A Guide to Digital Front Doors in Healthcare

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Kopius

As the healthcare field rapidly evolves, the digital front door has become a valuable strategy for leveraging technology to deliver a better patient experience while reducing costs. A digital front door encompasses a conglomeration of features, from online appointment scheduling to telehealth visits, all selected to create cohesive, engaging, and high-value interactions.

What Is a Digital Front Door in Healthcare?

In healthcare, the definition of a digital front door encompasses a strategy for engaging with patients through user-friendly digital technology. It often uses technology the patients already have, like a smartphone and app, that unifies the patient experience and connects patients to care across the continuum. In short, a digital front door connects and scales the virtual care journey to give patients what they need, when they need it.

This idea started with traditional patient portals, and the digital front door has evolved to include a more overarching approach centered around patient-centered care and accessibility. Data-driven, highly personalized customer brands like Amazon and Apple are expanding into the healthcare sphere, so staying competitive with consumer-oriented experiences will be nothing short of crucial.

Take appointment scheduling, for example. Surveys show that 67% of patients prefer booking appointments online, and an overwhelming 95% of them are either “somewhat” or “much more” likely to choose a service provider offering online booking. Unsurprisingly, online appointment scheduling is one of the most prominent elements of digital front doors in healthcare.

Some providers use one robust application or portal to meet a virtual front door strategy, although you can do it with multiple systems. Features you might have in a digital front door solution include:

Self-scheduling and care coordination.
Bill pay and payment plans.
Provider communications.
Appointment reminders.
Telehealth.
Virtual forms, such as intake and consent management.
Virtual check-in and pre-registration.
Kiosks for in-office check-in.
Data collection and analytics.

How Does a Digital Front Door Enhance the Patient Experience?

One of the primary goals of digital front doors is to improve the patient experience, which comes with various benefits for patients and providers, like improved clinical outcomes, adherence, and loyalty. With the industry’s shift to value-based programs, designing a great experience throughout the patient journey can also support increased revenue while reducing costs through efficient care delivery.

Using a digital front door helps improve experiences in many areas, such as:

Improving accessibility with flexible, personalized tools.
Supporting providers in delivering more attentive, effective, and efficient care.
Empowering customers to actively manage their health.
Meeting customers where they’re at with appropriate digital technology and options.
Boosting patient loyalty through easy-to-use, convenient, and engaging programs.
Reducing wait times with self-serve resources and streamlined care delivery.

These benefits often overlap and build upon each other. For example, when patients use self-service tools to check in early or submit forms, they reduce wait times in the office and help providers work more efficiently.

Patient Portals vs. Digital Front Doors

While patient portals are often a central element to digital front doors, they shouldn’t reflect your entire strategy. These systems do a great job of putting digital tools in one easy-to-access space. However, they often lack user-friendly designs. Many providers use portals offered by the company that built their electronic health record (EHR). EHRs are complex, unwieldy, and designed for providers. Translating the information into a consumer-friendly program proves challenging.

Similarly, portals may not offer tools to help providers in nonclinical aspects of care. A comprehensive digital front door strategy drives digital innovation through insights, like collecting information on how patients interact with you and how those interactions affect their care journeys. It also provides a more personalized, patient-centric approach. For example, you might offer educational resources for a patient with a new diagnosis, or you could prompt someone to activate reminders after they missed a payment.

Although patient portals are highly valuable, digital front doors address their shortcomings to create more cohesive and user-friendly experiences.

How Data Analytics Drive Healthcare Digital Front Doors

Data analytics is a cornerstone of digital front doors in healthcare. It can help you personalize care and make technology decisions based on real-world data about your patients and services.

Say you collect surveys from patients about their preferred payment methods. You find that many people pay larger sums with credit cards because they don’t have the funds available. With this new insight, you add payment plans to your online portal, helping more people afford care and offering a better experience, simultaneously boosting accessibility and satisfaction.

Leveraging data analytics solutions can help you identify new opportunities of all kinds and measure the efficacy of your digital front door strategy.

6 Tips for Implementing a Digital Front Door

Implementing a virtual front door requires thoughtful planning and consideration for various aspects of your practice. Consider these digital front door implementation tips to boost your chances of success.

1. Craft a Robust Digital Front Door Strategy

Malia Jacobson, healthcare content strategist at Valence, suggests you start by identifying your overarching goals. “When embarking on a digital effort in healthcare, it’s important to start by understanding which changes you need to see in the organization. Are you pursuing improved patient satisfaction scores? Physician satisfaction? ED/Urgent Care wait times? Quality and safety scores? Each area targeted for improvement may influence priorities differently.”

Many healthcare providers are developing digital solutions to address patient satisfaction, reduce service demand, and reduce administrative overhead. In addition to standard features of a digital front door experience, providers should consider designing for experiences such as:

Self-service: Provide tools for bill pay, self-scheduling, care coordination, and finding providers to offer streamlined and convenient access.
Provider messaging and patient outreach: Improve access, loyalty, and engagement.
Information and imaging libraries: Support patient and provider education.
Practice management: Capacity and census management, forecasting, and discharge planning streamline operations.
Insights-driven capabilities: Capabilities like infectious disease tracking, forecasting, and population health initiatives support proactive planning and informed decision-making.
Premium privacy and security: Safeguard patient data and meet compliance requirements.
Adoption-focused activities: Gamification and push notifications help increase awareness and usage of the program.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features: Features like chatbots reduce clinical burden and improve patient flow.
Support for healthcare information exchange: Stay in compliance with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards and best practices.

