Enhancing Decision Velocity for the C-Suite
In today’s high-speed digital arena, C-suite leaders grapple with a flood of software solutions, each claiming to be the linchpin for operational efficiency and strategic insight. Often overlooked is the vital synergy between applications within this digital deluge. The fusion of diverse applications doesn’t just offer untapped potential; it holds the key to propelling businesses into new realms of innovation and competitive advantage. Unlocking this value demands a shift in mindset—a call to embrace a broader perspective.
Moreover, the soaring popularity of FinTech and Insurtech lies in their seamless amalgamation of disparate requirements into one unified process, a level of integration achievable for any industry or function. This article delves into these pivotal intersections, illustrating how integrations not only streamline processes but also forge a unified business environment that transcends the individual contributions of each component.
1. Enabling Cross-Application Data Flow
Integrated process management across your diverse applications facilitates smooth data sharing among different software solutions. This integration eradicates data silos, enabling relevant and timely data to circulate freely.
As a result, the most accurate and up-to-date information becomes instantly accessible to those who need it. This immediate access not only supports comprehensive analysis but also fosters more informed decision-making based on the latest data sets. By promoting data exchange, we effectively eliminate data silos, ensuring timely accessibility and enhancing the quality of decision-making.
2. Automating Cross Application Data Flow
Currently, you dedicate a significant amount of time each month to managing related administrative tasks, consolidating scattered pieces of valuable information into cohesive reports or workflows for control and management activities. This arises from information being dispersed across various applications or ecosystems, requiring transformation to turn it into usable data.
With latest technologies, these processes can become repeatable and auditable. Joining applications, through end-to-end management processes, reduces manual handoffs and the potential for errors.
Interconnecting different applications allows for the automation of processes spanning multiple departments or functional areas, either partially or fully, with or without human intervention. By identifying and prioritizing data flows burdened by excessive friction, such as those reliant on spreadsheets or data re-entry, more time can gradually be freed for other activities.
Essentially, this redefines the time dynamics associated with preparing reports and using them for decision support, control functions, and management activities. This results in improved decision-making and frees up time, leading to enhanced work-life balance and increased confidence in the final qualitative and quantitative outputs submitted to and from recipients. Replicating resultant processes to your overseas entities is a productivity multiplier, recognising that some modified or additional steps might be required for purposes of localisation.
3. Contextual Actionable Reporting @Anywhere @Anytime
Consolidating data from multiple sources provides more comprehensive insights than siloed analytics. Recent technologies enable actionable workflows and contextual reports to drive timelier decisions.
Integrations overcome delayed analytics from month-end processes. They also reduce your extensive data transformation activities, instead tailoring processes to deliver relevant information.
Key benefits include, a) enhancing existing processes; b) facilitating new analytics opportunities; c) achieving a broader perspective beyond current roles. While familiarity within roles brings value, an interconnected outlook engages employees more deeply. This broader thinking requires evolving organizational structures (more below).
4. Simpler Process Interactions. Sophisticated Execution
Once processes are established, regular iterations allow the process owner to further streamline high-level process execution by the user without losing quality of information, recognizing that other complexities are being automatically managed in the background.
It’s crucial to recognize the roles of both the process owner(s) and the user, with the former defining each possible scenario step and the latter engaging with the system at a practical level, as per the process owner’s requirements. As process execution is ultra-granular, then machine learning can be introduced into any process as another additional step, recognising that algorithms might be made by you, or be leveraged from existing 3rd party providers. Today, many organisations are unable to introduce machine learning as they first need to address the timeliness, granularity, and quality of data flows.
While the concept of process owner and executor has always existed, modern technologies simplify execution from a practical perspective, as well as reducing the cost of deployment, due to processes being purpose-designed without superfluous functionality.
As a result, processes can be organized and deployed as 1,2,3 or 3,2,1, which is just a simple term to explain deployment options and to provide more colour into the “how”. For example, a 1,2,3 process may be organized by an entity to produce a final reporting pack for submission ie stage 3 to the Head Office, where the process logic and workflows to achieve the completion of packs are owned within the reporting entity. On the other hand, a 3,2,1 process is deployed by the head office to an entity, with the ongoing logic defined and controlled by the head office.
