Find your focus and deliver impact
Three years ago, I set a personal goal to donate plasma monthly for at least one year. (The header image for this post showcases my #donorfeet photos from January 2022 to December 2024.) This commitment felt achievable only because of the exceptional team and facility at Bloodworks Northwest. Their capable, friendly, and professional staff ensured every donation experience was top-notch.
The systems they use to manage my appointments and communications are great. The badges they award throughout the year are motivational and fun. Their mission to support the local blood supply and advance research deeply resonates with me. Over three years of monthly donations, despite changes in staff, processes, and systems, my experience has consistently been positive and professional.
What I see is their commitment to the welfare of the donor and the larger community. This is an organization that has successfully prioritized the donor experience and they have consistently invested in the areas where they have positive impact. Their focus on donor experience has allowed me to keep a promise to myself for three straight years. They helped me achieve and exceed my personal goal.
Who will benefit from your choices?
When you look at your organization and its competing priorities, are you thinking about who will be impacted by those priorities? I am a customer-centric person so I tend to think of the impact on my internal and external customers when I weigh the costs and benefits of any plan. Unless I can see where my plan is providing real value to my customers, I am not going to push for it. Unfortunately, it seems like some have forsaken value for the latest shiny object: GenAI.
Creating value vs. chasing vapor
During these last three years, I’ve observed the frantic response to the rise of GenAI, and its overwhelming influx of models and agents. For many, this journey has been chaotic, expensive and, unproductive.
As we head into 2025, I encourage organizations to take a step back and carefully evaluate how large language models (LLMs), small language models (SLMs), and agents can genuinely add value. Avoid chasing trends solely to check off a “GenAI Project” box. Instead, focus on meaningful applications.
There is a lot of work you can and should be doing with your content, its lifecycle processes, and your people before you start choosing models or agents for training and automation. Look at your content like the data it is. Try to determine where you need to clean, munge or migrate it in order to improve its performance. Look at your processes and find the places you can automate without compromising quality. Look at your people and ensure that they have the right mix of skills to thrive now and through the next year.
Start with the basics and build on success
- Review and improve content structure, classification, & indexing
- Taxonomies and metadata evolve and need regular maintenance. Invest in getting this right for improvements in findability, reporting, and automation of operations within your content collection.
- It is cheaper and faster to ingest and train models on well structured and tagged content.
- Identify tasks that can be automated throughout your content’s lifecycle.
- Simple agents, can prompt workflows based on lifecycle stages, timestamps, or performance thresholds, to streamline maintenance.
- Automation, when aligned with business rules, relieves teams of repetitive tasks while reinforcing strategic goals.
- Make direct investments in your people
- Review and improve onboarding materials for new hires or contractors to ensure they have the tools to be immediately productive. Assess your team’s skill sets and invest in training or courseware to close gaps or help individuals master complex concepts.
- While professional education requires a significant time investment, the long-term benefits to your organization are invaluable.
I believe the suggestions outlined here can help organizations unlock meaningful improvements in the coming year. By focusing on content optimization, thoughtful automation, and skill development, you’ll provide your team and your customers with real value in their relationship with you and your content. You might even make concrete progress on that “GenAI Project” your leadership is so obsessed with too.
What steps are you taking to improve your operations in 2025? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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