As you ideate your digital products and strategy, it’s important to understand how these features interplay as part of a big-picture roadmap with a rollout timeline and strategy. You don’t have to release everything at once to be successful, and adding features as the platform develops and collects user feedback will future-proof the effort.

2. Keep Your Users Front and Center

“While a digital front door is a technology solution, it’s ultimately about humanizing the patient experience,” says Sam To, designer at Valence.

In the case of a digital front door, the users may be patients, families of patients, or healthcare providers. In nearly all scenarios, people value products that are easy to use and simple to set up and that follow a logical progression. This is especially true in a healthcare situation, which may be hypercharged by personal and situational stressors.

Equitable design should be at the forefront of design decisions because the healthcare organization needs to design for a wide array of users and needs. Fully understanding equitable design is critical to any digital front door strategy.

The design phase of the digital front door project should include user interviews, feedback sessions, prototyping, and more. Giving the UX/UI design team access to users early in the process can help to identify the best-case rollout strategy, reveal opportunities to differentiate from competitors, and deliver precisely the right content to users when they need it — all leading to better patient satisfaction scores.

3. Ensure System Interoperability and Integration

Healthcare organizations often use a wide array of technologies and programs. Your digital front door must connect with relevant systems. For instance, some businesses offer “online scheduling” by having the user submit a form. Then, the provider calls the patient to schedule the appointment. By seamlessly connecting an online tool with your scheduling system, you can provide a much better experience with real-time availability and no time commitment from your team.

Some programs offer easy integrations, while others require clever workarounds. However it happens, integration and interoperability are essential for creating cohesive experiences, achieving efficiency, and maximizing the value of your systems.

4. Get the Right Stakeholders Involved

Yuri Brigance, Valence’s director of software engineering, says, “This is more than a digital shift — the shift to a digital front door requires a culture shift within the organization.”

Experience has taught us that having the right people in the room can make all the difference in the success or failure of a major initiative, especially considering the role that change management plays here. People don’t resist change — they resist being changed. You must engage stakeholders from all impacted groups, from frontline workers to back-office operations. This engagement improves requirements documentation, roadmap planning, and buy-in as the work rolls out.

5. Uphold Security and Patient Privacy

Of course, all digital technology in the healthcare field demands top-notch security. However complex your system is, security and privacy help foster trust, maintain a good reputation, and ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and FHIR.

While connecting people and systems, include robust data security compliance practices, such as risk assessments, monitoring, reporting, and training.

6. Use KPIs and Feedback to Measure Success

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and feedback from patients and providers allow you to measure your success after launching a digital front door and long after implementation. Incorporate a data strategy to collect and evaluate this information. Identify metrics relevant to your goals, decide how you’ll collect data, and regularly revisit KPIs to continuously improve upon your strategy.

Get Started on Your Digital Front Door Solution

Building a digital front door requires much more than buying a new software system. This comprehensive strategy requires careful analysis and expert development for your organization’s unique characteristics. With an effective strategy, a digital front door can transform your approach to patient engagement, driving innovation, increasing revenue, and boosting patient satisfaction.

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Our JumpStart program fast-tracks business results and platform solutions. Connect with us today to enhance your customer satisfaction through a data-driven approach, drive innovation through emerging technologies, and achieve competitive advantage.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

Related Services:

What is Digital Transformation?

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Brian Lamilla

Any business that wants to stay afloat must be ready to adapt or risk falling behind. In the fast-paced age of technology, this evolution often comes in the form of digital transformation. This digital-first strategy guides organizations toward improving processes and delivering more value to customers. It combines new technologies with cultural shifts that promote innovation and continuous adaptation. Regardless of your industry, digital transformation is paving the way forward as a necessity for modern businesses.

What Does Digital Transformation Mean?

To define digital transformation, we have to look at how businesses use their resources. A digital transformation strategy uses technologies to fundamentally change how a business operates and provides value. It may involve a range of goals, like adapting to evolving market conditions or improving your ability to meet customer demands. Whatever the goal, a digital transformation solution calls for foundational change at all levels.

Yet, digital transformation is about more than replacing outdated processes with newer technology — although that step is critical. It’s also about challenging “the way it’s always been” and driving the company toward a more agile mindset with openness to experimentation and innovation. Employees may need to accept the possibility of failure, and companies must embrace new practices before their competitors have already implemented them. Digital transformation rethinks tried-and-true practices and seeks out new methods of continual improvement.

This acceptance of new ideas illustrates the need for both cultural and technological development, hallmarks of a successful digital transformation process.

