The Accessibility Business Case for IT

Accessibility goes beyond compliance

Analyst Perspective

Avoid tech debt related to accessibility barriers

Accessibility is important for individuals, businesses, and society. Diverse populations need diverse access, and it’s essential to provide access and opportunity to everyone, including people with diverse abilities. In fact, access to information and communications technologies (ICT) is a basic human right according to the United Nations.

The benefits of ICT accessibility go beyond compliance. Many innovations that we use in everyday life, such as voice activation, began as accessibility initiatives and ended up creating a better lived experience for everyone. Accessibility can improve user experience and satisfaction, and it can enhance your brand, drive innovation, and extend your market reach (WAI, 2022).

Although your organization might be required by law to ensure accessibility, understanding your users’ needs and incorporating them into your processes early will determine success beyond just compliance.

Heather Leier-Murray
Senior Research Analyst, People and Leadership
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

1. Harvard Business Review, 2021

Info-Tech Insight
The longer you put off accessibility, the more tech debt you accumulate and the more you risk losing access to new and existing markets. The longer you wait to adopt standards and best practices, the more interest you’ll accumulate on accessibility barriers and costs for remediation.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organizations who are looking to:

• Build a business case for accessibility.
• Ensure that digital assets, products, and services are accessible to everyone, internally and externally.
• Support staff and build skills to support the organization with accessibility and accommodation.
• Get assistance figuring out where to start on the road to accessibility compliance and beyond.

The cost of inaction related to accessibility is rising. Preparing for accessibility earlier helps prevent tech debt; the longer you wait to address your accessibility obligations, the more costly it gets.

More than 3,500 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the US in 2020, up more than 50% from 2018.

Source: UsableNet. Inc.

Common obstacles

These barriers make accessibility difficult to address for many organizations:

• You don’t know where your gaps in understanding are. Recognizing the importance of accessibility and how it fits into the bigger picture is key to developing buy-in.
• Too often organizations focus on mitigating risk by being compliance driven. Shifting focus to the user experience, internally and externally, will realize better results.
• Conventional approaches to accessibility often fail because the expectation is for users to do the hard work. One in five people have a permanent disability, but it’s likely everyone will be faced with some sort of disability at some point in their lives.¹ Your organization has to be doing at least 80% of the hard work.²
• Other types of compliance reside clearly with one area of the organization. Accessibility, however, has many homes: IT, user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), and even HR.

1. Smashing Magazine

2. Harvard Business Review, 2021

90% of companies claim to prioritize diversity.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 2020

Only 4% of those that claim to prioritize diversity consider disability in those initiatives.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 2020

The four principles of accessibility

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) identifies four principles of accessibility. WCAG is the most referenced standard in website accessibility lawsuits.

Source: eSSENTIAL Accessibility, 2022

Why organizations address accessibility

Top three reasons:

Source: Level Access

Still, most businesses aren’t meeting compliance standards. Even though legislation has been in place for over 30 years, a 2022 study by WebAIM of 1,000,000 homepages returned a 96.8% WCAG 2.0 failure rate.

Source: Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice

How organizations prioritize digital accessibility

43% rated it as a top priority.

36% rated it as important.

Fewer than 5% rated as either low priority or not even on the radar.

More than 65% agreed or strongly agreed it’s a higher priority than last year.

Source: Angel Business Communications

Organizations expect consumers to do more online

The pandemic led to many businesses going digital and more people doing things online.

Source: Statistics Canada

Disability is part of being human

Merriam-Webster defines disability as a “physical, mental, cognitive, or developmental condition that impairs, interferes with, or limits a person’s ability to engage in certain tasks or actions or participate in typical daily activities and interactions.”¹

The World Health Organization (WHO) points out that a crucial part of the definition of disability is that it’s not just a health problem, but the environment impacts the experience and extent of disability. Inaccessibility creates barriers for full participation in society.²

The likelihood of you experiencing a disability at some point in your life is very high, whether a physical or mental disability, seen or unseen, temporary or permanent, severe or mild.²

Many people acquire disabilities as they age yet may not identify as “a person with a disability.”³ Where life expectancies are over 70 years of age, 11.5% of life is spent living with a disability. ⁴

“Extreme personalization is becoming the primary difference in business success, and everyone wants to be a stakeholder in a company that provides processes, products, and services to employees and customers with equitable, person-centered experiences and allows for full participation where no one is left out.”
– Paudie Healy, CEO, Universal Access

1. Merriam-Webster
2. World Health Organization
3. Digital Leaders, as cited in WAI, 2018
4. Disabled World, as cited in WAI, 2018

Untapped talent resource

Common myths about people with disabilities:

• They can’t work.
• They need more time off or are absent more often.
• Only basic, unskilled work is appropriate for them.
• Their productivity is lower than that of coworkers.
• They cost more to recruit, train, and employ.
• They decrease others’ productivity.
• They’re not eligible for governmental financial incentives (e.g. apprentices).
• They don’t fit in.

These assumptions prevent organizations from hiring valuable people into the workforce and retaining them.

Source: Forbes

50% to 70% of people with disabilities are unemployed in industrialized countries. In the US alone, 61 million adults have a disability.

Source: United Nations, as cited in Forbes

Info-Tech’s methodology for the accessibility business case for IT

Insight Summary

1. WAI, 2018

Blueprint deliverables

This blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

Accessibility Business Case Template

The business case for accessibility is strong. Use this template to communicate to senior leaders the benefits and challenges of accessibility and the risks of inaction.

Accessibility Maturity Assessment

Use this assessment to understand your current accessibility maturity.

Blueprint benefits

Measure the value of this blueprint

Improve stakeholder satisfaction and engagement

• Tracking measures to understand the value of this blueprint is a critical part of the process.
• Monitor employee engagement, overall stakeholder satisfaction with IT, and the overall end-customer satisfaction.
• Remember, accessibility is not a one-and-done project – just because measures are positive does not mean your work is done.

In phase 2 of this blueprint, we will help you establish current-state and target-state metrics for your organization.

Suggested Metrics
Overall end-customer satisfaction
Monies saved through cost optimization efforts
Employee engagement
Monies save through application rationalization and standardization

For more metrics ideas, see the Info-Tech IT Metrics Library.

Executive Brief Case Study

INDUSTRY
Technology

SOURCE
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), 2018

Google

Investing in accessibility
With an innovative edge, Google invests in accessibility with the objective of making life easier for everyone. Google has created a broad array of accessibility innovations in its products and services so that people with disabilities get as much out of them as anyone else.

Part of Google’s core mission, accessibility means more to Google than implementing fixes. It is viewed positively by the organization and drives it to be more innovative to make information available to everyone. Google approaches accessibility problems not as barriers but as ways to innovate and discover breakthroughs that will become mainstream in the future.

Results
Among Google’s innovations are contrast minimums, auto-complete, voice-control, AI advances, and machine learning auto-captioning. All of these were created for accessibility purposes but have positively impacted the user experience in general for Google.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 4 to 6 calls over the course of 2 to 4 months.

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Phase 1

Understand Your Current State

Phase 1
1.1 Understand standards and legislation
1.2 Build awareness
1.3 Understand maturity level

Phase 2
2.1 Define desired future state
2.2 Define goals and objectives
2.3 Document roles and responsibilities

Phase 3
3.1 Prepare business case template for presentation and approval
3.2 Validate post-approval steps and establish timelines

The Accessibility Business Case for IT

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Identifying and understanding accessibility and compliance requirements and the ramifications of noncompliance.
• Defining accessibility, disability, and disability inclusion and building awareness of these with senior leaders.
• Completing the Accessibility Maturity Assessment to help you understand your current state.

Step 1.1

Understand standards and legislation

Activities

1.1.1 Make a list of the legislation you need to comply with

1.1.2 Seek legal and/or professional services’ input on compliance

1.1.3 Detail the risks of inaction for your organization

Understand Your Current State

Outcomes of this step
You will gain foundational understanding of the breadth of the regulation requirements for your organization. You will have reviewed and understand what is applicable to your organization.

The regulatory landscape is evolving

Canada

• Canadian Human Rights Act
• Policy on Communications and Federal Identity
• Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
• Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act
• Accessible Canada Act of 2019 (ACA)

Europe

• UK Equality Act 2010
• EU Web and Mobile Accessibility Directive (2016)
• EN 301 549 European Standard – Accessibility requirements for public procurement of ICT products and services

United States

• Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act of 1973
• Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)
• Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996
• Air Carrier Access Act of 1986
• 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA)

New Zealand

• Human Rights Act 1993
• Online Practice Guidelines for Government

Australia

• Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA)

Regulatory systems are moving toward an international standard.

1.1.1 Make a list of the legislation you need to comply with

1. Download the Accessibility Business Case Template.
2. Conduct research and investigate what legislation and standards are applicable to your organization.

a)	Start by looking at your local legislation.
b)	Then consider any other regions you conduct business in.
c)	Also account for the various industries you are in.

3. While researching, build a list of legislation requirements. Document these in your Accessibility Business Case Template as part of the Project Context section.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

1.1.2 Seek professional advice on compliance

1. Have general counsel review your list of regulations and standards related to accessibility or seek legal and/or professional support to review your list.
2. Review or research further the implications of any suggestions from legal counsel.
3. Make any updates to the Legal Landscape slide in the Accessibility Business Case Template.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Ramifications of noncompliance

Go beyond financial consequences

Beyond the costs resulting from a claim, noncompliance can damage your organization in several ways.

Source: May Hopewell

In the last four years, 83% of the retail 500 have been sued. Since 2018, 417 of the top 500 have received ADA-based digital lawsuits.

Source: UsableNet

1.1.3 Detail the risks of inaction for your organization

1. Using the information that you’ve gathered through your research and legal/professional advice, detail the risks of inaction for your organization.

a)	Consider legal risks, consumer risks, brand risks, and employee risks. (Remember, risks aren’t just monetary.)

2. Document the risks in your Accessibility Business Case Template.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Step 1.2

Build awareness of accessibility and disability inclusion

Activities

1.2.1 Identify gaps in understanding

1.2.2 Brainstorm how to reframe accessibility positively

Understand Your Current State

Outcomes of this step
You’ll have a better understanding of accessibility so that you can effectively implement and promote it.

Where to look for understanding

First-hand experience of how people with disabilities interact with your organization is often eye-opening. It will help you understand the benefits and value of accessibility.

Where to look for understanding

• Talk with people you know with disabilities that are willing to share.*
• Find role-specific training that’s appropriate.
• Research. Articles and videos are easy to find.
• Set up assistive technology trials.
• Seek out first-hand experience from people with disabilities and how they work and use digital assets.

Source: WAI, 2016

* Remember, people with disabilities aren't obligated to discuss or explain their disabilities and may not be comfortable sharing. If you're asking for their time, be respectful, only ask if appropriate, and accept a "no" answer if the person doesn't wish to assist.

1.2.1 Identify gaps in understanding

Find out what accessibility is and why it is important. Learn the basics.

1. Using the information that you’ve gathered through your research and legal counsel, conduct further research to understand the importance of accessibility.
2. Answer these questions:

a)	What is accessibility? Why is it important?
b)	From the legislation and standards identified in step 1.1, what gaps exist?
c)	What is the definition of disability?
d)	How does your organization currently address accessibility?
e)	What are your risks?
f)	Do you have any current employees who have disabilities?

3. Review the previous slide for suggestions on where to find more information to answer the above questions.
4. Document any changes to the risks in your Accessibility Business Case Template.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Reframe accessibility as a benefit, not a burden

A clear understanding of accessibility and the related standards and regulations can turn accessibility from something big and scary to an achievable part of the business.

The benefits of accessibility are:

Source 1: WAI, 2018

1.2.2 Brainstorm ways to reframe accessibility positively

1. Using the information that you’ve gathered through your research, brainstorm additional positives of accessibility for your organization.
2. Clearly identify the problem you want to solve (e.g., reframing accessibility positively in your organization).
3. Collect any tools you want to use to during brainstorming (e.g., whiteboard, markers, sticky notes)
4. Write down all the ideas that come to mind.
5. Review all the points and group them into themes.
6. Update the Accessibility Business Case Template with your findings.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Make it part of the conversation

A first step to disability and accessibility awareness is to talk about it. When it is talked about as freely as other things are in the workplace, this can create a more welcoming workplace.

Accessibility goes beyond physical access and includes technological access and support as well as our attitudes.

Accessibility is making sure everyone (disabled or abled) can access the workplace equally.

Adjustments in the workplace are necessary to create an accessible and welcoming environment. Understanding the three dimensions of accessibility in the workplace is a good place to start.

Source: May Hopewell

Three dimensions of accessibility in the workplace

Case Study

INDUSTRY
Professional Services

SOURCE
Accenture

Accenture takes an inclusive approach to increase accessibility.

Step 1.3

Understand your current accessibility maturity level

Activities

1.3.1 Complete the Accessibility Maturity Assessment

Understand Your Current State

Outcomes of this step
Completed Accessibility Maturity Assessment to inform planning for and building your business case in Phases 2 and 3.

Know where you are to know where to go

Consider accessibility improvements from three interconnected aspects to determine current maturity level

Accessibility Maturity

People

• Consider employee, customer, and user experience.

Process

• Review processes to ensure accessibility is considered early.

Technology

• Whether it’s new or existing, technology is an important tool to increase accessibility.

Accessibility maturity levels

Determine your level of maturity

Use Info-Tech’s Accessibility Maturity Assessment

• On the accessibility questionnaire, tab 2, choose how much the statements apply to your organization. Answer the questions based on your knowledge of your current state organizationally.
• Once you’ve answered all the questions, see the results on the tab 3, Accessibility Results. You can see your overall maturity level and the maturity level for each of six dimensions that are necessary to increase the success of an accessibility program.
• Click through to tab 4, Recommendations, to see specific recommendations based on your results and proven research to progress through the maturity levels. Keep in mind that not all organizations will or should aspire to the “Optimize” maturity level.

1.3.1 Complete the Accessibility Maturity Assessment

1. Download the Accessibility Maturity Assessment and save it with the date so that as you work on your accessibility program, you can reassess later and track your progress.
2. Once you have saved the assessment, select the appropriate answer for each statement on tab 2, Accessibility Questions, based on your knowledge of the organization’s approach.
3. After reviewing all the accessibility statements, see your maturity level results on tab 3, Accessibility Results. Then see tab 4, Recommendations, for suggestions based on your answers.
4. Document your accessibility maturity results in your Accessibility Business Case Template.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Phase 2

Plan for Senior Leader Buy-In

Phase 1
1.1 Understand standards and legislation
1.2 Build awareness
1.3 Understand maturity level

Phase 2
2.1 Define desired future state
2.2 Define goals and objectives
2.3 Document roles and responsibilities

Phase 3
3.1 Prepare business case template for presentation and approval
3.2 Validate post-approval steps and establish timelines

The Accessibility Business Case for IT

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Defining your desired future state.
• Determining your accessibility program goals and objectives.
• Clarifying and documenting roles and responsibilities related to accessibility in IT.

This phase involves the following participants:

• Project lead/sponsor
• IT leadership team
• Senior leaders/decision makers

Step 2.1

Define the desired future state of accessibility

Activities

2.1.1 Identify key stakeholders

2.1.2 Hold a key stakeholder focus group

2.1.3 Conduct a future-state analysis

Outcomes of this step
Following this step, you will have identified your aspirational maturity level and what your accessibility future state looks like for your organization.

Plan for Senior Leader Buy-In

Cheat sheet: Identify stakeholders

Ask stakeholders, “Who else should I be talking to?” to discover additional stakeholders and ensure you don’t miss anyone.

Categorize your stakeholders with a stakeholder prioritization map

A stakeholder prioritization map helps teams categorize their stakeholders by their level of influence and ownership.

There are four areas in the map, and the stakeholders within each area should be treated differently.

Players – Players have a high interest in the initiative and the influence to effect change over the initiative. Their support is critical, and a lack of support can cause significant impediment to the objectives.

