Business Transformation, and its close partner Digital Transformation, are terms we’re suddenly hearing everywhere—and yet as Business Transformation specialists here at Rulesware, we’re still often asked just what it is, and how we define and apply it.
This post gathers insights and perspectives from Rulesware’s senior leaders to share our experiences with helping companies achieve digital and business transformation, offering up some concrete examples of how transformation happens, and how it helps.
Defining Business Transformation
We define business transformation pretty simply here at Rulesware: it’s all about moving away from the traditional approach of making things better/faster/cheaper to rethinking everything and focusing on desired business outcomes.
Examples of Business Transformation
For Rulesware Delivery Director Steve Park, one of the best examples of business transformation occurred recently when Rulesware helped a client to fully automate its claim processing processing—achieving huge business value for that client.
“From a pre-adjudication perspective,” Park says, “we transformed years of hard coded, undocumented and fragile pre-claims adjudication processes into a highly structured and scalable business solution that could adapt to ever-changing business regulatory and compliance rules.”
He adds that from a post-adjudication process, Rulesware was also able to transform that client’s manual standard operating procedures “into automated business rules and claim processing which have translated into increased auto-adjudication rates and less manual intervention.”
Delivery Director Lynette Clark adds the example of delivering a recent Business Process Management project for an auto manufacturing client, which enabled the client to move away from managing their work via paper and reports, thanks to an online, traceable, trackable, and auditable solution. She says the client called the release, “a truly collaborative effort,” and gave them the ability to fully deliver on their business objectives and to establish the foundation from which to build their strategic transformation programs.
Critical Success Factors in Business Transformation Projects
Dana Reiner, Rulesware’s Senior Director of Business Development, notes that there are few factors more critical to business transformation success than ensuring that the problems, or obstacles, standing in the way of business transformation are fully understood.
And that’s why, he says, “we strive to act like true consultants, guiding the customer to ensure that the “right” functionality is built, rather than just what the customer initially asks for. That applies to gathering and prioritizing the requirements to ensure alignment with business objectives, keeping the future direction in mind while focusing the immediate needs and architecting the solution with performance, scalability and reuse in mind.”
Steve Park agrees. “When it comes to business transformation, I feel that what separates us from other companies is the way we look at the business problem or challenge a client is facing. Consulting firms often want to dive deeply into the current state or as-is process to identify all of the moving parts to understand what is wrong and to start solutioning.” There’s a time and a place for this approach, Park says, but adds that “our approach is help the client get alignment of what they are trying to achieve from business perspective regardless of constraints. This alignment to company values or objectives is critical to define your success criteria. And this grounding is essential in transforming business processes and solutions and is often overlooked.”
Indeed, says Senior Director of Business Development David Bliss, companies interested in true business transformation must be willing to take a hard, honest look at the real problems they’re trying to solve. “I think Rulesware’s best attribute in business transformation is our willingness to tell the customer they’re wrong when appropriate and push them to seek a better way. So many delivery firms simply take orders rather than provide transparent viewpoints and leadership.”
This is best accomplished when a client is open to a deep, rich conversation about what they most want to achieve, adds Lynette Clark. “When the customer comes to us with a list of pain points, we let the curiosity and creativity flow by asking questions and having the critical conversations until the true business problem can be clearly articulated -THEN we work with them to identify a solution that is transformational,” she says. In this way we keep the focus on helping our customers solve their business problems, not just fix ‘the pain points’ in and existing process.”
The Outcomes of Business Transformation: What Truly Matters
Measuring the success of a business transformation project can, for our clients, differ from project to project, depending on the targeted business outcomes. For us, though, standards of success don’t vary much.
Our digital and business transformation solutions must:
- Yield concrete results that the client is excited about
- Have been built with the future in mind, in addition to meeting the specific business goals defined for the project
drive real business value that is aligned with the business case or defined goals for the organization or department. - Have been built technically sound from a performance, scalability, usability, security and re-use perspective.
- Prove the value of Pega and show a client how the platform can be a tool to aid in their digital transformation goals.
Easily as important as the success of any software or process solution, though, is the deep trust we build with our clients, says Steve Park. “We want to be viewed as company that clients can trust with their best interest in mind,” he says. “Our goal is to provide transparency with the reality of the client’s challenges and perspective on how to solve the problem. We are not order takers.” Rather, he says, it’s about “co-delivering solutions in which our client are confident in adopting, and carrying forward.”
And with that level of trust comes truly strong relationships– on which our business is built.
“For me, after every successful project, I really want to hear the customer say they enjoy working with Rulesware, that it is easy and refreshing to work with us even when we ‘tell it like it is.’” says Lynette Clark.
Want to find out more about our approach to digital and business transformation? Get in touch.
