by Avii
“All progress starts with the truth.”
-Dan Sullivan, as quoted by Gary Boomer, Nov. 2020
“Sometimes the truth is glorious – but sometimes it hurts…”
- Lyle Ball, Cofounder and CEO of Avii
By Jim Boomer, CEO of Boomer Consulting Inc., and Lyle Ball, CEO and Co-Founder of Avii, based on the Dec. 15, 2020 Webinar they co-presented, located here.
The year 2020 has happened to all of us and has forever changed the way the public and private sectors do business, revamping in a few traumatic days what would have taken five years, says Bill Reeb, the 2019-20 chair of the AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants).
Bill Reeb, AICPA Chair (Image courtesy of CPA.com)
Says Reeb: “We have fast-forwarded the technology by at least five years. The use of technology has skyrocketed. And people are starting to say, Okay, we got to get people working at home, and we’ve found ways to communicate with each other during the day.”
To that end, the 2020 Siblings of the Year in determining our winners and losers are: 1) Technology Evolution, and 2) Change Management.
As we lead into this topic, I'd like to invite you to participate by grabbing a pen and a piece of paper, or a digital notepad or take some notes digitally. Think for a second and write down, who you believe in the software world your software world where winners and losers. Write down some software brand names. I'm going to share some of these publicly today, so I want them to be top of your mind.
Think of the winners of the software you rely on and what worked for you. Also think about the losers and what did not work for you. Then write down, secondly, why these products or technologies were a loser for you. For instance, a loser might be that this software brand name was not available on when it was needed and had downtime during a very critical time period. That would be a simple reason why you believe something was a loser, or a winner in 2020. Then let's see if your opinions and ours are aligned at the end of the process.
2020 hit all of us.
We were faced in this unprecedented season with the following (and more):
The coronavirus pandemic
Business models were flipped on their heads (providers and clients)
Forced remote workforce
Economic downturns
The faster than ever rise of values-based consumers
The requirement of most every business to pivot to remote, highly evolved, mostly digital models of operation
And the 2020 season is not over yet. The world will likely never return to the working experience we considered “normal” before. We’ve experienced losses in several primary categories this year:
The Technology Losers of 2020:
· Outages: data center, networks, applications
· Complex security concerns answered poorly
· Dependence on Silo’d, disconnected software and data that technically cannot automate “nose-to-tail” workflows
The Change Management Losers of 2020:
In this category we have the biggest Losers of all –
Investment in heavy client communication spikes with few resulting process and technology changes
Failure of exec teams to drive action and automation early in the cycle
Overwhelmed Lean Process, IT and Service Team Leads burdened by 11th hour demands & delayed empowerment to evolve prior to Oct 15
Here’s what The Realities of Practice Management, 2020, from AccountingWEB has to say:
While you can choose to deploy best-of-class individual products from different vendors, as you can see, they rarely connect with one another and often have a “siloed” effect, leaving little to no connection between functions and the client. This approach can add complexity to your processes, as your firm must often create and maintain processes to synchronize the data between the separate applications.
The losers in this category fail to provide integration of the things focus on most to the things their clients are needing.
“It is common for practitioners to expect a higher degree of integration into standard products like Microsoft Office than is commonly available in current product offerings.” – Realities of Practice Management 2020.
2020s biggest Losers, perhaps, are the Best of breed traditional solutions that want you to do the integration yourself.
Poll Question:
How much time do you spend jumping between technology solutions every day?
15 minutes
30 minutes
An hour
90 minutes?
According to Mavenlink, the average executive spends an hour a day! If you were a firm of 20 people and received on the average, three disruptions each that require 25 minutes apiece to resolve, at $150 an hour the cost would average $3,750 per day!
Now for the winners - Who and what have been the biggest winners of 2020?
These are the Change Management Winners of 2020:
Executive Teams that jumped in early in the year
Firms that see Lean + Technology as inseparable siblings
Openness to disrupting the business more than ever before
Firms that rely on Client Satisfaction to drive change
In all, 2020’s winners are the providers who can assess the risks, then lean in to create a competitive advantage through disruptive innovation. A few examples include:
AI that is learning how to automate repetitive functions, streaming workflows and change organizational structures.
Cloud-native technology that helps you integrate and innovate with software everywhere – integrate the software you want with the traditional solutions and functions your clients may need.
Software that can gather and coalesce business intelligence and put it where you need it, when you need it to become a trusted advisor instead of a recorder and reporter of historical facts. Today’s winners leverage new technology platforms and models to deliver research and insights to clients more efficiently in formats that let readers decide how they want to learn.
Moving from an annual trends and technologies report cadence to twice a year in the spirit of more insight faster, with new trends and emerging tech updates published in between.
Provide strengths of equal level in primary practice areas (workflow, Document management, Client Portal and Time billing).
Poll Question:
What are your biggest technology goals for 2021, in order of priority?
Greater workflow management
Stronger automation support
Better integration among technology functions
Better client-facing support/Client portal
Better business intelligence support on industry trends
And for the icing on the top, what are the biggest winning characteristics that can propel the accounting industry into greater success in 2021 and beyond?
Vendor culture. “We’re not your grandmother’s company.”
Support - Can you easily reach a human with the knowledge and empowerment to help you?
Flexibility – Does your vendor listen to you and adapt to your needs?
Evolution - Do they innovate year-over-year with your needs and industry changes?
Change management fuel source – Is the provider an innovator or are they stuck in “Tradition”?
Joy-to-Grumble factor - What are your peers saying about the provider?
Track Record – Is the win to loss score card looking good?
For these answers and more, we invite you to review the full Winners and Losers Webinar, here.