Community Association Management (CAM) companies are adjusting to new market conditions as the world navigates a global pandemic.
They’re grappling with broad and complex remote working situations, more contactless business transactions, outdated technology infrastructures and budget cuts.
They realize the need to think and act strategically but may not fully understand how investing in new digital technologies such as automation, cloud computing and data analytics can help ensure their businesses run smoothly and efficiently regardless of future market disruptions.
But how do they continue to run smoothly no matter what happens in the future? The answer is to embrace a strategy focused on digital resiliency that includes investing in accounts payable (AP) automation software to ensure more secure and faster invoice and payment processes.
We’re going to help you understand what digital resilience is, why it’s important for your business and what steps you can take to ensure your community management company is digitally resilient
What is digital resilience?
The key to understanding digital resiliency is to think of it as a related — but distinctly focused – strategy building on a broad digital transformation. Newer and more futuristic, digital resiliency is a way of making changes to improve your business operations and be prepared to operate effectively when future interruptions occur.
This new tech wave differs from the more generalized and broad-based digital transformation that’s been going on for several years. Narrower in scope, digital resiliency aims to make smaller and more pinpointed investments to your business such as adding AP automation software and integrating it with your accounting software. That drives more efficiencies and provides more technology strength to hold off future business disruptions.
Experts offer definitions of digital resiliency
From various sectors of the business world, experts are now weighing in with their own explanations for what this relatively new digital resiliency trend is all about.
“Digital resiliency refers to an organization’s ability to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging digital capabilities to not only restore business operations but also capitalize on the changed conditions,” said Stephen Minton, IDC’s vice president for customer insights. “As the COVID-19 crisis has shown, the ability to respond quickly and effectively to unexpected changes in the business environment is critical to an organization’s short-term success.”
Here at AvidXchange we have a similar view in that we think of digital resilience as an enabler for businesses to rapidly change course quickly and effectively rather than just respond reactively to future disruptions.
“The more digitally resilient an organization is in its back office – which means the right technology is in place to grow and scale with business – the more supported and confident finance teams will feel about the future,” said Dan Drees, chief growth officer at AvidXchange.
HOA industry perspective
For one HOA industry perspective on the growing need for versatile digital technologies that enable digital resiliency, we turn to Jamie Clymer, the CEO of association management software provider FRONTSTEPS. He offered this insight on the importance of smart technology investments in the rapidly changing HOA market.
“Changes are occurring at an ever-faster rate in the association management industry. The most successful management companies will be the ones who invest in flexible technology that helps them adapt to whatever comes next."
Why is digital resilience so important for community association pros to focus on now?
Here are three key reasons why digital resilience is so important for CAM finance pros:
- Because businesses have to be prepared for future and major disruptions. If there’s onething we’ve all learned from the pandemic, it’s that another major disruption can happen to businesses at any time. Digital resiliency aims to ensure your business keeps on running no matter what happens externally.
- Because digital resiliency builds and improves upon the momentum of broad digital transformations now underway across the HOA industry. Digital resiliency is the next big strategic step your business can take beyond digital transformation to get ahead of the massive move towards digitalization of businesses. This new trend leverages targeted approaches and more specific investments.
- Because these smaller investments will deliver fast and tangible returns on your technology investments. By investing in AP automation, your business will be able to make faster, more reliable and more secure payments while minimizing costs and business interruptions.
Actions CAM finance pros can take to enhance digital resiliency
You can take several smart steps to make your HOA management company more digitally resilient. Here are some worth considering:
Invest in easily scalable technologies
Invest in a technology platform that will meet your needs now and over the next several years. It’s best to go with a proven, easily integrated solutions from vendors such as AvidXchange and FRONTSTEPS who continually improve and enhance as customer demands change.
For example, CAM finance pros can use AP automation for more efficient, faster and more secure and reliable financial transactions. Consistent with this, TechBeacon emphasizes the crucial role automation plays in digital resiliency:
“To become a truly resilient digital enterprise, you need to go beyond redundant systems and processes and adopt extreme automation with intelligence everywhere… You need automated provisioning, intelligent monitoring…and analytics and insight that can understand complex relationships…and identify threats and identify the root cause of problems.”
Beyond these capabilities, digital resiliency should be about more than securing your business. It’s should also be set up to generate revenues and explore new business opportunities, according to TechBeacon.
“Digital resilience is the ability to rapidly deliver new business services or offerings to market…When the environment changes, your resilient digital enterprise will adapt, grow, and thrive. You’ll be able to rapidly deliver new services or switch to conducting business in a different way and, ultimately, your organization will strengthen its ecosystem and secure its place within it.”
Invest in fraud prevention
There are other steps you can take to make your business more digitally resilient. We suggest you consider investing in:
- fraud prevention and network outage prevention/recovery technologies
- data analytics to generate better insights that lead to decisions with more favorable outcomes
- cloud computing for more efficient, economical and secure operations
- robotics process automation to reduce mundane task for your employees
Focus on hiring digital talent and sharpening digital skills
To successfully build digital resilience into your business, hire the most digitally savvy employees available because they’ll quickly learn how to use digital technologies to generate value for your business.
You’ll also achieve digital resiliency by training current employees on how to efficiently and effectively use digital tools such as AP automation software.
Not only will this help your employees be more effective, but it will also create an environment that attracts and retains top talent.
Final thoughts
To summarize, digital resiliency isn’t a complete tech stack overhaul. It’s the idea of implementing smaller strategic tweaks, targeted add-ons and second-layer software that bring your organization’s efficiencies to the next level.
It’s vital to assess your current tools and the options available to make sure you and your teammates have the best tools to succeed financially and professionally.
The relevancy of digital resiliency to AvidXchange and FRONTSTEPS is about providing easy to access and use digital tools for more efficient and secure processing of CAM invoices and payments.
Together, the companies provide a digitally resilient combination of technologies – AP software and accounting software, respectively — to provide a complete, consolidated solution for HOA accounting, accounts receivable and accounts payable that meet these growth opportunities head on.