This is a preview of Ops Digest, our monthly newsletter for operations teams. This month, we're talking about the launch of two new newsletters, one each focused on legal ops and procurement ops. Subscribe and receive these newsletters in your inbox every month!
Long-time readers of Ops Digest will have noticed that issues of this newsletter have increasingly focused quite a bit on legal operations and procurement operations. There’s good reason for that: Tonkean has increased its focus on those two verticals, and as such, the topics we’re interested in for this newsletter have leaned that same way.
But increased focus in one area means less focus in others, especially general areas of business operations. Our solution? MORE NEWSLETTERS.
Beginning next month, we will begin producing two new newsletters, each focused on a respective vertical: Legal Ops Digest and Procurement Ops Digest. (Be sure to click through to ensure you’re subscribed!)
Meanwhile, Ops Digest will live on. We will re-broaden its scope to include less vertical-specific business operations topics.
If you’re already a subscriber, you don’t have to do anything to continue receiving this newsletter. If you’re not already a subscriber, head here to get signed up!
As always, dear readers, let us know about any interesting or amazing things happening in the world of business operations (and legal ops, and procurement ops), and who’s doing them. We’re interested in your stories and ideas.
And now, back to the show. As it were.
If you have some insightful news or knowledge about the world of Ops to share, let us know!
Laura Close, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Included, wants to see HR ops enjoy the same business intelligence revolution inside of organizations that other disciplines have enjoyed. Sales, engineering, marketing, and even shipping have seen rapid digital transformation in recent years.
“How did we get here—that HR seems to be the last department standing inside the business that doesn't have instant data insights at its fingertips, that is talking about its own digital transformation?” she said in a recent episode of the Modern Business Operations podcast.
There are two reasons, she believes. One is that it took a long time for organizations, broadly speaking, to commit to the push from employees to unify all the company data and make a plan for digital transformation. The second is due more to historical and sociological issues: “HR originally was a pink collar work role,” she said. “It was the domain of ladies, and it was the domain of secretaries.”
Early HR technology was primarily transactional—like tracking who is clocking in and out, who’s getting paid, and who is taking leave. And though there’s been some rudimentary reporting coming from those systems, she said, the reporting capabilities are still largely falling short of what HR leaders want.
It’s true that some technologies have emerged to help smooth and speed processes, like calibration, performance, engagement surveys, and various tasks that were previously performed manually or even on paper.
“But what we don't have is the ability for HR to engage in continuous improvement from the data. And that's really the emerging class of solutions that I founded software inside of,” she said.
That class of solutions is centered around data and AI. And it’s evolving. “We got the advent of a profession which is called people analytics. That is a math- and data science-driven role that has been very historically an ivory tower sort of experience. Necessarily so—it's very complex work,” she said.
But in practicality, there aren’t enough of those deep experts available to glean insights from all the data that all these companies have. What’s happened instead is that people who are self-taught are trying to do it, and it’s difficult.
Close advocated for technology solutions that help those people gain what they need from data. “And that's really where the technology solutions that use AI and ML are now coming into play [in HR],” she said—a more “mechanized” and “delightful” process.
Listen to the whole episode to learn more about digital transformation in HR ops; the role of AI in HR analytics; challenges in HR around data extraction, reporting, and creating actionable insights; the need for HR to secure and allocate budgets for technology; and more.
On this episode of Modern Business Operations, host Sagi Eliyahu is joined by Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO of TealBook, to talk about procurement’s vast potential within unoptimized spending, and the compelling intersection of large enterprises and startup innovation.
Sagi and Stephany discuss:
Subscribe to the Modern Business Operations podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here’s everything we did in this month’s Tonkean release notes:
User Management:
Enterprise Components:
Bug fixes:
And all the rest:
Thanks for checking out Ops Digest! To learn more about who Tonkean is or what we do, we have a few different kinds of trials that you can sign up for. They walk users through our most salient solutions, including Legal intake, Purchasing Approval, Invoice Intake, and Email inbox automation. Sign up for one here!
