Take the context and the existing environment into account

10 essential factors for Onboarding – 5/10

Situational analysis of your organization

Unless you start an entrepreneurial project, it’s safe to bet that your work environment is already made up of several IT solutions that meet different business needs. Some of which you know of, some not.

Some of them may be remnants of high-performance technologies (e.g. IBM Lotus Notes, DMS software, forums, traditional intranets), but today they are destined to transform or disappear. This can represent potential cost savings that are sometimes hidden and not negligible.

More modern platforms may already be deployed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and offer implementation speed and characteristics close to the key needs that you have been able to identify beforehand .

Some key questions that will move you forward:

  • Which technological ecosystem does my company favor? Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple or other?
  • What are the different families of existing solutions for communication (intranet, e-mail, chat), documentation management (SharePoint, Documentum, Lotus Notes, Shared Trees, etc.), community management (Yammer, Jive, etc.), business (Salesforce, HubSpot as CRM, Odoo as ERP, intelligence gathering tools, etc.) already present in my company? How are they used and by whom?
  • Are some of these platforms likely to be replaced? In this case, the current uses should be examined in greater depth to see if they can be transferred.
  • Are some of these platforms bound to coexist? In that case, it is essential to illustrate relevant integrations through concrete scenarios that bring value.

Situational analysis table example:

An alternative format is to make a mindmap of all solutions and connect specific usages to each. This allows to visually map the scope of the situation, and potentially gather them in “bubbles” or “clusters” to replace some tools or find a good positioning for the new solution.

The importance of a balanced IT governance

Providing all its employees with a balanced portfolio of services that are as simple to use as they are powerful, scalable, secure and manageable in terms of cost or management is the dream of any IT department. Only reality is far from simple for many technological, human, financial, and other reasons.

“I dream of being able to use solutions as simple, pleasant and efficient at work as those of my daily life (and often free) at home.”

On the one hand, it is essential to hear these governance issues, which seek to ensure the coherence, security and integrity of the entire technological platform that the IT department is responsible for. The phenomenon of shadow IT is very real at the time of mobility and BYOD, accessibility in one click to many free services that facilitate our daily life but whose risks are difficult to evaluate by the businesses.

On the other hand, it should be kept in mind that digital technologies and IT are at the service of the business and the performance of the company. Ideally, they should act as facilitators and catalysts. An excellent practice observed among our customers is practicing a culture of right to experiment and giving room to error.

In SaaS, it is easy and fast to conduct pilot projects to illustrate the added value (and safety) of a new service within a limited scope. Serving as an area of ​​innovation may be of great interest to IT, which can then inspire more global initiatives – provided that proximity and a trusting relationship drive the project and reflect a fair balance.

Here are some questions that will help you anticipate your exchanges with IT:

  • What is the process or who are the teams involved in choosing an IT solution in my company? How were past choices made? Does my purchasing and legal department have any recommendations?
  • Is there a charter of criteria to be respected as a grid of accepted solutions according to their degree of confidentiality? (SaaS, on-site, etc.)
  • Does our IT have a “single-sign-on” (SSO) service to manage security access to a SaaS solution and no need for login/password for users?
  • What level of transparency does my SaaS provider provides on its infrastructure, on my data location, on its restitution if I want to stop our project? What is its experience in managing similar levels of confidentiality or criticality?

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