It’s time to take transformation up a gear. As decision-makers and digital leaders grapple with the logistics of delivering transformation, they also need to drive through cost optimisation, productivity improvements and improved citizen experiences with speed and scale. The secret to success? It’s a change of perspective – one that can add rocket fuel to your goals while delivering the right strategic results. And it can be summarised through three components: mindset, method and metrics.
Digital and tech leaders have a tough challenge. What technology estate will they have in five years’ time? Chances are, thanks to the pace of technology advancements, in five years that plan will be behind the curve or completely reworked. Leaders need to be comfortable making the decisions that allow the future to unfold. Get curious about how things work, how it might work, how it could be different otherwise.
It's with this mindset, one less confined by rigid concepts of how the programme should look, work and deliver, that opportunities present themselves. Are there assets or technology solutions that already exist which means you can do things faster or more cost effectively?
This is where the need to follow through on that vision comes in. Because organisational life can all too easily get in the way.
Recently, a client wanted to take the next big step in contact management to combine voice automation and AI agent assistance. However, the benefits and costs fell to different service areas with different budgets. This meant the procurement process focused on meeting a ‘telephony’ budget, one set for a different purpose and subset of ‘traditional’ features rather than the total cost of ownership of a next generation contact management solution. To maximise the potential for innovation, procurement processes should be looking at what the total cost of ownership - in other words, a decision based on a holistic business case, not the lowest price for a fixed set of features.
Digital tech leaders need to find their voice – and their confidence to have these conversations. Let’s not underestimate how hard this can be, but this degree of difficulty is a reflection of the requirement for leadership. It's not a reason not to do it.
The common challenge with tech implementation is that people are at risk of getting overly fixated on methodology at the expense of citizen experience. Or they pursue their own idea of what the citizen experience is without considering alternative views.
Which is why during our recent work with central and local government and NHS trusts we tried a different approach. For example with NHS Medway, instead of just implementing technology for technology's sake, the team focused on stretching staff imaginations about how they actually interact with patients. By collaborating directly with booking teams and patients, we crafted solutions that embraced the uncertainty of what might work by putting them into the real-world environment and iterating from there. This adaptability and openness set the scene for groundbreaking progress. Average phone call wait of times of 16 minutes, cut to zero. A 3% decrease in appointment no-shows. 30% of patients using self-service options and overall tens of thousands of minutes of patients’ time saved.
The thing to keep in mind is that your goal should be making the problem simpler. Cut off all the superfluous stuff that’s come about as a result of dogma and present this as a learning opportunity. A chance to incentivise people to use technology in new ways to do their role differently.
There’s a cultural shift with this amount of change. And it’s human nature that people who have used technology or gone about implementation in a certain way will automatically see all the ways it could go wrong. They might question the cost when it’s configured in a more holistic way. Which is where the right metrics can help. And you don’t need more KPIs to justify your approach. You need to find the right way to allow your stakeholders to see the impact you’re having – easily understandable, in real-time and used as a cornerstone for telling the story of what you are doing. Nothing convinces an audience like a trend line on a graph that drops to nothing when your solution goes live.
Any technology implementation project has the potential to be the inspiration for the next big breakthrough – it’s just a question of mindset, method and metrics.