Mediators – Mediators have a low interest but significant influence over the initiative. They can help to provide balance and objective opinions to issues that arise.

Noisemakers – Noisemakers have low influence but high interest. They tend to be very vocal and engaged, either positively or negatively, but have little ability to enact their wishes.

Spectators – Generally, spectators are apathetic and have little influence over or interest in the initiative.

Define strategies for engaging stakeholders by type

Each group of stakeholders draws attention and resources away from critical tasks.

By properly identifying your stakeholder groups, you can develop corresponding actions to manage stakeholders in each group. This can dramatically reduce wasted effort trying to satisfy Spectators and Noisemakers while ensuring the needs of the Mediators and Players are met.

2.1.1 Identify key stakeholders

Collect this information by:

1. List direct stakeholders for your area. Include stakeholders across the organization (both IT and business units) and externally.
2. Create a stakeholder map to capture your stakeholders’ interest in and influence on digital accessibility.
3. Shortlist stakeholders to invite as focus group participants in activity 2.1.2.
   • Aim for a combination of Players, Mediators, and Noisemakers.

Hold a focus group to initiate planning

Involve key stakeholders to determine the organizational drivers of accessibility, identify target maturity and key performance indicators (KPIs), and ultimately build the project charter.

Building the project charter as a group will help you to clarify your key messages and secure buy-in from critical stakeholders up-front, which is key.

Executing the business case for accessibility requires significant involvement from your IT leadership team. The challenge is that accessibility can be overwhelming because of inherent bias. Members of your IT leadership team will also need to participate in knowledge transfer, so get them involved up-front. The focus group will help stakeholders feel more engaged in the project, which is pivotal for success.

You may feel like a full project charter isn’t necessary, and depending on your organizational size, it might not be. However, the exercise of building the charter is important regardless. No matter your current climate, some level of socializing the value of and plans for accessibility will be necessary.

Meeting Agenda

1. Short introduction
   Led by: Project Sponsor
   • Why the initiative is being considered.
2. Make the case for the project
   Led by: Project Manager
   • Current state: What does the initiative address?
   • Future state: What is our target state of maturity?
3. Success criteria
   Led by: Project Manager
   • How will success be measured?
4. Define the project team
   Led by: Project Manager
   • Description of planned approach.
   • Stakeholder assessment.
   • What is required of the sponsor and stakeholders?
5. Determine next steps
   Led by: Project Manager

2.1.2 Hold a stakeholder focus group

Identify the pain points you want to resolve and some of the benefits that you’d like to see from a program. By doing so, you’ll get a holistic view of what you need to achieve and what your drivers are.

1. Ask the working group participants (as a whole or in smaller groups) to discuss pain points created by inaccessibility.
   • Challenges related to stakeholders.
   • Challenges created by process issues.
   • Difficulties improving accessibility practices.
2. Discuss opportunities to be gained from improving these practices.
3. Have participants write these down on sticky notes and place them on a whiteboard or flip chart.
4. Review all the points as a group. Group challenges and benefits into themes.
5. Have the group prioritize the risks and benefits in terms of what the solution must have, should have, could have, and won’t have.

While defining future state, consider your drivers

The Info-Tech Accessibility Maturity Framework identifies three key strategic drivers: compliance, experience, and incorporation.

• Over 30% of organizations are focused on compliance, according to a 2022 survey by Harvard Business Review and Slack’s Future Forum. The survey asked more than 10,000 workers in six countries about their organizations’ approach to DEI.²

Even though 90% of companies claim to prioritize diversity,¹ over 30% are focused on compliance.²

1. Harvard Business Review, 2020
2. Harvard Business Review, 2022

31.6% of companies remain in the Compliant stage, where they are focused on DEI compliance and not on integrating DEI throughout the organization or on creating continual improvement.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 2022

Align the benefits of program drivers to organizational goals or outcomes

Although there will be various motivating factors, aligning the drivers of your accessibility program provides direction to the program. Connecting the advantages of program drivers to organizational goals builds the confidence of senior leaders and decision makers, increasing the continued commitment to invest in accessibility programming.

Info-Tech Accessibility Maturity Framework

After initially ensuring your organization is compliant with regulations and standards, you will progress to building disciplined process and consistent standardized processes. Eventually you will build the ability for predictable process, and lastly, you’ll optimize by continuously improving.

Depending on the level of maturity you are trying to achieve, it could take months or even years to implement. The important thing to understand, however, is that accessibility work is never done.

At all levels of the maturity framework, you must consider the interconnected aspects of people, process, and technology. However, as the organization progresses, the impact will shift from largely being focused on process and technology improvement to being focused on people.

Info-Tech Insight
IT typically works through maturity frameworks from the bottom to the top, progressing at each level until they reach the end. When it comes to digital accessibility initiatives, being especially thorough, thoughtful, and collaborative is critical to success. This will mean spending more time in the Developing, Defined, and Managed levels of maturity rather than trying to reach Optimized as quickly as you can. This may feel contrary to what IT historically considers as a successful implementation.

Accessibility maturity levels

2.1.3 Conduct future-state analysis

Identify your target state of maturity

1. Provide the group with your maturity assessment results to review as well as the slides on the maturity levels, framework, and drivers.
2. Compare the benefits listed on the Accessibility maturity levels slide to those that you named in the previous exercise and determine which maturity level best describes your target state.
3. Discuss as a group and agree on one desired maturity level to reach.
4. Review the other levels of maturity and determine what is in and out of scope for the project (higher-level benefits would be considered out of scope).
5. Document your target state of maturity in your Accessibility Business Case Template.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Case Study

Accessibility as a differentiator

INDUSTRY
Financial

SOURCE
WAI-Engage

Step 2.2

Define your accessibility program goals and objectives

Activities

2.2.1 Create a list of goals and objectives

2.2.2 Finalize key metrics

Plan for Senior Leader Buy-In

Outcomes of this step
You will have clear measurable goals and objectives to respond to identified accessibility issues and organizational goals.

What does a good goal look like?

Use the SMART framework to build effective goals.

SMART is a common framework for setting effective goals. Make sure your goals satisfy these criteria to ensure you can achieve real results.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

2.2.1 Create a list of goals and objectives

Use the outcomes from activity 2.1.2.

1. Using the prioritized list of what your solution must have, should have, could have, and won’t have from activity 2.1.2, develop goals.
2. Remember to use the SMART goal framework to build out each goal (see the previous slide for more information on SMART goals).
3. Ensure each goal supports departmental and organizational goals to ensure it is meaningful.
4. Document your goals and objectives in your Accessibility Business Case Template.

Establish Baseline Metrics

Baseline metrics will be improved through:

1. Progressing through the accessibility maturity model.
2. Addressing accessibility earlier in processes to avoid tech debt and rework late in projects or releases.
3. Making accessibility part of the procurement process as a scoring consideration and vendor choice.
4. Ensuring compliance with regulations and standards.

For more metrics ideas, see the Info-Tech IT Metrics Library.

2.2.2 Finalize key metrics

Finalize key metrics the organization will use to measure accessibility success

1. Brainstorm how you would measure the success of each goal based on the benefits, challenges, and risks you previously identified.
2. Write each of the metric ideas down and finalize three to five key metrics which you will track. The metrics you choose should relate to the key challenges or risks you have identified and match your desired maturity level and driver.
3. Document your key metrics in the Accessibility Business Case Template.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Step 2.3

Document accessibility program roles and responsibilities

Activities

2.3.1 Populate a RACI chart

Plan for Senior Leader Buy-In

Outcomes of this step
At the end of this step, you will have a completed RACI chart documenting the roles and responsibilities related to accessibility for your accessibility business case.

2.3.1 Populate a RACI

Populate a RACI chart to identify who should be responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for each key activity.

Define who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for the project team:

1. Write out the list of all stakeholders along the top of a whiteboard. Write out the key project steps along the left-hand side.
2. For each initiative, identify each team member’s role. Are they:
   Responsible: The one responsible for getting the job done.
   Accountable: Only one person can be accountable for each task.
   Consulted: Are involved by providing knowledge.
   Informed: Receive information about execution and quality.
3. As you proceed, continue to add tasks and assign responsibility to the RACI chart in the appendix of the Accessibility Business Case Template.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Phase 3

Prepare your business case and get approval

Phase 1
1.1 Understand standards and legislation
1.2 Build awareness
1.3 Understand maturity level

Phase 2
2.1 Define desired future state
2.2 Define goals and objectives
2.3 Document roles and responsibilities

Phase 3
3.1 Prepare business case template for presentation and approval
3.2 Validate post-approval steps and establish timelines

The Accessibility Business Case for IT

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Compiling the work and learning you’ve done so far into a business case presentation.

This phase involves the following participants:

• Project lead/sponsor
• Senior leaders/approval authority

There is a business case for accessibility

• When planning for initiatives, a business case is a necessary tool. Although it can feel like an administrative exercise, it helps create a compelling argument to senior leaders about the benefits and necessity of building an accessibility program.
• No matter the industry, you need to justify how the budget and effort you require for the initiative support organizational goals. However, senior leaders of different industries might be motivated by different reasons. For example, government is strongly motivated by legal and equity aspects, commercial companies may be attracted to the increase in innovation or market reach, and educational and nonprofit companies are likely motivated by brand enhancement.
• The organizational focus and goals will guide your business case for accessibility. Highlight the most relevant benefits to your operational landscape and the risk of inaction.

Source: WAI, 2018

“Many organizations are waking up to the fact that embracing accessibility leads to multiple benefits – reducing legal risks, strengthening brand presence, improving customer experience and colleague productivity.”
– Paul Smyth, Head of Digital Accessibility, Barclays
Source: WAI, 2018

Step 3.1

Customize and populate the Accessibility Business Case Template

Activities

3.1.1 Prepare your business case template for presentation and approval

Build Your Business Case

Outcomes of this step
Following this step, you will have a customized business case presentation that you can present to senior leaders.

Use Info-Tech’s template to communicate with stakeholders

Obtain approval for your accessibility program by customizing Info-Tech’s Accessibility Business Case Template, which is designed to effectively convey your key messages. Tailor the template to suit your needs.

It includes:

• Project context
• Project scope and objectives
• Knowledge transfer roadmap
• Next steps

Info-Tech Insight
The support of senior leaders is critical to the success of your accessibility program development. Remind them of the benefits and impact and the risks associated with inaction.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

3.1.1 Prepare a presentation for senior leaders to gain approval

Now that you understand your current and desired accessibility maturity, the next step is to get sign-off to begin planning your initiatives.

Know your audience:

1. Consider who will be included in your presentation audience.
2. You want your presentation to be succinct and hard-hitting. Management’s time is tight, and they will lose interest if you drag out the delivery. Impact them hard and fast with the challenges, benefits, and risks of inaction.
3. Contain the presentation to no more than an hour. Depending on your audience, the actual presentation delivery could be quite short. You want to ensure adequate time for questions and answers.
4. Schedule a meeting with the key decision makers who will need to approve the initiatives (IT leadership team, executive team, the board, etc.) and present your business case.

Download the Accessibility Business Case Template

Step 3.2

Validate post-approval steps and establish timelines

Activities

3.2.1 Prepare for implementation: Complete the implementation prep to-do list and assign proposed timelines

Build Your Business Case

Outcomes of this step
This step will help you gain leadership’s approval to move forward with building and implementing the accessibility program.

Prepare to implement your program

Complete the to-do list to ensure you are ready to move your accessibility program forward.

3.2.1 Prep for implementation (action planning)

Use the implementation prep to-do list to make sure you have gathered relevant information and completed critical steps to be ready for success.

Use the list on the previous slide to make sure you are set up for implementation success and that you’re ready to move your accessibility program forward.

1. Assign proposed timelines to each of the items.
2. Work through the list, collecting or completing each item.
3. As you proceed, keep your identified drivers, current state, desired future state, goals, and objectives in mind.

Related Info-Tech Research

Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice

• Create a practice that is focused on human outcomes; it starts and ends with the people you are designing for. This includes:
  • Establishing a practice with a common vision.
  • Enhancing the practice through four design factors.
  • Communicating a roadmap to improve your business through design.

Modernize Your Corporate Website to Drive Business Value

• Users are demanding more valuable web functionalities and improved access to your website services.
• The criteria of user acceptance and satisfaction involves more than an aesthetically pleasing user interface (UI). It also includes how emotionally attached the user is to the website and how it accommodates user behaviors.

IT Diversity & Inclusion Tactics

• Although inclusion is key to the success of a diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, the complexity of the concept makes it a daunting pursuit.
• This is further complicated by the fact that creating inclusion is not a one-and-done exercise. Rather, it requires the ongoing commitment of employees and managers to reassess their own behaviors and to drive a cultural shift.

Fix Your IT Culture

• Go beyond value statements to create a culture that enables the departmental strategy.
• There is confusion about how to translate culture from an abstract concept to something that is measurable, actionable, and process driven.
• Organizations lack clarity about who is accountable and responsible for culture, with groups often pointing fingers at each other.

Works cited

“2021 State of Digital Accessibility.” Level Access, n.d. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022

”2022 Midyear Report: ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits.” UsableNet, 2022. Accessed 9 Nov. 2022

“Barclay’s Bank Case Study.” WAI-Engage, 12 Sept. 2018. Accessed 7 Nov. 2022.

Bilodeau, Howard, et al. “StatCan COVID-19 Data to Insights for a Better Canada.” Statistics Canada, 24 June 2021. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022.

Casey, Caroline. “Do Your D&I Efforts Include People With Disabilities?” Harvard Business Review, 19 March 2020. Accessed 28 July 2022.

Digitalisation World. “Organisations failing to meet digital accessibility standards.” Angel Business Communications, 19 May 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022.

“disability.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disability. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022.

“Disability.” World Health Organization, 2022. Accessed 10 Aug 2022.

“Driving the Accessibility Advantage at Accenture.” Accenture, 2022. Accessed 7 Oct. 2022.

eSSENTIAL Accessibility. The Must-Have WCAG 2.1 Checklist. 2022

Hopewell, May. Accessibility in the Workplace. 2022.

“Initiate.” W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), 31 March 2016. Accessed 18 Aug. 2022.

Kalcevich, Kate, and Mike Gifford. “How to Bake Layers of Accessibility Testing Into Your Process.” Smashing Magazine, 26 April 2021. Accessed 31 Aug. 2022.

Noone, Cat. “4 Common Ways Companies Alienate People with Disabilities.” Harvard Business Review, 29 Nov. 2021. Accessed Jul. 2022.

Taylor, Jason. “A Record-Breaking Year for ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits.” UsableNet, 21 December 2020. Accessed Jul. 2022.

“The Business Case for Digital Accessibility.” W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), 9 Nov. 2018. Accessed 4 Aug. 2022.

“The WebAIM Million.” Web AIM, 31 March 2022. Accessed 28 Jul. 2022.

Washington, Ella F. “The Five Stages of DEI Maturity.” Harvard Business Review, November - December 2022. Accessed 7 Nov. 2022.

Wyman, Nicholas. “An Untapped Talent Resource: People With Disabilities.” Forbes, 25 Feb. 2021. Accessed 14 Sep. 2022.

Take the First Steps to Embrace Open-Source Software

Begin to understand what is required to embrace open-source software in your organization.

Analyst Perspective

With great empowerment comes great responsibilities.

Open-source software promotes enticing technology and functional opportunities to any organization looking to modernize without the headaches of traditional licensing. Many organizations see the value of open source in its ability to foster innovation, be flexible to various use cases and system configurations, and give complete control to the teams who are using and managing it.

However, open source is not free. While the software is freely and easily accessible, its use and sharing are bound by its licenses, and its implementation requires technical expertise and infrastructure investments. Your organization must be motivated and capable of taking on the various services traditionally provided and managed by the vendor.

Andrew Kum-Seun
Research Director,
Application Delivery and Application Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Insight Summary

Overarching Info-Tech Insight

Open source is as much about an investment in people as it is about technology. It empowers applications teams to take greater control over their technology and customize it as they see fit. However, teams need the time and funding to conduct the necessary training, management, and ongoing community engagement that open-source software and its licenses require.

