How WorkMesh Supports Enterprise

How WorkMesh Supports Enterprise

One of the things I find interesting about large businesses is that they can spend a lot of money on systems and still end up running significant parts of the organisation through Excel.

It normally happens for a simple reason. The business buys a system to solve a particular problem, but the system is too rigid to deal with everything the people using it actually need. Someone exports the data into Excel, adds the missing information, builds another spreadsheet around it and before long the spreadsheet becomes part of the business process.

Eventually you have good systems underneath the business, but reporting and management are still being held together by spreadsheets, emails and manual effort.

That is one of the problems WorkMesh is designed to solve.

Consistent processes with clear Actions

For Enterprise, I think the biggest value in WorkMesh comes from being able to build consistent workflows around the way the business actually operates.

The process can define what information needs to be captured, who needs to do something with it, what happens next and what should happen if somebody does not complete their part. Instead of sending another email and hoping somebody sees it, the workflow creates the Action and gives it a clear owner.

That becomes particularly useful as WorkMesh expands across the business. Compliance can have its processes, Risk can have its processes, Audit can have its processes, Sustainability can have its processes and Cyber Security can have its processes, but the people working in those areas can still use the same Action approach.

The system keeps the record while the Action tells the person what they actually need to do.

Getting away from Excel as the integration layer

I have no problem with Excel. It is an incredibly useful tool and there are plenty of things it does very well.

The problem is when Excel becomes the integration layer for the company.

Even businesses with expensive enterprise systems can end up exporting data from several systems every month, combining it into spreadsheets, manipulating it and then sending another spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation around management.

At that point you have to ask what the systems are really doing for the people using them.

If a process repeatedly requires people to extract the information, manually combine it and rebuild the same report every month, there is probably an opportunity to do it better.

WorkMesh is designed around consistent workflows, controlled snapshots and automated reporting so that information already being managed in the system can flow into the reporting process without somebody manually rebuilding it every reporting cycle.

There will always be analysis that needs human judgement, but copying data between systems should not be the part of the job consuming people's time.

Compliance

Compliance is a good example because businesses can have hundreds or thousands of requirements spread across different functions.

Knowing that an obligation exists is only the beginning. Someone needs to understand what the business has to do, who is responsible, what evidence is required and when the requirement needs to be reviewed or completed.

WorkMesh can turn those requirements into managed workflows and Actions rather than leaving them as entries in a register that somebody checks periodically.

For management, the useful view is not necessarily every compliant item. It is the exceptions. What is overdue? Where is evidence missing? What obligation has not been completed? Which Action has escalated?

That gives management somewhere useful to focus its attention.

Risk Management and Risk Appetite

Risk Management has a similar problem. Businesses often put a lot of effort into maintaining risk registers, but the value does not come from having a list of risks. It comes from understanding which risks are outside appetite, whether treatments are progressing and where management intervention is required.

That is where risk appetite, Actions and exception-based reporting can work together.

If a risk moves outside the position the business is prepared to accept, management should be able to see it. If a treatment is overdue, somebody should own the Action. If a business unit repeatedly has risks outside appetite, that should be visible through the reporting rather than waiting for somebody to discover it during the next quarterly review.

The risk register is still important, but it should be part of an active management process rather than an administrative exercise.

Audit

Audit is another area where structured workflows and Actions can remove a lot of unnecessary administration.

An audit can identify findings, assign corrective Actions, collect evidence and track the response through to closure. Management does not need another spreadsheet showing hundreds of lines when what they really need to understand is which findings remain unresolved, which Actions are overdue and where the same issues keep appearing.

Keeping the evidence and the Actions connected also gives the organisation a much clearer history of what happened and how the finding was addressed.

Sustainability reporting

Sustainability reporting is becoming another significant information-management challenge for many businesses. The information can come from different business units and different systems, and somebody still needs to coordinate collection, review, evidence and reporting.

