Digital transformation in sales in employment contracts

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for those about to begin a digital transformation it's important to understand the basic nomenclature and terminology that's commonly used in these transformations so today i want to talk about the top 10 terms you need to know before beginning your digital transformation [Music] my name is eric kimberling and i'm the ceo of third stage consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients through their digital transformation journeys and speaking the language of digital transformation is very important it's important to be speaking the same language with your team internally with your outside consultants and other stakeholders and really just making sure that you understand what these terms mean and how it applies to your organization and your transformation so what i want to do today is talk about those top 10 terms that you need to know in embarking on your digital transformation the first thing to understand are all the acronyms and buzzwords that describe different types of enterprise technologies so for example you have erp enterprise resource planning systems those are technologies that provide broad capabilities across financials inventory management customer relationship management your hr systems basically ties together your entire organization under one umbrella which is called erp so that's what erp or enterprise software planning software means another type of common technology used in enterprise technology initiatives is crm or customer relationship management this type of software is basically salesforce automation it's how you automate your pipeline is how you track the activities of your sales team it's how you track commissions it's how you assign leads and prospects and opportunities and regions to your sales team so crm is really the first contact that an outside prospective client has with your organization and crm is the way of tracking that there's another type of technology called hcm or human capital management this is the hr processes your benefits your payroll your performance management all your performance reviews all that stuff is done within an hcm system and then finally the supply chain management which is sem as it's often called is a way to manage everything from your procure to pay processes to ordering of raw materials to the actual manufacturing to the warehouse to the distribution of logistics so there are a number of similarities between these different types of technologies and they don't necessarily need to be mutually exclusive you may have more than one of these solutions and in many cases organizations will have more than one so understanding these terms upfront will help you find the one that's best for you and for more information on any one of these acronyms i've talked about i actually have more videos on my youtube channel to talk about erp supply chain hcm crm and describe in more detail what each of those things are but at a high level that's how we define those terms [Music] another distinction to understand is how the technology is deployed and what i mean by that is is your technology going to be deployed within your office or within your four walls or is it going to be hosted off-site by someone else and that's really the difference between on-premise systems and cloud systems so on-premise means that you've installed or implemented the technology on your server within your organization cloud means that someone else is hosting that solution so the software all of your data all that stuff is up in the cloud hosted by a third party now more vendors are moving to the cloud in recent years and some argue that on-premise will be a dead sort of technology in a few years maybe that's true maybe it's not but there's still a majority of software vendors that are providing on-premise solutions largely because on-premise has been around for so long and those technologies tend to be more mature and more established than cloud solutions a third important concept to understand is what is the difference between configuration and customization first of all it's important to note that every organization that deploys any sort of enterprise technology has to do some sort of configuration you're configuring or personalizing the technology for your specific needs you're choosing what screens to use how the information is going to flow but you're doing this all in the context of how the software was built and how it was meant to be used customization on the other hand is taking the concept of configuration a step further and now you're actually changing the code you're rewriting the software to do something it wasn't necessarily meant to do now most organizations are very allergic to the concept of customization but they find that they have to customize because there's some deficiencies in the technology they've acquired that don't quite meet their business requirements so while most organizations want to steer clear of customization or they try to steer clear of customization inevitably most of them end up having to do some of that but it's important to recognize that customization leads to a lot of risk in terms of difficulty of upgrading in terms of increased cost higher risk all that good stuff so understand the downside of that but also understand that configuration is something you'll have to do as part of your implementation [Music] one of the first steps in any sort of digital transformation is to define business requirements and what business requirements are are basically a definition and a description of what you need your technology to do so it's usually based on your business processes it's usually based on what you're trying to accomplish as an organization and it's usually based on your future state of what you're trying to accomplish in the future one thing to note is when you're defining your business requirements not all of your business requirements may be created equally there might be some that are higher priority because they're unique to you and or because they're requirements that are going to differentiate the different systems in the marketplace but regardless of how you use the business requirements which by the way can also be used for the implementation you want to make sure you define those early on and understand what business requirements are another term that's very important to understand is organizational change management it's a important term that's also misunderstood and organizational change management is commonly referred to as communications and training but that is a very limited and inaccurate description of change management change management essentially has anything to do with the people side of the transformation so that could be things like how jobs are going to be