• Position open source in the same light as commercial software.
  The continuous improvement and evolution of popular open-source software and communities have established a trusting and reliable reputation in the industry. Open-source software quality and community support can rival similar vendor capabilities given the community’s maturity and contributions in the technology.
• Consider open source another form of outsource development.
  Open source is externally developed software where the code is accessible and customizable. Code quality may not align to your organization’s standards, which can require extensive testing and optimization. A thorough analysis of change logs, code repositories, contributors, and the community is recommended – much to the same degree as one would do with prospective outsourcing partners.
• Treat open source as any internally developed solution.
  Configurations, integrations, customizations, and orchestrations of open-source software are often done at the code level. While some community support is provided, most of the heavy lifting is done by the applications team. Teams must be properly resourced, upskilled, and equipped to meet this requirement. Otherwise, third-party partners are needed.

What is open source?

According to Synopsys, “Open source software (OSS) is software that is distributed with its source code, making it available for use, modification, and distribution with its original rights. … Programmers who have access to source code can change a program by adding to it, changing it, or fixing parts of it that aren’t working properly. OSS typically includes a license that allows programmers to modify the software to best fit their needs and control how the software can be distributed.”

What are the popular use cases?

1. Programming languages and frameworks
2. Databases and data technologies
3. Operating systems
4. Git public repos
5. Frameworks and tools for AI/ML/DL
6. CI/CD tooling
7. Cloud-related tools
8. Security tools
9. Container technology
10. Networking

Source: OpenLogic, 2022

Common Attributes of All Open-Source Software

• Publicly shared repository that anyone can access to use the solution and contribute changes to the design and functionality of the project.
• A community that is an open forum to share ideas and solution enhancements, discuss project direction and vision, and seek support from peers.
• Project governance that sets out guidelines, rules, and requirements to participate and contribute to the project.
• Distribution license that defines the terms of how a solution can be used, assessed, modified, and distributed.

Take the first steps to embrace open-source software

Begin to understand what is required to embrace open-source software in your organization.

State the Value of Open Source: Discuss current business and IT priorities, use cases, and value opportunities to determine what to expect from open-source versus commercial software.

Select Your Open-Source Software: Clarify the driving factors in your evaluation of open-source and commercial software using your existing IT procurement practices as a starting point.

Prepare for Open Source: Clarify the roles, processes, and tools needed for the implementation, use, and maintenance of open-source software.

Step 1.1: State the Value of Open Source

Activities

1.1.1 Outline the value you expect to gain from open-source software

This step involves the following participants:

• Applications team
• Product owner

Outcomes of this step:

• Value proposition for open source
• Potential open-source use cases

Use a canvas to frame your open-source evaluation

This canvas is intended to provide a single pane of glass to start collecting your thoughts and framing your future conversations on open-source software selection and adoption.

Record the results in the “Open-Source Canvas” tab in the Open-Source Readiness Assessment.

Open source presents unique software and tooling opportunities

Innovation

Many leading-edge and bleeding-edge technologies are collaborated and innovated in open-source projects, especially in areas that are beyond the vision and scope of vendor products and priorities.

Niche Solutions

Open-source projects are focused. They are designed and built to solve specific business and technology problems.

Flexible & Customizable

All aspects of the open-source software are customizable, including source code and integrations. They can be used to extend, complement, or replace internally developed code. Licenses define how open-source code should be and must be used, productized, and modified.

Brand & Recognition

Open-source communities encourage contribution and collaboration among their members to add functionality and improve quality and adoption.

Cost

Open-source software is accessible to everyone, free of charge. Communities do not need be consulted prior to acquisition, but the software’s use, configurations, and modifications may be restricted by its license.

However, myths continue to challenge adoption

• Open source is less secure or poorer quality than proprietary solutions.
• Open source is free from risk of intellectual property (IP) infringement.
• Open source is cheaper than proprietary solutions.

What are the top perceived barriers to using enterprise open source?

• Concerns about the level of support
• Compatibility concerns
• Concerns about inherent security of the code
• Lack of internal skills to manage and support it

Source: Red Hat, 2022

Microsoft Teams Cookbook

Recipes for best practices and use cases for Microsoft Teams.

Table of contents

Executive Brief

Section 1: Teams for IT

Section 2: Teams for End Users

Executive Summary

Situation

Remote work calls for leveraging your Office 365 license to utilize Teams – but IT is unsure about best practices for governance and permissions.

Without a framework or plan for governing the rollout of Teams, IT risks overlooking secure use of Teams, the phenomenon of “teams sprawl,” and not realizing how Teams integrates with Office 365 more broadly.

Complication

Teams needs to be rolled out quickly, but IT has few resources to help train end users with Teams best practices.

With teams, channels, chats, meetings, and live events to choose from, end users may get frustrated with lack of guidance on how to use Teams’ many capabilities.

Resolution

Use Info-Tech’s Microsoft Teams Cookbook to successfully implement and utilize Teams. This cookbook includes recipes for:

• IT best practices concerning governance of the creation process and Teams rollout.
• End-user best practices for Teams functionality and common use cases.

Key Insights

Teams is not a standalone app

Successful utilization of Teams occurs when conceived in the broader context of how it integrates with Office 365. Understanding how information flows between Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, for instance, will aid governance with permissions, information storage, and file sharing.

IT should paint the first picture for team creation

No initial governance for team creation can lead to “teams sprawl.” While Teams was built to allow end users’ creativity to flow in creating teams and channels, this can create problems with a cluttered interface and keeping track of information. To prevent end-user dissatisfaction here, IT’s initial Teams rollout should offer a basic structure for end users to work with first, limiting early teams sprawl.

The Teams admin center can only take you so far with permissions

Knowing how Teams integrates with other Office 365 apps will help with rolling out sensitivity labels to protect important information being accidentally shared in Teams. Of course, technology only does so much – proper processes to train and hold people accountable for their actions with data sharing must be implemented, too.

Related Info-Tech Research

Establish a Communication and Collaboration System Strategy

Don’t waste your time deploying yet another collaboration tool that won’t get used.

Modernize Communication and Collaboration Infrastructure

Your legacy telephony infrastructure is dragging you down – modern communications and collaboration technology will dramatically improve productivity.

Migrate to Office 365 Now

One small step to cloud, one big leap to Office 365. The key is to look before you leap.

Section 1: Teams for IT

Governance best practices and use cases for IT

From determining prerequisites to engaging end users.

IT fundamentals

• Creation process
• Teams rollout

Use cases

• Retain and search for legal/regulatory compliance
• Add an external user to a team
• Delete/archive a team

Overview: Creation process

IT needs to be prepared to manage other dependent services when rolling out Teams. See the figure below for how Teams integrates with these other Office 365 applications.

Which Microsoft 365 license do I need to access Teams?

• Microsoft 365 Business Essentials
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium
• Office 365 Enterprise, E1, E3, or E5
• Office 365 Enterprise E4 (if purchased prior to its retirement)

Please note: To appeal to the majority of Info-Tech’s members, this blueprint refers to Teams in the context of Office 365 Enterprise licenses.

Assign admin roles

You will already have at least one global administrator from setting up Office 365.

Global administrators have almost unlimited access to settings and most of the data within the software, so Microsoft recommends having only two to four IT and business owners responsible for data and security.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Configure multifactor authentication for your dedicated Office 365 global administrator accounts and set up two-step verification.

Once you have organized your global administrators, you can designate your other administrators with “just-enough” access for managing Teams. There are four administrator roles:

Prepare the network

There are three prerequisites before Teams can be rolled out:

• UDP ports 3478 through 3481 are opened.
• You have a verified domain for Office 365.
• Office 365 has been rolled out, including Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

Microsoft then recommends the following checklist to optimize your Teams utilization:

• Optimize calls and performance using the Call Quality Dashboard.
• Assess network requirements in the Network Planner in the Teams admin center.
• Ensure all computers running Teams client can resolve external DNS queries.
• Check adequate public IP addresses are assigned to the NAT pools to prevent port exhaustion.
• Route to local or regional Microsoft data centers.
• Whitelist all Office 365 URLs to move through security layers, especially IDS/IPS.
• Split tunnel Teams traffic so it bypasses your organization’s VPN.

Info-Tech Best Practice

For online support and walkthroughs, utilize Advisor for Teams. This assistant can be found in the Teams admin center.

Team Creation

You can create and manage Teams through the Teams PowerShell module and the Teams admin center. Only the global administrator and Teams service administrator have full administrative capabilities in this center.

Governance over team creation intends to prevent “teams sprawl” – the phenomenon whereby end users create team upon team without guidance. This creates a disorganized interface, with issues over finding the correct team and sharing the right information.

Prevent teams sprawl by painting the first picture for end users:

1. Decide what kind of team grouping would best fit your organization: by department or by project.
2. Start with a small number of teams before letting end users’ creativity take over. This will prevent initial death by notifications and support adoption.
3. Add people or groups to these teams. Assign multiple owners for each team in case people move around at the start of rollout or someone leaves the organization.
4. Each team has a general channel that cannot be removed. Use it for sharing an overview of the team’s goals, onboarding, and announcements.

Info-Tech Best Practice

For smaller organizations that are project-driven, organize teams by projects. For larger organizations with established, siloed departments, organize by department; projects within departments can become channels.

Integrations with SharePoint Online

Teams does not integrate with SharePoint Server.

Governance of Teams is important because of how tightly it integrates with other Office 365 apps, including SharePoint Online.

A poor rollout of Teams will have ramifications in SharePoint. A good rollout will optimize these apps for the organization.

Teams and SharePoint integrate in the following ways:

• Each team created in Teams automatically generates a SharePoint team site behind it. All documents and chat shared through a team are stored in that team’s SharePoint document library.
• As such, all files shared through Teams are subject to SharePoint permissions.
• Existing SharePoint folders can be tied to a team without needing to create a new one.
• If governance over resource sharing in Teams is poor, information can get lost, duplicated, or cluttered throughout both Teams and SharePoint.

Info-Tech Best Practice

End users should be encouraged to integrate their teams and channels with existing SharePoint folders and, where no folder exists, to create one in SharePoint first before then attaching a team to it.

Permissions

Within the Teams admin center, the global or Teams service administrator can manage Teams policies.

Typical Teams policies requiring governance include:

• The extent end users can discover or create private teams or channels
• Messaging policies
• Third-party app use

Chosen policies can be either applied globally or assigned to specific users.

Info-Tech Best Practice

If organizations need to share sensitive information within the bounds of a certain group, private channels help protect this data. However, inviting users into that channel will enable them to see all shared history.

External and guest access

Within the security and compliance center, the global or Teams service administrator can set external and guest access.

External access (federation) – turned on by default.

• Lets you find, call, and chat with users in other domains. External users will have no access to the organization’s teams or team resources.

Guest access – turned off by default.

• Lets you add individual users with their own email address. You do this when you want external users to access teams and team resources. Approved guests will be added to the organization’s active directory.

If guest access is enabled, it is subject to Azure AD and Office 365 licensing and service limits. Guests will have no access to the following, which cannot be changed:

• OneDrive for Business
• An organization’s calendar/meetings
• PSTN
• Organization’s hierarchical chart
• The ability to create, revise, or browse a team
• Upload files to one-on-one chat

Info-Tech Best Practice

Within the security and compliance center, you can allow users to add sensitivity labels to their teams that can prevent external and guest access.

Expiration and archiving

To reduce the number of unused teams and channels, or delete information permanently, the global or Teams service administrator can implement an Office 365 group expiration and archiving policy through the Teams admin center.

If a team has an expiration policy applied to it, the team owner will receive a notification for team renewal 30 days, 15 days, and 1 day before the expiry date. They can renew their team at any point within this time.

• To prevent accidental deletion, auto-renewal is enabled for a team. If the team owner is unable to manually respond, any team that has one channel visit from a team member before expiry is automatically renewed.
• A deleted Office 365 group is retained for 30 days and can be restored at any point within this time.

Alternatively, teams and their channels (including private) can be archived. This will mean that all activity for the team ceases. However, you can still add, remove, and update roles of the members.

Retention and data loss prevention

Retention policies can be created and managed in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center or the security and compliance center PowerShell cmdlets. This can be applied globally or to specific users.

By default, information shared through Teams is retained forever.

However, setting up retention policies ensures data is retained for a specified time regardless of what happens to that data within Teams (e.g. user deletes).

Info-Tech Best Practice

To prevent external or guest users accessing and deleting sensitive data, Teams is able to block this content when shared by internal users. Ensure this is configured appropriately in your organization:

• For guest access in teams and channels
• For external access in meetings and chat

Please note the following limitations of Teams’ retention and data loss prevention:

• Organization-wide retention policies will need to be manually inputted into Teams. This is because Teams requires a retention policy that is independent of other workloads.
• As of May 2020, retention policies apply to all information in Teams except private channel messages. Files shared in private channels, though, are subject to retention policies.
• Teams does not support advanced retention settings, such as a policy that pertains to specific keywords or sensitive information.
• It will take three to seven days to permanently delete expired messages.

Teams telephony

Teams has built-in functionality to call any team member within the organization through VoIP.

However, Teams does not automatically connect to the PSTN, meaning that calling or receiving calls from external users is not immediately possible.

Bridging VoIP calls with the PSTN through Teams is available as an add-on that can be attached to an E3 license or as part of an E5 license.

There are two options to enable this capability:

• Enable Phone System. This allows for call control and PBX capabilities in Office 365.
• Use direct routing. You can use an existing PSTN connection via a Session Border Controller that links with Teams (Amaxra).

Steps to implement Teams telephony:

1. Ensure Phone System and required (non-Microsoft-related) services are available in your country or region.
2. Purchase and assign Phone System and Calling Plan licenses. If Calling Plans are not available in your country or region, Microsoft recommends using Direct Routing.
3. Get phone numbers and/or service numbers. There are three ways to do this:
   • Get new numbers through the Teams admin center.
   • If you cannot get new numbers through the Teams admin center, you can request new numbers from Microsoft directly.
   • Port or transfer existing numbers. To do this, you need to send Microsoft a letter of authorization, giving them permission to request and transfer existing numbers on your behalf.
4. To enable service numbers, including toll-free numbers, Microsoft recommends setting up Communications Credits for your Calling Plans and Audio Conferencing.

Overview: Teams rollout

1. From Skype (and Slack) to Teams
2. Gain stakeholder purchase
3. Employ a phased deployment
4. Engage end users

Skype for Business is being retired; Microsoft offers a range of transitions to Teams.

Combine the best transition mode with Info-Tech’s adoption best practices to successfully onboard and socialize Teams.

From Skype to Teams

Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021. Choose from the options below to see which transition mode is right for your organization.

Skype for Business On-Premises will be retired in 2024. To upgrade to Teams, first configure hybrid connectivity to Skype for Business Online.

Islands mode (default)

• Skype for Business and Teams coexist while Teams is rolled out.
• Recommended for phased rollouts or when Teams is ready to use for chat, calling, and meetings.
• Interoperability is limited. Teams and Skype for Business only transfer information if an internal Teams user sends communications to an external Skype for Business user.

Teams only mode (final)

• All capabilities are enabled in Teams and Skype for Business is disabled.
• Recommended when end users are ready to switch fully to Teams.
• End users may retain Skype for Business to join meetings with non-upgraded or external parties. However, this communication is only initiated from the Skype for Business external user.

Collaboration first mode

• Skype for Business and Teams coexist, but only Teams’ collaboration capabilities are enabled. Teams communications capabilities are turned off.
• Recommended to leverage Skype for Business communications yet utilize Teams for collaboration.

Meetings first mode

• Skype for Business and Teams coexist, but only Teams’ meetings capabilities are enabled.
• Recommended for organizations that want to leverage their Skype for Business On-Premises’ Enterprise Voice capability but want to benefit from Teams’ meetings through VoIP.

