CategoriesTechnology

Six Factors That CIOs Must Consider Before Embarking on Digital Transformation Journey

Digital Transformation requires planning and processes. Here’s a list of things that CIO’s who are the change makers for this initiative within their organization should consider before they start the transformation journey.

If you have been thinking about digital transformation, now is the time to go ahead. We are living in the most challenging economic conditions since the 2008 financial crisis and the present pandemic is far worse in every imaginable way. For companies to survive and thrive in the post-covid world, they need innovative thinking and processes.

The pandemic has hurt all businesses across the world and it may prompt businesses to pull back on new investment or even product development and that may not be a good idea. Uncertain times are always good for development and innovation. While we are not sure when the pandemic will end, one thing is for sure that companies will try to accelerate their digital transformation. Whatever be your digital transformation strategy, if you had planned it, now is the time to move ahead.

Growth Happens Through Innovation

Although every company talks about innovation, it is really difficult for companies to stay ahead of the curve. According to a recent study by McKinsey,  84% of executives it spoke to said innovation was crucial for growth and only 6% were happy with the performance of their company. Several others it interviewed said innovations in products and services did not bring any meaningful value to them. The reason behind this is that the executives had no clear idea about innovation and often confused innovation to creating a new product or service, which is not exactly right.

Changes in CIOs Role

In 2017, Gartner had surveyed more than 3000 CIOs across the world and over 95% of those surveyed said they expect their roles to be realigned or changed due to digitization and fast-changing technology.

As CIO, you will have to upgrade your knowledge and skills to stay relevant and redefine your skills in the fast-changing business and technology world and be able to take on challenges of the next few years.

Here are six important areas that a CIO must consider before embarking on a digital transformation journey.

Think from Business Point of View

To succeed in your role as a CIO you have to go beyond your domain expertise—you need to think from a business perspective like working on innovations, strategizing on business activities, and identifying opportunities to grow your business.

As you are in a position to decide your company’s digital initiative, that gives you the chance to focus on your company’s business strategy besides it being a major part of your company’s business. As a leader with the power to strategize, people in the C-level and peers look toward you as an important part of the business.

To succeed in your role as the digital business leader, you must show traits like:

  1. Leading from the front in upcoming and growing business functions and innovations.
  2. Investing in building a network of digital business capabilities that can nurture other divisions within and outside the company.
  3. Thinking ahead of what technologies to use when changes happen or are scheduled to happen.

Become Change Agents

When you lead the digital transformation process, you must also take over the role of a change agent. This means you need to convince the board or the leadership to invest in newer technologies, products, and services that will add value to the business, both in the short and long term.

While you are at it, you will also be expected to help your colleagues and others in the company through the digital transformation process. In all, starting from the top level to the mid-level, you will have to work with just about everyone that matters in the company.

To ensure the process of digital transformation is smooth, you must build a solid business relationship with the CEO as well as others around you. As a rule, most CIOs report directly to the CEO and this makes your job much easier as you don’t have to go through the hierarchy to get budgetary or other permissions.

Target Results or Outcomes

Digital transformation is not an overnight process. It is also not a very straightforward process. Not all digital transformation processes are an instant success, however, the ones that do succeed are always directed by results or outcomes. You need to give the freedom to people that are involved in the process to judge and decide when, where, and how to prioritize resource distribution and remove any thorns that are coming in the way.

To achieve better results, you need to give the team the freedom to respond to a technical crisis within a shorter time span and without delay. Also, have the hierarchy in place so that confusion can be avoided at all stages in terms of decision making and escalation matrix.

Commence with Existing IT Infrastructure

As the CIO, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you analyze and check if the existing infrastructure is enough for digital transformation. This is to ensure that your expenses are minimal and you get the best from whatever infrastructure you have.

Technology has made it easy to blend legacy infrastructure with new, however in some cases that’s not possible, in that case, it’s always better to talk to your vendor and get this sorted.