WorkMesh does not need to replace every specialist sustainability system to help with that problem.

It can support the workflow around the information: who needs to provide it, who needs to review it, what evidence is required, which submissions are late and how the information moves through the business before it is reported.

That is a good example of where I see WorkMesh fitting alongside specialist systems rather than trying to replace something that already does its core job well.

Cyber Security

The same applies to Cyber Security.

WorkMesh is not intended to replace specialist security platforms that monitor networks, endpoints or threats. Those systems have a very different job.

But Cyber Security also contains a lot of business processes around reviews, controls, exceptions, audits, assessments, remediation and evidence. Those processes still need owners and Actions, and they still need management visibility when something is not being dealt with.

That is where WorkMesh can support the specialist technology and help manage the work around it.

Actions can also show where the business is struggling

One of the less obvious benefits of a shared Action model is the evidence it creates around workload.

In most businesses, when someone is overloaded the evidence is buried in emails, meetings and conversations. They might tell their manager they are struggling, but it can be difficult to quickly show where all of the work is coming from and what is being delayed.

When business processes are creating Actions in one environment, that becomes much easier to see. You can see that somebody has Actions coming from Compliance, Risk, Audit and another operational process, and you can see what is becoming overdue.

That gives management better information to make a resourcing decision. Instead of somebody simply saying, "I have too much work," there is evidence showing where the pressure actually is.

A better view for senior management

Senior management should not have to open six systems and ten spreadsheets to work out what is happening across the business.

WorkMesh dashboards can bring information from the workflows being managed in the platform into views designed for the people who need them. A Risk Manager might need one view, an executive another and a Board or Audit Committee something different again.

The point is not to show management everything. It is to show them what matters.

Where are the exceptions? What is overdue? What is outside risk appetite? Where are compliance obligations not being met? Which audit findings are still open? Where is workload creating bottlenecks?

That is the information that helps management act.

Protecting corporate information

Corporate information is a valuable business asset, so access to it needs to be controlled appropriately.

Not everyone in a business should automatically see every risk, audit finding, compliance issue or Cyber Security record. WorkMesh is designed around controlled access so businesses can decide who should be able to see and work with particular information rather than relying on broad access simply because everything sits in the same platform.

Security also needs to extend beyond access to the information itself. Backups, recovery, audit history and the controls around how information is stored and accessed all form part of protecting the business if something goes wrong.

The objective is to give businesses flexibility without treating security as an afterthought.

Start with one problem and expand

One of the Enterprise ideas I like most about WorkMesh is that a business does not need to solve everything at once.

You might start because your compliance process is being managed through spreadsheets and emails. Build that process first.

Later you realise the same Action engine and reporting approach would work well for Risk. Then Audit. Then Sustainability. Perhaps HR has an onboarding process where teams keep missing their Actions, so you build that too.

WorkMesh is designed to grow like that.

It is not one rigid product for one narrow problem. It is an application foundation that can be extended as the business finds other processes that would benefit from better workflow, Actions and reporting.

That does not mean WorkMesh should replace every complex specialist system in the business. If a system is doing its job well, keep using it.

The opportunity is in all the gaps around those systems, and in the collection of smaller systems, registers and spreadsheets that have accumulated because the larger systems could not adapt.

Fewer systems, fewer spreadsheets and more consistent processes

When I think about the Enterprise value of WorkMesh, the end result I want is fairly simple.

I want a business to look across ten small systems and a hundred spreadsheets and ask how much of that could be brought into one flexible environment.

If WorkMesh can replace several disconnected tools, reduce licensing and administration costs, give the business more flexibility and provide one consistent Action and reporting model at the same time, that is a much better outcome.

The business gets clearer processes, management gets better visibility and the people doing the work spend less time copying information between systems.

For me, that is what Enterprise WorkMesh should achieve: start with one problem, solve it properly and then keep extending the platform as the business finds the next one.

Build better processes. Drive action. Reduce cost.