Tech Vision 2014-2016 by MindSource

Mind Source Technology Vision 2014-2016 1

TRANSFORMATION

2014 | 2016

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Foreword Introduction Enterprise

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Performance End Notes Contacts

Our Approach

Mind Source triennial Business and Technology Transformation document provides a perspective in the future of Business and Technology trends. Top Management can use this document to position their organizations for growth, cost cutting and efficiency improvements. It provides practical ideas and approaches that can transform enterprises addressing these trends today and in the future. This is the reality of your future. Technology alone delivers no value. It’s the combination of people, a clear strategy, the right technology, high-quality data and lean processes that creates value. This is how our world is changing. May the force be with you.



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Major political and economic uncertainties obstructed business investment in the last years. However, the fog is clearing and digital will play a prominent role in Top Management’s next year’s plans. Organizations are looking to technology to improve business results and to transform their companies. Most business leaders will quickly acknowledge the maxim, "You can't just cost-cut your way to success." Business leaders know that they must invest in talent, innovation and productivity to become customer centric and to grow revenues.

Actually when we look to IT investments, we typically see 80% going to activities to just Run the Business and keep the lights on and only 20% to activities and projects to Grow and to Transform the business. It’s crucial to achieve balance between maintenance and innovation. The convergence of four major trends: Cloud, Social, Mobile and Information will deeply transform every industry and organization. In the next three years Top Management will have 3 top main priorities: Increasing Enterprise Growth, Enterprise Costs and Improve Operational Performance.

Introduction

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Gamification Customer Experience

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Gamification Gamification is an important tool and an important that organizations are using to engage employees, customers and the people in order to change behaviors, develop skills and to promote innovation.



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Gamification

Gamification is right now in the hype and most of organizations want to understand better the trend and evaluate possibly opportunities. Gamification is being applied to solve a wide array of business problems and is affecting many areas like business, government and society. The majority of organizations should use and implement this in order to deeply engage customers and employees as it provides a way to create more meaningful relationships with these targets. Gamification initiatives must be led by business managers and supported by IT.

Gamification is the use of design techniques and game mechanics found in games, but applying them to nongame environment contexts, including employee performance, training and education, innovation, personal development and customer engagement. In the broader world of gamification, there are many opportunities to change behaviour and increase engagement - from crowdsourcing solutions, to challenging problems, to training a workforce in a particular skill, or improving the productivity of employees.

Suddenly, games are popping up everywhere, and there is an opportunity to improve results through higher levels of engagement and changed behaviour.

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Gamification

Nowadays, organizations are using game mechanics to accelerate feedback cycles, providing clear goals and rules for interactions, introducing achievable goals/challenges and providing status and recognition. This mechanism intends to apply these motivators to real-world experiences and challenges with the goal of improve employee performance, implement change programs, create more engaging training programs, and enable innovation and creativity.

Organizations can use gamification techniques in a wide range of technology, product and service related scenarios to enhance product and service strategies. Their use is relevant to marketing managers, product designers, customer service managers, financial managers and HR staff, among others, whose aim is to bring about longer-lasting and more meaningful interactions with customers, employees or the general public. Gamification receives a lot of attention as a business trend to increase customer engagement, and can also be applied to internal processes.

When the objective is to convert customers into fans, routine work into fun or make learning a joy, the organization’s potential impact is enormous.



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Organizations are implementing the customer experience management practice through designing and reacting to customer interactions in order to meet customer expectations to increase their satisfaction, retention and loyalty.

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Customer Experience

Driven by nexus technologies, customer choice and voice make the competition for customers depend less on products/services and more on the overall emotional experience. Today customers have more choices, more information, higher expectations, and greater influence. Understanding the voice of the customer is very important and is changing the relationships with brands. Customers decide how, when, and where they want to engage with your brand -whether it’s in the store, on the Web, over the phone, or across their social networks.

Customers expect you to know who they are and what they need, and to recognize them at every contact touch point. And with the enormous amount of new social channels amplifying the customer’s voice, peers now have greater influence over the buy decisions than traditional marketing. The power has shifted from brands to customers and it’s impossible for companies to sustain meaningful differentiation based solely on price or product. The only option that remains is a differentiated customer experience.

We are now in the age of the customer - where a focus on customers matters more than any other organization strategic imperative.



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Customer Experience

The big challenge is to balance the benefits for the organization with the customer benefits and to avoid being too internally focused. It's impossible to pretend that you understand customers without talking to them and without understanding how they interact. Organizations need to create positions that formalize and understand the need for the customer viewpoint and ensure that it's heard at the highest levels in the enterprise. Customers satisfaction levels should be routinely monitored, and the customer experience should be consistent with brand values and be well-known in the enterprise.