The latter 321 process can be useful in managing more complex scenarios from a head office or regional centre of excellence, particularly where specialist expertise, such as an accounting specialty or other specific skill set eg insurance knowledge, is not available to the level required within each operating entity.
5. Holistic, Transactional Governance, and Compliance
Many organizations have struggled to achieve proactive ongoing checks and balances, primarily due to operational time constraints. However, as process technologies have advanced, governance and compliance can now be more seamlessly integrated at various levels, encompassing both transactional and holistic levels.
At the transactional level, controls can ensure approved behaviour, preventing the exceeding or abuse of budgets or policies. Holistically, checks and balances compare transactions to identify anomalies or data outliers. The ultra-granular design ensures that processes achieve your expectation.
Furthermore, cybersecurity and privacy considerations are imperative in every process. In recent years, data management has become even more critical, especially concerning established and emerging rules relating to cross-border data transfers.
6. Strategically Focused IT Spend
Modern organizations are seeking to maximize the impact of their expenditures. While packaged software offers numerous benefits, it inherently represents a compromise when deployed within an organization, as its feature sets must accommodate a wide range of possible scenarios. This often necessitates aligning the organization’s existing operational requirements with the designed functionality of the packaged system, rather than vice versa.
Over the years, significant business system enhancement & deployment hours have been invested by your teams, often resulting in the squeezing of key data tags into systems using any available field type.
Leveraging this data at a later stage can be challenging, particularly as transactions progress across sub-systems, potentially leaving behind other chunks of essential supporting data beyond those key required elements which are transferred to the next application in the process. This loss of supporting information at each stage exacerbates data transformation. It is not simply about data access, but more about the multiple transformations required to gain critical valuable insights.
Modern process technologies are able to leverage your existing investments, enabling more efficient operations with lower total cost of ownership. However, it’s crucial to emphasize the need for a trusted System of Record in every process, one that can in fact be trusted by key stakeholders such as auditors.
7. Adaptability, Scalability and Flexibility
Modern process technologies can seamlessly adapt and scale with your business needs, accommodating growth and changes without necessitating major overhauls. A cohesive design eliminates the workforce training and IT overhead required when independent systems demand individual expansion.
These process technologies are finely tuned to your specific environment, containing no excess functionality, being lightweight, easily deployable, and quick to execute due to their smaller size. Moreover, they present a reduced threat vector for privacy and cybersecurity, while also being easier to maintain and debug due to there being less code.
However, at the same time, companies will have to adapt to manage processes at this more granular level, which will usefully put more transparency and accountability on to the table. In the past too much emphasis has been put on managers digesting the more complex data points only prior to key stakeholder meetings, and not proactively as challenges arise.
8. Driving Competitive Advantage and Business Performance
Some limited examples of how latest technologies have been deployed so far:-
a. Data Enrichment & Data Management: a)The ability toinclude additional useful information in transactions, aiding subsequent backtracking and audit. This can be achieved by incorporating source ledger details during allocations to segments and/or business units, along with explanations for how allocated numbers have been calculated; b) the ability to see where and how a transaction is being processed at data field level (crucial for overseas data transfers), according to relevant regulatory rules; c) the ability to tightly manage inter and intra domain process flows to ensure that actions are signed off at each stage and data management to prevent data leakage.
b. Streamlined Processes: Automated progression of transactions over the lifecycle of a transaction / contract as it travels to and from your other functional domains. For instance, contracts can be broken down into underlying accounting entries over their lifecycle, with key future events triggering ongoing workflows and overall operational model refinement. The power of such technologies is illustrated in FinTech and Insurtech, where operational and compliance checks are fully baked into a process over a contracts lifecycle, with any deviations from a contract being addressed immediately. Reporting can be at multiple levels; segment, transaction and contract.
c. Data Transparency: Delivery of reconciliations for balance sheet movements in both local and reporting currency (+ language), facilitating direct discussions between operating units / head office, with the ability to toggle making them more efficient and fruitful.
