Creating the Digital Infrastructure for Your Invisible Organization
As you build your strategic plan for going fully virtual, as instructed in The Invisible Organization, you may find building this plan into a step-by-step process can be challenging.
We have worked with Mitch Russo before when building the infrastructure for Business Breakthroughs, International. The theory of how this all works is clearly explained in the book, but the details can be daunting, which is where we come in.
Building a technology strategy for going fully virtual can be as difficult as transitioning employees and leaders to the new realities of a virtual office. It can be confusing to decide what vendors are appropriate and what applications to invest in?
At Future Point of View, we help organizations who believe in the advantages highlighted in The Invisible Organization go fully virtual. We assist these organizations in laying out a step-by-step process to migrate their technology to a virtual environment. This process, of course, varies with the size, scope and need of every organization, but it looks roughly something like this:
1) We first suggest, if an organization has not done so, begin moving to a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Mitch suggests several on this page or we can assist you to choose the particular system that works best for your infrastructure. In this case, we will use the CRM system as a central place for team members to store their information, and connect with others, just as Mitch suggested in the book.
2) Next is to transfer all existing data into this CRM and to ensure that all new data collected will properly flow into this CRM.
3) Gradually or rapidly, depending on a company’s urgency to go fully virtual, all remaining on-premises hardware and software will need to be migrated to the cloud. This can include email, servers, scheduling software and disaster recovery management plans or systems. It is important that this migration to the cloud not disrupt business or the ability of employees to complete their day-to-day tasks. Therefore, this may end up being a gradual process, requiring preliminary testing of a virtual environment, although most organizations have at least partially migrated to the cloud.
4) Leaders will need to ensure that employees, especially those that need uninterrupted access to the internet, have a secondary connection option, such as a mobile device or a WiFi hotspot, to ensure continuous service in case the primary connection is lost.
5) You then determine how and where your business documentation will be stored. There are programs like Google Docs that support text and presentation documents and can allow for real-time collaboration within a Google document. Meanwhile, a program like Dropbox is more appropriate for larger files such as those required in video or graphic design. Basecamp can be valuable as a project management application.
As Mitch Russo lays out in The Invisible Organization, going invisible can be challenging but it can also be very rewarding and lucrative. At Future Point of View, we help organizations overcome the challenges to reap the rewards. If you would like us to assist you in crafting a technology strategy for going invisible please visit: www.fpov.com. We can help you move your organization forward into a bright and invisible future.