How TAINA is helping eliminate barriers to change for implementing solutions into large organizations?

Eliminating barriers to change for implementing solutions into large organizations

Through a vast array of global engagements, TAINA has developed significant insight into the common challenges faced by organizations when considering change. The most common challenges we hear focus on the general organizational fear and resistance toward change, time constraints, and budgetary concerns.

The primary obstacle when considering the adoption of a vendor solution tends to typically revolve around the apprehension regarding the overall change process, especially within large, complex organizations. The unfamiliarity associated with new vendors, coupled with uncertainties around deployment timelines, resource requirements, and technology viability, contributes to reluctancy among internal teams and stakeholders.

How to Deploy Software Solutions into Large Organisations

Those of us who have worked in large organisations will instantly appreciate the complexity of delivering a new software solution into such an environment.  Those who work as a Third-Party vendor, supplying software to large organisations, will also understand just how long it can take to get their software up and running within a large organisation.  Whether it be the Purchasing department’s Vendor Management or Onboarding processes, Information Security checks and audits, technical integrations to various data sources, authentication systems to control access; the list of challenges goes on.  What can take days to deploy in a small organization can take months in a larger organization.

TAINA, drawing from extensive experience in delivering solutions to large and complex institutions worldwide, has developed various deployment methodologies and migration tools. This robust framework ensures alignment with organizational needs while addressing common apprehensions and challenges that come with change. By tailoring solutions to meet organizational expectations, TAINA alleviates the uncertainties surrounding the common vendor “transition”.

We have developed an innovative “Evolutionary Deployment Model”.  The premise is that we can deploy the TAINA Platform with a light touch quickly, then, as the project teams are able to work through an organization’s quality gates and processes, we can enable more and more integration points and product features over time.

TAINA’s 5 Step Evolutionary Deployment Model

The overall premise of TAINA’s 5 Step Evolutionary Deployment Model is that you can go live very quickly, so that you can start to realise your benefits, both operational and financial, expanding on functionality only when you are ready. 

1. Initiate the Project

To be successful, any implementation requires best practice project management disciplines to be followed.  During this phase TAINA would look to clarify the measures of success for the implementation, establish a communications strategy and ensure the correct resources are allocated to the project. 

A critical factor at this initial stage is obtaining senior management buy-in to the project.  This normally is achieved by nominating the senior management executives who will provide oversight and by establishing a governance cadence.  Having this senior management sponsorship is vital.

Another important step during initiation is establishing how the success of the implementation will be measured.  Knowing your success criteria will help guide decision making throughout the project, but without it you will not be able to measure your benefits realisation.

2. Discovery Phase

Now that we have a project team allocated, with clear goals and measures of success it is time to start to understand the environmental factors influencing the implementation.  At TAINA we run three specific workstreams to understand the challenges ahead:

2.1 Tax Technical

The tax technical workstream serves to give TAINA’s customers confidence in our regulatory support, but also helps identify any additional policies which are specific to these customers, and which we need to support.

2.2 Technology

Technology, also including Information Security, will help us to understand the quality gates we need to pass through, the architectural review processes to follow, the Information Security standards we need to demonstrate, and all technical integration points which are ultimately needed, be that data transfer, user authentication, etc.  This workstream will also clarify the non-functional requirements we need to demonstrate.

2.3 Business Operations

Finally, the Business Operations workstream will help us understand what data needs to flow into and out of the TAINA Platform, what the business workflows will look like, and how aspects such as reporting will work.

Typically, this phase of the implementation can take a couple of weeks.  One lesson TAINA has learned is that it is much better to remain in the discovery phase until you are certain that the landscape is very clear and that we have all the information required to plan the next steps.

3. Planning Phase.

The planning phase is arguably the most important   This is where the project teams on both sides take the information gathered during the workshops in the previous phases, and decide how the TAINA Platform can be incrementally phased in.

Senior Management engagement at this stage is the key.  Experience has taught us that some key stakeholders within the organisation but outside of the project team, will invariably want to undertake all the work in one big bang delivery.  It is vital at this stage to deliver a clear, phased delivery plan to the Senior Managers.  This starts with an initial light touch deployment and builds up the functionality incrementally, making it very clear which benefits each stage delivers from a benefits realisation perspective. 

You will need these Senior Managers to accept the plan before we leave this phase.  Invariably your Senior Managers will be called upon to explain the plan to their counterparts across the organisation.

4. Initial Launch

Initial launch will be the lightest touch deployment possible, with the least amount of integration.  The TAINA Platform can be standalone without any integration, without degrading functionality, so a light touch deployment is something we are used to. 

In order to get to this point in the project, you will almost certainly need to pass through certain quality and/or decision-making gates within the organization.  Aspects such as Architectural Review Boards, or Information Security approvals cannot be bypassed.  So long as the integration is light touch and the project team can demonstrate that best practice is still being followed, then often these gates can be straightforward to move through at initial launch.  In rare cases the Senior Managers will need to step in and explain the benefits of a phased, light touch approach to the organisation.

Aspects such as user training and user acceptance testing are also important activities at this stage.  It is still vital that operational users know how to work the system.

A key aspect that cannot be overlooked at this stage is to measure the benefits a sensible period after initial launch.  If you can demonstrate the benefits you were expecting to see have actually become reality, then you will find support for continuing with further phases of the implementation and integration of the software solution will be much easier to obtain.

5. Phased Delivery of Additional Benefits and Features.

You will not have delivered all the benefits after initial launch, and so you will need further phases to complete the business case.  The number of increments that follow on after initial launch depends upon the complexity of the organisation.

Again, a key factor at each stage is to measure and report upon the benefits which are being realised.  Maintaining Senior Management buy-in is still vital, especially at the latter stages, when the amount of benefit to each phase tends to tail off. 

Typically, TAINA would expect there to be a minimum of two further phased deliveries, although this does vary greatly from organisation to organisation.

TAINA has found that moving back through the organisation’s process, such as Architectural Review Boards or user acceptance, is much easier after initial launch as the service is already live. 

The Consequences of Not Changing

An additional perspective crucial in evaluating vendor solutions is considering the repercussions of maintaining the status quo. Invariably, the repercussions of inertia often outweigh the worries and challenges associated with change. The fear of change often stems from convoluted internal processes and the fear of accountability in case of failure. However, persisting with legacy systems and/or manual processes and workarounds exposes businesses to heightened risks of errors, non-compliance, operational inefficiencies, excessive manual operation costs, or outsourcing expenses, and a generally poor customer experience. Whether individually or in combination, these challenges perpetuate year after year, overshadowing the brief change process.

Eliminating fear around adopting vendor solutions

Deployments and implementations stand as significant hurdles in adopting vendor solutions.  Legacy systems, quality gates, internal processes, resource availability, organisational policies, the list of challenges is, quite naturally, long and time consuming to move through. 

Through years of experience and customized solutions tailored to mitigate these challenges, TAINA ensures that its clients are not hindered but rather empowered to effect positive changes in their businesses. By focusing on benefits realisation and accepting that you can deliver an implementation over a series of phases, it is entirely possible to go live quickly and reach your nirvana state incrementally.

TAINA’s Evolutionary Deployment Model delivers value to its customers quickly, ensuring that initial benefits are realised quickly, thereafter building upon an initial launch in a series of phased deliverables.

We would love to talk to you more about your current compliance process and discuss how your company coul benefit from automated tax compliance. 

For more information on how TAINA's fully automated FATCA and CRS Validation platform is deployed using both a on premise or SaaS Model, get in touch or request a demo to see it in action.