From Slack to Teams

The more that’s left behind in Slack, the easier the transition. As a prerequisite, pull together the following information:

• Usage statistics of Slack workspaces and channels
• What apps end users utilize in Slack
• What message history you want to export
• A list of users whose Slack accounts can map on to required Microsoft accounts

Test content migration

Your Slack service plan will determine what you can and can’t migrate. By default, public channels content can be exported. However, private channels may not be exportable, and a third-party app is needed to migrate Direct Messages.

Files migration

Once you have set up your teams and channels in Teams, you can programmatically copy files from Slack into the target Teams channel.

Apps migration

Once you have a list of apps and their configurations used in Slack’s workspaces, you can search in Teams’ app store to see if they’re available for Teams.

User identity migration

Slack user identities may not map onto a Microsoft account. This will cause migration issues, such as problems with exporting text content posted by that user.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Avoid data-handling violations. Determine what privacy and compliance regulations (if any) apply to the handling, storage, and processing of data during this migration.

Gain stakeholder purchase

Change management is a challenging aspect of implementing a new collaboration tool. Creating a communication and adoption plan is crucial to achieving universal buy-in for Teams.

To start, define SMART objectives and create a goals cascade.

Sample list of stakeholder-specific benefits from improving collaboration

Use these activities to define what pain points stakeholders face and how Teams can directly mitigate those pain points.

Employ a phased deployment

Info-Tech Best Practice

Deploy Teams over a series of phases. As such, if you are already using Skype for Business, choose one of the coexistence phases to start.

1. Identify and pilot Teams with early adopters that will become your champions. These champions should be formally trained, be encouraged to help and train their colleagues, and be positively reinforced for their efforts.
2. Iron out bugs identified with the pilot group and train middle management. Enterprise collaboration tool adoption is strongly correlated with leadership adoption.
   1. Top-level management
      Control and direct overall organization.
   2. Middle management
      Execute top-level management’s plans in accordance with organization’s norms.
   3. First-level management
      Execute day-to-day activities.
3. Use Info-Tech’s one-pager marketing template to advertise the new tool to stakeholders. Highlight how the new tool addresses specific pain points. Address questions stemming from fear and uncertainty to avoid employees’ embarrassment or their rejection of the tool.

1. Extend the pilot to other departments and continue this process for the whole organization.

(Source: Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools (coming soon), Tools:GANTT Chart and Marketing Materials, Activities: 3.2A – 3.2B)

Info-Tech Insight

Be in control of setting and maintaining expectations. Aligning expectations with reality and the needs of employees will lower onboarding resistance.

Engage end users

Short-term best practices

Launch day:

• Hold a “lunch and learn” targeted training session to walk end users through common use cases.
• Open a booth or virtual session (through Teams!) and have tool representatives available to answer questions.
• Create a game to get users exploring the new tool – from scavenger hunts to bingo.

Launch week:

• Offer incentives for using the tool and helping others, including small gift cards.
• Publicize achievements if departments hit adoption milestones.

Long-term best practices

• Make available additional training past launch week. End users should keep learning new features to improve familiarity.
• Distribute frequent training clips, slowly exposing end users to more complex ways of utilizing Teams.
• Continue to positively reinforce and recognize those who use Teams well. This could be celebrating those that help others use the tool, how active certain users are, and attendance at learning events.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Microsoft has a range of training support that can be utilized. From instructor-led training to “Coffee in the Cloud” sessions, leverage all the support you can.

Use case #1: Retain and search data for legal/regulatory compliance

Scenario:

Your organization requires you to retain data and documents for a certain period of time; however, after this period, your organization wishes to delete or archive the data instead of maintaining it indefinitely. Within the timeframe of the retention policy, the admin may be asked to retrieve information that has been requested through a legal channel.

Purpose:

• Maintain compliance with the legal and regulatory standards to which the organization is subject.

Jobs:

• Ensure the data is retained for the approved time period.
• Ensure the policy applies to all relevant data and users.

Solution: Retention Policies

• Ensure that your organization has an Office 365 E3 or higher license.
• Set the desired retention policy through the Security & Compliance Center or PowerShell by deciding which teams, channels, chats, and users the policies will apply to and what will happen once the retention period ends.
• Ensure that matching retention policies are applied to SharePoint and OneDrive, since this is where files shared in Teams are stored.
• Be aware that Teams retention policies cannot be applied to messages in private channels.

Solution: e-Discovery

• If legally necessary, place users or Teams on legal hold in order to retain data that would be otherwise deleted by your organization’s retention policies.
• Perform e-discovery on Teams messages, files, and summaries of meetings and calls through the Security & Compliance Center.
• See Microsoft’s chart on the next slide for what is e-discoverable.

Content subject to e-discovery

E-discovery does not capture audio messages and read receipts in MS Teams.

Since files shared in private channels are stored separately from the rest of a team, follow Microsoft’s directions for how to include private channels in e-discovery. (Source: “Conduct an eDiscovery investigation of content in Microsoft Teams,” Microsoft, 2020.)

Use case #2: Add external person to a team

Scenario:

A team in your organization needs to work in an ongoing way with someone external to the company. This user needs access to the relevant team’s work environment, but they should not be privy to the goings-on in the other parts of the organization.

Jobs:

This external person needs to be able to:

• Attend meetings
• Join calls
• Chat with individual team members
• View and collaborate on the team’s files

Solution:

• If necessary, set a data loss prevention policy to prevent your users from sharing certain types of information or files with external users present in your organization’s Teams chats and public channels.
• Ensure that your Microsoft license includes DLP protection. However:
  • DLP cannot be applied to private channel messages.
  • DLP cannot block messages from external Skype for Business users nor external users who are not in “Teams only” mode.
• Ensure that you have a team set up for the project that you wish the external user to join. The external user will be able to see all the channels in this team, unless you create a private channel they are restricted from.
• Complete Microsoft’s “Guest Access Checklist” to enable guest access in Teams, if it isn’t already enabled.
• As admin, give the external user guest access through the Teams admin center or Azure AD B2B collaboration. (If given permission, team owners can also add guests through the Teams client).
• Decide whether to set a policy to monitor and audit external user activity.

Use case #3: Delete/archive a team

Scenario:

In order to avoid teams sprawl, organizations may want IT to periodically delete or archive unused teams within the Teams client in order to improve the user interface.

Alternately, if you are using a project-based approach to organizing Teams, you may wish to formalize a process to archive a team once the project is complete.

Delete:

• Determine if the team owner anticipates the team will need to be restored one day.
• Ensure that deletion does not contradict the organization’s retention policy.
• If not, proceed with deletion. Find the team in the Teams admin center and delete.
• Restore a deleted team within 30 days of its initial deletion through PowerShell.

Archive:

• Determine if the team owner anticipates the team will need to be restored one day.
• Find the relevant team in the Teams admin center and change its status to “Archived.”
• Restore the archived team if the workspace becomes relevant once again.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Remind end users that they can hide teams or channels they do not wish to see in their Teams interface. Knowing a team can be hidden may impact a team owner’s decision to delete it.

Section 2: Teams for End Users

Best practices for utilizing teams, channels, chat, meetings, and live events

From Teams how-tos to common use cases for end users.

End user basics

• Teams, channels, and chat
• Meetings and live events

Common use cases: Workspaces

• WS#1: Departments
• WS#2: A cross-functional committee
• WS#3: An innovation day event
• WS#4: A non-work-related social event
• WS#5: A project team with a defined end time

Common use cases: Meetings

• M#1: Job interview with an external candidate
• M#2: Quarterly board meeting
• M#3: Weekly recurring team meeting
• M#4: Morning stand-up/scrum
• M#5: Phone call between two people

Overview: Teams, channels, and chat

Teams

• Team: A workspace for a group of collaborative individuals.
  • Public channel: A focused area where all members of a team can meet, communicate, and share ideas and content.
  • Private channel: Like a public channel but restricted to a subset of team members, defined by channel owner.

Chat

• Chat: Two or more users collected into a common conversation thread.

For any Microsoft Teams newcomer, the differences between teams, channels, and chat can be confusing.

Use Microsoft’s figure (left) to see how these three mediums differ in their role and function.

Best practices: Workspaces 1/2

When does a Group Chat become a Channel?

• When it’s appropriate for the conversation to have a gallery – an audience of members who may not be actively participating in the discussion.
• When control over who joins the conversation needs to be centrally governed and not left up to anyone in the discussion.
• When the discussion will persist over a longer time period.
• When the number of participants approaches 100.

When does a Channel become a Team?

• When a team approaches 30 private channels, many of those private channels are likely candidates to become their own team.
• When the channel membership needs to extend beyond the boundary of the team membership.

Best practices: Workspaces 2/2

When does a Team become a Channel?

• When a team’s purpose for existing can logically be subsumed by another team that has a larger scope.

When does a Channel become a Group Chat?

• When a conversation within a channel between select users does not pertain to that channel’s scope (or any other existing channel), they should move the conversation to a group chat.
• However, this is until that group chat desires to form a channel of its own.

Create a new team

Team owner: The person who creates the team. It is possible for the team owner to then invite other members of the team to become co-owners to distribute administrative responsibilities.

Team members: People who have accepted their invitation to be a part of the team.

NB: Your organization can control who has permission to set up a team. If you can’t set a up a team, contact your IT department.

Create a new team

Decide from these two options:

• Building a team from scratch, which will create a new group with no prior history imported (steps 4.1–4.3).
• Creating a team from an existing group in Office 365, including an already existing team (steps 4.4–4.6).

NB: You cannot create a team from an existing group if:

• That group has 5,000 members or more.
• That group is in Yammer.

Decide if you want you new team from scratch to be private or public. If you set up a private team, any internal or external user you invite into the team will have access to all team history and files shared.

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Create a new team

Decide from these two options:

• Building a team from scratch, which will create a new group with no prior history imported (steps 4.1–4.3).
• Creating a team from an existing group in Office 365, including an already existing team (steps 4.4–4.6).

NB: You cannot create a team from an existing group if:

• That group has 5,000 members or more.
• That group is in Yammer.

Configure your new team settings, including privacy, apps, tabs, and members.

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Create a new channel

	On the right-hand side of the team name, click “More options.” Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Add channel.”	Name your channel, give a description, and set your channel’s privacy.
	To manage subsequent permissions, on the right-hand side of the channel name, click “More options.” Then, from the drop-down menu, click “Manage channel.”	Adding and removing members from channels: Only members in a team can see that team’s channels. Setting channel privacy as “standard” means that the channel can be accessed by anyone in a team. Unless privacy settings for a channel are set as “private” (from which the channel creator can choose who can be in that channel), there is no current way to remove members from channels. It will be up to the end user to decide which channels they want to hide.

Link team/channel to SharePoint folder

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Create a chat

Overview: Meetings and live events

Teams Meetings: Real-time communication and collaboration between a group, limited to 250 people.

Teams Live Events: designed for presentations and webinars to a large audience of up to 10,000 people, in which attendees watch rather than interact.

Depending on the use case, end users will have to determine whether they need to hold a meeting or a live event.

Use Microsoft’s table (left) to see what license your organization needs to perform meetings and live events.

Best practices: Meetings

When should an Ad Hoc Call become a Scheduled Meeting?

• When the participants need time to prepare content for the call.
• When an answer is not required immediately.
• When bringing a group of people together requires logistical organizing.

When should a Scheduled Meeting become an Ad Hoc Call?

• When the participants can meet on short notice.
• When a topic under discussion requires creating alignment quickly.

When should a Live Event be created?

• When the expected attendance exceeds 250 people.
• If the event does not require collaboration and is mostly a presenter conveying information.

Create a scheduled meeting

Create an ad hoc meeting

Tip: Use existing channels to host the chatrooms for your online meetings

When you host a meeting online with Microsoft Teams, there will always be a chatroom associated with the meeting. While this is a great place for meeting participants to interact, there is one particular downside.

Problem: The never-ending chat. Often the activity in these chatrooms can persist long after the meeting. The chatroom itself becomes, unofficially, a channel. When end users can’t keep up with the deluge of communication, the tools have failed them.

Solution: Adding an existing channel to the meeting. This ensures that discussion activity is already hosted in the appropriate venue for the group, during and after the meeting. Furthermore, it provides non-attendees with a means to catch up on the discussion they have missed.

In section two of this cookbook, we will often refer to this tactic.

Don’t have a channel for the chat session of your online meeting? Perhaps you should!

If your meeting is with a group of individuals that will be collaborating frequently, they may need a workspace that persists beyond the meeting.

Guests can still attend the meeting, but they can’t chat!

If there are attendees in your meeting that do not have access to the channel you select to host the chat, they will not see the chat discussion nor have any ability to use this function.

This may be appropriate in some cases – for example, a vendor providing a briefing as part of a regular team meeting.

However, if there are attendees outside the channel membership that need to see the meeting chat, consider another channel or simply default to not assigning one.

Meeting settings explained

Show device settings. For settings concerning audio, video, and whether viewing is private.

Show meeting notes. Use to take notes throughout the meeting. The notes will stay attached to this event.

Show meeting details. Find meeting information for: a dial-in number, conference ID, and link to join.

Enter full screen.

Show background effects. Choose from a range of video backgrounds to hide/blur your location.

Turn on the captions (preview). Turn on live speech-to-text captions.

Keypad. For dialing a number within the meeting (when enabled as an add-on with E3 or as part of E5).

Start recording. Recorded and saved using Microsoft Stream.

End meeting.

Turn off incoming video. To save network bandwidth, you can decline receiving attendee’s video.

Click “More options” to access the meetings settings.

Screen share. In the tool tray, select “Share” to share your screen. Select particular applications if you only want to share certain information; otherwise, you can share your whole desktop.

System audio share. To share your device’s audio while screen sharing, checkbox the “Include system audio” option upon clicking “Share.”

If you didn’t click that option at the start but now want to share audio during screen share, click the “Include systems audio” option in the tool tray along the top of the screen.

Give/take control of screen share. To give control, click “Give control” in the tool tray along the top of the screen when sharing content. Choose from the drop-down who you would like to give control to. In the same spot, click “Take back control” when required.

To request control, click “Request control” in the same space when viewing someone sharing their content. Click “Release control” once finished.

Start whiteboarding

1. You’ll first need to enable Microsoft Whiteboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Ask your relevant admin to do so if Whiteboard is not already enabled.
2. Once enabled, click “Share” in a meeting. This feature only appears if you have 3+ participants in the meeting.
3. Under the “Whiteboard” section in the bottom right, click “Microsoft Whiteboard.”
4. Click the pen icons to the right of the screen to begin sketching.

NB: Anonymous, federated, or guest users are currently not supported to start, view, or ink a whiteboard in a Teams meeting.

Will the whiteboard session be recorded if the meeting is being recorded?

No. However, the final whiteboard will be available to all meeting attendees after the meeting, under “Board Gallery” in the Microsoft Whiteboard app. Attendees can then continue to work on the whiteboard after the meeting has ended.

Create a live event

As the organizer, you can invite other people to the event who will be the “producers” or “presenters.” Producers: Control the live event stream, including being able to start and stop the event, share their own and others’ video, share desktop or window, and select layout. Presenters: Present audio, video, or a screen.

Live event settings explained

When you join the live event as a producer/presenter, nothing will be immediately broadcast. You’ll be in a pre-live state. Decide what content to share and in what order. Along the bottom of the screen, you can share your video and audio, share your screen, and mute incoming attendees. Once your content is ready to share along the bottom of the screen, add it to the screen on the left, in order of viewing. This is your queue – your “Pre-live” state. Then, click “Send now.” This content will now move to the right-hand screen, ready for broadcasting. Once you’re ready to broadcast, click “Start.” Your state will change from “Pre-live” to “Live.” Along the top right of the app will be a tools bar.

Workspace #1: Departments

Scenario: Most of your organization’s communication and collaboration occurs within its pre-existing departmental divisions.

Conventional communication channels:

• Oral communication: Employees work in proximity to each other and communicate in person, by phone, in department meetings
• Email: Department-wide announcements
• Memos: Typically posted/circulated in mailboxes

Solution: Determine the best way to organize your organization’s departments in Teams based on its size and your requirements to keep information private between departments.

