How do you drive innovation in transactional back office environments?

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Working in a Finance department means I have some colleagues who have been submitting month-end journal entries, coding invoices or processing weekly payroll for decades. I don't often associate these individuals with innovation, but they have a wealth of knowledge in a very specific function. What methods would you apply in identifying innovation opportunities with a group of individuals like this?

Daniel Andrew
78 months ago

6 answers

2

If it works, don't try to fix it.
But of course anything can be made to work better. Your senior colleagues are a great resource for answering your questions. I would inquire, asking
• what is it that bothers, irritates, bores you when doing your job?
• what takes you too long to do at your job?
• what is the most dufficult part of what you do?
• what would you like to change but do not know how?
etc.
Once you have identified issues, you can start inventing to make it better!

Karel Petrak
78 months ago
1

Daniel. Loads of advice I can provide here - too much for this forum - but the essentials are:

  • Methods alone never deliver reliable results - methods generally need to be adapted for the particular people and context involved, so be wary of any method/tool that promises results
  • people who aren't expected to 'innovate' regularly can get freaked out by lack of structure and high expectations, so start small and slow - innovation is not magic - it's just finding useful new ways to do things
  • start not with 'ideas' (solutions) but with getting people to identify problems needing solutions. Ideally do that in groups, but if people often work alone, you'll need to give them time to think about problems alone first and then come together
  • most people will often identify problems in terms of the things that drive them nuts, but you need to help them step back and see its less about them and more about the whole system e.g. what is payroll is like from the viewpoint of various groups involved i.e. the 'customers' (employees); the team: management etc
  • define problems in terms of questions, not statements e.g. the problem is not it that this process costs $xxx, but How might we make this process simpler, cheaper and more reliable?
  • once you have some agreed problems to work on, dont just ask for ideas - send people away to research ideas first e.g. send some people off to see if they can find out how other companies do this process, send some to find how people do different processes they could learn from e.g. instead of processing payroll, find out how other companies process other things that happen in a rush (getting planes turned around at airports? delivering a banquet for 200 people?)
  • get people to realise ideas often dont come fully formed - don't prejudge the weird ideas badly - select a range and assess each by looking at Advantages (I like ....) and Limitations (How would we ...)
  • dont leap from idea to plan - get people to prototype and experiment by using pieces of paper, or post-its, or lego, or anything that lets them try and make it work
  • encourage people to find bits of ideas they can implement easily, without massive budgets and sign off

Key is not to find the most radical idea first - find one thing that everyone thinks is worth tackling and get some improvement made and live, so people can see it through from beginning to end.
Hope thats a useful start!

Alan A
78 months ago
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Daniel - Great question. Given the strength and depth of that Finance Department, they should know their processes well.
Do you have a cordial and trusted/valued relationship with that department, with a few Champions that might be receptive to change? The opportunity or the hesitancy for innovation and/or digital transformation is hugely impacted by the disruptive culture - how READY are they, how willing to change?
From an outsiders perspective, it's faily easy to interview and/or look at repetitive processes- high volume, low risk - as low-hanging fruit for the application of intelligent automation (RPA, AI...)
I'd suggest that anyone take a step back to identify, what are your objectives, what are you hoping to innovate or change - and why? What's the motivation? Is it cost take-out, accelerated processes, increased quality/consistency/compliance, customer/user experience (inside the organization and out).
Finally (for this part of the thread, and not to take the wind out of your sails, because getting Finance to think out of the box is something we should all promote1), would you be open to considering a cross functional look at innovation and change? When silos do it in and of/for themselves, it can be conflicting or counter productive to the enterprise goals and objectives.
This should get us started - looking forward to your response...

Michael Kotowski
78 months ago
0

Hello Daniel,
The question is too general and you're not sure if there could take shape any possible innovation at all in your department. However, there is a way to find out. If you really have/want to come up with improvements, and have some $$ to spend, there it is..
Plant a general purpose A.I. on each and every single one of their computers/servers and let them learn the experts' jobs. After a while ask every independent A.I. to do what you want to achieve and then connect the dots -- that's doing same jobs but your way, as you program the A.I.'s desired parameters (for example to restrict the number of people operating for the same holding, to group transactions by region and time zones etc.). As such, one of the A.I.s will surely design a flow of methods closer to your goals than anything else that's running today. Having established the next goal, modelled with the skills learned from your experts, "all" you have to do in real life is slowly modifying the existing methods to the new workflow, nothing else changes. Don't forget to check up again with A.I.!
Emil

Emil Valentin Toma
78 months ago
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There are many ways of driving innovation in the back office, some include automation of procedures/ processes/ tasks especially those repetitive, labor intense or taking long time to complete, and/or prompt to errors. Often if we map out the flow(s) of selected business operational processes (including those processes followed by engineering release and deployment) we may be surprised to find many steps/ hands-off (including those processes supported by IT), gaps (incompatibilities, break ups, holds/delays and/or other issues). This is how many companies with IT and operations support back offices are succeeding; the back office of many organizations is continuously innovating to support survival of business with complex business models.

Norma H. Antuñano
78 months ago
0

Furthering contract challenges and competition around back-office functions will help to manage commoditized servcies along as quality does not suffer.

Randy Vogenberg, PhD
77 months ago

Have some input?