Another crucial aspect is the lack of a clearly defined endpoint. With a focus on innovation, digital transformation doesn’t end when new software is implemented or your efficiency goals are met. It’s more of a journey about building and maintaining an agile culture. Organizations look for ways to continuously improve the customer experience and operational processes.

Why Is Digital Transformation Important?

Digital transformation is nothing short of crucial for today’s businesses. Technology will continue to evolve, and businesses that embrace transformation will be positioned to use it to meet their goals instead of playing catchup or resisting change.

Even if you don’t feel like you need to change, digital transformation has become a question of resiliency. Adaptation ensures you have the resources and mindset to weather storms and market variations — because your competitors are likely already there.

Even after the initial transformation, you should be able to adopt new technologies as they appear and use them to help meet your business goals. Since we don’t know what the future holds, this agile approach allows organizations to keep pace with uncertainty and innovation, improving customer experiences and operational results with changes that span all parts of the company.

An agile culture is all about being flexible and responsive… this flexibility is key in digital transformation, where things move fast and being able to pivot and tweak things based on real-time feedback can make a huge difference.

Alex Arroyo, Project Manager at Kopius

Before tackling a transformation, businesses must understand digital transformation models accurately to implement a strategy that matches their organization. These tactics depend on knowing how digital transformation will apply to a specific business, such as its intended goals and company culture.

The Benefits of Digital Transformation

Although digital transformation is a necessity, it also has many advantages for its users, such as:

Higher efficiency: Digital technologies facilitate better productivity or reduced labor demands. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI), for instance, are rapidly gaining popularity across business strategies, eliminating manual processes, intelligently solving problems, and allowing skilled employees to focus on more important tasks. Digital transformation technologies are especially good at eliminating repetitive tasks, so your team members can work at the tops of their pay grades.
Opportunity for innovation: Embracing digital transformation allows you to get ahead of the competition and solidify yourself as a leader in your industry. It supports agility and responsive practices, so you can jump on new technologies, trends, and ideas that help you stand out. For some businesses, a head start makes all the difference in outperforming competitors.
Improved customer and employee experiences: Both customers and employees expect smooth, seamless resources. Customers want consistent, positive experiences at each touchpoint, while employees want the right tools to help them work their best. These demands are a significant driver for digital transformation strategies and the sophisticated features that come with them.
Improved communication: Successful digital transformation depends on everyone being on the same page. Many digital strategies provide resources for increasing visibility, transparency, and communication between employees, so this element is a significant part of any digital transformation strategy.
Risk mitigation: While a more experimental mindset comes with some risk, the digital transformation process can minimize it by providing a more agile position. Digital-first businesses can respond to volatility and disruptions with business models that can pivot as needed.

Keys to a Successful Digital Transformation

Although the goals and nature of digital transformation will vary by company, the following key elements stand out as necessary parts of the equation.

1. Digital Strategies That Empower Workers

Unsurprisingly, digital transformation calls for best-in-class digital tools. These resources should make information accessible across departments, providing cross-functional digital technologies that support efficiency, the customer experience, and other aspects of your transformation goals. Aligning digital strategies with your unique needs can be daunting, so invest special time and energy in finding appropriate resources.

2. New Operational Procedures to Incorporate Digital Technology

Your long-standing operational procedures are likely inappropriate for your new processes. Remember that digital transformation requires fundamental shifts, so new operational procedures will guide workers through the new systems while reflecting these fresh ways of thinking.

3. Engaged and Tech-Savvy Leaders

Digital transformation depends on engaged leaders at all levels being fully invested in the new approach. They should understand the aim of digital transformation and embody the movement during regular communications and activities. These leaders must also have the appropriate technical skills to fully grasp how to integrate new tech and processes into their workflows. Leaders can include executives, supervisors, and even workers chosen to champion the cause.

4. Strong Communication and Collaboration

Any business attempting digital transformation must go all-in. A “halfway” approach is inadequate, so communicating the goals and ideals driving the transformation is critical. You’ll also need to discuss the details, showing team members how these new resources contribute to modernizing the organization. Dive into how the culture shifts support the company’s long-term goals and dedication to the digital approach.

Why Digital Transformations Fail

Despite its importance, the vast majority of digital transformations fail, often due to one of these common pitfalls:

Poor communication: We mentioned earlier that good communication is key to a successful transformation program, and many of the attempts that don’t succeed involve poor communication. Early on, leaders should identify what “digital” means to them. In one organization, it might mean going paperless, while another might use it to implement agile processes. With so much ambiguity, strong communication is crucial from the highest levels — they should define what the transformation means for the business and how it should happen.
Inadequate measurement: Like many business strategies, qualitative and quantitative measurements should guide the process. You may already use key performance indicators (KPIs). Continue to use them, and evaluate which ones are most relevant to the digital transformation and create new ones if needed. If your goal, for instance, is to improve the customer experience through a new tech support system, you might pay special attention to your net promoter score. If you’re prioritizing efficiency, ticket resolution speed may be more relevant.
Culture misalignment: People often equate digital transformation with implementing high-tech tools, but businesses must stress the mindset shift, too. The transformation should include a focus on agility and responsiveness, with ideas that change alongside digital technology. Cultural changes must occur across the organization to help foster innovation and new ideas appropriate for a modern workplace. Many businesses that fail digital transformation do so because they don’t emphasize the cultural change it entails.