Option A:

• Create a team for the organization/division.
• Create channels for each department. Remember that all members of a team can view all public channels created in that team and the default General channel.
• Create private channels if you wish to have a channel that only select members of that team can see. Remember that private channels have some limitations in functionality.

Option B:

• Create a new team for each department.
• Create channels within this team for projects or topics that are recurring workflows for the department members. Only department members can view the content of these channels.

Option C:

• Post departmental memos and announcements in the General channel.
• Use “Meet now” in channels for ad hoc meetings. For regular department meetings, create a recurring Teams calendar event for the specific department channel (Option A) or the General channel (Option B). Remember that all members of a team can join a public channel meeting.

Workspace #2: A cross-functional committee

Scenario: Your organization has struck a committee composed of members from different departments. The rest of the organization should not have access to the work done in the committee.

Purpose: To analyze a particular organizational challenge and produce a plan or report; to confidentially develop or carry out a series of processes that affect the whole organization.

Jobs: Committee members must be able to:

• Attend private meetings.
• Share files confidentially.

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Private team

Construction:

• Create a new private team for the cross-functional committee.
• Add only committee members to the team.
• Create channels based on the topics likely to be the focal point of the committee work.
• Decide how you will use the mandatory General channel. If the committee is small and the work limited in scope, this channel may be the main communication space. If the committee is larger or the work more complex, use the General channel for announcements and move discussions to new topic-related channels.
• Schedule recurring committee meetings in the Teams calendar. Add the relevant channel to the meeting invite to keep the meeting chat attached to this team and channel (as meeting organizer, put your name in the meeting invite notes, as the channel will show as the organizer in the Outlook invite).
• Remember that all members of this team will have access to these meetings and be able to view that they are occurring.

Workspace #3: An innovation day event

Scenario: The organization holds a yearly innovation day event in which employees form small groups and work on a defined, short-term problem or project.

Purpose: To develop innovative solutions and ideas.

Jobs:

• Convene small groups.
• Work toward time-sensitive goals.
• Communicate synchronously.
• Share files.

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Public team
• Channel tabs
• Whiteboard
• Planner

Construction:

• Create a team for the innovation day event.
• Add channels for each project working group.
• Communicate to participants the schedule for the day and their assigned channel.
• Use the General channel for announcements and instructions throughout the day. Ensure someone moderates the General channel for participants’ questions.
• Pre-populate the channel tabs with files the participants need to work with. To add a scrum board, refer to M#4 (Morning stand-up/Scrum) in this slide deck.
• For breakouts, instruct participants to use the “meet now” feature in their channel and how to use the Whiteboard during these meetings.
• Arrange to have your IT admin archive the team after a certain point so the material is still viewable but not editable.

Workspace #4: A non-work-related social event

Scenario: Employees within the organization wish to organize social events around shared interests: board game clubs, book clubs, TV show discussion groups, trivia nights, etc.

Purpose: To encourage cohesion among coworkers and boost morale.

Jobs:

• Schedule the event.
• Invite participants.
• Prepare the activity.
• Host and moderate the discussion.

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Public team
• Private channels
• Screen-sharing

Construction:

• Create a public team for the social event so that interested people can find and join it.
• Example: Trivia Night
  • Schedule the event in the Teams calendar.
  • Publish the link to the Trivia Night team where other employees will see it.
  • Create private channels for each trivia team so they cannot see the other competitors’ discussions. Add yourself to each private channel so you can see their answers.
  • As the host, begin a meeting in the General channel. Pose the trivia questions live or present the questions on PowerPoint via screen-sharing.
  • Ask each team to post its answers to its private channel.
• To avoid teams sprawl, ask your IT admin to set a deletion policy for the team, as long as this request does not contradict your organization’s policies on data retention. If the team becomes moribund, it can be set to auto-delete after a certain period of time.

Workspace #5: A project team with a defined end time

Scenario: Within a department/workplace team, employees are assigned to projects with defined end times, after which they will be assigned to a new project.

Purpose: To complete project-based work that fulfills business needs.

Jobs:

• Oral communication with team members.
• Synchronous and asynchronous work on project files.
• The ability to attend scheduled meetings and ad hoc meetings.
• The ability to access shared resources related to the project.

Solution:

If your working group already has its own team within Teams:

• Create a new public or private channel for the project. Remember that some functionality is not available in private channels (such as Microsoft Planner).
• Use the channel for the project team’s meetings (scheduled in Teams calendar or through Meet Now).
• Add a tab that links to the team’s project folder in SharePoint.

If your workplace team does not already have its own team in Teams:

• Determine if there is a natural fit for this project as a new channel in an existing team. Remember that all team members will be able to see the channel if it is public and that all relevant project members need to belong to the Team to participate in the channel.
• If necessary, create a new team for the project. Add the project members.
• Create channels based on the type of work that comprises the project.
• Use the channel for the project team’s meetings (scheduled in Teams calendar or through Meet Now)
• Add a tab to link to the team’s project folder in SharePoint.

Info-tech Best Practice

Hide the channel after the project concludes to de-clutter your Teams user interface.

Meeting #1: Job interview with external candidate

Scenario: The organization must interview a slate of candidates to fill an open position.

Purpose:

• Select the most qualified candidate for the job.

Jobs:

• Create a meeting, ensuring the candidate and other attendees know when and where the meeting will happen.
• Ensure the meeting is secure to protect confidential information.
• Ensure the meeting is accessible, allowing the candidate to present themselves through audio and/or visual means.
• Create a professional environment for the meeting to take place.
• Engender a space for the candidate to share their CV, research, or other relevant file.
• The interview must be transcribed and recorded.

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Private Teams meeting
• Screen-sharing
• Microsoft Stream

Construction:

• Create a Teams meeting, inviting the candidate with their email, alongside other internal attendees. The Teams meeting invite will auto-generate a link to the meeting itself.
• The host can control who joins the meeting through settings for the “lobby.”
• Through the Teams meeting, the attendees will be able to use the voice and video chat functionality.
• All attendees can opt to blur their backgrounds to maintain a professional online presence.
• The candidate can share their screen, either specific applications or their whole desktop, during the Teams meeting.
• A Teams meeting can be recorded and transcribed through Stream. After the meeting, the transcript can be searched, edited, and shared

NB: The external candidate does not need the Teams application. Through the meeting invite, the external candidate will join via a web browser.

Meeting #2: Quarterly board meeting

Scenario: Every quarter, the organization holds its regular board meeting.

Purpose: To discuss agenda items and determine the company’s future direction.

Jobs:

• Attendance and minutes must be taken.
• Votes must be recorded.
• In-camera sessions must occur.
• External experts must be included.

• Follow-up items must be assigned.
• Reports must be submitted.

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Teams calendar invite
• Planner; Forms
• Private channel
• Microsoft Stream

Construction:

• Guest Invite: Invites can be sent to any non-domain-joined email address to join a private, invitation-only channel within the team controlled by the board chair.
• SharePoint & Flow: Documents are emailed to the Team addresses, which kicks off an MS Flow routine to collect review notes.
• Planner: Any board member can assign tasks to any employee.
• Forms/Add-On: Chair puts down the form of the question and individual votes are tracked.
• Teams cloud meeting recording: Recording available through Stream. Manual edits can be made to VTT caption file. Greater than acceptable transcription error rate.
• Meeting Log: Real-time attendance is viewable but a point-in-time record needs admin access.

NB: The external guests do not need the Teams application. Through the meeting invite, the guests will join via a web browser.

Meeting #3: Weekly team meeting

Scenario: A team meets for a weekly recurring meeting. The meeting is facilitated by the team lead (or manager) who addresses through agenda items and invites participation from the attendees.

Purpose: The purpose of the meeting is to:

• Share information verbally
• Present content visually
• Achieve consensus
• Build team morale

Jobs: The facilitator must:

• Determine participants
• Book room
• Book meeting in calendar

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Meeting Place: A channel in Microsoft Teams (must be public) where all members of the meeting make up the entirety of the audience.
• Calendar Recurrence: A meeting is booked through Teams and appears in all participants’ Outlook calendar.
• Collaboration Space: Participants join the meeting through video or audio and can share screens and contribute text, images, and links to the meeting chat.

Construction:

• Ensure your team already has a channel created for it. If not, create one in the appropriate team.
• Create the meeting using the calendar view within Microsoft Teams:
  • Set the meeting’s name, attendees, time, and recurrence.
  • Add the team channel that serves as the most appropriate workplace for the meeting. (Any discussion in the meeting chat will be posted to this channel.)

NB: Create the meeting in the Teams calendar, not Outlook, or you will not be able to add the Teams channel. As meeting organizer, put your name in the meeting invite notes, as the channel will show as the organizer in the Outlook invite.

Meeting #4: Morning stand-up/scrum

Scenario: Each morning, at 9am, members of the team meet online.

Purpose: After some pleasantries, the team discusses what tasks they each plan to complete in the day.

Jobs: The team leader (or scrum master) must:

• Place all tasks on a scrum board, each represented by a sticky note denoting the task name and owner.
• Move the sticky notes through the columns, adjusting assignments as needed.
• Sort tasks into the following columns: “Not Started,” “In Progress,” and “Done.”

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Meeting Place: A channel in Microsoft Teams (must be public) where all members of the meeting make up the entirety of the audience.
• Scrum Board: A tab within that channel where a persistent scrum board has been created and is visible to all team members.

Meeting Place Construction:

• Create the meeting using the calendar view in Teams.
• Set the meeting’s name, attendees, time, and work-week daily recurrence (see left).
• Add the channel that is the most appropriate workplace for the meeting. Any meeting chat will be posted to this channel rather than a separate chat.

Scrum Board Construction:

• Add a tab to the channel using Microsoft Planner as the app. (You can use other task management apps such as Trello, but the identity integration of first-party Office 365 tools may be less hassle.)
• Create a new (or import an existing) Plan to the channel. This will be used as the focal point.

Meeting #5: Weekly team meeting

Scenario: An audio-only conversation that could be a regularly scheduled event but is more often conducted on an ad-hoc basis.

Purpose: To quickly share information, achieve consensus, or clarify misunderstandings.

Jobs:

• Dial recipient
• See missed calls
• Leave/check voicemail
• Create speed-dial list
• Conference call

Solution:

Ingredients:

• Audio call begun through Teams chat.

Construction:

• Voice over IP calls between users in the same MS Teams tenant can begin in multiple ways:
  • A call can be initiated through any appearance of a user’s profile picture: hover over user’s profile photo in the Chat list and select the phone icon.
  • Enter your last chat with a user and click phone icon in upper-right corner.
  • Go to the Calls section and type the name in the “Make a call” text entry form.
• Voicemail: Voicemail, missed calls, and call history are available in the Calls section.
• Speed dial: Speed dial lists can be created in the Calls section.
• Conference call: Other users can be added to an ongoing call.

NB: Microsoft Teams can be configured to provide an organization’s telephony for external calls, but this requires an E5 license. Additional audio-conferencing licenses are required to call in to a Teams meeting over a phone.

Bibliography 1/4

Section 1: Teams for IT › Creation Process

Overview: Creation process

• “How do I get access to Microsoft Teams?” Microsoft, n.d., support.office.com/en-us/article/how-do-i-get-access-to-microsoft-teams-fc7f1634-abd3-4f26-a597-9df16e4ca65b. Accessed 11 May 2020.
• “Logical architecture for Microsoft Teams and related services.” Microsoft, 6 Mar. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-architecture-solutions-posters. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Plan for governance in Teams.” Microsoft, 10 Aug. 2018, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/plan-teams-governance. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.

Assign admin roles

• “Use Microsoft Teams administrator roles to manage Teams.” Microsoft, 19 Sep. 2018, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/using-admin-roles. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Prepare the network

• “Prepare your organization's network for Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 28 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Team creation

• “Best practices for organizing teams in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 13 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/best-practices-organizing. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Create your first teams and channels in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/get-started-with-teams-create-your-first-teams-and-channels. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Integrations with SharePoint Online

• “Configure Teams with three tiers of protection.” Microsoft, 7 May 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/solutions/configure-teams-three-tiers-protection?view=o365-worldwide. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “File collaboration in SharePoint with Microsoft 365.” Microsoft, 21 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/deploy-file-collaboration. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Permissions

• “Manage app permission policies in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 21 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-app-permission-policies. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Manage messaging policies in Teams.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/messaging-policies-in-teams. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.
• “Sensitivity labels for Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 22 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/sensitivity-labels. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Bibliography 2/4

Section 1: Teams for IT › Creation Process (cont'd.)

External and guest access

• “Add a guest to Teams.” Microsoft, 22 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/add-guests. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.
• “Communicate with users from other organizations in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 22 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/communicate-with-users-from-other-organizations. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.
• “Guest access in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 22 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/guest-access. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Manage external access in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 22 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-external-access. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Microsoft Teams guest access checklist.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/guest-access-checklist. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.
• “Turn on or turn off guest access to Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/set-up-guests. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “What the guest experience is like.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/guest-experience. Accessed 4 May 2020.

Expiration and archiving

• “Archive or delete a team in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/archive-or-delete-a-team?view=o365-worldwide. Accessed 29 Apr. 2020.
• “Microsoft 365 group expiration policy.” Microsoft, 6 May 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/create-groups/office-365-groups-expiration-policy?view=o365-worldwide. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Team expiration and renewal in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 6 Feb. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/team-expiration-renewal. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Retention and data loss prevention

• “Data loss prevention and Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 21 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/dlp-microsoft-teams?view=o365-worldwide. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Retention policies in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 5 May 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/retention-policies. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Teams telephony

• “Here's what you get with Phone System in Office 365.” Microsoft, 26 Feb. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/here-s-what-you-get-with-phone-system. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• O’Donnell, J.P. “The killer feature in Microsoft Teams your business should be using.” Amaxra, n.d., www.amaxra.com/blog/the-killer-feature-in-microsoft-teams-your-business-should-be-using. Accessed 4 May 2020.
• “Set up Phone System in your organization.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/deploy-audio-conferencing-teams-landing-page. Accessed 4 May. 2020.
• “What is Phone System in Office 365?” Microsoft, 29 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/what-is-phone-system-in-office-365. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Bibliography 3/4

Section 1: Teams for IT › Teams Rollout

From Skype to Teams

• “FAQ — Upgrading from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/faq-journey. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• “Teams and Skype interoperability.” Microsoft, 21 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-skype-interop. Accessed 9 May 2020.
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From Slack to Teams

• “Migrate from Slack to Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 14 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/migrate-slack-to-teams. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Teams adoption

• “365 adoption guide” Microsoft, 22 Jan. 2020, query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWqTOD. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Section 1: Teams for IT › Use Cases

• Acharya, Ansuman. “Microsoft Teams launches eDiscovery for calling and meetings.” Microsoft Tech Community, 2 Jul. 2018, techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-launches-ediscovery-for-calling-and-meetings/ba-p/210947. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.
• “Conduct an eDiscovery investigation of content in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/ediscovery-investigation?view=o365-worldwide#overview, Accessed 29 Apr. 2020.
• “Teams cloud meeting recording: Compliance and eDiscovery for meeting recordings.” Microsoft, 27 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/cloud-recording#compliance-and-ediscovery-for-meeting-recordings. Accessed 29 Apr. 2020.

Bibliography 4/4

Section 2: Teams for End Users › Teams, Channels, Chat

• “Limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 29 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/limits-specifications-teams. Accessed 4 May 2020.
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• “Manage the Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 1 Oct. 2019, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-whiteboard. Accessed 9 May 2020.
• [Microsoft Teams admin documentation.] Microsoft, n.d., docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/teams-overview. Accessed 29 Apr. 2020.
• “Overview of teams and channels in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 9 Mar. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/teams-channels-overview. Accessed 4 May 2020.
• “Private channels in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 24 Feb. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/private-channels. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.