Today, brands that focus on customer experience are able to attract more by engaging in smarter demand generation. They can target the right customers with personalized and relevant offers to drive demand and more sales revenue. They can retain more by recognizing, rewarding, and strengthening relationships. This leads to more trust, loyalty, and advocacy. In the end, they know their customers likes and preferences, they provide customers with meaningful and relevant engagements, and they are strategic with their marketing mix and maximizing their marketing impact to improve revenues.

The Business Value of Customer Experience is crucial for organizations - Every Interaction Counts. Attract More, Retain More and Achieve More. Happy consumers are willing to pay more.



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Big Data The amount of data in the organizations has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets, will become the next frontier for more competition, better innovation and increasing productivity.



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Big Data

Big data refers to high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making and process automation. There is a big evidence that information and Big Data can play a crucial and important role not only to the national economies but also to organizations and citizens. The ability to store, aggregate and combine data and after use the results to perform deep analysis is now crucial for leaders across every industry to take decisions with confidence.

Analytics can really improve decision making, mitigate risks and show important insights that otherwise would remain hidden. Simply making Big Data easily accessible to relevant stakeholders in a timely manner can create an enormous value and increase revenues. Organizations are using data, to improve the creation and development of the next generation of products and to create innovative customer service offerings. The big data trend represents a new era in which information plays an increasingly central and critical role in the organizations business success and an important competitive advantage.

Big Data will enable organizations to create new products and services, enhance existing ones and invent entirely new business models.



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Big Data

The most important aspects of big data are the benefits that can be added to the organization. Increasingly diverse datasets complement each other and permit the business to fill in missing gaps in the information flow. Filling these gaps improves operations and decisions, and enhances business delivery. As big data become an increasingly valuable asset, the exploitation of data will be very important for organizations to compete effectively and with efficiency. Organizations that understand and embrace the use of big data can be easily ahead of their peers in tangible corporate performance measures.

The use of big data will become a key basis of competition across several industries and sectors, so it is imperative that organizational leaders begin to incorporate big data projects into their business plans. Organizations should conduct an inventory of their own proprietary data, and also systematically catalog other data public available or from third-party data sources to which they could potentially gain access. They should also integrate own information with social media, geo-location data and sensors. Finally they need also to have the right people and processes to capture value from the use of big data.

Information and Big data is the next frontier for improving competition, more innovation and productivity.



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Digitalization Today “being digital” has two different approaches: a business oriented approach (the digital experience) and a technical approach (focused on digital transactions). New digital-based capabilities are emerging from combinations of mobile, analytics, social, big data and communication technologies.



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Digitalization

On one hand, the digital business oriented approach is focused on the degree to which the business model relies on digital capabilities to generate value and revenue. This approach generates revenue and consequently organizational growth by applying digital resources to create a new type of value proposition. On the other hand, the technical approach is the application of technology to transform resources from analog to digital. The mobile technologies, e-channels and e-stores represent front-end digital processes, however they might not constitute a true digitalized business.

The technically oriented definition reflects the current state of many organizations, where digital technologies support an essentially analog-based business model. The gap between this IT digitalization of processes and digitalized business revenue is too big to ignore, especially as the next generation of technologies creates new levels of context, connectivity, information and computing power known as the “Internet of things”. Any organization today – big, medium or small, old or new - can use this digital technology to create a winning proposition for its business, stakeholders and its industry.

A digitalized business creates value and revenue from digital assets. It’s crucial to do more than just process automation and to transform processes, business models and customer experience.



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Digitalization

Organizations with a high level of digitalized services and processes achieved higher returns and larger gross margins than enterprises with low digital maturity. One of the greatest challenges in business is using digital resources to generate customer value and revenue. However, actually core business models are not conducive to current digitalized business models. Few enterprises have the customer base required to generate revenue with advertising or the margin to promote digital offerings, and joining digital islands to create effective and powerful digital capabilities are not easy tasks.

Building a digitalized business involves more than a Web interface. The majority of enterprises have already done a “Web-lift,” however the critical challenge is how to drive customer value and revenue from digitalized resources and processes, going deeper and creating new connections, a better customer experience and a set of capabilities across the organization. This involves bringing various analog and digital islands together to form a coherent digitalized business strategy achieving digital innovation. The success of this strategy is the result of a comprehensive method that discovers digitalization from the outside in and designs it from the inside out.

