Should You be Resting at the Seat of Information Technology?

Take a seat. With technology adapting both easily and quickly to an organization’s needs, what else would you need to achieve a business transformation? You don’t have to go that far to find the right implementation with technology front and center, and in today’s hybrid fashion, understanding the process for today and tomorrow is easy like A-B-C, right?

Wrong!

In GovLoop’s Thursday online training, How Government is Achieving Business Transformation, audience members received lessons learned for success by hearing two real world government case studies using Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM to overcome public sector challenges.

Orange County Sheriff’s Department Case Study:

Chris Wilson, Public Sector Business Development Manager at Tribridge, shared how Orange County Sheriff’s Department created a Personnel History Index (PHI) dashboard to take a look at the different behaviors citizens have in order to dive deeper into areas that need improvement or show success. The challenges OCSD faced were disparate, legacy systems, how-to best accomplish the sheriff’s directive, and what type of solution to use. With Dynamics CRM, what once was not available for leadership review now has consistent reporting and real time information available to managers, and labor intensive or redundant data entry is now solved with automated workflows.

Best practices? Have a constant focus and reminders. Wilson encouraged audience members looking to implement Dynamics CRM to re-visit assumptions – which can change overtime from both external factors or simply by learning something new – and be rest assured that the Microsoft platform is easily configurable and adaptable to your organization’s needs like it did for OCSD by finding them the funds necessary to purchase, maintain and create a system to train employees more effectively.

Centers for Disease Control Case Study:

John Auraujo, Health Scientist and S3P Project Lead at the Centers for Disease Control, discussed how understanding the development environment and planning for the future with Microsoft’s product architecture, Dynamics CRM, allowed the CDC to decrease the time and money it takes to deliver solutions – critical for any organization who’s mission is rooted from the discovery and delivery of benefits to public health.

Best practices? Leverage technology and partnerships. Evolving the stakeholder community – allowing them to engage in the process and functional testing – gives your organization’s immediate feedback.

“Share before you build,” said Auraujo when reviewing the importance of a cross environment in the federal government.

Here are the top four takeaways from yesterday’s online training, which you can view on-demand here:

1. Factors for Business Transformation

You’re probably wondering why exactly business transformation is effecting your organization. Sam Thepvongs, Practice Manager for Public Sector and Parature at Webfortis, gave insights to new priorities to be recognized. Included were improving mission delivery, process/information silos, organizational efficiency and effectiveness, as well as keeping up with technology innovation including cloud and mobility.

Takeaway: putting these factors at the forefront can reveal your organization’s ability to do more with less, in a much more efficient way compared to the initial methods of how your organization might have been constructed decades ago.

2. Focus on the holy grail combo of a successful business transformation

Sam also stressed how important it is to recognize that technology by itself will not create the new development methods your organization needs. So what else is involved?

The answer: Technology + Leadership + Strategic Partnerships.

Takeaway: this combination is essential to achieve a business transformation strategy. Partners serve as huge accelerators and can have your starting point maxed, and having your leadership team understand both the foundation and big picture is paramount to give direction of where you want to go and what you want to accomplish.

3. Deliver amazing customer experiences

Note that customer experience is both internal and external interactions. An implication of having a less than ideal experience is problematic but when you anticipate the need to address change management and user adoption, you will reap long-term benefits.

Takeaway: By delivering amazing customer experience, adding technology to the mix will help drive accountability and performance within organizations, making people accountable for their executions.

4. Start fresh, now!

Don’t wait until everything is perfect to begin achieving a business transformation. Find the balance between what you need to operate –the cases currently in progress – and decide later if it’s valuable to convert data beyond 12 months.

Takeaway: Microsoft Dynamics CRM is so flexible that you’ll soon discover that the quicker you start [with one mission], the quicker you’ll find other areas that you can take advantage of and new capabilities that you didn’t anticipate having, allowing you to leverage your investment to the fullest. By starting fresh now, you can also use your old methods for research.

Learn more about the advantages of Dynamics CRM by viewing the on-demand version of the training here.