Section 2: Teams for End Users › Meetings and Live Events

• “Admin quick start – Meetings and live events in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 7 Apr. 2020, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/quick-start-meetings-live-events. Accessed 21 Apr. 2020.
• “Get started with Microsoft Teams live events.” Microsoft, n.d., support.office.com/en-us/article/get-started-with-microsoft-teams-live-events-d077fec2-a058-483e-9ab5-1494afda578a#bkmk_roles. Accessed 29 Apr. 2020.
• “Schedule a Teams live event.” Microsoft, n.d., support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/schedule-a-teams-live-event-7a9ce97c-e1cd-470f-acaf-e6dfc179a0e2. Accessed 29 Apr. 2020.
• “Search the audit log for events in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, 12 Mar. 2018, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/audit-log-events?view=o365-worldwide. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020.

Section 2: Teams for End Users › Use Cases

• “Understand calling in Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft, n.d., docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/tutorial-calling-in-teams. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Scale Business Process Automation

Take a value-first approach to automate the processes that matter

Analyst Perspective

Scaling business process automation (BPA) is an organization-wide commitment

Business and IT must work together to ensure the right automations are implemented and BPA is grown and matured in a sustainable way. However, many organizations are not ready to make this commitment. Managing the automation demand backlog, coordinating cross-functional effort and organizational change, and measuring BPA value are some of the leading factors challenging scaling BPA.

Pilot BPA with the intent to scale it. Pilots are safe starting points to establish your foundational governance and management practices and build the necessary relationships and collaborations for you to be successful. These factors will then allow you to explore more sophisticated, complicated, and innovative opportunities to drive new value to your team, department, and organization.

Andrew Kum-Seun
Research Director,
Application Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Business process automation (BPA) adoption gained significant momentum as your business leaders see the positive outcomes in your pilots, such as improvements in customer experience, operational efficiencies, and cost optimizations.
• Your stakeholders are ready to increase their investments in more process automation solutions. They want to scale initial successes to other business and IT functions.
• However, it is unclear how BPA can be successfully scaled and what benefits can be achieved from it.

Common Obstacles

The shift from isolated, task-based automations in your pilot to value-oriented and scaled automations brings new challenges and barriers to your organization:

• Little motivation or tolerance to change existing business operations to see the full value of BPA.
• Overinvesting in current BPA technologies to maximize return despite available alternatives that can do the same tasks better.
• BPA teams are ill-equipped to meet the demands and complexities of scaled BPA implementations.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Ground your scaling expectations. Set realistic and achievable goals centered on driving business value to the entire organization by optimizing and automating end-to-end business processes.
• Define your scaling journey. Tailor your scaling approach according to your ability to ease BPA implementation, to broaden BPA adoption, and to loosen BPA constraints.
• Prepare to scale BPA. Cement your BPA management and governance foundations to support BPA scaling using the lessons learned from your pilot implementation.

Info-Tech Insight

Take a value-first approach in your scaling business process automation (BPA) journey. Low-risk, task-oriented automations are good starting points to introduce BPA but constrain the broader returns your organization wants. Business value can only scale when everything and everyone in your processes are working together to streamline the entire value stream rather than the small gains from optimizing small, isolated automations.

Scale Business Process Automation

Take a value-first approach to automate the processes that matter

Pilot Your BPA Capabilities

• Learn the foundation practices to design, deliver, and support BPA.
• Understand the fit and value of BPA.
• Gauge the tolerance for business operational change and system risk.

See Info-Tech's Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook blueprint for more information.

Build Your Scaling BPA Vision

Apply Lessons Learned to Scale

1. Ground Your Scaling Expectations
   Set realistic and achievable goals centered on driving business value to the entire organization by optimizing and automating end-to-end business processes.
2. Define Your Scaling Journey
   Tailor your scaling approach according to your ability to ease BPA implementation, to broaden BPA adoption, and to loosen BPA constraints.
3. Prepare to Scale BPA
   Cement your BPA management and governance foundations to support BPA scaling using the lessons learned from your pilot implementation.

Research deliverable

Design and communicate your approach to scale business process automation with Info-Tech's Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment:

• Level set your scaled BPA goals and objectives.
• Discuss and design your scaled BPA journey.
• Identify the gaps and improvements needed to scale your BPA practices and implementation.

Step 1.1

Ground Your Scaling Expectations

Activities

1.1.1 Define Your Scaling Objectives

This step involves the following participants:

• Business Process Owners
• Product Owners
• Application Directors
• Business Architects
• BPA Delivery & Support Teams

Outcomes of this step

Scaling BPA objectives

Organizations want to scale their initial BPA success

Notable Initial Benefits

1. Time Saved: "In the first day of live operations, the robots were saving 51 hours each day or the equivalent of six people working an eight-hour shift." – Brendan MacDonald, Director of Customer Compliance Operations, Ladbrokes (UiPath)
2. Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: "If certain people left, knowledge of some processes would be lost and we realized that we needed a reliable process management system in place." – Peta Kinnane, Acting Audit and Risk Coordinator, Liverpool City Council (Nintex)
3. Improved Service Delivery: "Thanks to this automation, our percentage of triaged and assigned tickets is now 100%. Nothing falls through the cracks. It has also improved the time to assignment. We assign tickets 2x faster than before." – Sebastian Goodwin, Head of Cybersecurity, Nutanix (Workato)

Can We Gain More From Automation?

The Solution

As industries evolve and adopt more tools and technology, their products, services, and business operating models become more complex. Task- and desktop-based automations are often not enough. More sophisticated and scaled automations are needed to simplify and streamline the process from end-to-end of complex operations and align them with organizational goals.

Stakeholders see automation as an opportunity to scale the business

The value of scaling BPA is dependent on the organization's ability to scale with it. In other words, stakeholders should see an increase in business value without a substantial increase in resources and operational costs (e.g., there should be little difference if sending out 10 emails versus 1000).

Examples of how business can be scaled with automation

• Processes triggered by incoming documents or email: in these processes, an incoming document or email (that has semi-structured or unstructured data) is collected by a script or an RPA bot. This document is then processed with a machine learning model that validates it either by rules or ML models. The validated and enriched machine-readable data is then passed on to the next system of record.
• The accounts payable process: this process includes receiving, processing, and paying out invoices from suppliers that provided goods or services to the company. While manual processing can be expensive, take too much time, and lead to errors, businesses can automate this process with machine learning and document extraction technologies like optical characters recognition (OCR), which converts texts containing images into characters that can be readable by computers to edit, compute, and analyze.
• Order management: these processes include retrieving email and relevant attachments, extracting information that tells the business what its customers want, updating internal systems with newly placed orders or modifications, or taking necessary actions related to customer queries.
• Enhance customer experience: [BPA tools] can help teams develop and distribute customer loyalty offers faster while also optimizing these offers with customer insights. Now, enterprises can more easily guarantee they are delivering the relevant solutions their clients are demanding.

Source: Stefanini Group

Scaling BPA has its challenges

Perceived Lack of Opportunities

Pilot BPA implementations often involve the processes that are straightforward to automate or are already shortlisted to optimize. However, these low-hanging fruits will run out. Discovering new BPA opportunities can be challenged for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Lack of documentation and knowledge
• Low user participation or drive to change
• BPA technology limitations and constraints

Perceived Lack of Opportunities

BPA is not a cheap investment. A single RPA bot, for example, can cost between $5,000 to $15,000. This cost does not include the added cost for training, renewal fees, infrastructure set up and other variable and reoccurring costs that often come with RPA delivery and support (Blueprint). This reality can motivate BPA owners to favor existing technologies over other cheaper and more effective alternatives in an attempt boost their return on investment.

Ill-Equipped Support Teams

Good technical skills and tools, and the right mindset are critical to ensure BPA capabilities are deployed effectively. Low-code no-code (LCNC) can help but success isn't guaranteed. Lack of experience with low-code platforms is the biggest obstacle in low-code adoption according to 60% of respondents (Creatio). The learning curve has led some organizations to hire contractors to onboard BPA teams, hire new employees, or dedicate significant funding and resources to upskill internal resources.

Shift your objectives from task-based efficiencies to value-driven capabilities

Gauge the success of your scaled BPA

BPA Practice Effectiveness

Key Question: Are stakeholders satisfied with how the BPA practice is meeting their automation needs?

Examples of Metrics:

• User satisfaction
• Automation request turnaround time
• Throughput of BPA team

Automation Solution Quality

Key Question: How do your automation solutions perform and meet your quality standards?

Examples of Metrics:

• Licensing and operational costs
• Service level agreement and uptime/downtime
• Number of defects

Business Value Delivery

Key Question: How has automation improved the value your employees, teams, and the organization delivers?

Examples of Metrics:
Increase in revenue generation
Reduction in operational costs
Expansion of business capabilities with minimal increases in costs and risks

1.1.1 Define your scaling objectives

5 minutes

1. Complete the following fields to build your scaled business process automation canvas:
   1. Problem that scaling BPA is intending to solve
   2. Your vision for scaling BPA
   3. Stakeholders
   4. Scaled BPA business and IT objectives and metrics
   5. Business capabilities, processes, and application systems involved
   6. Notable constraints, roadblocks, and challenges to your scaled BPA success
2. Document your findings and discussions in Info-Tech's Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment.

Output

Scaled BPA value canvas

Participants

• Business Process Owners
• Product Owners
• Application Directors
• Business Architects
• BPA Delivery & Support Teams

Record the results in the 2. Value Canvas Tab in the Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment.

1.1.1 cont'd

Scaled BPA Value Canvas Template:

Align your objectives to your application portfolio strategy

Why is an application portfolio strategy important for BPA?

• All business process optimizations are designed, delivered, and managed to support a consistent interpretation of the business and IT vision and goals.
• Clear understanding of the sprawl, criticality, and risks of automation solutions and applications to business capabilities.
• BPA initiatives are planned, prioritized, and coordinated alongside modernization, upgrades, and other changes to the application portfolio.
• Resources, skills, and capacities are strategically allocated to meet BPA demand considering other commitments in the backlog and roadmap.
• BPA expectations and practices uphold the persona, values, and principles of the application team.

What is an application portfolio strategy?

An application portfolio strategy details the direction, activities, and tactics to deliver on the promise of your application portfolio. It often includes:

• Portfolio vision and goals
• Application, automation, and process portfolio
• Values and principles
• Portfolio health
• Risks and constraints
• Strategic roadmap

See our Application Portfolio Management Foundations blueprint for more information.

Leverage your BPA champions to drive change and support scaling initiatives

Expected Outcome From Your Pilot: Your pilot would have recognized the roles that know how to effectively apply good BPA practices (e.g., process analysis and optimization) and are familiar with the BPA toolset. These individuals are prime candidates who can standardize your Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook, upskill interested teams, and build relationships among those involved in the delivery and use of BPA.

Step 1.2

Define Your Scaling Journey

Activities

1.2.1 Discuss Your BPA Opportunities
1.2.2 Lay Out Your Scaling BPA Journey

Scale Business Process Automation

This step involves the following participants:

• Business Process Owners
• Product Owners
• Application Directors
• Business Architects
• BPA Delivery & Support Teams

Outcomes of this step

• List of scaling BPA opportunities
• Tailored scaling journey

Maintain a healthy demand pipeline

A successful scaled BPA practice requires a continuous demand for BPA capabilities and the delivery of minimum viable automations (MVA) held together by a broader strategic roadmap.

An MVA focuses on a single and small process use case, involves minimal possible effort to improve, and is designed to satisfy a specific user group. Its purpose is to maximize learning and value and inform the further scaling of the BPA technology, approach, or practice.

See our Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook blueprint for more information.

Investigate how BPA trends can drive more value for the organization

• Event-Driven Automation
  Process is triggered by a schedule, system output, scenario, or user (e.g., voice-activated, time-sensitive, system condition)
• Low- & No-Code Automation build and management are completed through an easy-to-learn scripting language and/or a GUI.
• Intelligent Document Processing
  Transform documents for better analysis, processing and handling (e.g., optical character recognition) by a tool or system.
• End-to-End Process Automation & Transparency
  Linking cross-functional processes to enable automation of the entire value stream with seamless handoffs or triggers.
• Orchestration of Different BPA Technologies
  Integrating and sequencing the execution of multiple automation solutions through a single console.
• Cognitive Automation
  AI and other intelligent technologies automate information-intensive processes, including semi and unstructured data and human thinking simulation.
• Intelligent Internet-of-Things
  Connecting process automation technologies to physical environments with sensors and other interaction devices (e.g., computer vision).
• Ethical Design
  Optimizing processes that align to the moral value, principles, and beliefs of the organization (e.g., respects data privacy, resists manipulative patterns).
• User Profiling & Tailored Experiences
  Customizing process outputs and user experience with user-defined configurations or system and user activity monitoring.
• Process Mining & Discovery
  Gleaning optimization opportunities by analyzing system activities (mining) or monitoring user interactions with applications (discovery).

1.2.1 Discuss your BPA opportunities

5 minutes

1. Review the goals and objectives of your initiative and the expectations you want to gain from scaling BPA.
2. Discuss how BPA trends can be leveraged in your organization.
3. List high priority scaling BPA opportunities.

Output

• Scaled BPA opportunities

Participants

• Business Process Owners
• Product Owners
• Application Directors
• Business Architects
• BPA Delivery & Support Teams

Create your recipe for success

Your scaling BPA recipe (approach) can involve multiple different flavors of various quantities to fit the needs and constraints of your organization and workers.

What and how many ingredients you need is dependent on three key questions:

1. How can we ease BPA implementation?
2. How can we broaden the BPA scope?
3. How can we loosen constraints?

Personalize Scaling BPA To Your Taste

• Extend BPA Across Business Units (Horizontal)
• Integrate BPA Across Your Application Architecture (Vertical)
• Embed AI/ML Into Your Automation Technologies
• Empower Users With Business-Managed Automations
• Combine Multiple Technologies for End-to-End Automation
• Increase the Volume and Velocity of Automation
• Automate Cognitive Processes and Making Variable Decisions

Answer these questions in the definition of your scaling BPA journey

Seeing the full value of your scaling approach is dependent on your ability to support BPA adoption across the organization

How can we ease BPA implementation?

• Good governance practices (e.g., role definitions, delivery and management processes, technology standards).
• Support for innovation and experimentation.
• Interoperable and plug-and-play architecture.
• Dedicated technology management and support, including resources, documents, templates and shells.
• Accessible and easy-to-understand knowledge and document repository.

How can we broaden BPA scope?

• Provide a unified experience across processes, fragmented technologies, and siloed business functions.
• Improve intellectually intensive activities, challenging decision making and complex processes with more valuable insights and information using BPA.
• Proactively react to business and technology environments and operational changes and interact with customers with unattended automation.
• Infuse BPA technologies into your product and service to expand their functions, output quality, and reliability.

How can we loosen constraints?

• Processes are automated without the need for structured data and optimized processes, and there is no need to work around or avoid legacy applications.
• Workers are empowered to develop and maintain their own automations.
• Coaching, mentoring, training, and onboarding capabilities.
• Accessibility and adoption of underutilized applications are improved with BPA.
• BPA is used to overcome the limitations or the inefficiencies of other BPA technologies.

1.2.2 Lay out your scaling BPA journey

5 minutes

1. Review the goals and objectives of your initiative, the expectations you want to gain from scaling BPA, and the various scaling BPA opportunities.
2. Discuss the different scaling BPA flavors (patterns) and how each flavor is applicable to your situation. Ask yourself these key questions:
   1. How can we ease BPA implementation?
   2. How can we broaden the BPA scope?
   3. How can we loosen constraints?
3. Design the broad steps of your scaling BPA journey. See the following slide for an example.
4. Document your findings and discussions in Info-Tech's Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment.

Record the results in the 3. Scaled BPA Journey Tab in the Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment.