The future is digital and the right time to start is now.



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Social Media Many organizations have experimented with social media and now want to develop a strategy that supports business goals. A social media strategy must be intentionally designed and managed to achieve the desired business outcomes.



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Social Media Many organizations have experimented with social media and now want to develop a strategy that supports business goals. A social media strategy must be intentionally designed and managed to achieve the desired business outcomes. Most organizations treat social business initiatives as just another technology deployment, and they tend to implement them one project at a time. As a result, few people realize how far social initiatives have already spread within the organization. Ultimately, social business will affect every activity executed by an organization. Social media leaders must better coordinate their social initiatives to share best practices, take advantage of business opportunities and address enterprise level problems. Therefore, IT and Business leaders involved in these social projects should take steps to help move the organization toward a more strategic approach to social business.

Social media leaders should reach out to their business and IT colleagues who can assist with social initiatives, build relationships, and jointly approach the senior leadership team to sponsor enterprise-level structures, such as a center of excellence. Social initiatives are now inside organizations; they are becoming part of every business and also every operational activity. However, organizations usually treat social initiatives as isolated projects because the technology is relatively new and it can often be implemented within hours at little or no cost. Social CRM is a business strategy designed to engage customers in a collaborative way.



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Social Media

This approach may achieve narrow goals (for example, resolving problems for customers faster), but it risks failure for avoidable reasons and may miss opportunities to create more value. Marketing and IT leaders involved in social projects should explore the breadth of social business initiatives within their enterprise and what it means for their own projects. The term "social media" is sometimes stigmatized within an organization and immediately branded a frivolous waste of time.

Early implementations monitored what was happening on the social Web or used this new communication channel to broadcast messages to an intended audience, frequently exposing minimal business benefit. However, businesses are now focused on marketing, customer support, research and development, human resources, sales, manufacturing, distribution and executive leadership departments across multiple industries and geographies. Organizations are implementing social strategies to achieve objectives aligning to their prime metrics.

Refusing to communicate with customers via social channels will be as harmful as ignoring emails or phone calls is today.



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Mobile New business opportunities are emerging as billions of people embrace the use of mobile devices that provide high-speed Internet access, innovative mobile applications and other powerful capabilities.



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Mobile

The rush to develop mobile applications is similar to the rapid introduction of websites in the late 90s. At that time, enterprises viewed websites as a powerful channel through which to sell products/services and to communicate with customers, employees and partners. Nowadays, organizations view mobile applications as providing many of the same opportunities. However, unlike the 90s where deploying a simple website was good enough to get started, simply having a mobile application is not. Increasingly sophisticated user requirements are driving the enterprise to buy and develop applications that deliver an elegant, powerful, and intuitive user experience.

We cannot forget that the media tablet market did not exist 4 years ago. Today, millions of enterprise workers want to use tablets in the organization. The growth of mobile devices and media tablets is just the tip of the iceberg. Just below the surface lies we can found a torrent of trends including mobile application development, mobile security risk assessment and mobile device management evaluation. Mobile strategies and engagement is going to transform the business world, and CIOs need a comprehensive strategy to integrate mobile throughout the organization’s.

Organizations must do more than simply replicate existing desktop or Web application functionality. They must innovate.



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Mobile

It is therefore critical for organizations to set priorities in order to avoid "analysis paralysis," which would delay adoption and cause lost opportunities. Over the next years, Top Management should focus on the following three areas: creating a cross-functional mobility team, understanding how specific groups of users make use of mobile technology, and using a repeatable and defensible methodology to create a mobile endpoint-independent architecture. However, establishing an early mobile presence with your first iPhone application may be necessary, it is not sufficient. Enterprises discover that a single application quickly becomes old news.

The tablet will be the most important computing device for most users — laptops and desktops will complement the tablet for more intensive creation tasks, while smartphones will remain very important for voice and small-screen device. Mobile devices will act as controller of the network of personal devices and sensors around a person, their workspaces, their home, and their autos. Wearable's such as watches, glasses, and activity trackers, plus eye-tracking and brainwave sensors, will provide context for end user interactions with personal devices, automotive systems, and home automation.

It’s impossible for an organization to make thoughtful decisions in mobile application development without considering security and risk management.



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Data Mining Is a modern way to analyze data, a process revealing useful patterns that can be essential in the decision-making process.



