Emily Long's Blog

Our methodology sets our customers up for success We hear you: consolidating legacy systems and migrating to the cloud can be a challenge. How do we make it less risky and less expensive? Will our solutions be worth it? At Zia Consulting , we developed a clear-cut, five-step methodology that we take with every project presented to us: discovery , diagnostic , design , delivery , and delight . By covering all of our bases, we gain a true understanding of your organization’s migration and transformation challenges. Hopefully, you'll find this approach to be helpful. 1. Discovery First, we identify your organization’s real pain before recommending a best practice. We do this with upfront analysis and planning around these three notions: Pain : What current problems are you facing? Are you reeling from a compliance issue or a data breach? Do you want to mitigate costs and consolidate applications? Our team collaborates with you to articulate the underlying business and technical pain points. Claim : We architect a solution that provides differentiating capabilities to satisfy your success criteria. We also propose ways to build an effective communication ...

Anticipating your next technology change This article, the fourth in a five part series on technology strategy techniques, discusses how to be successful through all kinds of business and technology changes. If you haven’t read the series, find the additional posts here . “It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.” — Niccolo Machiavelli, “The Prince” I’ve seen this quoted in various settings before. Machiavelli wrote these words in the early 1500s to provide advice—his rant being potentially harmful or immoral—to a new prince attempting to establish rule in the 16th century. Yet today, in the minds of leaders who are driving strategic initiatives across the corporate landscape, these simple words continue to carry cautionary weight. Modern technological change is continuous and when it comes to your ECM platform or any large enterprise system, the preparation, planning, and continuous management through change is key to the health of your systems and team members. In the other articles of this blog series , I’ve focused ...

Numbers: Measuring the value and success of what’s been done This article, the third in a five part series on technology strategy techniques that bring about lasting change, discusses using numbers to effectively plan and analyze your ECM. If you haven’t read the series, find the additional posts here . A wide variety of articles can be quickly found online with ideas and instructions to develop a cost/benefit analysis for an ECM rollout. Most of these articles focus on: 1) initial justification of implementing an ECM system, and 2) a whole lot of numbers in complex spreadsheets consisting of hardware and software expenditures, personnel costs, operations, maintenance and support, and more. Dry and complicated? For sure! But in some organizations, these justifications can’t be avoided and are required to get your ECM project off the ground. The core of these calculations require some analysis of these areas: Total benefits: Increase: profit, growth, retention, efficiency, visibility Decrease: costs, time, effort, complaints, attrition, risk, conflict, duplication, administrative burden, infrastructure Project rollout costs Mapping benefit and cost ...

Oh my gosh, this seems hard…executing on the top things. This is the second article in a five-part series from Zia Consulting on technology strategy techniques that bring about lasting change. In case you missed it, read the introduction . As you begin executing an ECM project, there are going to be hiccups and all out fires. Risks turn into issues, requiring mitigations, new decisions, and so on and so forth. You may start thinking, “What happened to our strategy?!” One of the most important things you need to do, in times of project stress, is remind your team to apply basics of your strategy throughout all phases of execution of the project. It’s very easy to be distracted or get off track due to delays, scope creep, and unexpected issues. However, what’s important is not what comes up (because things will come up!) but how you get through it. Remember all the work your team did in the previous stages—that success criteria and planning? Use it! Apply it! In every situation, weigh the next steps against the strategy that you originally set out for your success. Validate your readiness to execute Before you roll into implementation, stick to the framework to ...

Planning for successful technology change. But let’s just GO! This is the first article of a five-part series on technology strategy techniques that bring about lasting change. In case you missed it, read the introduction . It may seem obvious, but the first thing to start with when embarking on a significantly large ECM technology change, platform refresh, or software upgrade, is a strategically informed plan. Many organizations don’t do this well or skip it entirely. Everyone may think that your enterprise project has the green light to begin implementation when procurement finally signs on the dotted line; however, that doesn’t mean you have a map for the inevitable challenges ahead. To be successful, every project has to start with a clear picture of the Why , the Who, and the How . Why are we doing this project? At the outset, this seems obvious—especially if you’ve spent a year or more researching the right platform to put in place. When I inquire about success criteria early on during engagements with clients, I usually get reasonably straightforward, yet vague answers such as: We have to replace the previous, unsupported ...

How did we get here? It’s taken nearly 10 years to arrive at our current state of Content Chaos—perhaps starting back in 2007 when managing compliance/risk began its steady decline as the primary business driver for investments into ECM systems. At the same, we initiated the rapid growth of collaboration—simplified sharing of documents both internally and externally—as the leading reason for new ECM investments. If we define content chaos as the inability to properly find, manage, and secure documents and records, it’s clear from virtually every metric that most organizations (if not all) are facing content chaos in 2015. Whether it’s the amount of time each day that knowledge workers spend searching for documents, or the number of times the wrong version of a document is used, or even the significant investments that companies are forced to make in human capital to staff information governance or records management groups, due to the failure of technology to address these areas. Not to mention the fact that in the news virtually every week is another Sony Pictures or Anthem, where data or content security is the headline for another enterprise. So how ...

Recently I was in discussion with our team as we contemplated a response to a proposal request. This particular request was heavily focused on workflow which lead to a spirited discussion. It occurs to me that often at Zia, we are cautious about scoping workflow implementation work. There’s good reason for this, as workflows are that type of software in our business that is heavily utilized by our client’s users, so we have to get them right. Workflows also typically have integration points with other pieces of software. What that tells us is that there is reason to be clear on both the technical and user-facing components of the implementation. Interestingly, the Java portion of this isn’t really the hard part. Our team agrees that ultimately writing the software, drawing the diagram and creating the workflow isn’t where the time is spent. I find that I get caution from my team around duration of workflow implementation and when we look closely at why that is, we can attribute the overall effort to three distinct areas: Requirements Gathering: This is where we collaborate with our client to understand their business process. We guide our clients on what makes for a successful ...