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GBS Excelleration – 5 Essential Digital Business Capabilities

By Martijn Geerling, Vin Kumar, and Paul Morrison

May 3, 2021

Season 1, Episode 22

Host Martijn Geerling talks with Paul Morrison, Principal and Digital Enablement Transformation Practice leader and Vin Kumar, Principal and Digital Finance and Global Business Services Advisory Practice leader about how digital transformation is changing the way global business services organizations operate, and how they can use technology to further optimize processes, reduce manual labor, and provide greater strategic value to their companies.

Show Notes

Tune in to this episode of the Business Excelleration Podcast—hosted by The Hackett Group, a global leader in defining and enabling world-class performance. Hearing from the top experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours, and celebrate milestones, this episode focuses in on finance and the CFO Agenda for 2021. How can finance work to improve the strategic business advisory role and analytic modeling capabilities? Learn the importance of understanding and establishing what a business needs from finance, and then develop processes around these requirements.

Welcome to this episode of the Business Excelleration Podcast, a podcast where The Hackett Group shares their latest information, research, and tips for the journey to world class performance. In this episode, host Martijn Geerling chats with Paul and Van/Fin about the role of accelerating and utilizing digital technology—they dive into 5 essential digital capabilities for GBS groups to transform.

What does The Hackett Group mean by digital Excelleration? Digital transformation is not new, it is at the top of the business agenda from a management focus. This captures a changing mindset around the digital landscape—from speed, to focus, to a perceived need of having a clear view.

Why should GBS leaders care about this? Hear from these professionals about three things to consider. First, they touch on optimizing the process from the perspective of taking out manual labor and who is best positioned to do this. Second, they chat about the next level of optimization having to come through technology and automation. Third, they emphasize this will be an essential issue for companies if they don’t adopt digital methods and accelerate its use. If companies do not enable themselves digitally, their existence in the enterprise will be compromised. The Heckett Group has observed that some of the digital journey is customized, but large portions are the same for many, so you do not need to reinvent the digital wheel completely. How should organizations think about digital as it relates to technology? Listen as they discuss the 3 core groups of technology, along with the cost to customize and upgrade.

What are the essential digital business capabilities and how do you think through a digital model? Learn as they explain the framework behind this and what the five central components of the digital journey are— digital engagement, digital workforce and organization, digital service optimization, digital ecosystems, and analytics driven business insights. These components are essential for companies to experience and they dive deeper into the details of a few of these.

In looking at the new digital engagement in GBS organizations, these professionals discuss the customer centric focus and objective. Learn about providing a customized service at scale through using different sets of tools – service management, virtual assistant, and micro apps. They chat about the customer experience and ease of use in deploying these technologies, along with how they inform developing functionality, ideas, and techniques. Moving to the digital workforce and organization, they express the heightened need to digitize due to pandemic, and their perspective on what’s happening with GBS organizations as a whole. There are rapid collaborative technologies in the new digital environment, along with massive changes from manual to automated driven work. Learn about the role of IT in defining the roadmap and infrastructure for companies.

The conversation wraps up as they share the key steps GBS leaders need to take to fast track their journey in the digital space. Start thinking about and building a map. Funding this role and the center of excellence for your company can help provide a clear flow of idea-to-value process. Make an assessment as to whether you want to be a forefront leader, or a follower, in this process.

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