d. Broader & More Complete Participation: Facilitation of connected processes to make sure that connected actions take place. For example, such as ensuring that procured assets are amortized cf written off, insured based on specifics of the asset, and considered within the context of sustainability, cybersecurity and privacy. HR related processes deployed as employee self-service as a single point of contact for all related activities, including the sharing of news, gamifications and processes that extend the effectiveness of employee benefits where appropriate with controls: automatic e-meal vouchers, e-taxis home etc
e. Protecting Cash: Stronger payment authorisation processes for higher value payments such as bonus payments, larger procurement expenditures, large cash transfers, can be put in place over and above your standard sign off processes to protect against Business Process Compromise, where threat actors seek to divert funds to bank accounts under their control. Capex related processes can be extended to provide more justification context in any sign off, plus may include other critical factors; for example whether a building is needing modifications to enable asset installation etc.
f. Progressive Automation: This can lead to partial or fully automated designs that are trusted (processing steps are transparent), repeatable and auditable. Designs can be iterative or full blown. Consider Financial Consolidation: the system can auto explain variances at entity or consolidated level with supporting contextual actionable documentation, to the level of materiality required by the process owner. Segmental analysis can become automated with independent P&L and Balance Sheets etc, recognising that similar appropriately modified processes can be utilised for multi-year sustainability reporting and project prioritisation.
g. Staff Onboarding / Development / Retention: Processes for onboarding can be automated to ensure that all required employment steps are completed. API’s can be put into place to established career assessment and progression bodies. Retention programs can minimise churn.
h. Human Resources meet Cybersecurity / Privacy: Re-enforcement processes can be put into place on a regular basis. For example, the ability to proactively re-enforce staff education of best cybersecurity practice, and to have some form of measurement for check and balance purposes, that there has in fact been appropriate staff engagement with the process.
i. Process Simulations: These allow competing or complementary scenarios to be tested. These might also be used to test actionable contextual workflows and alerts using last year’s data to set process parameters ie how many alerts are being produced by the system. Today, many quantitative markers are not managed, but it would be useful to do so to drive efficiency; ie cost per transaction, time for process execution etc.
j. Complex Tasks, Complex Processes, Specialist Processes: The examples above are some generic examples of how latest process technologies have been utilised already to drive value. To summarise the capabilities of modern technologies at a higher level, they can be used to manage complex tasks undertaken by a few staff eg lease management, bond management, and also complex processes that are managed / touched-on by many staff eg FP&A. Specialist processes can address specific process design.
9. Innovation at Data Intersections
The integration points between your applications can serve as fertile ground for innovation, where unique combinations of data and functionality spark new ideas. Leveraging processes across applications creates fresh opportunities for value creation, made possible by broader access to data.
An important takeaway here, is that it could be broader access to other applications and ecosystems that can help you drive value creation; for example it might mean taking into account your other ecosystems that manage transportation costs, Open Banking API’s, Third Party Employment Checks, Credit Checks etc.
Another example of how activity between domains can be compacted / condensed is illustrated by 8 b) above. In this case contract management is simultaneously meeting all / most of the goals of operations, finance and compliance. As processes become more sophisticated and multi-faceted ie operations / finance / compliance etc, it begins to expose the rigidity of existing organisational structures.
10. The Evolution of Organisational Structure
As interconnectivity increases, rigid organizational silos would logically give way to agile, team-based structures organized around business capabilities rather than functional domains. However, whilst one might see an end point that works, one needs to consider transitions from where we are today, particularly as organisations are already “full on” and absorbed in daily operations.
No one has figured this out how organisational structures should be changed, but it stands to reason that if processes are being simplified across functional areas that there is an opportunity to think differently.
Cross-functional teams facilitate greater collaboration and information sharing. For example, an analytics team with diverse expertise can drive broader more insightful data analysis and reduce duplication of effort. Or a team can optimize a specific process from end-to-end as illustrated in FinTech and Insurtech above.
Also think broadly; for example consider the intersection of HR and other applications. This could see the management of HR resourcing levels being more regularly fine-tuned using current / rolling data points, based on operational needs. This makes a process dynamic, ie consider staff redeployment, to meet a broader set of operational objectives. Of course, this approach applies to other single or multiple data intersection points to drive value creation.
Development teams should also increasingly blend business and technical skills to design solutions tailored to business needs.
A culture of experimentation and continuous learning is critical as technologies rapidly advance. While organization-wide shifts may be risky, starting with smaller pilot teams can provide valuable lessons.
The right models and mindsets are key to unlocking integration’s full potential. With deliberate leadership and change management, companies can reorient for interconnectivity.