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Data Mining

Organizations have been investing in business intelligence capabilities (e.g. Reporting, Dashboards, Scorecards) mostly trying to answer what happened. Nowadays, the business needs to evolve in the analytics continuum. They need to take a journey from analyze to predict and to act in order to understand what did it happen (using Interactive Visualization, Data Discovery tools, Data Mashups), what will happen (using Data Mining, Predictive Modeling and Forecasting) and how can we make it happen (through Prescriptive Modeling, Simulations and Optimization, Decision Automation).

We cannot drive enterprises and take critical decisions looking only in the rear-view mirror. By using the right Data Mining techniques and tools organizations and decision makers are able to find some patterns that most of the times are hidden. Decision makers and Business Analysts can deal with a large data sets beyond normal human capabilities as well as the analysis costs compared to conventional analysis. Real-time reality mining will enhance the organization’s ability to react instantly to changes in the behavior of customers and competitors and increase sales.

The business objective is to look to the past, understand the present and predict the future.



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Data Mining

An evolution is required to increase business analytics value. It is necessary to jump from descriptive analytics that we are doing today based on information according to “yesterday’s” requirements to a diagnostic analytics giving autonomy and enhance visibility and flexibility to business users to share, comment, approve, track, discuss and analyze in a collaborative effort. In this level decision makers can improve pattern detection and analysis. This can give to them an opportunity to anticipate events, create models for propensity and risk, identifying correlations and crucial business indicators.

Data Mining will deliver to the organizations the opportunity to jump to the next level promoting opportunities to identify the Client lifetime value, generating the next-best offer, testing hypothesis, optimize processes and business outcomes. Who are our most valuable clients and how to improve their satisfaction? What are our most lucrative sales and how to achieve more of them? What is causing our best selling products to no longer be popular? What can we do to protect our business from financial crisis? These are the most frequent questions in the decision makers mind.

Organizations need to take advantage of predictive analytics opportunities, which Data Mining, Predictive Modeling and Forecasting promote.



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Sales Performance Management It’s a business strategy that benefits midsize companies and enterprise sales organizations through driving unrelenting continuous improvement of the sales force.



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Managers of midsize companies and enterprise firms have historically focused their attention on CRM when it came to the sales organization; the primary purposes were to improve customer interactions and manage customer data. However, managers are being asked to look inside the organization to assist in creating optimal selling environments, since improving selling efficiency and effectiveness provides for more selling time and higher close rates. Sales Performance Management (SPM) will provide the framework that carries the information to motivate and help the sales force improve their activities and interactions at key points in the sales cycle.

Sales teams need to implement more efficient, smarter approaches to identifying and engaging prospects that present promising sales opportunities. Sales opportunity management focuses on the external aspects (customer/prospect) of sales on accounts, contacts, opportunities, marketing and selling processes to support Business to Business (B2B) sales relationships, whereas Sales Performance Management focuses on the internal aspects (the salesperson) of selling, objective and quota management, territory management, incentive compensation management, appraisal and evaluation management, and coaching.

Organizations should have a concrete SPM strategy and the right technology with a framework to plan, model and build sales strategies that will ensure greater execution of sales initiatives.



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The Sales Performance Management (SPM) approach will depend on the enterprise's overall strategy (growth, declining sales, restructuring sales). The monthly, quarterly and annual demands for revenue and profit should make SPM one of the most important initiatives inside the enterprise. However, past investments and quick fixes in sales training, methodology and technology will potentially leave executives skeptical. Understanding the overall enterprise strategy and framework will help organizations make better decisions about SPM for the enterprise.

The SPM success means having a focus sales force, reaching and exceeding revenue and profitability targets/goals, attaining maximum customer retention and satisfaction. SPM requires high-level vision and leadership to drive unrelenting continuous improvement of the sales force. Executing on an SPM strategy involves difficult changes to culture and the sales organization. The organization must have a sincere desire to improve the salesperson's effectiveness and efficiency to fully take advantage of an SPM.

SPM efforts should result in more-qualified opportunities committed to sales pipelines, and should ultimately encourage shorter sales cycles and even better deal quality.



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Software Asset Management

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Software Asset Management Is a framework and set of processes that strategically track and manage the financial, physical, licensing and contractual aspects during the life cycle of software assets.



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Software licenses are valuable assets to the organization and should be managed as such. SAM requires a combination of people, processes and technology to gain and obtain the maximum efficiency – from both a risk mitigation and cost management perspective. It plays an important role in the acquisition and disposal of software, including strategies to identify and eliminate underutilized software, the consolidation of licenses, ensure legal compliance, or the move to new licensing models.

