Managing at the speed of thought

Successful businesses are managing at the speed of thought.  In other words, once a decision is made implementation starts immediately, and board rooms have become intolerant to “let me look into it and get back to you.”  Successful professionals know they cannot lead their industry by maintaining the status quo, with information technology they are not rocking the boat, they are stepping on the accelerator to outperform their competitors.

We read weekly reports of prominent businesses that have fallen because they were entrenched in ‘business as usual’ or who thought improvements only happened when one of their business units experienced the proverbial pain points.  Like humans, organizations that wait to experience pain before acting will suffer, sometimes they will recover, and sometimes they won’t.  Either way, these businesses will fall on average 5 steps behind competitors that are early adopters of technology:

• Step 1: research a fix
• Step 2: secure funding and procurement
• Step 3: implementation and deployment
• Step 4: fix the pain
• Step 5: benefit from improvements

Some may argue these 5 steps need to happen if a business is in the lead or in the back of the pack.  Everything being equal, when businesses act proactively they eliminate the ‘pain’ stage, and control deployment timing.  However, with the advent of cloud based software as a service (SaaS) solutions, things are not equal anymore: today, organizations can eliminate the 5 steps and adopt a SaaS solution overnight.  That can happen because capital investment in SaaS is low, and implementation and benefits to a management team are immediate.

Management cannot happen without documentation.  Organizations keep track of everything, from contracts, to correspondence, warranties, photos of assets, etc.  In many organizations these documents are:

• in paper form,
• stored in unstructured multi-layered folders,
• on non-sanctioned, scattered, cloud solutions,
• on personal laptops or phones (photos),
• and, tracked on Excel spreadsheets.

This prevalent way of managing documentation is quietly crippling businesses.  The pains of such inefficiencies are masked by the inevitability of someone eventually finding a needed document, no matter how long it takes.  Conversely, organizations using document management SaaS platforms, such as Facilitr, will instantly find a document and act on it.  These platforms reverse the definition of success from finding a document, to knowing a document exists and consuming its content.

Most professionals know what needs to be done.  Delays in decision making are typically attributable to lack of access to supporting documentation.  It is the decision makers’ responsibility within an organization to advocate migration to a document management platform.  When that happens, you will be able to manage at the speed of thought.