CIOs Must Bank on BI, AI, and Analytics

Business intelligence and analytics provide companies with rich data that they can use in many ways to grow their business. Today business intelligence and analytics have become an important part of digital transformation initiatives worldwide. You will have to tune yourself to think about and use data at all times to improve business and make accurate business judgments.

Take a Collaborative Approach

Collaboration is at the heart of every successful initiative— whether technical or non-technical. Any digital transformation project needs collaboration of every department as it has wider ramifications. As CIO you need to sit with department heads and bring them on board so that the initiative is successful.

Businesses are set to change once digital transformation is actioned within your organization. As the CIO, your role would be the key in how organizations adapt to changes, and to excel in this initiative, you must become an enabler.

You will also have to look at AI and Data to back your transformation plan as they will help you with business intelligence, cybersecurity, and analytics as these are key to your plan.

Lastly, you have to get into the right communication mode to get backing for your initiative and overcome any resistance.

CategoriesTechnology

9 Things to Consider Before Choosing an ERP

Implementing an ERP system in an organization requires a planning, time, effort and experts. However, readiness before the actual implementation ensures the process is handled smoothly.

Big or small, organizations need Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems because they help streamline operations — from customer data acquisition and storage, financials, HR function, sales, inventory and everything in between.

With an ERP solution at your disposal, you can accelerate customer on-boarding, eliminate redundant back-office processes, deal with data efficiently and improve business performance along with team communications.

ERP systems are a great addition to the company’s tech stack to simplify overall business operations. They help you consolidate your organization’s information in single source and manage several tasks without depending on multiple tools and teams.

Is your organization thinking of implementing an ERP system?

We have curated a 9-point checklist to consider before you embark on an ERP journey and lead your company towards digital transformation.

Be Clear About Intent: At the heart of any ERP implementation is intent. Right from the beginning, you must have a well-defined objective when embarking on the implementation journey. Your reasons may include any one of these or a combination including process improvement, production quality, employee productivity, business expansion, transparency, financial & asset control, compliance, and many more.

The justifications can be as diverse as the processes in your organization. However, if you cannot communicate the intentions and benefits of an ERP implementation clearly, then it would be challenging for your leadership to agree to such a large investment.

Define Your Organization’s Best Practices: More than using technology to support and optimize business processes, ERPs help in defining best practices.

Once you have decided to implement an ERP and have on-boarded stakeholders, it is important to define the best practices for the organization spanning all processes and people. However, the challenge lays in achieving a common understanding without making too many changes to the processes or people.

To fast track your ERP implementation, it is imperative you select the right implementation partner who can guide you in global best practices that suit organization and benefit your organization.

Have Clarity: An ERP has a wide array of uses. You may choose to use it for one process or for multiple – across the organization, depending on where and how you want it to work for you.

Organizations that want an ERP across multiple entities or locations (regions, countries, functions, divisions) can choose from one of the several ERP landscape strategies available to them: from a single ERP instance to function or entity specific implementation.

Follow Industry Trends: What’s trending today may not be feasible for your organization in a few years. Similarly, an ERP that is comparatively smaller can explode into an industry leader in a few years.

If you have decided to purchase an ERP solution, then you need to also look at how your industry is developing too. This will help you not only keep up with your competition but stay ahead of them.

SAP’s ERP is designed to enable organizations become Intelligent Enterprises. SAP S/4 HANA is powered by AI and is an integrated, intelligent next-generation platform that improves large organizations’ ability to process transactions and analyze informational databases in real-time. Report generation happens in real-time, insights are powered by AI and ML.

S/4 HANA enables users to work on large datasets in one system, thereby significantly saving hardware, operational costs, along with total cost of ownership(TCO).

Get Your Business Strategies Right: While the going becomes easy for companies that have an ERP, it’s always in your interest to get your business strategy right. Being able to adapt to change globally and within the industry become defining factors.

You must also look at things that your organization will do differently once the ERP is in place.

An ERP will give you insights into several aspects of your industry and you will have to respond or translate them into some actionable and measurable insights. This will lead to change the way your business works.