Output

• Scaled BPA journey

Participants

• Business Process Owners
• Product Owners
• Application Directors
• Business Architects
• BPA Delivery & Support Teams

1.2.2 cont'd

	Continuous business process optimization and automation
	Scope of Info-Tech's Build Your Business Process Automation Playbook blueprint

Example:

• Scale by Adding More Automation
• Build Digital Processes With Seamless Automation
• Reimagine IT's Role
• Introduce Adaptive Process Governance
• Govern & Manage an Automation Platform
• Implement a Business Automation CoE

Continuously review and realign expectations

Optimizing your scaled BPA practices and applying continuous improvements starts with monitoring the process after implementation.

Purpose of Monitoring

1. Diligent monitoring confirms your scaled BPA implementation is performing as desired and meeting initial expectations.
2. Holding reviews of your BPA practice and implementations helps assess the impact of marketplace and business operations changes and allows the organization to stay on top of trends and risks.

Metrics

Metrics are an important aspect of monitoring and sustaining the scaled practice. The metrics will help determine success and find areas where adjustments may be needed.

Hold retrospectives to identify any practice issues to be resolved or opportunities to undertake

The retrospective gives your organization the opportunity to review themselves and brainstorm solutions and a plan for improvements to be actioned. This session is reoccurring, typically, after key milestones. While it is important to allow all participants the opportunity to voice their opinions, feelings, and experiences, retrospectives must be positive, productive, and time boxed.

Step 1.3

Prepare to Scale BPA

Activities

1.3.1 Assess Your Readiness to Scale BPA

This step involves the following participants:

• Business Process Owners
• Product Owners
• Application Directors
• Business Architects
• BPA Delivery & Support Teams

Outcomes of this step

• Scale BPA readiness assessment

Prepare to scale by learning from your pilot implementations

"While most organizations are advised to start with automating the 'low hanging fruit' first, the truth is that it can create traps that will impede your ability to achieve RPA at scale. In fact, scaling RPA into the organizational structure is fundamentally different from implementing a conventional software product or other process automation."
– Blueprint

What should be the takeaways from your pilot?

Degree of Required BPA Support

• Practices needed to address the organization's tolerance to business process changes and automation adoption.
• Resources, budget and skills needed to configure and orchestrate automation technologies to existing business applications and systems.

Technology Integration & Compatibility

• The BPA technology and application system's flexibility to be enhanced, modified, and removed.
• Adherence to data and system quality standards (e.g., security, availability) across all tools and technologies.

Good Practices Toolkit

• A list of tactics, techniques, templates, and examples to assist teams assessing and optimizing business processes and applying BPA solutions in your organization's context.
• Strategies to navigate common blockers, challenges, and risks.

Controls & Measures

• Defined guardrails aligned to your organization's policies and risk tolerance
• Key metrics are gathered to gauge the value and performance of your processes and automations for enhancements and further scaling.

Decide how to architect and govern your BPA solutions

Centralized

A single body and platform to coordinate, execute, and manage all automation solutions.

Distributed

Automation solutions are locally delivered and managed whether that is per business unit, type of technology, or vendor. Some collaboration and integration can occur among solutions but might be done without a holistic strategy or approach.

Hybrid

Automation solutions are locally delivered and managed and executed for isolated use cases. Broader and complex automations are centrally orchestrated and administered.

Be prepared to address the risks with scaling BPA

"Companies tend to underestimate the complexity of their business processes – and bots will frequently malfunction without an RPA design team that knows how to anticipate and prepare for most process exceptions. Unresolved process exceptions rank among the biggest RPA challenges, prompting frustrated users to revert to manual work."
– Eduardo Diquez, Auxis, 2020

Scenarios

• Handling Failures of Dependent Systems
• Handling Data Corruption & Quality Issues
• Alignment to Regulatory & Industry Standards
• Addressing Changes & Regressions to Business Processes
• "Run Away" & Hijacked Automations
• Unauthorized Access to Sensitive Information

Recognize the costs to support your scaled BPA environment

Cost Factors

Automation Operations
How will chaining multiple BPA technologies together impact your operating budget? Is there a limit on the number of active automations you can have at a single time?

User Licenses
How many users require access to the designer, orchestrator, and other functions of the BPA solution? Do they also require access to dependent applications, services, and databases?

System Enhancements
Are application and system upgrades and modernizations needed to support BPA? Is your infrastructure, data, and security controls capable of handling BPA demand?

Supporting Resources
Are dedicated resources needed to support, govern, and manage BPA across business and IT functions? Are internal resources or third-party providers preferred?

Training & Onboarding
Are end users and supporting resources trained to deliver, support, and/or use BPA? How will training and onboarding be facilitated: internally or via third party providers?

Create a cross-functional and supportive body to lead the scaling of BPA

Your supportive body is a cross-functional group of individuals promoting collaboration and good BPA practices. It enables an organization to extract the full benefits from critical systems, guides the growth and evolution of strategic BPA implementations, and provides critical expertise to those that need it. A supportive body distinctly caters to optimizing and strengthening BPA governance, management, and operational practices for a single technology or business function or broadly across the entire organization encompassing all BPA capabilities.

What a support body is not:

• A Temporary Measure
• Exclusive to Large Organizations
• A Project Management Office
• A Physical Office
• A Quick Fix

See our Maximize the Benefits from Enterprise Applications With a Center of Excellence blueprint for more information.

What are my options?

Center of Excellence (CoE)
AND
Community of Practice (CoP)

CoEs and CoPs provide critical functions

Shift your principles as you scale BPA

As BPA scales, users and teams must not only think of how a BPA solution operates at a personal and technical level or what goals it is trying to achieve, but why it is worth doing and how the outcomes of the automated process will impact the organization's reputation, morality, and public perception.

"I think you're going to see a lot of corporations thinking about the corporate responsibility of [organizational change from automation], because studies show that consumers want and will only do business with socially responsible companies."

– Todd Lohr

Source: Appian, 2018.

Assess your readiness to scale BPA

Vision & Objectives
Clear direction and goals of the business process automation practice.

Governance
Defined BPA roles and responsibilities, processes, and technology controls.

Skills & Competencies
The capabilities users and support roles must have to be successful with BPA.

Business Process Management & Optimization
The tactics to document, analyze, optimize, and monitor business processes.

Business Process Automation Delivery
The tactics to review the fit of automation solutions and deliver and support according to end user needs and preferences.

Business Process Automation Platform
The capabilities to manage BPA platforms and ensure it supports the growing needs of the business.

1.3.1 Assess your readiness to scale BPA

5 minutes

1. Review your scaling BPA journey and selected patterns.
2. Conduct a readiness assessment using the 4. Readiness Assessment tab in Info-Tech's Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment.
3. Brainstorm solutions to improve the capability or address the gaps found in this assessment.

Output

• Scaled BPA readiness assessment

Participants

• Business Process Owners
• Product Owners
• Application Directors
• Business Architects
• BPA Delivery & Support Teams

Record the results in the 4. Readiness Assessment tab in Info-Tech's Scale Business Process Automation Readiness Assessment.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Related Info-Tech Research

• Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook
  Optimize and automate your business processes with a user-centric approach.
• Embrace Business Managed Applications
  Empower the business to implement their own applications with a trusted business-IT relationship.
• Application Portfolio Management Foundations
  Ensure your application portfolio delivers the best possible return on investment.
• Maximize the Benefits from Enterprise Applications with a Center of Excellence
  Optimize your organization's enterprise application capabilities with a refined and scalable methodology.
• Create an Architecture for AI
  Build your target state architecture from predefined best-practice building blocks.
• Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
  Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.
• Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices
  Ensure your software systems solution is architected to reflect stakeholders' short- and long-term needs.
• Apply Design Thinking to Build Empathy With the Business
  Use design thinking and journey mapping to make IT the business' go-to problem solver.

Bibliography

Alston, Roland. "With the Rise of Intelligent Automation, Ethics Matter Now More than Ever." Appian, 4 Sept. 2018. Web.
"Challenges of Achieving RPA at Scale." Blueprint, N.d. Web.
Dilmegani, Cem. "RPA Benefits: 20 Ways Bots Improve Businesses in 2023," AI Multiple, 9 Jan 2023. Web.
Diquez, Eduardo. "Struggling To Scale RPA? Discover The Secret to Success." Auxis, 30 Sept. 2020. Web.
"How much does Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Really Cost?" Blueprint, 14 Sept. 2021. Web.
"Liverpool City Council improves document process with Nintex." Nintex, n.d. Web.
"The State of Low-Code/No-Code." Creatio, 2021. Web.
"Using automation to enhance security and increase IT NPS to 90+ at Nutanix." Workato, n.d. Web.
"What Is Hyperautomation? A Complete Guide To One Of Gartner's Top Tech Trends." Stefanini Group, 26 Mar. 2021. Web.

Choose Your Mobile Platform and Tools

Maximize the value of your mobile investments by prioritizing technology decisions on user experience, business priorities, and system quality.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Mobile is the way of working.

Workers require access to enterprise products, data, and services anywhere at anytime on any device. Give them the device-specific features, offline access, desktop-like interfaces, and automation capabilities they need to be productive.

To be successful, you need to instill a collaborative business-IT partnership. Only through this partnership will you be able to select the right mobile platform and tools to balance desired outcomes with enterprise security, performance, integration, quality, and other delivery capacity concerns.

Andrew Kum-Seun
Senior Research Analyst,
Application Delivery and Application Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Organizations see the value of mobile applications in improving productivity and reach of day-to-day business and IT operations. This motivates leaders to begin the planning of their first application.
• However, organizations often lack the critical foundational knowledge and skills to deliver and maintain high quality and valuable applications that meet business and user priorities and technical requirements.
• Mobile technologies and trends are continually evolving and maturing. It is hard to predict which trends will make a significant impact and to prepare current mobile investments to harness the value of these trends.

Common Obstacles

• Mobile applications can stress the stability, reliability and overall quality of your enterprise systems and services. They will also increase your security risks because of the exposure of your enterprise technology assets to unsecured networks and devices.
• High costs of entry may restrict what native features your users can have in their mobile experience. Workarounds may not be sufficient to offset the costs of certain native feature needs.
• Many operating models do not enable or encourage the collaboration required to fully understand user needs and behaviors and evaluate mobile opportunities and underlying operational systems from multiple perspectives.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Establish the right expectations. Understand your mobile users by learning their needs, challenges, and behaviors. Discuss the current state of your systems and your high priority non-functional requirements to determine what to expect from your mobile applications.
• Choose the right mobile platform approach and shortlist your mobile delivery solutions. Obtain a thorough view of the business and technical complexities of your mobile opportunities, including current mobile delivery capabilities and system compatibilities.
• Create your mobile roadmap. Describe the gradual rollout of your mobile technologies through minimal valuable products (MVPs).

Insight Summary

Overarching Info-Tech Insight

Treat your mobile applications as digital products. Digital products are continuously modernized to ensure they are fit-for-purpose, secured, accessible, and immersive. A successful mobile experience involves more than just the software and supporting system. It involves good training and onboarding, efficient delivery turnaround, and a clear and rational vision and strategy.

Phase 1: Set the Mobile Context

• Build applications your users need and desire – Design the right mobile application that enables your users to address their frustrations and productivity challenges.
• Maximize return on your technology investments – Build your mobile applications with existing web APIs, infrastructure, and services as much as possible.
• Prioritize mobile security, performance and integration requirements – Understand the unique security, performance, and integration influences has on your desired mobile user experience. Find the right balance of functional and non-functional requirements through business and IT collaboration.

Phase 2: Define Your Mobile Approach

• Start with a mobile web platform - Minimize disruptions to your existing delivery process and technical stack by building against common web standards. Select a hybrid platform or cross-platform if you need device hardware access or have complicated non-functional requirements.
• Focus your mobile solution decision on vendor support and functional complexity – Verify that your solution is not only compatible with the architecture, data, and policies of existing business systems, but satisfies IT's concerns with access to restricted technology and data, and with IT's ability to manage and operate your applications.
• Anticipate changes, defects & failures in your roadmap - Quickly shift your mobile roadmaps according to user feedback, delivery challenges, value, and stability.

Mobile is how the business works today

Mobile adoption continues to grow in part due to the need to be a mobile workforce, and the shift in customer behaviors. This reality pushed the industry to transform business processes and technologies to better support the mobile way of working.

Mobile Builds Interests
61%
Mobile devices drove 61% of visits to U.S. websites
Source: Perficient, 2021

Mobile Maintains Engagement
54%
Mobile devices generated 54.4% of global website traffic in Q4 2021.
Source: Statista, 2022

Mobile Drives Productivity
82%
According to 82% of IT executives, smartphones are highly important to employee productivity
Source: Samsung and Oxford Economics, 2022

Mobile applications enable and drive your digital business strategy

Organizations know the criticality of mobile applications in meeting key business and digital transformation goals, and they are making significant investments. Over half (58%) of organizations say their main strategy for driving application adoption is enabling mobile access to critical enterprise systems (Enterprise CIO, 2016). The strategic positioning and planning of mobile applications are key for success.

Mobile Can Motivate, Support and Drive Progress in Key Activities Underpinning Digital Transformation Goals

Goal: Enhance Customer Experience

• A shift from paper to digital communications
• Seamless, omni-channel client experiences across devices
• Create Digital interactive documents with sections that customers can customize to better understand their communications

Goal: Increase Workflow Throughput & Efficiency

• Digitized processes and use of data to improve process efficiency
• Modern IT platforms
• Automation through robotic process automation (RPA) where possible
• Use of AI and machine learning for intelligent automation

Source: Broadridge, 2022

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Define Your Digital Business Strategy blueprint.

Well developed mobile applications bring unique opportunities to drive more value

Info-Tech Insight

If you build it, they may not come. Design and build the applications your user wants and needs, and ensure users are properly onboarded and trained. Learn how your applications are leveraged, capture feedback from the user and system dashboards, and plan for enhancements, fixes, and modernizations.

Workers expect IT to deliver against their high mobile expectations

Workers want sophisticated mobile applications like what they see their peers and competitors use.

Why is IT considering building their own applications?

• Complex and Unique Workflows: Canned templates and shells are viewed as incompatible to the workflows required to complete worker responsibilities outside the office, with the same level of access to corporate data as on premise.
• Supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): Developing your own mobile applications around your security protocols and standards can help mitigate the risks with personal devices that are already in your workforce.
• Long-Term Architecture Misalignment: Outsourcing mobile development risks the mobile application misaligned with your quality standards or incompatible with other enterprise and third-party systems.

Continuously meeting aggressive user expectations will not be easy

Value Quickly Wears Off
39.9% of users uninstall an application because it is not in use.
40%
Source: n=2,000, CleverTap, 2021

Low Tolerance to Waiting
Keeping a user waiting for 3 seconds is enough to dissatisfy 43% of users.
43%
Source: AppSamurai, 2018

Quick Fixes Are Paramount
44% of defects are found by users
44%
Source: Perfecto Mobile, 2014

Mobile emphasizes the importance of good security, performance, and integration

Today's mobile workers are looking for new ways to get more work done quickly. They want access to enterprise solutions and data directly on their mobile devices, which can reside on multiple legacy systems and in the cloud and third-party infrastructure. This presents significant performance, integration, and security risks.

Accept change as the norm

IT is challenged with keeping up with disruptive technologies, such as mobile, which are arriving and changing faster and faster.

What is the issue? Mobile priorities, concepts, and technologies do not remain static. For example, current Google's Pixels benefit from at least three versions of Android updates and at least three years of monthly security patches after their release (NextPit, 2022). Keeping up to date with anything mobile is difficult if you do not have the right delivery and product management practices in place.

What is the impact on IT? Those who fail to prepare for changing requirements and technologies will quickly run into maintainability, extensibility, and flexibility issues. Mobile applications will quickly become stale and misaligned with the maturity of other enterprise infrastructure and applications.

Continuously look at the trends, vendor roadmaps, and your user's feedback to envision where your mobile applications should be. Learning from your past attempts gives you insights on the opportunities and impacts changes will have on your people, process, and technology.

How do I address this issue? A well-defined mobile vision and roadmap ensures your initiatives are aligned with your holistic business and technology strategies, the right problem is being solved, and resources are available to deliver high priority changes.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision blueprint.

