The first key step is not to take too narrow a focus on technology.
Technology implementation by itself will not drive any transformation in the business.
It's important that organisations look at in a holistic way that looks across the
changes required from a business process, a business organisation [POV] and
cultural change, to ensure that the changes anticipated through the
investment are actually realised. From the organisations that we're working with,
those organisations who focus explicitly on the adoption phase of
programmes are those that are differentiating themselves in terms of return.
The other observation we'd have is what we're seeing is that in recent years there's been a lot
written over the need to improve integration between business and
technology. That debate is now moving on. The next evolution of that is
organisations who are successful are not just driving better integration between
their business and IT functions but they're putting the human at the centre
of that experience. And that human may be the employee, it may be the end consumer,
it may be the customer, it may be the supplier.
There are a number of factors behind this gap. The first is that organisations
historically haven't really focused on data as an asset within the organisation.
Therefore, clarity in relation to governance and management of data within
the organisations hasn't been clear. The recent discussions and effort around GDPR
at least have brought to the forefront discussions and awareness in relation to data.
The challenge now is to move those discussions from compliance into the
land of value-add activities that can be derived from the appropriate use of data.
The second factor is that, traditionally, both organisations and the
systems they've had to support them have been quite siloed. So the ability of
management to get an end-to-end view of either processes or data has been a
challenge. What we're noting over recent years is organisations invest
both in new business systems and supporting organisational structures
coupled with improved technology so that people can more readily
visualise data. We see significant improvements in that regard.
The third factor that has acted as a barrier to the more significant use of data
has been the absence of appropriate skills; the ability to attract and retain
the skills necessary to support the necessary data analytics activities are
challenging. And the other thing, I suppose, to face is that those skills
don't reside just within the IT function. There's a need to bolster business
functions whether that be finance, HR, operations or supply chain with those
skills also.
I suppose this goes back to some of the factors we highlighted as impacting and
progress to date, the most fundamental of which is ensuring that any investment in
technology is grounded with an appropriate data management framework
and governance. So rather than the temptation of running to invest heavily
in technology, a more appropriate step for a first step for organisations would
be to take the time out to understand the data lifecycle from the time the
organisation acquires that data to the time that it retires it or archives that data.