Digital Transformation Strategies

Depending on your goals, your digital transformation solution can take on many different forms. Some popular strategies for digital transformation models might focus on:

Business processes: This kind of digital transformation adjusts the day-to-day workflow and how workers access information. It might involve heavily automating manual processes and gathering reliable and data-driven insights that can guide business decisions. Revising business processes can help you minimize costs, improve product quality, and boost efficiency with faster and more informed procedures.
Industry domains: If your brand is traditionally limited to one market, you might look to a digital transformation model to help you expand your offerings. A fitness store, for example, could use digital strategies to create a fitness app and sell virtual workouts to appeal to customers and build their brand image. Expanding the boundaries of the brand is a task that often falls to digital transformation.
Business models: A transformation that affects the entire business model can be drastic but necessary. This approach adapts your current model to a new digital environment, whether that’s an environment you’re creating anew or one that just hasn’t been working well with your old processes. It might call for trying out new ways of operating, even those that no one else in the industry has done yet. In some cases, nailing this transformation disrupts entire industries.
Culture: Adapting to the digital world is difficult for some people and businesses. A cultural transformation focuses on aligning a company’s culture with the forward-thinking ideas of a digital-first organization. It requires extensive education and training, new onboarding processes, and activities and processes that support collaboration. This type of transformation gives your team the necessary resources to integrate digital technology into every aspect of the workday and maximize its benefits.
The cloud: A cloud transformation is about moving systems into cloud environments. You may only need it for a few applications or services, or you might move everything. A cloud-based infrastructure helps improve data access and storage, flexibility, and scalability. It offers a more centralized and visible system and can grow alongside your business.

Of course, the lines between these styles of transformation aren’t hard and fast. They often blur and overlap, so identifying what digital transformation strategy is right for your goals and needs can help improve your chances of success.

Digital Transformation Examples

The digital strategies available in different industries often affect the nature of digital transformation and its necessity. Here are a few of the ways that businesses in certain fields or departments might address digital transformation.

1. Health Care

The health care field has seen a dramatic technological transformation. From online check-ins to telehealth appointments, physicians now use digital technology to improve experiences and outcomes across all specialties. At Kaiser Permanente, for instance, about a third of ambulatory care visits in 2022 happened through phone or video calls. Supporting this level of virtual care requires a major shift in infrastructure and mindset.

A health care organization might use digital transformation to better use and integrate new technologies and support clinicians in effectively using these new strategies in their workflow. With capable, easy-to-use systems, health care businesses often improve outcomes and the patient experience while helping providers work more efficiently.

2. Customer Support

As AI and self-service platforms have improved, many businesses with customer support systems have revamped how their customers get help. With digital transformation, a company might reduce the demands on its slow, labor-intensive call center in favor of a support portal for customers to use on their own. Customers might start a return request, track their order, or search through frequent technical issues to troubleshoot the problem in an online knowledge base. The new system can add efficiency while improving the customer experience.

3. Sales and Accounting

Sales and accounting rely on many processes that digital strategies can speed up and refine. A digital transformation in these fields often entails programs that can automate calculations and communications. For example, using traditional spreadsheets for sales tracking would likely lead to errors and slow processes. Moving to a cloud-based system, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, offers efficiency and simplicity. Representatives can easily track interactions, generate quotes, and communicate with clients without time-consuming paperwork.

Get Started With Your Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a necessity for organizations of all types, offering the agility and modern resources required to compete in today’s business environment. Still, it involves a dedicated, concerted effort with the right kind of talent guiding the charge. You need everything from software engineers to data scientists and brand strategists. At Kopius, Inc., we’ll help you assemble the right team and solidify a successful program with our digital transformation services.

We offer dual-shore digital expertise with end-to-end capabilities to support speedy, effective digital transformations. From our lean, agile roadmaps to our data and analytical services, we provide flexible yet streamlined strategies tailored to your organization’s unique demands. Reach out to us today to discuss your needs and start on the path to digital transformation!

Additional Resources:

Related Services:

Elevating Customer Experience Through Digital Transformation

Posted on July 28, 2023 by Kopius

With customers having countless options at their fingertips, the importance of delivering seamless customer experiences cannot be overstated. Offering a great product or service is no longer enough. In today’s fast-paced online world, businesses must go above and beyond to ensure each touchpoint in the customer journey is exceptional if they want to stand out from the competition. One key solution that has emerged to help companies stay relevant and meet growing customer expectations is digital transformation. IBM defines digital transformations as a customer-driven, digital-first strategy that uses “AI, automation… and other digital technologies to leverage data and drive intelligent workflows… that drive faster and smarter decision-making.” But why should companies who are looking to improve the customer experience invest in digital transformation? The benefits of shifting to a digital-first business model are plentiful, impacting those both inside and outside of the organization. Let’s delve deeper into how adopting a digital transformation strategy can supercharge the customer experience and benefit your business.