The SAM discipline aims to create a dependable account of software asset costs and risks, providing support for software strategy, architecture, service management, sourcing and procurement decisions. Software vendor audits continue to occur in the market, as evidenced by the surveys taken during the past years. As vendors smooth their own audit processes, several have announced their intent to systematically audit significant subgroups of their customers. SAM can be crucial during contract renewals and when trying to find out better software alternatives.

Software Asset Management (SAM) helps achieve cost savings and optimize these investments.



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Organizations should now that they will be approached for at least two vendor audits in the next two years. They need to prepare in advance to minimize the negative consequences not only in terms of money but also corporate image. Being out of compliance can be costly for an organization with possible fines and penalties, negative publicity and higher prices for software than could be negotiated if not in response to an audit finding. Due to the complex nature of software assets, SAM needs to be a comprehensive solution that integrates asset planning, purchasing, maintaining inventory, financial, maintenance into one management approach.

The growth of cloud based desktop applications such as ‘Google Apps’ or ‘Office 360’ and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) solutions competing with traditionally installed office products is also changing the way software is used and licensed as metrics move from being largely device based to ‘per user’ and ‘per usage’ based licensing models. Thin client technology such as Citrix or Terminal Server has always presented challenges to managing software. Tracking an actual install while measuring multiple users accessing that software remotely is difficult to automate, largely because there is no evidence of that software on local machines.

The risk of software audits presents a real threat to organizations. The resulting fine resulting from an audit is generally an unbudgeted cost and a big amount.



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Application Modernization and Optimization Most enterprises are surprised by how many applications have not been accessed in months, or even a year. This is because they don't realize how often small groups of people create a custom database a glorified spreadsheet or other simple system for a specific task or project.



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Application Modernization and Optimization

Business and IT leaders need to think about a strategy for applications that is more than just planning. That strategy defines what needs to be done and why. A plan details how and when it will be executed. Application Portfolio Management is the critical input into determining an applications strategy. The plan defines how and when, and provides to the CIO the means to manage the delivery of business value and to proactively manage the retirement of outdated solutions that no longer meet the needs of the business, eliminate waste and free resources for new applications to grow and transform the business.

Big, complex applications are often a fairly small percentage of the total application count. Large, complex applications usually support a lot of business value, and merit a detailed analysis using the limited Application Portfolio Management (APM) resources. This leaves an important question: How can we economically categorize and overhaul the thousands of smaller applications that form the rest of the portfolio? The objective of "just-enough process" must be applied to avoid dissipating overall resources on this long tail of applications.

CIO’s and business leaders face very difficult challenges and need to do more with less. The idea that IT organizations need to develop a strategy for applications is a matter of great importance.



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Application Modernization and Optimization

Application Modernization and Optimization is a combination of four elements as simplification, modernization, migration and retirement activities that maintains or improves the business value delivered by the application portfolio while balancing cost and risk in a way that is consistent with enterprise tactics and strategies. With this process we are able to analyse the purpose of existing applications in the portfolio and we can develop a health rating that shows the relationship between the application's ability to support the business's functional requirements, its technical condition and a categorization of value-added versus sunk-cost spending.

This analysis promotes the identification related to the portions of the application portfolio where additional investment should be discouraged or encouraged, and ensures also that decisions are made based on maximizing business value at acceptable cost and risk, by providing the credible facts on which CFO’s can make business decisions. This is more than just managing individual applications as assets; rather, it means that applications are collectively managed as an interrelated set of assets.

Applications are valuable assets. CFOs need to work with CIOs to understand the risks of application investment options and to ensure that these investments deliver the greatest possible value to the organization.



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Application Development and Estimation Model Application Development organizations cannot fly blind without a metric and an estimation model in place to measure their productivity.



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Application Development and Estimation Model

Software Development has become critical for most organizations. In general, the view of measurement programs in AD organizations is very difficult to accept. The vast majority of enterprises do not formally measure AD at all. Many of those that attempt to measure rely on input-based metrics, such as the hourly cost of developers, variance to budget, or percent of delivery dates achieved. Although, these metrics do not truly answer the questions like: How much software functionality did a team deliver in a given time period?, or How productive was the application-development group?

AD organizations should measure the AD/Business Boundary (Effectiveness), the AD Process (Efficiency) and AD Project Status, understanding how well their projects are running. AD organizations should adopt a reliable output metric that is integrated with the process for gathering application requirements. For most organizations, this path would involve a transformation journey - adopting Function Points Analysis. While there might be internal and external resistance not only from from business partners but also from application developers, we believe the journey is well worth the effort.

