use of external data sources. 54% said their companies plan to increase spending on it”. Deloitte

1. Create an ecosystem to make your end-to-end solutions more effective.
2. Build a platform. Building a platform makes effective enterprise collaboration possible.
3. Use a data framework. This means you can integrate other solutions now and in the future.

Being proactive: Digital products that can grow and flex with the ever-changing landscape

Companies are already firmly in the race to develop or implement the right product to solve their burdens. Almost everyone we have spoken to is speeding up their innovation trajectory to create scalable and flexible solutions that can be rapidly implemented to stand up in emergency situations. When choosing or building a solution, we advise not focusing entirely on optimisation and efficiency but opportunities to evolve and constantly improve when you face new problems.

There’s no shortage of good ideas. It’s choosing the right one and making it happen that is difficult. Based on our experience as product building partners to companies including both startups and Fortune 500 companies, we find the most success when we collaborate with internal employees.

If you have any questions you would like to ask us, or you would just like to have a chat with one of our experts in this challenging time, please do get in touch at info@eli5.io