Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As businesses continue to utilize digitaltools to maintain competitive advantage and improve the customer experience, we’re beginning to see an alarming pattern that harms legacy organizations in Boston who’ve been utilizing the same protocols and technology for a long time.

When organizations begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to focus on customer-facing departments like Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s important to improve the buyer journey and properly market your products and services, ignoring other parts of the company that also help customers, vendors, partners, and employees can hurt your capability to provide a seamless experience for all parties.

Our View

From our perspective, the Back Office is the cornerstone of your business. If your workflow creates inefficiencies, the yield of your entire business suffers. For example, let’s say a business onboards a new client in minutes but requires several weeks to spin up a new employee or supplier. That’s a problem because both your employees' talent and your partner’s products play a critical role in providing excellent service to the customer. Therefore, if those components are not operating smoothly, your client is ultimately who pays the price. Your Front Office can only be as efficient as your Back Office, and both must be included in a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are integrated in a logical way to aid in the user experience for your workers, making it more efficient for knowledge workers to utilize more than one tool. By aligning systems so that they’re communicating with one another, knowledge workers can avoid extra work, make better decisions, and concentrate on more critical tasks.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing things the way you always have is no longer a valid reason for shunning change in your organization workflows. This inflexible mentality is destructive to any digital transformation or modernization goal and should be resolved through education on creating work efficiency and change management. Every job should have a designated objective, require minimal effort, and be aligned with this greater goal.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as vital for your workers, partners, and merchants to have a seamless user experience as it is for your clients. Eliminating swivel chair jobs should be your first priority, particularly when hiring new employees. In the time of digital transformation, a tedious staffing experience could hurt the livelihood of your entire organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS platforms are increasing in use, businesses are moving more and more to Cloud and Hybrid frameworks and pulling out legacy systems to remain under budget and productive.
Security Expectations

Your clients, workers, suppliers, and partners all assume you will have state-of-the-art security protocols implemented that lessen the risk of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital era and your business will be expected to defend it without diminishing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Businesses should make data-based decisions while utilizing Business Intelligence software that empower decision-making with a full view that uses multiple data sources and applications.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, preparing invoices or purchase orders should involve minimal human intervention. Day-to-day processes should be automated so that human capital can prioritize the most vital work.