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Every business unit optimizes what it can see. The gaps between them belong to nobody, and that is where the largest inefficiencies live.
Every business unit optimizes what it can see. Sales improves the sales process, finance improves finance, clinical improves clinical. Each gets good at its own work.
The gaps between them belong to nobody, and that is where the largest inefficiencies live.
A handoff between two teams has two halves and no owner. The sending team's responsibility ends when they have done their part. The receiving team's begins when the work arrives. What happens in between — the retyping, the chasing, the spreadsheet emailed on Fridays — is nobody's process.
It is also invisible from either side. The sending team does not experience it as a problem because they have finished. The receiving team assumes that is simply how work arrives. Ask either whether there is a problem and both will honestly say no.
Process improvement driven from inside a business unit tends to plateau. The team optimizes to its own boundary and stops.
Not a project manager, who is accountable for a defined outcome. Not an enterprise architect, who works from a model of how things should be. Something more mundane: a technologist whose job is to sit across several business units and notice.
We assign one on every engagement, and the assignment is not generic. The liaison on a healthcare estate has worked with healthcare systems before; they know what a revenue cycle looks like, what an EMR does and does not do, and which handoffs are usually painful in that environment. That domain knowledge is what separates a useful liaison from somebody conducting a survey — they arrive with hypotheses rather than a blank page.
In practice that means a prepared list. Before the first conversation, the liaison writes down the specific things to look for in this kind of estate, based on where the gaps usually are. Then they go and ask. Short, focused sessions with each business team, aimed at the items on that list rather than an open-ended discovery exercise, which is both faster and considerably less tiring for the people being asked.
Less than people expect, which matters in a regulated environment where every access request is a conversation with someone who would rather not.
A good proportion of what a liaison finds needs no system access at all. When somebody describes receiving a file every Friday and typing its contents into another system, that is a complete finding. You do not need to log in to confirm it, and you do not need to log in to design the integration that replaces it. Manual processes are the easiest things in the estate to convert, and they are entirely visible from a conversation.
When access is genuinely required
To understand how data is structured, what the status values mean, what an integration would actually have to handle — we ask for read-only access with the minimum privileges that answer the question. Not an administrator account, not a standing grant, not more scope than the specific investigation needs.
That is partly discipline and partly self-interest. In healthcare, financial services or anywhere else carrying regulatory weight, the fastest way to slow an engagement down is to ask for more access than you can justify. Asking for the least gets you an answer this week rather than a security review next month.
The same categories recur.
Duplicated data entry. The same information typed into more than one system because the systems do not talk.
Duplicated software. Two business units solving similar problems with different tools, both paid for. Neither knows the other exists.
Dependencies nobody mapped. A report one team produces that three others rely on, running on a machine under a desk, maintained by one person who has not taken a proper vacation in years.
Risks that sit in the gap. Data crossing a boundary in a way that made sense when it was one spreadsheet and now carries information it should not.
Not expertise. Two structural advantages.
No turf. Asking a business unit to explain its process in detail is a delicate thing when you are a colleague from a department with its own agenda. From someone whose remit is the whole estate, it is just the job.
No history. You have not been in the meetings where the current arrangement was agreed. You can ask why something works the way it does without it sounding like a challenge to whoever decided it.
Both wear off. After a year you have turf and history like everyone else, which is an argument for doing this work early in a relationship rather than saving it.
The point
Integration opportunities are not hidden. They are in plain sight, at the boundaries between teams, being worked around by people who have stopped noticing they are working around anything.
Finding them does not require sophisticated analysis, or deep access, or a long discovery phase. It requires somebody whose job is to look across rather than down, who knows the sector well enough to know what to look for — and organizations rarely have one, which is why the opportunities are still there.
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Written by
Liaison Lead, Modern Signal
Modern Signal's business consulting practice, working across business units to find what nobody owns.
Where this came from
A healthcare provider
A healthcare provider's technology estate had grown by addition, with every business unit solving its own problem. We took over running it, then rebuilt what duplication had made expensive.
Read the case study: Entered once, not three times — 70% faster RCM workflows and 35% off licensing~70%
Faster revenue cycle workflows
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