Balancing family tradition and business transformation with technology
INTRODUCTION
Family businesses have unique requirements. They typically span multiple countries and continents. They are multi-generational, and have varying levels of technological prowess across the business. However, any differences must be overcome as everyone unites to operate and grow the business.
How can such businesses balance the family traditions that provide much of their strength with the desire and requirement to transform and evolve to remain relevant and competitive? All against a backdrop of a world that continues to grow in complexity, with ever increasing security concerns.
Any technology platform that the family business chooses must be a seamless enabler for how family businesses have always and will continue to operate, while embracing opportunities to operate in ways that are faster, better, or cheaper.
TRADITION VS. TRANSFORMATION: IS IT A CHOICE?
Tradition and transformation are often perceived as at odds with each other, and an either / or choice.
Traditional has the family unit as a key competitive advantage, with established ways of doing things. There is stability through shared culture and belief systems, and trust and relationships as keys to success. Within family businesses, there is an embedded attitude of entrepreneurship and innovation, with the degree of pride that accompanies this.
Transformation has the family business embracing new generations and family members around the world as the business expands. Increasingly tech-savvy and mobile-dependent generations are involved in the business. It also means adapting to a more complex operating environment, in terms of legislation and globalization, and a greater need for security measures for both document management and communications.
How can a family business leverage and learn from the past while embracing the opportunities that the future will bring? This constant pull between the past and the future is a key source of conflict and stress.
The right Digital HQ technology can actually bridge these two worlds, combining the best of both, rather than compromising either of them. Being rooted in the past rather than being anchored to it. Growing towards the future while not leaping mindlessly towards it.
TECHNOLOGY DESIGNED FROM A FAMILY PERSPECTIVE
The Trusted Family platform has been designed specifically for the unique challenges and operating environment of family businesses.
Distinct from generic collaboration solutions, the Trusted Family platform prioritizes stakeholder governance and the management of sensitive information. Three key design elements are spaces, vaults and security.
Spaces are secure, organized environments for collaboration, set up for specific groups, with both owner and member privileges, and controlled access to information.
Vaults enable the storage, organization and sharing of sensitive documents within the family enterprise or with external collaborators, with Audit Logs for change tracking.
Security is embodied throughout the platform, including download-prevention tools, watermarking and digital signature solutions to protect sensitive files.
The structure of spaces and vaults, wrapped in security, demonstrates how Trusted Family was built from the perspective of a family business, with all the tradition this embodies, rather than a purely IT perspective.
USING TRUSTED FAMILY 2.0
The platform simply works the way you do, enabling you to run your business the way you want to:
- Chat with other members of the family business in the appropriate context, be that with different groups, specific to events, or private messaging with individuals
- Collaborate in real-time as needed, discussing issues and voting on decisions
- Manage events, with everything you need, including adding agendas, collecting RSVPs, sharing venue information and sharing documents
- Share confidential documents, easily uploading them and distributing them to multiple people at a time in a private and secure manner
- Protect and manage valuable assets such as legal documents, financial statements and personal files, with the use of private vaults
Rather than using a multitude of different tools, each with limited scope for efficiency, scale and integration, Trusted Family 2.0 combines the functionality needed to run a family business. It works the way modern families do, with increasingly mobile lifestyles and changing communication styles, without excluding more traditional users. It considers the ever increasing complexity in business ownership structure and information to manage, and the need to operate in a world of increasing security risks and threats.
TRADITION VS. TRANSFORMATION: NOT ACTUALLY A CHOICE
It doesn’t have to be a choice between tradition and transformation.
The Trusted Family platform enables transformation by incorporating better, faster, cheaper, future-proof ways of managing family businesses, because of it being a modern technology platform. At the same time, it supports tradition by retaining the established conventions and requirements of managing family businesses, despite it being a modern technology platform.
To be successful, technology must be an equalizing enabler throughout the business, bringing the family closer together, not a dividing barrier that creates organizational silos.
Technology that supports tradition while empowering transformation. Trusted Family, the all-in-one stakeholder experience software, uniquely achieves this. Effective. Simple. Secure.