Today’s post is submitted by Joyce Maroney, Executive Director of the Workforce Institute. Here, she discusses how Kronos’ successful transition to a cloud company serves as a great primer on organizational transformation for beginners.
My employer, Kronos Inc., was recently recognized as a Best Workplace for Innovators by Fast Company. While this award focused on a major technological achievement, it took far more than just an engineering investment to deliver this transformation. Founded in 1977, Kronos became a market leader in workforce management software over the next 30 years. By the early 2000’s, though, software-as-a-service was rapidly gaining favor with customers. After more than 35 years in business selling on-premise software, Kronos found itself needing to take the leap into the cloud while continuing to leapfrog its competitors.
Making this kind of big change is not without its perils. Long time employees were nervous about their jobs. In the early years, not all customers bought into a cloud vision. Our entire customer service and support model had to be changed. Every process in the company, from sales to billing had to evolve to handle the new model. After years of making do internally, enormous investments in tech to enable our own employees had to be made.
And we did it. With great effort, focus and discipline. From creating a skunkworks engineering team to creating completely new organizations within the company, every aspect of our business was transformed.
We’ve received so many requests for interviews, tours, and recipes for how we achieved this transformation, that we’ve created a set of resources to answer those questions. If you are looking for guidance on how to plan and execute a major organizational transformation, these assets are a great place to start.
- Download and read the e-book, “Making the 5HIFT: How Kronos Transformed from a Licensed Software Business to a SaaS Powerhouse “
- Listen to my podcast with Lisa Pratt, who led the organizational transformation. Lisa was named a Top 10 Innovator of 2018 by Great Place to Work for her role in project managing the Kronos Transformation Management Office during the company’s business transformation.
- Read – or listen – to CEO Aron Ain’s book “Work Inspired“. In it, he lays out his principles for building a culture in which innovation can thrive.
Photo Credit Rowan Walrath/Bostinno