technology

Analysis

Future of global business services

Enterprise-wide digital transformation

What trends and best practices should shared services and functional leaders be considering as they think about the evolution of their operating model? What role might global business services constructs play in enabling digital transformation across the enterprise? Explore perspectives on these questions and other hot topics via our report and a series of videos featuring leaders who are working with some of the world’s largest companies to help anticipate and bring about the future of shared services models.

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Hear directly from those on the front lines of navigating the future of global business and shared services models.

Digital isn’t a technology. It’s a strategy.

Cross-functional and global organizational models such as global business services (GBS) are becoming more relevant in fostering and enabling enterprise-wide change. GBS provides improved access to cross-functional data, draws talent from dispersed business units and regions, and shifts focus to customer service and continuous improvement. This creates an ideal position from which to incubate new ideas and lead digital business transformation, which is about having:

  • The right strategy
  • Appropriate processes and governance
  • A different kind of talent and culture to support becoming digital
  • And, of course, technology

Why digital?

The world is changing so dramatically that real-time, customized experiences with predictive insights at unparalleled speed are becoming the norm. To what end? The goal is to drive operating costs down to better fuel and sustain growth. Today, winners and losers are differentiated by their ability to thrive in uncertainty while balancing costs and growth.

As humans, we’ve been generating insights from our experiences and information throughout our history. What has changed is the speed at which the underlying assumptions of businesses are being threatened...creating a need for agility and decision-making at unprecedented speeds.

Growing competition and consumer power have eroded traditional product-based advantages, forcing companies to shift to a new battlefield: experience. This requires integration across the enterprise to demonstrate value at every touchpoint with both customers and employees, delivering an experience that’s personalized yet consistent—no matter where or how we access it.

Who can “make digital happen?”

The world around us is becoming more intuitive. Yet most organizations continue to be burdened by structures and practices that were developed more than a hundred years ago. Deloitte, in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review, conducted a study on digital maturity, in which almost 50 percent of the executives interviewed felt they didn’t have the right structure or practices to achieve digital maturity.

How does an organization attain digital maturity? What data do we need to effect change? Where is the data? Who in the organization, or outside of it, has the vision and capabilities to engineer a drive toward digital maturity? The answers are out there.

Many organizations successfully pursuing digital maturity leverage GBS or GBS-like models. Might GBS grow from “providing them what they ask for” to being a core business element, delivering proactive insights, enabling a consistent experience for end customers, providing a testing ground for innovation, and being a strategic asset to enable the digital ecosystem?

The short answer is: Yes!

(And our latest global shared services survey reveals this is beginning to happen.)

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Three impact areas of digital:

Experience

  • Personalization
  • Accessibility
  • Collaboration/engagement

Insights

  • Data/information availability
  • Proactive decision making
  • Creativity/innovation

Speed

  • Agility 
  • Standardization and integration
  • Automation

How to make it happen

It’s hard to enable digital for the enterprise without embracing digital within GBS. Traditional investments in technology have focused on solving specific problems or enhancing a given function. Since digital is about looking at the big picture and embracing the chance to rethink everything, it’s vital to assess and understand your GBS as well as the broader organization’s digital maturity and readiness for taking the next steps. It’s important to carefully assess maturity across four key elements, as each relates to the three impact areas discussed earlier, to determine where you are today, where you want to be, and the actions needed to get there. Reflecting on and placing your “today” and “tomorrow” on the maturity spectrum is critical in determining the kind of journey to undertake and the role GBS could play―incubator, center of excellence (CoE), or full-service provider.

Embracing digital is an opportunity for accelerated performance with a new way of thinking. This can’t be achieved without widespread adoption and openness to change. Most GBS organizations successfully driving enterprise-wide digital transformation are the ones that have defined digital enablement as a critical element of their vision. They align to a broader organizational vision with a clear strategy for enablement that is communicated and understood, typically driven top down and supported by grassroots campaigns with clear measures of success.

Leading GBS organizations are able to employ technology to enhance customer experience and provide real-time insights with speed on a consistent basis. These GBS organizations need to have strategic alignment and partnership with the IT function to jointly determine viability of various technology solutions and weigh risks and benefits. Customers want multiple options and channels available to interact with GBS, including social media, mobile, apps, and tablet devices. Intuitive customer interfaces, powered by the latest in artificial intelligence as well as structured and quality data, can quickly and visually showcase business performance.

What should the GBS talent pool and culture of tomorrow look like to reimagine new operating models? It starts with a culture that fosters and rewards innovation and experimentation, puts the customer at the heart of design, and rewards team and individual performance. The GBS workforce of the future will be trained and skilled in deriving insights from data versus transaction processing. At predicting customer needs versus waiting to be told. At changing the “hearts and minds” of its customers (internal and external). These GBS organizations are building highly collaborative and cross-functional groups that can deploy or redeploy talent irrespective of location and business. These groups serve as SWAT teams that can address key issues and implement change, which makes them the obvious hotbed for incubation of digital innovation.

Leading GBS organizations at the forefront of driving digital transformation have formal mechanisms in place to engage users and customers frequently in jointly identifying and validating business issues and priorities. They have formal mechanisms for governing their augmented human-digital workforce with near real-time performance measurement capabilities. They have tightly aligned partnerships between GBS, IT, and individual business units, with clear decision rights. They have a broad view of their end-to-end processes, which are highly automated and standardized with rigorous continuous improvement and integration capabilities. It’s also worth noticing that governance in high-performing organizations is breaking traditional silos, with joint or matrix ownership of decisions and tighter cross-functional teaming becoming the norm. This requires a fundamentally different talent and rewards model.

What does the journey look like?

Becoming “digital” is about achieving a level of exponential connection that can shape or reshape every aspect of business and operations. Leading GBS organizations embrace the challenge as an opportunity. They’re clear about the characteristics of the digital impact they need to create. By identifying the right level of maturity and enabling movement in that direction, they will ultimately create capacity to do “more with less” and drive down operating costs to reinvest in growth.

Digital operating models of high-performing GBS organizations lower operating costs to fuel and sustain growth. It’s a business transformation journey that requires answering some hard questions as part of deliberate self-reflection.

You must consider where you are today and where you’d like to go. And this must align with the overall vision and strategy of your company.

Let's talk

Kort Syverson
Principal
Global Business Services
ksyverson@deloitte.com
+1 213 553 1275

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