Measuring Application Development (AD) is not simple. However, due to the amount of money that we spend in AD, organizations need to measure their productivity.



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A successful software development project is one that satisfies the user’s requirements, on schedule, and within budget. However, since it is based on estimates and agreements the record of successful activities or projects can be misleading. Without a trend of their measured productivity, or a profile of measured productivity from other sites, it is difficult for a site to determine that the estimates are competitive. Top Management may not know how much more efficiently the activity or project might have been done. Productivity is measured in terms of Output per Input (or effort).

To assess productivity two basic measures are required. First we need to know what the output of our activity is and second, we must be able to measure the effort or cost to produce that output. We can start then to compare software development projects with other software development projects. In doing so it is possible to see whether a particular project is hitting or missing a given productivity target. Function Points Analysis (FPA) provides a consistent measure of system size that is independent of the development technology, is simple to apply, can be estimated (reasonably well) from the requirements specification and finally is meaningful to the end user.

A productivity measure in place, can have an enormous impact on the organization involved in development as it can then take steps to improve productivity



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Design Thinking Is about believing that we can make the difference and having an intentional process in order to get to new and relevant solutions that create a positive impact.



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Design Thinking

In an ever changing society, coming up with the solution just isn’t good enough, you need the right solution, one with value and not just a price. Design Thinking will enable to empathize with your audience, the people for whom you are designing. Define correctly the problem you are focusing on, by coming up with the right questions. Ideate the solution, working as a team and colleting all input from people with different backgrounds, to come up with creative solutions. Build a representation of one or more of your creative ideas though prototyping. Return to your original user group and test your ideas collect feedback and new input.

You may have to come back to the starting point and start all over again but you get there fast, and by the end of the day you will have the right solution. One that empathizes with your audience, that answer in the correct manner to the addressed problem and that has great value. Design Thinking is all about taking a leap of faith and explore your creativity. It may come as a surprise but as many other skills and talents, creativity is the human nature and it can be improved with practice and method. So start working out your creativity and take it to the gym.

Design Thinking balances the traditional focus on reliability within organizations with an emphasis on using empathetic and intuitive thinking to create meaningful to human centered experiences.



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Design Thinking

Design Thinking is relevant to all business activities, but are particularly impactful when applied to critical areas such as business transformation, strategy, innovation and wicked problems (e.g., inherently complex issues with numerous, ambiguous causes). It’s collaborative. Several great minds are always stronger when solving a challenge than just one. Design Thinking benefits greatly from the views of multiple perspectives, and others’ creativity bolstering your own.

It’s Optimistic. Design Thinking is the fundamental belief that we all can create change - no matter how big a problem, how little time or how small a budget. No matter what constraints exist around you, designing can be an enjoyable process. Implications are: Creative process, putting yourself in other people's shoes, allowing space for trial and error, not excluding any idea from the start, collecting input from different areas/ backgrounds, while improving customer engagement. Approach problems as a novice even if you already know a lot about them.

It’s a deeply human approach that relies on your ability to be intuitive, to interpret what you observe and to develop ideas that are emotionally meaningful to those you are designing for.



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Operational Performance

Benefits Realization

Talent Management

Cloud Data Quality Intelligent Business Process

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Benefits Realization Discipline of ensuring that Business and IT initiatives deliver expected benefits.



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Have you ever delivered a 'successful' project (on time, on budget & on scope), and find out later the product or service was never used or implemented? That happens a lot and it's not a good feeling. So what can you do about it? Benefits Realization is the answer. The only reason to make Business and IT investments, is to generate business value (the benefits). It’s very important to shift the focus from activities to benefits and that will challenge the enterprise too change, but is necessary to capture the money currently left on the table by weak benefits realization practices.

Benefits are real sources of value to the business, such as increased revenues, better customer retention, lower costs or quicker time-to-market. The last few years it has been observed greater budget constraints in the organizations, and it is not surprising that in the current macroeconomic situation, the CFO’s are more sensitized to ensure the return on investments, whether strategic or operational, advocated in their organizations. The Benefits Realization discipline is critical to enterprise survival and success.

There is a real concern to ensure that every invested euro/ dollar has the expected return.



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As businesses increasingly digitize, it is clearer than ever that without Benefits Realization – BR most organizations cannot realize the value of intensive investments projects. IT is involved in almost every significant business change project. If these projects fail to deliver value, not only is it bad for the business but it may also put the IT organization and its contribution in a negative light. These organizations have also strong capabilities in project management, process management and cross-functional perspectives.

