Digital Transformation - Modernize Your IT Systems
Today we're going to talk about digital transformation a term that you've heard all over the place. And it can mean different things to different people. It's also referred to as IT modernization coming into the 21st century redoing your IT organization and infrastructure, overhauling your systems. So IT transformation. Digital transformation really means how do you operate your business, your organization in a way that really embraces technology, uses the automations, uses the robotics these days, artificial intelligence, customer facing, better transparency, better budgeting. How do you use all of these systems to make you more secure and your organization a lot more efficient as you go through your day-to-day processes of providing value to your customers, which in our case are your citizens and the people that rely on your services like utilities bus services, transportation, airports, governments, you name it. And in our experience, a lot of times government agencies tend to be behind the times by design or not in terms of technology.
Utilizing Outdated Systems
So in my experience, I've done work with 50 plus cities and counties across the country in over the last 16 years. And in every case there are several aspects of the organization that are behind the times. They either have older e r P systems or your infrastructure is old and falling apart. There are no servers, nothing is virtualized there is no high speed cabling within new building. All of these things play into this myth and sometimes reality that government agencies are not technologically advanced and therefore unable to be with the times. And what does that do to the organization? You can't attract the right workforce, you can't retain the workforce, you can't be efficient. And so it's a self-perpetuating sort of cycle if you don't take it upon yourself to bite the bullet and modernize and have a proper strategy to doing so in three to five years back when I started in this industry, we were doing 10 year IT strategic plans, modernization plans.
And really these days as quickly as technology changes, 10 years is a lifetime. You have to plan for three to five years at most. And every year you better go back and check your plan to make sure that it's still relevant, that things haven't changed in the market, in the industry that's going to put you behind. So you have to be nimble at the same time forward thinking in order to put a solid IT strategic plan in place that's going to modernize your operations, that's going to transform you and your operation by using digital tools and strategies. Where would you go to start with the modernization process? You would probably go and ask your IT team, what tools do you guys have and what kind of things can we use to modernize our processes? And at that time, most IT departments will tell you, we have the right tools in place.
Envisioning the Ideal System
You just have to tell us what you want to use. You may even see a network diagram and a schematic that shows every cool piece of equipment they have, but it doesn't work for you. So when you talk to your IT department or anyone that's responsible for keeping up with your infrastructure, what you'll probably see is there's a fancy map laid out there. You have your computers, you have your servers, you have switches, firewalls, you have all of these fancy things that show that your infrastructure is in top shape. When you go into your office and you see that you're still working on Excel files and sticky notes and paper folders and faxes, you've gotta ask yourself what's missing? And typically these two things are related because your IT infrastructure is what you use to do your business on a day-to-day basis and make things more efficient.
To make things efficient, you have to make sure that you have the right tool sets and the right infrastructure to make things happen. And typically when you are in a situation like this, you probably have some common pain points that we've seen all over the place. You have manual data entry, you've got a lack of documented practices and pro procedures decreased efficiency of the workforce. I mean, this is huge, right? We are all trying to gather and attract the right workforce to work for our teams. And when you don't have the right tools in place, you just can't attract people or keep them in place, especially when you have older systems with green screens and that require command prompts. You're not going to keep a millennial worker engaged when they can just go down the street and use better tools to enhance their skillsets and feel like they're doing a better job.
Lack of audit trails, duplicate efforts. We see this all over the place where two people in the same department doing the same job are doing it two completely different ways because the system doesn't allow for automation and you have workarounds to workarounds, your decision making tends to be reactive. You cannot make proactive for thinking decisions. Lack of interfaces between departments is also very common. This is critical because you might have a cool system, but if the department that you interface with a lot, for example, let's say engineering and public works or community development, don't have the right system, don't have the systems that talk to each other. Now you're looking at printing things, rolling stacks of papers into your zoning and plan review meetings and it's just inefficiency. I mean, overall, you just have this feeling and a sense of inefficiency and a sense that you don't have the right tools to do your job.
And all of this is because your strategy, your long-term thinking, your vision hasn't matched up with the IT infrastructure and the tool set. Yes, yet. So this is very common. We see this all over the place. And if you're feeling or experiencing any of these common pain points or symptoms, you might want to look at IT modernization and enhanced digital transformation. That starts at the very top. That starts at the leadership's vision and walks backwards toward what kind of tools are we going to need to get rid of these inefficiencies and make sure that the tools that we do have are working in our favor in the long term. Where do you start? Like everything else you start with a vision. What is it that you want your agency to do for your citizens, for your clients? How do you want to deliver services? How secure do you want to be?
