Sunday Email: Gen Shift / The Grip

Read time: ~5 minutes

Happy Sunday!

Every Sunday I offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

I love a good puzzle.

There's something satisfying about sorting the pieces and steadily assembling the image bit by bit.

Puzzles require patience, organization, and strategy.

We can say the same thing for technology integration. When done thoughtfully, integrations connect systems and data to form a unified whole. But without care, it becomes a frustrating mess.

Defining Integration

Having had the opportunity to lead a technology company whose fundamental value proposition hinged on creating automation across processes based on deep integrations, I've seen both the good and the challenging with integrations in our business.

To start, let's clarify what integration means.

Integration means pulling all data from System A into System B for many firms. However, some tech companies use "integration" as a buzzword when all they offer is single sign-on (the ability to seamlessly login to System B via System A).

This discrepancy sets unrealistic expectations.

Proper integration goes beyond single sign-on by syncing data and actions across platforms. When executed well, integrations provide immense value. But they require diligence and coordination, like assembling a puzzle.

Common Integration Pitfalls

In my experience helping firms benefit from integration and automation, we encountered several roadblocks time and again:

• Resistance to Change—Firms often want new technology to bend to current processes rather than optimize processes to leverage the tech's capabilities. This is a normal bias, as humans are not wired to change. Humans tend to believe that the way we do things works. And despite the prospect of a better way, we don't know that way, so we are weary of it. So, we default to wanting to keep our ways the exact same as we have done them forever.

• Data Inconsistency - Despite the advancements of AI and large language models (LLM), we have yet to create the ability to read people's minds. When advisors use CRMs and inputs inconsistently, integrations fail to mesh.

• "Curse of Knowledge" - After going through a process for years, we take essential steps for granted. I always liken this to breaking down the steps of making a PB&J sandwich. The exercise is hard, given that we take many of the steps for granted given that it is such a perceived basic process. However, this inability makes it hard to truly understand the steps of a process, the data needed at every small step, and, ultimately, to determine which small steps can be automated.

• No Designated Resource Focused on Technology Ecosystem - Too often, the role of managing, monitoring, and implementing technologies falls to someone as a secondary or tertiary task. It is not their most important focus. And the task was certainly not a "revenue" generating task. With no single owner, integration falls through the cracks among siloed teams.

Strategies to Overcome The Challenges

Based on these common pitfalls, here are some ideas to enable integration success:

Change Leadership:

Teams resist changing processes and want technology to conform to them.

This mentality is natural as people gravitate toward the familiar.

Executives should spearhead an organizational culture shift that values adaptation, transparency, and learning. Rather than enforcing dated processes, leadership should role model exploring emerging solutions. They must involve teams in decision-making and allow failure en route to efficiency. Rewards and promotions should center around flexibility – welcoming new tools that enhance best practices rather than forcing technology into past comfort zones. Leaders with vision inspire change, while lack thereof brews resistance.

Information Governance & Controls:

Inconsistent data undermines integration capabilities.

Rapid growth leaves little time to optimize systems, and siloed teams use tools differently.

Teams should look to appoint an expert to overhaul information flows, establishing standardized data inputs, tags, formats, and system workflows. A committee spanning departments can govern guidelines as new tools enter the ecosystem. Required fields and drop-downs limit ad-hoc inputs, supporting consistency as business scales.

Map it Out:

Naturally, we overlook simple sub-steps that technology could handle.

Experts in specific roles suffer the "curse of knowledge," taking the basics for granted.

Leadership should guide teams in meticulously mapping workflows – detailing what data gets gathered, input, and shared at each phase. Noting which systems touch each process stage clarifies where to establish integration points to relax duplicative manual work.

When working with teams, we would work to break down their process into a flow chart to see each individual step, the information needed within the steps, and the technologies we would interact with. You can see a simplified example here.

Assign Ownership:

If integration is no one's primary responsibility, it will fall through the cracks.

This role is not a core revenue-generating role; thus, leaders tend to deprioritize it.

Overcome this challenge by hiring or developing a dedicated Director of Technology. Let them thoroughly map current infrastructure, build expertise across all tools, liaise between stakeholders, guide benefit realization, and serve as an evangelist through training. Treat integration as a critical building block. The return is exponential.

With deliberate strategy, the puzzle pieces click together. Integration streamlines systems and information flow. But it requires diligence. Like a challenging puzzle, teams can enjoy the satisfaction of steadily connecting those pieces.

A Thought To Ponder This Week

Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted something so badly that you could not stop thinking about it?

Then one day, you got distracted.

And what you wanted, happened?

So often in life, we want something so badly that we end up getting trapped by our own desires.

And sometimes, the key to getting what we want is to stop thinking about it.

It’s an odd theory that proves right time and again.

Sometimes our conscious mind isn’t the best tool to accomplish our conscious desires.

Rather, the conscious mind can think through them, ultimately allowing room for the subconscious mind to accomplish them.

This lesson doesn’t just apply to us, but to clients as well.

We want a specific financial future that we hold that desire so tight. But as an advisor, we need to help them loosen their grip. The more our conscious mind gets involved, the more we tend actually to get in the way.

Set a plan, then let the subconscious navigate through it.

As we head into the week, it’s a good idea to ponder: How might we help our clients and ourselves relinquish the grip on what we desire and let our subconscious take over?

The best is ahead!

-Matt