Including Digital in Your Budget Process- Part 2 of 2
In Part 1 of this blog series, we focused on the importance of considering digital in your budget process by leveraging data to help identify organizational priorities. As we wrap up this series, we’ve provided foundational best practices to get you on the right path during the upcoming budget season. As a supplement to this blog series, CLA has an upcoming webinar with more details on digital planning on September 14, 2023 that is open to registration now- Structuring Your Digital Journey
By working digital conversations and considerations into your institution, you will be able to identify and implement the preferences of your customers and members, while creating an innovative culture for your employees. Those wins will help light the path to your organization’s digital journey.
Digital, IT, & Cybersecurity Plan Helps Organizational Awareness of Digital
Having a Digital, IT, and Cybersecurity Strategic Plan in place that looks out at a rolling 24-36 months is a great start to get in front of future needs and reduce cost and resource surprises when you’ve made your decision to move forward on a particular digital solution. This plan will also help the entire organization, especially your Board of Directors, Executive Management, and IT or digital related committees know what’s on the horizon for future spend and the benefits that spend will have on your institution in the longer term. Most digital spend is not a “one and done” situation, nor does it always stand alone as an isolated spend. You should be looking at scalable solutions that align with your rolling digital strategy as you mature in your journey. Year-over-year, with the right strategic plan in place, you’ll continue to incrementally build with less significant budget impacts as a result of your foundational investments to support your digital journey.
Best Practices for Considering Digital in the Budget Process
Regardless of where you are in your digital journey and budget process, a continuous improvement mindset will help your institution be aware of opportunities year-round instead of only considering them during your budget cycle. If you’re only thinking about digital as it relates to cost, these best practices should help put you on a better trajectory:
- Define what digital means at your institution.
- Develop an overall bank strategic plan for the next 24-36 months with specific measurables, timelines, and accountability defined.
- Develop a data strategy to help drive your digital journey.
- Develop a digital, IT, and cyber strategic plan that aligns with the overall bank strategic plan. (Review and update your plan monthly to align with any changes in the landscape or customer preferences.)
- Develop a place where employees and customers can provide suggestions on where processes and customer experiences might be improved.
- Find champions across your organization to foster an innovative culture with both the internal processes and customer experience improvements in mind.
- Reach out to your vendors and make sure you are taking full advantage of the functionality of your systems instead of first looking at bringing in an entirely new solution.
- Align your IT or digital related committee agendas with your data review, Vendor Management and Digital, IT, and Cyber plan for consistency in planning and forecasting.
- Think about digital, process improvements, and the customer/member experience every day, not just at budget season. Allow your data strategy to ease that burden.
- Make sure proposed digital solutions are properly scoped to account for implementation costs, on-going costs, internal resource availability, risk management and overall cost savings/time savings/quality realized.
- Consider reinvesting a portion of your savings from efficiency efforts (10-20%) into expanding your digital solutions.
Final Thoughts
Remember, digital isn’t just customer-facing solutions like an app, it’s a way to improve what you currently do, by doing it more efficiently. Stay tuned as we break down some of these best practices in future blogs, articles, and webinars.
How CLA Can Help
Whether you are in the crawl, walk, or run stage of your data strategy and digital journey, we can meet you where you are. It might seem overwhelming to determine where to start, so we’ve got you covered on all things data and digital for your financial institution. We will continue to provide content on all our platforms on hot topics in our industry and are ready to connect! Comment below or reach out to me directly and let us know how we can help!
Tim has more than 20 years of experience in operations, IT, cybersecurity, and digital strategic planning, most recently serving as a CTO/COO for a community bank. With a focus on financial services clients, he works with banks and credit unions to recognize the importance of data and embracing digital solutions to improve organizational performance while meeting the preferences of customers and members alike.
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