It is essential that there will be a close link between the benefits from individual projects or programmes, and the financial forecasting and modelling the organization undertakes. It also means that senior managers will be looking at benefits closely, as they will be held to account on their commitments to manage their pressures (and will need to amend their approach if their strategies are not tracking as planned). Ultimately the CEO must sponsor BR as a discipline, the CFO must enforce that discipline and business unit managers must ensure staff adherence to it.

Benefits realization is a discipline that IT and all in the enterprise must recognize and engage with.



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Talent Management


Management



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Talent Management Is an integrated set of processes, programs and cultural norms in an organization designed and implemented to attract, develop, deploy, and retain talent to achieve strategic objectives and meet future business needs.



Growth Enterprise

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Talent Management

Business executives have suggested that Talent Management practices need to lead to measurable financial business results. Talent Management is now more than a desirable Human Resources (HR) program - it is a leadership imperative. It is difficult for any business corporation to succeed in the long term without making talent central to the business model. This is particularly true because of the complex business challenges that need to be addressed. Organizations that do not have the right people in critical positions forfeit revenue growth, innovate more slowly, and/or lose competitive advantage because they are unable to adapt to market dynamics.

Talent Management is especially true in challenging economic times. However, having strong talent and sound talent management is equally critical to business survival. Why do organizations succeed or fail? Ultimately it comes down to talent. Did the organization have the talent to make the right decisions regarding where to invest financial and human resources, how to innovate and compete, and how to energize and direct the organization to achieve the business strategy?

Financial resources may be the lifeblood of a company, but talent is the heart that makes the difference.



Growth Enterprise

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Talent Management

The Talent Management framework shows the relationships among business strategy, talent management, and business results. The business results should then in turn influence setting new business strategies and talent strategies. The business results in many organizations are used as a broad outcome measure of whether the talent management effort is effective. There is a demonstrated relationship between better talent and better business performance and the context in which we do business is more complex and dynamic.

Employees expectations are also changing. They are interest in having challenging and meaningful work, more concerned about work-life balance, less accommodating of traditional structures and authority, more loyal to their profession than to the organization and prepared to take ownership of their careers and development. Five main processes should be used to ensure that the necessary talent is available to achieve their business strategies: attract and select talent to the organization; assess competencies and skills in talent, review talent and plan talent actions, develop and deploy talent and engage and retain talent.

Talent Management must be driven by the business strategies and help drive business results.



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Talent Management





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Talent Management


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Intelligent Business Process Management Expands the traditional functionalities of Business Process Management platforms (BPM), by incorporating Business Intelligent (BI) functionalities (analytics).



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Intelligent Business Process Management

In an era of accelerating business processes and increasing competition, organizations must make their operations more “intelligent” if they are to succeed. With the increase complexity of modern societies in all his aspects (social, business, others), organizations must prepare to deal with more types of event data and much higher volumes of event data than they encountered in the past. Intelligent Business Process Management (iBPM) provides the foundation to achieve operational excellence and accelerate business innovation.

Organizations must overcome the traditional wall between Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Process Management (BPM), and offline analytics programs and the operational and management systems that run the organizations. Until now there has been little synergy between these two technologies (BPM and BI), since that have enormous advantages if exist feedback between them. The BPM uplifting been able to produce information on the implementation of the business process, which subsequently been able to be used to predict the Business Intelligence.

Organizations need to make fundamental changes in their processes and in the application systems that support them. They must make their operations more intelligent.



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The adoption of integrated analytics is increasing as business managers and knowledge workers are asked to make faster and better decisions, and thus need improved visibility into their operations and environments. The combination of a broad set of relevant technologies from BPM and BI in one integrated suite (iBPMS) will allow business users to see and manage work in progress. Business analysts familiar with the BPM discipline and the concept of real-time analytics should be involved in every new, large business process improvement project so that they can identify opportunities to make operations more intelligent

Organizations that pursue a BPM approach to running their businesses are in a good position to see where real-time analytics and decision management can improve the business. In most cases, intelligent business operations will be implemented in conjunction with one or more service oriented-architecture (SOA) applications, because SOA is commonly used in BPM initiatives. The impact of integrating real-time analytics with business operations is go to increase the visibility into how the company is running and what is happening in its external environment, so managers are able to make faster and better decisions.

BPM treats business processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and business agility with a better control.



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Cloud Is a style of computing - scalable and elastic IT - enabled capabilities which are provided 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies in order to give more agility, flexibility, scalability, access, integration and some savings.