Offer Seamless Omni-Channel Experiences

Meeting and exceeding customer expectations requires delivering a consistent and continuous experience, regardless of which channel they choose to utilize. By integrating mobile applications, social media, websites, and other online platforms, digital transformations allow customers to interact with businesses through their preferred channels. Providing this level of convenience means customers can start their journey on one channel and easily continue to another without skipping a beat.

Deliver Personalization and Customization to Increase Customer Engagement

Research by Accenture showed that 91% of customers preferred brands that offered relevant offers and recommendations. Digital transformations help businesses unlock the power of customer data, by collecting and analyzing vast amounts of information to derive meaningful insights in a matter of seconds. By tapping into advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence, companies can gain valuable knowledge about buying behavior, preferences, and trends. This helps pave the way for targeted promotional campaigns, individualized interactions, and tailored product recommendations, cultivating elevated customer satisfaction.

Decrease Downtime, Increase Efficiency

Inquiries, requests, or the occasional complaint are inevitable, but how your business handles them can be a make or break for your customer. Swift and efficient customer service and support is a must. Digital transformations empower businesses to optimize processes and minimize response times, resulting in expedited customer interactions. Through automation technology, AI-powered chatbots, and self-service options, companies can deliver immediate support around the clock. Thus, customers are able to engage with brands at their desired time and place.

Digitally transforming the customer experience is a necessity for businesses wanting to thrive in the digital era and offer seamless, tailored experiences. Ensuring speed, customization, and convenience across multiple channels leads to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, driving tangible return on investment (ROI) for your brand. Are you ready to elevate your customer experience to new heights? Contact Kopius so we can create remarkable customer experiences that will drive your goals and revenue forward!

JumpStart Your Digital Transformation

Innovating technology is crucial, or your business will be left behind. Our expertise in technology and business helps our clients deliver tangible outcomes and accelerate growth. At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Kopius has an expert emerging tech team. We bring this expertise to your JumpStart program and help uncover innovative ideas and technologies supporting your business goals. We bring fresh perspectives while focusing on your current operations to ensure the greatest success.

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

Three Ways We Bring a Learning Culture to Our Business

Posted on February 16, 2022 by Kopius

One reasons that Valence consistently is awarded Best Place to Work by the Business Journal is because we are all about a Learning Culture. A Learning Culture is rooted in a growth mindset where people want to learn and to apply what they have learned to help their organization.

Our team weaves together consulting, design, and engineering practices while staying alert to new technologies and innovations, while also becoming experts in our clients’ industries, business units, and market trends.

That’s a lot to learn.

And rather than being intimidated by all the things we have yet to learn, we encourage our people to stay open and curious. Learning is a core value here, and it’s a key to our company’s success.

“One thing I love about this company is that it’s a learning place. I always feel comfortable calling our designers, architects, and engineers so I can tap their expertise and better understand what matters most. They always make the time and encourage me to ask questions, and it helps me feel confident in my role,” Angela Kaiser, senior project manager.

We leverage each other’s knowledge, and as part of MajorKey, we are exploring exciting ways to broaden our educational platform, especially since we are now a global business with learners and teachers in the US, India, and Argentina.

“I love being a part of the learning culture and I love that I have the freedom to learn, admit what I don’t know, and dig into what I want to know. Valence is a great place for that,” says Renee Christenson, senior project manager at Valence. Renee also leads up the Valence Lunch and Learn program!

Learning happens formally and informally here, whether it comes through moments in spontaneous conversations, as part of a scheduled deep dive with a colleague, at one of our monthly lunch and learn meetings, at a conference, or through collaboration with clients and partners.

Senior Content Writer, Malia Jacobson says, “I have a quote by author Annie Dillard framed in my office. The final lines are ‘Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.’ It reminds me that it’s not enough to continually develop new knowledge in our fields—we also need to share what we’re learning. I’ve learned so much from my Valence team members and colleagues, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to share, engage, and pay it forward.”

Here are three tips to bring a learning culture into your company:

A flat structure will encourage people to ask questions and show their curiosity.

We need each other’s knowledge, and with a flat organizational structure, anyone can share what they’ve learned and what they are passionate about with confidence.

Lunch and learn sessions offer a formalized process with an informal interaction, which helps people to feel comfortable presenting and attending. People respect each other and lead with kindness and respect, so whether you are a presenter with a bit of stage fright, or an attendee nervous to ask a question, everyone is welcome and respected.

2. Invest resources into your Learning Culture and put someone in charge of it.

Valence runs a monthly Lunch and Learn program, which is managed a senior project manager who collaborates with our People team. The Lunch and Learn program typically requires about 4 hours of management time each month.

When a team member delivers a Lunch and Learn presentation, they typically spend up to 40 hours putting the content together, rehearsing, and preparing to present it over several weeks.

The ad hoc requests for education and cross-team sharing are harder to measure, but it’s safe to say that subject matter experts share and seek expertise as part of their work.

We should mention a secondary culture benefit when your company prioritizes learning and teaching, which is that it creates new avenues for employees to know each other and build meaningful relationships, which are crucial for mental health and workplace satisfaction (and harder to come by in remote work situations.)

