A few months ago I transitioned from my past employer into a new leadership role at CrossVue, a Workday implementation partner. CrossVue is developing its own unique value-driven approach toward implementing ERPs. While the technical methodology is consistent with the Workday methodology, the functional and business architecture elements are fundamentally different and one reason why I now work at the firm as the head of its Transformation & Client Experience Center of Expertise within the Transformation Services practice. Strategy and transformation are not bolt-ons or throw-aways at CrossVue, they’re understood as essential to extract and achieve meaningful value from a major system investment.
People who know me understand that I’m a firm believer in the concept of value-on-investment. In short, if you can’t bring lasting value, what was the point of the investment in the first place? Changing a technology or vendor only to return to the status quo doesn’t achieve anything — it only extends the underlying problems and issues to a point where the whole system collapses. I saw this pattern play out time and again in higher education. Coalitions of academic IT professionals and small groups of faculty believed that whatever installed technology at the time was at the root of all instructional ills. However, I found these groups, while well-intentioned, often didn’t take into account the system in which instructors were being trained, the expectations of students, and the larger consumer technology ecosystem in which people lived and worked. Instead of building value through ongoing and constructive investment, resources were thrown at academic IT to solve niche issues that limited growth, expansion and ultimately opportunity. Every few years, it seemed easier to throw everything out and reinvest than to build a solid foundation and add value.
This is why I am so glad to now be at CrossVue, which understands what it means to create value. With every project there are tradeoffs, but if you know where you’re headed and take corrective action along the way, transformative success can be attained. Knowing when to take action has to start before the project begins in the ideation stage and last well after into production, which I like to think of as knowing how to look over the horizon and actually take action to get to where you’re headed. That concept is at the core of my first post at CrossVue, Transformation is Not Flat. Enjoy.
