Dysfunctional operations are a drag on businesses, but there’s an easy way to unlock agility. Here’s how.
Everyone knows operational pain blocks change, but the problem can easily feel like it’s too big to solve. If you’re wading in data fragmentation and disconnected workflows, chances are your business is also running slower than it should, costs are ramping up and your responsiveness is inhibited.
Narrowing down the causes of operational pain can help to pinpoint the problem and alleviate the symptoms holding you back.
Whether you like it or not, the center of your operations is probably your email. The issue is, email is only getting more chaotic as time rolls on. As the volume, variety and velocity of email charges ahead, it’s stopping people from unlocking vital business operational data in their most-used platform.
The three Vs of operational email
- Volume
Sifting through hundreds of emails a day can be a huge blocker to operational change. But unlocking the value from your emails doesn’t mean you have to eliminate them altogether. It’s all about how you manage them.
- Variety
It’s not just the amount of email that’s difficult, it’s dealing with the multitude of different formats and sources that need integrating into your systems — across many vital operational areas. Manually sorting them can cost you a serious amount of time.
- Velocity
Many organizations have data that’s valuable because of how often and how quickly it’s pouring into your systems. Managing that effectively is no mean feat.
Operational flow can help expose this hidden gold, but without a map to get there, your operations can feel like more of a mess than a masterpiece.
This blog explores the forces holding people back from operational agility and what you can achieve by getting to grips with the data and insight lurking inside your email system.
Can’t wait for effortless operations? Get in touch
Three forces in the firing line
Everyone knows the feeling of operational flow: processes, people and technology sync up and set productivity alight. Your workflows just work and things feel effortless. It’s the kind of thing that separates businesses from their competitors and catapults them to new heights.
What kills all of that? Operational pain. If you’re currently grappling with it, you’ll know it has three sides. If you want to banish that pain, it’s best to get clued up on the causes and tackle all three.
These are the big forces that slow down business, clog processes and inhibit performance:
- Friction
A little bit of friction never hurt anyone. But too much and you’ve got a process problem. Poor workflow design and dysfunctional communication results in too much manual work, convoluted processes and unhappy end users. Bottlenecks and delays become the norm and frustration abounds.
- Noise
Information overload means people waste time wading through information that isn’t meant for them, dealing with a constant deluge that takes them away from their real work. This results in glacial decision-making and insight that arrives too late.
- Drag
This lack of agility holds people back and takes them away from what they should be doing. Whenever this happens, drag is at work. The result is processes take longer, cost more and organizations are slow to respond — all in all, your operations are dysfunctional.
The fundamentals of painless operations
The companies that will win in a world of perpetual change and volatility are the ones that are able to find new ways to achieve painless operations.
This starts with exploiting the valuable pot of data gold hidden inside your email. It’s hiding in plain sight in your systems and contains valuable information on customers, contracts, proposals and critical transactions and relationships.
You can unlock this precious resource, connect your teams and make your workflows work with minimal disruption to your communication ecosystem — and leaving your data where it lives (yes, really).
It all starts with a new operational overlay to your mailbox, called SEDNA. It empowers your people to work smarter, better and faster thanks to a lightning-fast search, easily-accessed archive and expert meta-tagging that illuminates the billions of critical data points in your email.
Get your flow back
There are three forces that are stopping businesses from soaring, and eliminating them is a big challenge for any leader. If you’re used to feeling operational pain, don’t leave it unchecked. Luckily, we just made it a little bit easier — and getting to the root of the problem is just the start. SEDNA turns your most-used platform into an infrastructure of collaboration, making your operations feel effortless. What’s stopping you? Go forth and flow.
Learn more about how your business can prepare for take off, here.