3. Teach and learn about more than technical topics.

Naturally our monthly Lunch and Learn program covers topics like Artificial Intelligence, 5G, and data governance; but it has also covers topics like Crossfit, perfecting your LinkedIn profile, and making the most of video conferencing. Our upcoming lunch and learn schedule covers topics as varying as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and the evolution of digital content?

Showcase your Learning Culture by creating a platform for employees to share their passions.

By operating like a campus-less campus, everyone is a student, and everyone is a teacher so we can all come together around learning.

“People are encouraged to share their knowledge and be an educator for the company, which is why you never know what you can learn here,” said Valence President, Jim Darrin.

If you are a knowledge seeker, you’ve got a growth mindset, and you love a learning culture, check out our careers page! At Valence, you might find a career where you can tackle challenges, learn, grow, and develop professionally!

Additional Resources:

Kopius Careers Page

Effective Digital Transformation

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Kopius

The phrase Digital Transformation is commonly used today, referring to everything from an overhaul of a legacy system to leveraging online systems to engage customers. As champions of digital transformation, our team believes in the power of smartly planned and efficiently executed digital transformations to enhance business strategy; we believe that effective digital transformation is a cornerstone of business, and it is imperative that individuals understand the definition, potential impact, and processes that lead to success.

Effective Digital Transformation: How do we think about it?

Effective digital transformation puts business strategy ahead of digital strategy, whilst interweaving the two. Successful digital transformation solves business problems by focusing on the customer — for example, by decreasing costs, or increasing value — and using technology solutions that cut through business functions, industries, processes to affect change. In short, technology is a means to an end.

Digital transformation may help reduce product costs, but what does that do for the business? It provides resources to be routed into other aspects of the business. Leverage those freed up resources to enhance the customer experience and you are left with improved margins and happier customers and an effective digital transformation.

Consider Amazon — a company that digitally transformed its business of book selling to a Big 4 technology company. Amazon leveraged digital transformation initiatives to change its supply chain and operational efficiency in order to provide a better customer experience. Their culture (the world-famous 14 Leadership Principles) and business strategy are interwoven to focus on the customer: Amazon Prime has some of the fastest delivery options in the market and Amazon Web Services provides some of the best cloud solutions for enterprises. They digitally transformed their business and now provide customers with digital solutions to digitally transform theirs. From their website: “Amazonians… share a common desire to always be learning and inventing on behalf of our customers.” Leverage culture and technology to improve customer experience; digitally transform the business to help the customer.

Digital Transformation contains components of digital strategy, the use of digitalization, as well as digitization efforts. These terms, often thrown around interchangeably, are in fact pieces of the larger puzzle rather than equal to the overall process. Digitization is the process of moving from analog to digital, pen and paper to Microsoft Excel. Digitalization, according to Gartner, speaks of the use of digital strategies, technologies, initiatives to tap into new business opportunities or change a business model. If anything, one leverages digitization to digitalize, and the overall transformation of a business from one to another, becomes digital transformation. The definitions are debated and often vague, as discussed by Jason Bloomberg in this Forbes article. It is important to remain consistent in thinking of digital transformation as the overarching umbrella of strategic digital initiatives to improve the business with the customer at the forefront.

Digital Transformation: Consider “The Process” towards success

What does Digital Transformation success entail? What does it look like?

As enterprises restructure their strategy to evolve amid a changing technological and economic landscape while centering around the customer, it is important to consider the process and what it takes to succeed.

Key Stages to Success

According to Keller and Price in Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage, successful transformation involves a few key stages — from goal defining, to organizational assessment, to designing and initiating transformation and sustaining it. It is critical to understand where the enterprise is and where it wants to go — and it is critical to be consistent and practical.

Ensuring Success

to move forward with a transformation initiative, it is imperative to align Keller and Price’s stages with McKinsey’s 5 themes to a successful digital transformation, which involve digitization to prepare an enterprise for digitalization:

Having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place
Building capabilities for the workforce of the future
Empowering people to work in new ways
Giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade
Communicating frequently via traditional and digital methods

Think about the Amazon example again — they didn’t just leverage digital solutions to overhaul their business; they leveraged cultural practices to ensure that Amazonians are driven towards the integration of technology and customer centricity. McKinsey’s themes encompass a similar outlook: empowerment, communications, capabilities, leadership — core cultural understandings that can support a digital transformation initiative.

At Valence, we focus heavily on thinking about the future. It is critical to be ever ready for tomorrow, whether it means continuous learning, or building systems and solutions to prepare for what is next. These stages and themes will ensure enterprises are thinking about the next step, focusing on being proactive rather than reactive. At this important juncture of the 21st century, where we have crossed into a new decade and face the challenge of economic reinvention due to a global pandemic, it matters how we use technology to transform our enterprises to meet changing customer needs.

In summary, as stated by Jim Darrin, CEO of Valence,

“No industry or company can ignore the importance or impact of Digital Transformation, and must embrace a digital strategy in order to evolve into the next generation.”

Leverage Kopius and JumpStart Success

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Add our brainpower to your operation by contacting our team to JumpStart your business.