Growth Enterprise

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Cloud

As cloud computing enters the adoption era, IT organizations and business units are being asked to take a serious look at using cloud computing not only to lower costs but also to create a more agile IT environment. To date, cloud computing has been adopted in an ad hoc manner, often starting as "pilot projects“ projects deep within the IT organization. For cloud computing to be successful, IT organizations need a solid, well cloud adoption strategy that takes into account and consideration the risks and possible rewards. The problem many organizations face when devising a cloud adoption strategy is the lack of information necessary to make a sound decision.

Most organizations do not have enough information available regarding their applications, internal costs, business value, quality of service requirements or risk profile to decide if an application is a potential cloud candidate. And because cloud computing is an emerging market, customers are less familiar with cloud vendors (e.g., business model, costs, viability, and capabilities) to decide if the vendor can meet the application's requirements.

Cloud services value attributes like agility, flexibility, scalability, access, integration and savings will challenge business.



Growth Enterprise

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Cloud

As attractive as cloud environments can be, they also come with new types of risks and associated problems. Top Management asks whether building private clouds creates a single point of vulnerability by aggregating many different types of sensitive data into a single platform. They are also concern whether external providers can protect sensitive data, integrate systems and also ensure compliance with regulations about where certain data can be stored and who can access the data. Public, private and hybrid cloud solutions can provide data protection advantages compared with traditional, subscale technology environments.

Organizations which have several types of sensitive information to manage and protect and many cloud solutions to choose from, should balance the potential benefits against possible risks of breaches of data confidentiality, identity, access integrity, and system availability. Contracting for the cloud is very different. Highly scaled, shared, and automated IT platforms can obscure the geographic location of data from both the provider and customer. This is a problem for enterprises dealing in personally identifiable information because often they must keep some customer data in certain jurisdictions and face regulatory actions.

IT organizations must adopt a business-focused risk management approach that can balance the economic gains that cloud solutions promise and the risks they entail.



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Data Quality Data quality is the discipline of ensuring the fitness of the data to support business activities. It includes the roles, organizational structures, processes, metrics and tools necessary to assess, improve and monitor the data against expectations of quality.



Growth Enterprise

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Data Quality

Data quality issues impact business performance every day, however many Top Management leaders continue to view data quality as a technology problem, rather than as a business issue. This is because business leaders generally do not think about data quality and data governance. They think about marketing campaigns, customer retention, inventory optimization and revenue generation, which can be misleading depending of organization's data quality. To understand the business impact of data quality, business leaders must focus on business value drivers, as opposed to purely technical issues.

Many organizations are making the connection between accurate data and good decision making, process efficiencies and increased revenue. Data quality is an issue that costs enterprises a lot of money every year, but many of them are unaware of the impact that data quality issues have on their performance. Many organizations that ignore the issue of poor data quality will, at best, continue to operate inefficiently, missing opportunities and (often) invest their resources in the wrong areas. At worst, they will experience a slow decline in their ability to compete in the marketplace.

Data quality issues are creating significant challenges for organizations. Productivity loss, inaccurate forecasts, lack of transparency, inability to address compliance requirements and overall lack of trust around information accuracy are among the tangible pain points.



Growth Enterprise

Costs Operational



Data Quality

Data quality issues are creating significant challenges for most large enterprises. Productivity loss, inaccurate forecasts, lack of transparency, inability to address compliance requirements and overall lack of trust around information accuracy are among the tangible pain points. Studies show that organizations lose significant amount of money every year as a result of poor data quality. Business leaders who view data quality not as an IT initiative, but as a way to improve financial and business performance, can help their organizations avoid significant costs and lost revenue opportunities.

Inaccurate inventory data can result in stock-outs during peak seasons or overstocks in other period; inaccurate customer data can result in poor customer satisfaction, longer days sales outstanding and reduced cross-selling opportunities; and inaccurate financial data can result in delayed financial reporting and disclosure, financial restatement and even criminal liability. These data quality issues are not IT problems only, they are primarily business issues. That said, data quality, consistency and integrity are typically viewed as IT responsibilities.

The lack of focus on key aspects of information governance, such as data quality, can significantly affect enterprise perception (e.g., among stakeholders) and performance.



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About us

We are a Team of Consultants with deep knowledge in Business and Technological realities in which we operate. Our extensive experience allows us to offer Solutions to our Clients and Partners based in SLA’s with great flexibility and responsibility. Our passion about doing the best for our People, Clients and our Community makes us care for our Client’s Business success as our own.

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