Address the difficulties in managing enterprise mobile technologies

Adaptability During Development

Teams must be ready to alter their mobile approach when new insights and issues arise during and after the delivery of your mobile application and its updates.

High Cybersecurity Standards

Cybersecurity should be a top priority given the high security exposure of mobiles and the sensitive data mobile applications need to operate. Role-based access, back-up systems, advanced scanning, and protection software and encryption should all be implemented.

Integration with Other Systems

Your application will likely be integrated with other systems to expand service offerings and optimize performance and user experience. Your enterprise integration strategy ensures all systems connect against a common pattern with compatible technologies.

Finding the Right Mobile Developers

Enterprise mobile delivery requires a broad skillset to build valuable applications against extensive non-functional requirements in complex and integration environments. The right resources are even harder to find when native applications are preferred over web-based ones.

Source: Radoslaw Szeja, Netguru, 2022.

Build and manage the right experience by treating mobile as digital products

Digital products are continuously modernized to ensure they are fit-for-purpose, secured, insightful, accessible, and interoperable. A good experience involves more than just technology.

First, deliver the experience end users want and expect by designing the application against digital application principles.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Modernize Your Applications blueprint.

Then, deliver a long-lasting experience by supporting your applications with key governance and management capabilities.

• Product Strategy and Roadmap
• External Relationships
• User Adoption and Organizational Change Management
• Funding
• Knowledge Management
• Stakeholder Management
• Product Governance
• Maintenance & Enhancement
• User Support
• Managing and Governing Data
• Requirements Analysis and Design
• Research & Development

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Make the Case for Product Delivery blueprint.

Choose Your Mobile Platform and Tools

Maximize the value of your mobile investments by prioritizing technology decisions on user experience, business priorities, and system quality.

	WORKFLOW
1. Capture Your User Personas and Journey
2. Select Your Platform
3. Shortlist Your Solutions

Make user experience (UX) the standard

User experience (UX) focuses on a user's emotions, beliefs, and physical and psychological responses that occur before, during, or after interacting with a service or product.

For a mobile application to be meaningful, the functions, aesthetics and content must be:

• Usable
  • Users can intuitively navigate through your mobile application and complete their desired tasks.
• Desirable
  • The application elements are used to evoke positive emotions and appreciation.
• Accessible
  • Users can easily use your mobile application, including those with disabilities.
• Valuable
  • Users find the content useful, and it fulfills a need.

Enable a greater experience with UX-driven thinking

Designing for a high-quality experience requires more than just focusing on the UI. It also requires the merging of multiple business, technical, and social disciplines in order to create an immersive, practical, and receptive application. The image on the right explains the disciplines involved in UX. This is critical for ensuring users have a strong desire to use the mobile application, it is adequately supported technically, and it supports business objectives.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice blueprint.

Source: Marky Roden, Xomino, 2018

Define the mobile experience your end users want

• Anytime, Anywhere
  • The user can access, update and analyze data and corporate products and services whenever they want, in all networks, and on any device.
• Hands-Off and Automated
  • The application can perform various workflows and tasks without the user's involvement and notify the user when specific triggers are hit.
• Personalized and Insightful
  • Content presentation and subject are tailored for the user based on specific inputs from the user, device hardware, or predicted actions.
• Integrated Ecosystem
  • The application supports a seamless experience across various third-party and enterprise applications and services the user needs.
• Visually Pleasing and Fulfilling
  • The UI is intuitive and aesthetically gratifying, with little security and performance trade-offs to use the full breadth of its functions and services.

Each mobile platform has its own take on the mobile native experience. The choice ultimately depends on whether the costs and effort are worth the anticipated value.

Mobile value is dependent on the platform you choose

What is a platform?

"A platform is a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources that helps you to grow your business. A platform enables growth through connection: its value comes not only from its own features, but from its ability to connect external tools, teams, data, and processes." (Source: Emilie Nøss Wangen, 2021) In the mobile context, applications in a platform execute and communicate through a loosely-coupled API architecture, whether the supporting system is managed and supported by your organization or by third-party providers.

Web

Mobile web applications are deployed and executed within the mobile web browser. They are often developed with a combination of web and scripting languages, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Web often takes two forms on mobile:

• Progressive Web Applications (PWA)
• Mobile Web Sites

Hybrid

Hybrid applications are developed with web technologies but are deployed as native applications. The code is wrapped using a framework so that it runs locally within a native container. It uses the device's browser runtime engine to support more sophisticated designs and features than to the web approach.

Cross-Platform

Cross-platform applications are developed within a distinct programming or scripting environment that uses its own scripting language (often like web languages) and APIs. The solution compiles the code into device-specific builds for native deployment.

Native

Native applications are developed and deployed to specific devices and OSs using platform-specific software development kits (SDKs) provided by the operating system vendors. The programming language and framework are dictated by the targeted device, such as Java for Android.

Start mobile development on a mobile web platform

Start with what you have: begin with a mobile web platform to minimize impacts to your existing delivery skill sets and technical stack while addressing business needs. Resort to a hybrid first. Then consider a cross-platform application if you require device access or need to meet specific non-functional requirements.

Why choose a mobile web platform?

Other Notable Benefits with Web Languages

• Modern browsers in most mobile devices can execute and render many mobile features developed in web languages, allowing for greater portability and sophistication of code across multiple devices. However, this flexibility comes at the cost of performance since the browser's runtime engine will not perform as well as a native engine.
• Web languages are well known by developers, minimizing skills and resourcing impacts. Consequently, changes can be quickly accommodated and updated uniformly across all end users.

Select your mobile platform

Drive your mobile platform selection against user-centric needs (e.g. device access, aesthetics) and enterprise-centric needs (e.g. security, system performance).

Understand the common attributes of a mobile delivery solution

• Source Code Management – Built-in or having the ability to integrate with code management solutions for branching, merging, and versioning. Debugging and coding assistance capabilities may be available.
• Single Code Base – Capable of programming in a standard coding and scripting language for deployment into several platforms and devices. This code base is aligned to a common industry framework (e.g. AngularJS, Java) or a vendor-defined one.
• Out-of-the-Box Connectors & Plug-ins – Pre-built APIs enhance the solution's capabilities with third-party tools and systems to deliver and manage high quality and valuable mobile applications.
• Emulators – Ability to virtualize an application's execution on a target platform and device.
• Support for Native Features – Supports plug-ins and APIs for access to device-specific features.

What are mobile delivery solutions?

A mobile delivery solution provides the tools, resources, and support to enable or build your mobile application. It can provide pre-built applications, vendor supported components to allow some configurations, or resources for full stack customizations. Solutions can be barebone software development kits (SDKs), or comprehensive suites offering features to support the entire software delivery lifecycle, such as:

• Mobile application management
• Testing and publishing to app stores
• Content management
• Cloud hosting
• Application performance management

Info-Tech Insight

Mobile enablement and development capabilities are already embedded in many common productivity tools and enterprise applications, such as Microsoft PowerApps and ERP modules. They can serve as a starting point in the initial rollout of new management and governance practices without the need to acquire new tools.

Select your mobile delivery solutions

1. Set the scope of your framework.

• The initial context of this framework is based on the mobile functions needed to support your desired mobile experience and on the current state of your enterprise and 3rd party systems.

Optimize your software delivery process

Mobile brings new delivery and management challenges that are often difficult for organizations that are tied to legacy systems, hindered by rigid and slow delivery lifecycles, and are unable to adopt leading-edge technologies. Many of these challenges stem from the fact that mobile is a significant shift from desktop development:

• Mobile devices and operating systems are heavily fragmented, especially in the Android space.
• Test coverage is significantly expanded to include physical environments and multiple network connections.
• Mobile devices do not have the same performance capabilities and memory storage as their desktop counterparts.
• The user interface must be strategically designed to accommodate the limited screen size.
• Mobile applications are highly susceptible to security breaches.
• Mobile users often expect quick turnaround time on fixes and enhancements due to continuously changing technology, business priorities, and user needs.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Modernize Your SDLC blueprint.

How should the process change?

• Cross-functional collaboration – Bringing business and IT together at the most opportune times to clarify user needs and business priorities, and set realistic expectations given technology and capacity constraints. The appropriate tactics and techniques are used to improve decision making and delivery effectiveness according to the type of work.
• Iterative delivery – Frequent delivery of progressive changes minimizes the risk of low-quality features by containing and simplifying scope, and enables responsive turnarounds of fixes, enhancements, and priority changes.
• Feedback loops –Mobile application owners constantly review, update and refine their backlog of mobile features and changes to reflect user feedback and system performance metrics. Delivery teams proactively prepare the application for future scaling based on lessons and feedback learned from earlier releases.

Achieve mobile success with MVPs

By delivering mobile capabilities in small iterations, teams recognize value sooner and reduce accumulated risk. Both benefits are realized as the iteration enters validation testing and release.

An MVP focuses on a small set of functions, involves minimal possible effort to deliver a working and valuable solution, and is designed to satisfy a specific user group. Its purpose is to:

• Maximize learning.
• Evaluate the value and acceptance of mobile applications.
• Inform the building of a mobile delivery practice.

The build-measure-learn loop suggests mobile delivery teams should perpetually take an idea and develop, test, and validate it with the mobile development solution, then expand on the MVP using the lessons learned and evolving ideas. In this sense the MVP is just the first iteration in the loop.

Gauge the value with the right metrics

Metrics are a powerful way to drive behavior change in your organization. But metrics are highly prone to creating unexpected outcomes so they must be used with great care. Use metrics judiciously to avoid gaming or ambivalent behavior, productivity loss, and unintended consequences.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively blueprint.

What should I measure?

1. Mobile Application Engagement, Retention and User Satisfaction
   1. The activeness of users on the applications, the number of returning users, and the happiness of the users.
   2. Example: Number of tasks completed, number of active and returning users, session length and intervals, user satisfaction
2. Value Driven from Mobile Applications
   1. The business value that the user directly or indirectly receives with the mobile application.
   2. Example: Mobile application revenue, business operational costs, worker productivity, business reputation and image
3. Delivery Throughput and Quality
   1. The health and quality of your mobile applications throughout their lifespan and the speed to deliver working applications that meet stakeholder expectations.
   2. Example: Frequency of release, lead time, request turnaround, escaped defects, test coverage.

Use Info-Tech's diagnostic to evaluate the reception of your mobile applications

Info-Tech's Application Portfolio Assessment (APA) Diagnostic is a canned end-user satisfaction survey used to evaluate your application portfolio health to support data-driven decisions.

USE THE PROGRAM DIAGNOSTIC TO:

• Assess the importance and satisfaction of enterprise applications.
• Solicit feedback from your end users on applications being used.
• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your current applications.
• Perform a high-level application rationalization initiative.

INTEGRATE DIAGNOSTIC RESULTS TO:

• Target which applications to analyze in greater detail.
• Expand on the initial application rationalization results with a more comprehensive and business-value-focused criteria.

Grow your mobile delivery practice

Level 1: Mobile Delivery Foundations

You understand the opportunities and impacts mobile has on your business operations and its disruptive nature on your enterprise systems. Your software delivery lifecycle was optimized to incorporate the specific practices and requirements needed for mobile. A mobile platform was selected based on stakeholder needs that are weighed against current skillsets, high priority non-functional requirements, the available capacity and scalability of your stack, and alignment to your current delivery process.

Level 2: Scaled Mobile Delivery

New features and mobile use cases are regularly emerging in the industry. Ensuring your mobile platform and delivery process can easily scale to incorporate constantly changing mobile features and technologies is key. This can help minimize the impact these changes will have on your mobile stack and the resulting experience.

Achieving this state requires three competencies: mobile security, performance optimization, and integration practices.

Level 3: Leading-Edge Mobile Delivery

Many of today's mobile trends involve, in one form or another, hardware components on the mobile device (e.g., NFC receivers, GPS, cameras). You understand the scope of native features available on your end user's mobile device and the required steps and capabilities to enable and leverage them.

Hit a home run with your stakeholders

Use a data-driven approach to select the right tooling vendor for your needs – fast.

Investing time improving your software selection methodology has big returns.

Info-Tech Insight

Not all software selection projects are created equal – some are very small, some span the entire enterprise. To ensure that IT is using the right framework, understand the cost and complexity profile of the application you're looking to select. Info-Tech's Rapid Application Selection Framework approach is best for commodity and mid-tier enterprise applications; selecting complex applications is better handled by the methodology in Info-Tech's Implement a Proactive and Consistent Vendor Selection Process.

Pitch your mobile delivery approach with Info-Tech's template

Communicate the justification of your approach to mobile applications with Info-Tech's Mobile Application Delivery Communication Template:

• Level set your mobile application goals and objectives by weighing end user expectations with technical requirements.
• Define the high priority opportunities for mobile applications.
• Educate decision makers of the limitations and challenges of delivering specific mobile experiences with the various mobile platform options.
• Describe your framework to select the right mobile platform and delivery tools.
• Lay out your mobile delivery roadmap and initiatives.

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

Info-Tech's methodology for mobile platform and delivery solution selection

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 6 to 9 calls over the course of 2 to 3 months.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Phase 1

Set the Mobile Context

Choose Your Mobile Platform and Tools

This phase will walk you through the following steps:

• Step 1.1 – Build Your Mobile Backlog
• Step 1.2 – Identify Your Technical Needs
• Step 1.3 – Define Your Non-Functional Requirements

This phase involves the following participants:

• Applications Manager
• Product and Platform Owners
• Software Delivery Teams
• Business and IT Leaders

Step 1.1

Build Your Mobile Backlog

Activities

1.1.1 Generate user personas with empathy maps

1.1.2 Build your mobile application canvas

1.1.3 Build your mobile backlog

Set the Mobile Context

This step involves the following participants:

• Applications Manager
• Product and Platform Owners
• Software Delivery Teams
• Business and IT Leaders

Outcomes of this step

• User personas
• Mobile objectives and metrics
• Mobile opportunity backlog

Users expect your organization to support their mobile way of working

Today, users expect sophisticated and personalized features, immersive interactions, and cross-platform capabilities from their mobile applications and be able to access information and services anytime, anywhere and on any device. These demands are pushing organizations to become more user-driven, placing greater importance on user experience (UX) with enterprise-grade technologies.

How has technologies evolved to easily enable mobile capabilities?

• Desktop-Like Features
  • Native-like features, such as geolocation and local caching, are supported through web language or third-party plugins and extensions.
• Extendable & Scalable
  • Plug-and-play architecture is designed to allow software delivery teams to explore new use cases and mobile capabilities with out-of-the-box connectors and/or customizable REST APIs.
• Low Barrier to Entry
  • Low- and no-code development tools, full-stack solutions, and plug-and-play architectures allow non-technical users to easily build and implement applications without direct IT involvement.
• Templates & Shells
  • Vendors provide UI templates and application shells that contain pre-built native features and multiple aesthetic layouts in a publishing-friendly and configurable way.
• Personalized Content
  • Content can be uniquely tailored to a user's preference or be automatically generated based on the user's profile or activity history.
• Hands-Off Operations
  • Many mobile solutions operate in a as-a-service model where the underlying and integrated technologies are managed by the vendor and abstracted away.

Make user experience (UX) the standard

User experience (UX) focuses on a user's emotions, beliefs, and physical and psychological responses that occur before, during, or after interacting with a service or product.

For a mobile application to be a meaningful experience, the functions, aesthetics and content must be:

• Usable
  • Users can intuitively navigate through your mobile application and complete their desired tasks.
• Desirable
  • The application elements are used to evoke positive emotions and appreciation.
• Accessible
  • Users can easily use your mobile application, including those with disabilities.
• Valuable
  • Users find the content useful, and it fulfills a need.

Enable a greater experience with UX-driven thinking

Designing for a high-quality experience requires more than just focusing on the UI. It also requires the merging of multiple business, technical, and social disciplines in order to create an immersive, practical, and receptive application. The image on the right explains the disciplines involved in UX. This is critical for ensuring users have a strong desire to use the mobile application, it is adequately supported technically, and it supports business objectives.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice blueprint.