Additional Resources:

The Issue Isn’t With Technology Consultants, It’s With the WRONG Technology Consultants

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Kopius

By Glen Lewis

When businesses embark on a digital transformation, they often need to bring in technology consultants. Choosing the right technology consultant is the first and potentially most important step in the journey.

In the March 13th Harvard Business Review article “Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology,” the authors outlined “Five Key Lessons” that helped them lead their organizations through successful digital transformations. Lesson #2 stated:

Smart businesswoman sharing her ideas with her team during a meeting. Group of creative design professionals having a discussion while working on a new project.

I would offer that using technology consultants is not a poor idea — using the WRONG consultants is. In fact, using a technology consultant has distinct benefits.

After 12 years of working with change management consultants partnering with domestic and international clients, the good consultants that I have seen hold one truth sacred in their engagements — their clients have unique cultures, with unique issues, and require solutions tailored to their unique needs. While these consultants will reference analogous past experiences, it is to help encourage clients to share details (Harvey, 2018) by reassuring them that they are not the only ones suffering from similar issues (Adamson, 2011). That is about as far as the “one-size” mentality goes with good consultants. The good consultants, through consistent engagement of “insiders,” subsequently updates those initial analogies as they come to understand and appreciate their client’s culture, governance, change readiness, etc. This produces a new unique view of the client, their gaps, and potential solutions. Finally, if good consultants do recommend that their clients consider a best practice, it should service only as a starting point, because those practices should evolve into a solution meeting the client’s unique needs.

Technology consultants also bring important benefits often overlooked in change management such as enabling clients to continue to run/operate their businesses unencumbered by having to manage an enterprise change initiative. For example; a regional dialysis provider recently switched their electronic health record (EHRs) systems. While the CIO highlighted how he had participated in EHR transitions before, he, along with his PMO or IT, did not have the expertise to manage such a daunting endeavor. As a solution, they brought in a consultancy who partnered with the organization’s key “insiders” to build and manage the following: (1) the layers of schedules, (2) the change communication plans, (3) the EHR transition training plan for almost 1000 staff members who were scattered over 2000 square miles.

This allowed the dialysis provider’s staff to remain focused on operating their 15+ clinics. Their training department could continue to focus on serving current and new employees, meeting federal regulations and their PMO could continue implementing the HR and logistics projects already in motion. Finally, the public affairs department could continue focusing on community outreach communications.

The issue is not the use of technology consultants to facilitate digital transformation, it is about using the WRONG technology consultants to facilitate digital transformation. Good consultants establish partnerships with their clients, working with them to craft and implement solutions, while absorbing burdens that allow “insiders” to continue focusing on the daily run/operate of their businesses.

JumpStart Your Success Today

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Additional Resources:

Kopius Services – Experience Strategy and Design

Project Success is About the Tools, Not a Methodology

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Brian Lamilla

by Glen Lewis

What is the best methodology for successful change management? Organizations need the right partner to achieve competitive advantage.

Scientists are searching for a theory of everything — a framework linking together all physical aspects of the universe. There is a similar quest among Project and Change Management practitioners, the search for a framework linking together all the methodologies and supporting tools out there: Lean Six Sigma’s (LSS) DMAIC, Prosci’s ADKAR, International Institute of Business Analysis’s (IIBA) and Project Management Institute (PMI) methodologies, etc. Unfortunately, proliferation of these methodologies and their supporting tools often leads to confused practitioners who choose to follow a single methodology, ignoring other tools that may enhance their approach.

The key to a “theory of everything” linking these methodologies together lies in how you define: (1) what a project is and (2) what these methodologies are. My experience has shown that projects are more often efforts to correct a problem. Whether building an overpass to relieve congestion or implementing new processes to improve compliance, projects tend to revolve around problem solving.

Training and experience have also shown that the numerous methodologies — ADKAR, DMAIC, PMBOK, etc.- are essentially a set of tools linked together in a prescribed fashion.

Using these general views, we can see how the various tools underlying the methodologies can be mixed, matched, and linked together across a single project.

Most of my clients view their projects as 2-part: (1) defining the problem and solution, and (2) implementing that solution. I usually follow IIBA’s business analysis methodology during part 1; however, this is also an ideal time to leverage LSS’s tools associated with DMAIC’s Define, Measure, and Analyze phases — such as value stream mapping or design of experiment. If LSS tools don’t fit, one can then fall back to such tools as the IIBA’s functional decomposition, to provide that complete picture of the problem.

During part 1, one can also break apart another popular methodology — Procsi’s ADKAR — layering their “build awareness and desire” tools upon those mentioned above, building a comprehensive enterprise understanding of the problem.

For the second part — implementing a solution — I prefer a hybrid process of agile principles supported by traditional project management planning tools — WBS, resource calendars, etc. Again, weaving in Procsi’s coaching and training tools as applicable, one can provide a holistic enterprise wide solution.

Finally, after delivering the solution, Prosci’s and LSS DMAIC’s “Control” offers tools ensuring change will be sustained. Another example is where it’s the tools and not the methodology leading to success.