redefined new organizational structures new organizational design change impacts understanding how people's roles and responsibilities are going to change all of those things and the way we deal with all those things that all falls under the umbrella of organizational change management now the important thing i'll note about change management is it is the number one reason why a majority of transformations fail it's because they don't adequately address organizational change management so this is a term you absolutely need to know in fact i encourage you to go check out some of my other videos on my channel that cover change management in a lot more detail we didn't do a lot of the strategies and tactics and frameworks of how to deploy change management as well as a what is change management video in more detail but hopefully this gives you a description in the meantime [Music] how you manage your project and how you make decisions is essentially what project governance is so project governance is the overall framework that you use to manage the project this includes your project charter which describes how decisions are made and who the team members are what the roles and responsibilities of team members are it also includes your project plan so what is the plan what are the timelines what are the resource allocations how are major decisions made and escalated throughout an implementation as well as defining measures of success for the overall project those are just a few examples of what you might include within your project governance framework but in essence when you talk about project governance and controls it's an important framework that's designed to manage your project and put in the right controls to ensure it stays on track another concept that's important to understand is the differentiation between agile and waterfall deployments waterfall deployments to start are the traditional way of deploying technologies you have very clearly defined and sequential steps in an implementation process that start with defining your business requirements and then once everyone has agreed and signed off on the business requirements you then move into the design of the software and only once you've signed off on the design then you move into the build test training go live etc now that's how projects typically worked but in recent years the whole agile movement has sort of scrambled that approach or that common approach for a lot of organizations many organizations are shifting to more of an agile and less sequential approach where you just start building stuff and testing it in real time to get people's reaction and then you start modifying the technology to meet whatever feedback you get from your audience so the idea here is to deploy technology as quickly as possible and get a minimum viable product in place you can get immediate feedback and make adjustments and pivot from there sounds great in theory there's a lot of risk to this there's also a lot of risk to the waterfall approach too and i actually cover that in more detail in one of my videos on my youtube channel that's called agile versus waterfall so i encourage you to check that out on my youtube channel [Music] integration is a very important concept especially in today's technological day and age of multiple systems that need to tie together and talk to one another so integration is the way that those systems tie together and talk to one another the way they transition or transfer data between one another the way workflows transition between different systems so for example if you have a crm system or customer relationship management that your sales team is using and it's tracking sales commissions you would need that data on sales commissions to tie into your financial system which may be in your erp system or whatever your accounting system is you need to create an integration point where that data can flow from the crm system into your financial system i won't get into the technicalities of how that's done but in general the whole concept of integration is the flow of data and processes between multiple systems architecture is a lot like integration in that it defines what all your systems are where the integration points are and how data is going to flow between the system so it's oftentimes a visual representation of what all your different systems are where the data flows are where the touch points are and how it's being used throughout the organization so architecture is very important architecture can also be used to define any one specific system that you're using and what sort of architecture platform that that system is built on so for example microsoft dynamics has historically built their architecture on the.net platform and so that's a dot-net architecture that it's built on so you can have architecture within a specific one single system but more broadly speaking architecture also refers to how different systems tie together and what the overall landscape of your entire system landscape look and then another term that's important to understand is master data data in and of itself is just data transactions financial numbers any sort of data that flows through the system master data is not transactional in that someone makes a sale or someone does a transaction in a system that's data master data is the stuff that you use over and over again and defines how you're going to run your business so for example you would have your general ledger or your chart of accounts on the financial side technically that's mastered data because that's data that is overarching and defines how workflows work and how the data is all going to flow together you also have product masters which are basically all the products that you manufacture or distribute you have product masters for each of those products you also have customer masters that capture all the information about your customers and then when your customer buys from your organization it's captured as a transaction underneath that customer master so those are just a few examples of master data but that's one term that's very important in any sort of digital transformation so i hope this has given you a sense of those 10 terms that are most important to recognize and understand i encourage you to go a bit deeper though and download our annual digital transformation report this report contains a number of best practices and definitions and descriptions of all the things you need to know to understand as you embark on your digital transformation and that same report also includes a number of top 10 rankings of all the different types of technologies in the marketplace whether it be erp or crm or hcm or whatever the case may be so i encourage you to download that i've included a link below i hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day you