And work backwards from that vision. So in many ways it's not digital transformation, it's organizational transformation. It's transformation based on your vision as a city. It might be, I want to be more transparent. I want to have my budgets on the website. I want to have the ability to give my citizens the tools for public input. So a lot of these things happen because the leader of the city or the county think about what services to offer and how you want to do this for your customers. Once you have that documented, that then gives you the baseline for where you want to go. And then you can work backwards. You can work backwards and say, okay, to make that happen, we need these tactical plans late in place in the next three years, in the next five years. And then working backwards. You then get to where you are today and where you are today may not be anywhere close to where you need to be in terms of the services you wanna offer, but it gives you a real snapshot of the gaps that exist and the lack of technology or business process modernization in your organization that's keeping you from achieving those vision elements.
So once you've had the vision, you work backwards, you have the gaps, and you take those gaps and you see which of those gaps will need modern technology, which of those gaps exist that your IT organization can't meet themselves that they haven't done anything on yet? And then work forward from their, in terms of building a real technology plan that helps you put these pieces together. And I remember you don't have to build anything anymore. You don't have to build software. All the Lego pieces exist in the market. You have to bring them together with a vision that allows you to put these pieces together to make it a little more tangible. And this isn't an easy thing to do because remember you, if you're overhauling technologies from the 1970s, you better have a good story for why you need a couple million dollars to sell to your counselor commission to allow them to understand and approve the process.
Long-Term Progress
And again, it's a long process. You're not going to do this overnight. So you have to plan and work backwards from your vision. A lot of times when you show up in an organization as a new leader the IT organization could scramble a little bit because they don't know what to expect. So it's helpful if you come in with a vision and say, Hey, hi, I want to do these five things globally over the next five years, and I need your support IT department CIO to make this happen. And you might see that a bone may be thrown you away. Hey, we're going to buy you 50 office 365 licenses. That should keep you quiet for a couple years. It's not important. That is a small thing in a global vision that you're trying to set. Really, it's not about the tools, it's not about the IT stuff.
It's about how do you want your organization transform to take advantage of modern digital tools to transform the way you operate internally and provide services to your customers, whoever they may be. So what are the foundations of a strong digital transformation strategy or an IT modernization strategy? In my experience, it comes down to three things. One is your cyber security. We say when we do these projects for cities and counties across the country security first, and now that can mean many different things. But really when it comes down to it, how secure is your agency and how protected are you from things like cyber attacks, from phishing scams, from for people getting into and stealing your data from critical systems? That needs to be the first layer. So when we do it, strategic plan and assessments, that's the first thing we'll look at is not just the systems.
You might have the most expensive firewall, you might have the best sims out there, but what are you doing when there is a breach, when there's an instant, do you have a plan? Do you have documentation for who to call? Who's responsible for what? Do you have a disaster recovery plan? Do you have a response plan? What happens when your data is held captive and someone wants 10 Bitcoin to release it? How are you going to react with it? Now remember, cyber insurance is a factor. And you may have it, you may not. We recommend you get it, but companies and agencies that sell cyber insurance will likely not sell it to you. If you don't have all of these ducks in a row, if you don't have the documentation, if you don't have the systems, if you don't have the right people in place, at times they'll just flatly refuse to sell your policy or it'll cost you a lot more.
So cybersecurity is critical. It's it's one of the most important elements of a strong cyber plan, of a strong IT strategy of a strong digital transformation strategy. The second piece of this is your infrastructure. Now, what I mean by that is the blinking lights, as I call it, right? The firewalls, the servers, virtualized servers, cloud services, how you're wired internally. Do you have access control to your data center and your server rooms? Do you have excellent security within your services and your systems that don't allow on unauthorized access? Do you have the right infrastructure in place, the blinking lights, the servers, the switches, the wireless access points? How are those things configured? That is your second pillar of a solid IT strategy. And the last one is what we've been talking about for a while now, which is enterprise systems. That could be a financial system, could be your HR system, your work order management system.
Are those systems useful enough? Are they automated enough? Do they have the right kind of modules and pieces and parts that allow for automated modernized business processes that allow for better transparency, that allow for better response times, that allow for better reporting and dashboarding? Do you have the right systems in place that allow your users to work in a modern organization? So those are the three elements. Cybersecurity, enterprise systems and infrastructure, that those are the foundational elements of a modernization plan. And when we come in and do it, strategic planning for you, that's what it focuses on. But keep in mind that a lot of this is how are we delivering services to our staff internally and to the citizens outside? Everything else is part of the plan, is part of the tool set that you use to achieve your vision going forward?