In the end, these project management methodologies are a series of tools contained within prescribed frameworks that — if teased apart and recombined — provide unprecedented views of problems, solutions, and next steps. Ultimately organizations are not interested in a methodology. They want a practitioner who can understand and appreciate their unique problems, then drawing from a plethora of tools deliver the solution that will allow them to maintain their competitive advantage.

JumpStart Your Success Today

At Kopius, we’ve designed a program to JumpStart your customer, technology, and data success.

Tailored to your needs, our user-centric approach, tech smarts, and collaboration with your stakeholders equip teams with the skills and mindset needed to:

Identify unmet customer, employee, or business needs
Align on priorities
Rapidly prototype solutions
And, fast-forward success

Gather your best and brightest business-minded individuals and join our experts for a hands-on workshop that encourages innovation and drives new ideas.

Explore Change Management Solutions

Who Should Lead Your Digital Transformation?

Posted on December 10, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

Who should lead digital transformation in large enterprises?

For simplicity I’ll limit the possible solutions to who should lead digital transformation in large enterprises to either the CIO or someone else. The two most important factors in making the right selection are your current state of technology adoption and your culture. Are you moving materials manually or is your operation automated? Are all parts of your organization connected (IoT ) from sales to manufacturing? Are you already using AI? Are you still managing large waterfall style projects mapped start to finish with Gantt charts? Do you evaluate and deploy technology initiatives differently than other business initiatives? The answers to these questions can indicate where you are in your digital transformation process and the leadership required to move your organization forward.

Here are the two examples of situations where the CIO may be just the leader you need:

Situation 1 — Your enterprise is behind on technology adoption and you don’t even have a CIO. IT rolls-up to finance, HR, or other functional or operational leader. In this case, the CEO can set the tone for transformation by creating the role of CIO. She can define the CIO as the change agent and transform the culture around this role and the journey to an agile future state of the business.

Situation 2 — Your enterprise is technology-forward. Your data is already in the cloud and employees consume it real-time on mobile, desktop and operational devices alike. You include IT initiatives in core business decisions like other capital investments. In this case, your digital transformation culture is established and your focus is on implementing the latest emerging technologies.

Here is a situation where the CIO may not be the right leader:

Your company has intermittently adopted technology to supplement your ERP on an ad hoc basis, but the architecture was created before cloud and mobile fundamentals were even contemplated. Changing one application within your system risks breaking another, but you can’t predict which one. Culturally, your technology exploration and implementation cycles are bogged-down in IT backlog and your leaders see IT as a cost center. In this situation, the CEO will enable success by assigning a leader from outside the technology realm — a ‘digital transformation officer’ or project leader — to build and lead a cultural case for change from the ground up. Then the CIO can help deliver technology into the new culture.

Don’t blame the CIO too quickly for the current state of your enterprise. The explosion of technology and the economy in the early 2000’s collided to create expanding IT teams deploying new ERPs and adopting new technologies. Then the recession of the late 2000’s undermined the business assumptions upon which these investments were based. In my industry, building products, the result was devastating. No matter how good an IT team or leader may have been, IT was a less-understood cost-center. Considering that ten years ago any 40+ year-old CEO or senior executive had formed their business paradigm in a pre-mobile, pre-email and pre-PC world, any failed IT investments due to economic collapse were likely admonished more than non-IT investments that failed for the same underlying reason.

To establish a new digital path for your enterprise, a collaborative leader who has delivered results across multiple functions can deliver digital transformation. IT teams and consultants can help guide the technology deployment. After all, digital transformation is a culture change initiative to leverage technology, not a technology initiative to change culture. A successful digital transformation leader endorsed by the CEO and respected by peers builds a successful case for change from the ground up. The technologies he chooses to implement become decisions just like other investment decisions in equipment or teams and are weighed at the same time, by the same leaders, on the same basis of relative return on investment.

JumpStart Your Digital Transformation

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.

Advancing Digital Transformation in the Manufacturing, Operations and Logistics Industry

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Brian Lamilla

At Kopius we are known for building and deploying leading-edge solution using digital transformation technologies. While many companies see the need for digital transformation, choosing where to start in any big industrial enterprise — and in particular manufacturing, operations and logistics — can be overwhelming. The gap between business systems and tools and the pilla r s of technology transforming business today may as well be the Grand Canyon. Taken together with the often monumental change management and culture gap workload, many teams find themselves far from becoming a data and technology-driven enterprise. Many know they need to execute on digital transformation — they just don’t know where to start.

How to address digital transformation in manufacturing, operations, and logistics?

We try to close these gaps by connecting business domain knowledge with our clients with technology and solution expertise. We try to know enough about an industry to help companies get started down the digital transformation path. Because getting started — simply beginning the process of “doing” and “learning” — is what matters most. Need a digital transformation team who understands global supply chain? How about distribution operations, warehousing, and transportation? What about reliability in industrial manufacturing? And why not add first-hand experience of monumental culture-change when integrating businesses, on top of the complexities of combining ERP systems? At Kopius we have more domain knowledge to combine with our expertise than ever.

JumpStart Your Success Today

Partner with Kopius and JumpStart your future success.