4 Ways to Amplify Your Team's Success, Ownership, and Maintenance of Your O2C Tech Stack as a Tech Owner
2 | Audit and Understand Current State
Each company is unique in how its products and services are monetized. The types of services (products, services, royalties, consultation), the pricing model used (recurring, one-time, consumption), and how contracts are constructed (tiers, minimums, unlimited, metered) combine to create tremendous business and technical complexity. Meanwhile, the technical nature of O2C creates system and process dependencies, making digital transformation a daunting task for any IT leader.
The good news is that business complexity and dependency risk can be mitigated through an accurate understanding of the current state of processes, people, and technology. With an accurate audit of the current technical and business environment, IT leaders can map out a plan that accounts for the nuances of the business.
The importance of Auditing Current State
In many older organizations or companies that have experienced rapid growth or change, layers of processes and solutions can build up, overlap, and intersect in ways that are often poorly understood, creating “process debt.” Prioritizing short-term fixes at the expense of long-term maintainability, process debt accumulates over time and can be difficult and expensive to overcome.
Similarly, when an IT environment doesn't fully satisfy its internal users, those users often bridge the process gaps themselves. For example, employees might resort to shadow IT SaaS applications for tasks like file transfer or storage. The overdependence on manual file handling, Excel macros, and SQL scripts all indicate process gaps where workarounds have been created.
These workarounds often lead to delicate and potentially unstable operating environments. Although workarounds might function early on, they often break for unknown and unpredictable reasons when complexity and volume rise. When IT addresses and fixes the resulting issues, they may end up causing more issues, further compounding the problem.
IT leaders must know the current state, even if it’s not ideal. This knowledge allows them to mitigate dependency risk and continue to provide value to the business while navigating the path to a future state, and build more trust between IT and their internal customers.
How to audit for impact
Reduce complexity and dependency risk by auditing individual components as well as the whole ecosystem. We encourage IT leaders to start by focusing on blind spots in data and by mapping integration challenges:
- Where is data siloed?
- Where is information hard to access?
- Which subsystems are not easily interoperable with the whole system?
The answers to these questions can help isolate problem areas for further solutioning.
IT leaders should look for opportunities to bring in other customers of the O2C process, such as billing operations, collections, tax accounting, audit, financial planning and analysis, and customer success.
Outcome
Mapped out processes, a roadmap for improvement, actionable insights, and prioritized recommendations
auditing Benefits
Auditing your O2C tech stack based on business value can help your team map dependencies and assess which solutions to remove, replace, upgrade, or renew. Specifically, auditing helps:
- Create proper technology “swim lanes.”
- Ensure the proper placement of function.
- Minimize risk and maximize efficiency.
- Isolate symptomatic problems.