It can seem like change is the only constant in today’s business environment. The pressures of globalization, technological innovation, and competition continually drive the need for transformation across the organization. Uncovering new business models, revamping and streamlining existing processes, and modernizing technology and infrastructure are the keys to surviving and thriving.

Leading organizations anticipate the forces that will require these kinds of organizational change. Even under ideal circumstances, significant revisions to your operations, vision, and principles can be difficult to communicate. When you’re an industry leader with tens of thousands of employees, it can seem like an impossible task.

Executed poorly, organizational change can create chaos that has a real and lasting effect. Employees can lose sight of the company’s direction, their efficiency may plummet in the face of unfamiliar new processes, and morale takes a hit. In fact, according to McKinsey and Company, 70 percent of large-scale change programs don’t reach their stated goals. It happens when employees are not engaged, management fails to support the initiative, there’s little or no collaboration between teams, and no one is held accountable.

Managing change correctly and efficiently requires a different approach, one that puts leadership, management, and employees on the same page. It’s only achievable when everyone receives the message about changes at the same time, and more importantly, that they actually hear, internalize, and understand that message.

This is why tools like SharePoint are so important as a communication tool. It makes the change real for employees, and helps them decipher the signal from the noise so they can truly understand what’s important.

SharePoint in Action for Internal Communications

At Trellist, we recently helped a leading global agriscience company embrace digital technology to transform their business model. Such a radical transformation required an equally aggressive strategy for communicating changes to employees. SharePoint, which is globally accessible in the cloud through Office 365, was the optimal tool for supercharging employee communication and collaboration. The primary goals were to help the organization communicate:

• What it means to be digital
• Their transformation journey
• Their digital roadmap

You may think of SharePoint as a document management and sharing tool, but in this case it was equally adept at enabling consistent internal communications, video streams, and the presentation of interactive organizational charts. The media-rich environment we helped them create improved employee engagement, strengthened their internal communications strategy, and gave their executive team a voice that resonated more clearly with employees.

Is SharePoint Right for Your Organization?

Yes, it’s powerful, but it’s not all that it can be right out of the box. In order for SharePoint to truly help you communicate your brand message and strategies in the same way it did for the agriscience company we worked with, it needs the right UX and design to generate engagement and traffic. We’ve helped organizations across a variety of industries implement collaboration tools like SharePoint. If you’d like to explore how we can help your organization, contact us at enterprisetechnology@trellist.com.

With the latest economic news, CTOs and CIOs are once again seeking opportunities for short term cost savings. Outsourcing critical services to specialized vendors has been a favorite strategy of the CIO under pressure to reduce costs and improve service. Now CMOs are looking to steal a page from their business team rivals. Progressive CMOs are reexamining the productivity of dedicated marketing teams for SEO, content development, social media, web support, eMarketing and eCommerce, and are reducing costs by outsourcing these specialized business functions.
CIOs turned to outsourcing in early 1990, and again in 2001 and 2008, seeking an alternative to providing business services in-house, particularly when those services are not considered to be within the core competency of their business. IT executives have allowed third parties to work closely within the business units to provide expertise, meeting a clearly defined service level. As a result, the IT department could reduce fixed headcount while preserving the option to add staff externally as business changed. This flexibility allowed for greater efficiency. And in most cases, the specialized management of the process provided improved service.

This time, CMOs are seeking the same opportunity for a wide variety of functions now caught in the soft area between the IT function and the marketing organization. These functions require technical skills, proven processes and dedicated teams. Outsourcing combines the advantages of the work being done by an agency with specialized skills and the close working relationship and knowledge retention achieved with in-house teams. CMOs gain an advantage by outsourcing these specialized business functions to a new type of professional services firm.

Recently, CIO Magazine advised CIOs to avoid fast-tracking sourcing negotiations and invest savings to improve operations while shedding old processes that don’t help the brand. At Trellist, we think this is sound advice for the CMO, as well. An analysis of marketing operations will allow the CMO to determine which functions will achieve the greatest gains through outsourcing.
CMOs now get it, and they are looking very closely at this new approach to productivity and flexibility. To support this demand, Trellist Resource Management Division provides Outsourcing for more than 30 different professional service functions within the Trellist core competencies. This segment is the fastest growing area inside the Resource Management Division. Now both CIOs and CMOs have access to specialized outsourcing teams to leverage creative cost reduction within their business units.