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Business Synchrony: Enabling Sustainable Digital Transformation

By Christopher Geers posted 05-03-2022 09:11 AM

  

In a world that is in a constant state of technological evolution, we are seeing brilliantly innovative solutions for Oracle and other leading vendors enter the market at a rapidly increasing pace. The rise of these advancements now enables companies to unlock a whole host of capabilities undreamt of in recent memory. However, it has simultaneously made the landscape increasingly difficult to navigate and understand. Nonetheless, global spending on digital transformation continues to reach record highs year after year, yet most enterprises fail to yield any business value whatsoever from their digital transformation efforts, and even fewer achieve their expected business outcomes.

 

It is undeniable that digital transformation is no longer just a desire, but a requirement for companies in this increasingly competitive environment.  Leaders must rethink their approach to digital transformation. They need to be asking themselves what changes must be made technologically and strategically not just to survive but thrive in this era of complex business technology. With such a diverse range of prospective changes that can be made, there will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to digital transformation. However, we do see that for any business, by emphasizing just a few key areas of synchrony that are often overlooked, we can get monumentally closer to a truly optimized digital transformation.

 

The first step is establishing a clear, consistent vision of the ideal future state. This often encapsulates becoming less siloed and more centralized, utilizing data driven decision-making capabilities, and overall enhanced efficiency and insight. Process optimization can result in creating 20-40% in operational efficiencies. Data driven decision making can achieve 20-40% in cost savings and increase the overall productivity of finance teams by 50%. However, while many organizations can identify these goals and understand how this improvement could occur, they often overlook the downstream implications of these changes. Implementing new technologies inherently mandates substantial process adjustments and existing organizational models often become obsolete. Failing to address these realities leads organizations to at best, underleveraging their new capabilities or at worst, erasing the positive impact of their digital transformation altogether. Therefore, it is paramount that organizations have an in-depth change management strategy in place and consider necessary changes to their organizational structure.

 

We can analyze the success of a digital transformation initiative by looking at two critical focus areas. First, we need to examine operational success factors: speed, utilization, and proficiency.  Even if an organization flawlessly implements a complex system with advanced capabilities, it is of little importance if employees are not using it properly. As such, we must investigate the users’ rates of adoption, their overall utilization of new systems and their level of proficiency in effectively leveraging their new capabilities. Second, we look at an initiative’s overall performance factors: achievement of transformation objectives, duration of delivery, and budget performance. Organization’s success in all these focus areas varies immensely based on their commitment to change management.

 

Organizations that prioritize excellence in change management have been shown to experience in-line or better speed of user adoption, user utilization of new systems and user proficiency of new systems at rates far exceeding those who did not. Moreover, we see the same disproportionate levels of success when looking at an initiative’s overall performance. Organizations that prioritize excellence in change management are far more likely to meet the objectives of their transformation, stay on or ahead of schedule and stay on or under budget than those who do not. 

 

There is no end in sight to the development of revolutionary business technology, and it is easy for leaders to focus only on solutions’ cost and capabilities. However, if organizations want to optimize their digital transformations, it’s imperative not to forget about the processes and people behind the technology. Synchrony is the answer to success.

 

Learn how Huron Oracle clients are addressing digital transformation and driving Business Synchrony during Huron’s keynote presentation at the upcoming Ascend 2022 conference and download the full Business Synchrony eBook today.