Conclusion: The Future is Interconnected
In today’s digital world, the ability to rapidly adapt is the only sustainable competitive advantage. Companies that embrace an interconnected mindset and prioritize integration will future-proof their organizations for the accelerating changes ahead. Integration is not a one-time project but an ongoing strategic imperative. It’s time for C-suite leaders to reimagine their operating models and remove transactional friction to drive value creation.
Actionable Recommendations
#1 Prioritize Integration Initiatives: Begin by conducting a thorough audit of existing applications and identify key areas where integration can streamline operations and data flow. Prioritize integration initiatives based on their potential impact on decision-making processes and overall business outcomes. Recognise that work can be replicated to other entities, and any time freed can be used to drive more time saving.
#2 Establish Cross-Functional Integration Teams: When looking at project management, form cross-functional teams comprising of members from IT, operations, finance, and other relevant business domain units to drive the integration process. Encourage collaborative problem-solving and ensure that the integration strategy aligns with broader business goals. Project team representation and system integrations are areas that are typically overlooked and does cause deliverables to fail or resultant processes not being fully fit for purpose. Recognise that different levels of data integration can be achieved, thus providing proof of concepts that deliver immediate value in the early stages. Some corporates start at this stage, and then iterate to the required level of integration.
#3 Invest in Change Management and Training: Recognize that successful integration requires organisational change. Allocate resources for change management training to ensure that employees understand the benefits of what the project aims to achieve and are equipped to adapt to new processes and technologies. The more ambitious a digital enablement project, the deeper the change.
#4 Seek Vendor Expertise and Experience: When selecting software vendors for integration solutions, prioritize those with proven expertise in your specific industry or domain. Look for vendors who understand the unique challenges and opportunities within your sector and have a track record of successful integrations. Identify critical areas where vendors must have expertise. Note that many vendors have the technologies to deliver an end result, so it really come down to the “how” ie domain expertise, and changes made to their solutions to handle typical industry challenges.
#5 Implement Pilot Programs: Consider initiating smaller-scale pilot programs to test integration strategies before full-scale implementation. Pilot programs can provide valuable insights, allowing for adjustments and refinements before broader deployment.
#6 Measure and Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Establish clear KPIs related to the integration process, such as improved decision velocity, reduced data silos, and enhanced operational efficiency. Regularly monitor these KPIs to track the impact of integration efforts and make data-driven adjustments as needed. Recognise that sometimes, it will be hard to justify improvements in cases where mindsets are not focused or the objective is new ie no KPI’s currently exist, from which to measure improvements. This does happen a great deal, where a projects seems to make so much sense, but there are no metrics to support it, meaning that some justification work is required pre-sign off.
#7 Foster a Culture of Experimentation and Continuous Improvement: Encourage teams to experiment with new integrated processes and technologies. Create a culture that supports learning from both successes and failures, enabling continuous improvement and innovation. Skunk works run by the right people are a great enabler.
#8 Stay Informed About Emerging Technologies: Allocate resources for staying informed about emerging technologies, such as machine learning, and their potential applications for further enhancing integrated workflows and decision-making processes. Understand how these new technologies can be added to a process. Recognise that sometimes it is all about finding a partner to work through the options with, when technologies are new eg generative AI, to reach a go / no go decision point. Regarding AI, once processes are deployed on an ultra-granular basis it is easier to add AI; this includes top down AI, bottom up AI, generative AI, and also incorporating established AI algorithms from industry heavyweights.
#9 Develop a Clear Governance Framework: Establish governance protocols to ensure that each process adheres to compliance and security standards. This includes outlining responsibilities for data management in country and cross border transfers, privacy considerations, and cybersecurity best practices.
#10 Create a Roadmap for Continuous Improvement: Develop a roadmap that outlines the ongoing process of integration, emphasizing that integration is not a one-time event but an ongoing strategic initiative. This should include plans for future system updates (note that vendors are constantly changing strategies that may impact your integrations), new integrations, and evolving business needs. Modern day systems will support iterative steps, where confidence in execution can drive further steps towards greater execution simplification ie deeper automation. Use of spreadsheets is a good one to highlight. Some organisations engineer them out, whilst other want to keep them, BUT with the addition of integrity controls. This is also an example where iterations might move through stages to end in tight integration.
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