Stay Updated: Being a thought leader in your organization, you would already know how things are shaping in your industry and business. However, there can be certain processes that might be out of your sight – given that today’s CIOs are handling multiple teams across geographies.

You may think that you know how your business operates, but until you start examining how people and processes work, you will not have the right knowledge to make improvements. Additionally, you must keep acquiring knowledge of the best practices and various innovations that’s impacting your industry.

Cost Analysis and Infrastructure Check: Getting an ERP solution is no easy task. It involves onboarding various stakeholders and convincing several others as ERP solutions can be costly, but the return on investment (ROI) is immense – much more than the investment on the ERP tool itself.

Additionally, there’s the question about spending on infrastructure. It’s true that most companies that are thinking about ERP solutions might run on legacy systems and new age ERP solutions may or may not be compatible with the legacy systems.

To ensure that there’s minimal expenditure on infrastructure, it’s always better to check with the ERP implementation partner about compatibility.

Think of the Past, Present & Future: Once you have decided to implement and ERP, an analysis of the past and expectation from the future will help chart an action plan or course correction plan based on the expectations and outcomes.

Standardization: Before implementing an ERP, you must ask yourself if you want standardization across the whole company or autonomy across different levels. Both standardization and autonomy are different and may take different time to be implemented. Your ERP partner should give you an idea of which is better – standardization across the company or autonomy within divisions.

Any organization that wants to implement an ERP solution should consider this checklist. Having a roadmap makes it easier for you to navigate and funnel down to the right processes and systems and maximize ROI.

CategoriesPeople

At-Will Work from Office. Vogue or Pass.

Many among us have been working from home for over a year. We’ve experienced many things while working from home – like the joys of attending meetings while lazing in our beds, pretending to work while bingeing on our favorite shows, working while cooking. We’ve also had some lows too – like losing a loved one to the coronavirus, experiencing burn-out and zoom fatigue.

While half of Americans are fully vaccinated, the eagerness to come back to work is sporadic at best. Some organizations operating in specific industries in parts of the world have completely opened up and/or partially. However, one industry that hasn’t swung its doors wide open is IT.

As organizations contemplate having their workforce work from office, they are faced with two fundamental questions:

  1. What is best for the business?
  2. What do our employees want?

Simply put, the answer to both these questions is: flexibility.

Both, organizations and employees, need to be flexible in their approach to return to offices.

For organizations, empowering the workforce takes precedence. Giving employees the freedom to choose when, how and where they work is something both employees and organizations seem to agree on.

Coming back to work can be an emotional decision.

After working from home for over 15 months, returning to office can be an emotional decision. First – there is the concern for safety, as getting fully vaccinated is not the silver bullet we all thought it would be.

Employees are feeling anything from anticipation, excitement, happiness, hesitation to even fear while thinking about coming back to work.

One trend that has come to the fore is most employees are not interested in working in-office for five days a week, like we did before the pandemic.

Simultaneously, there are signs that few employees are charged up to return to work!

With emotions at play, it is imperative for organizations to give employees a voice in how, when and why they would like to come back to work.

A few reasons why giving employees a choice helps:

Forcing people back will force them out

According to the survey, job satisfaction is back to pre-pandemic heights, with 71% of those surveyed saying they were highly satisfied in their current position. However, over a third 36% say that they are very likely to quit their current job if forced to come back to office for five days a week as they used to.

Organizations and employees both need to be flexible.

A hybrid workforce is a happy workforce

The same survey sheds light on the fact that 72% of employees are willing to come back to work for 2-3 days in a week. An at-will hybrid model is currently the best opportunity for both organizations and employees to be productive and flexible.

A flexible workforce is productive

The flexibility of choosing when to work from office makes employees far more productive. Employees can prioritize work on the days they are at office, which leads to a healthier work-life balance. For organizations, offering a hybrid or flexible work options communicates trust in their workforce. Trust is the key ingredient “the secret” in a secret sauce recipe.

Covid-19 has proved that the human race can adapt, and we’ve evolved as a race in the past 18 months. Now going back to pre-pandemic days seems primitive.

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