Data visibility core to business transformation

Many for­ward-think­ing organ­i­sa­tions, whether in response to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic or in a bid to up their game in com­pet­i­tive sec­tors, are embark­ing on some form of busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion. Right now, this aligns with dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, because inno­va­tions in IT, as well as data vis­i­bil­i­ty, are core to a suc­cess­ful busi­ness strat­e­gy.

The shift to online ser­vices and dig­i­tal prod­ucts, as well as empow­er­ing IT depart­ments to pro­vide them, has been pal­pa­ble over the last 18 months. CEOs now see CTOs and CIOs as their pri­ma­ry part­ners in dri­ving inno­va­tion. In the process, those head­ing up IT depart­ments must prove their busi­ness and oper­a­tional val­ue and worth through their tech­nol­o­gy invest­ments.

“Busi­ness­es are chang­ing how they oper­ate. Many organ­i­sa­tions can now see most of their busi­ness dig­i­tal­ly. The only thing that is com­pat­i­ble through­out the busi­ness is data,” says Mark Woods, chief tech­ni­cal advis­er for Europe, Mid­dle East and Africa at Splunk. “There is now a real dri­ve to increase vis­i­bil­i­ty, not just how you resolve indi­vid­ual prob­lems, but how you start to under­stand your busi­ness end-to-end.”

The issue with busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion is that organ­i­sa­tions have to oper­ate and change at the same time. Many in finance, health­care, and oth­er more tra­di­tion­al sec­tors, also have lega­cy IT sys­tems they must con­tin­ue to work with. Both these fac­tors can lead to more siloed data as ele­ments of an organ­i­sa­tion con­tin­ue to dig­i­talise, not less. It’s a conun­drum that some are hav­ing to rec­on­cile.

“We’ve tak­en on a huge­ly ambi­tious job to build 25m full fibre broad­band con­nec­tions. But in order to ful­fil this by 2026, we have to auto­mate. We are tak­ing process­es that were his­tor­i­cal­ly paper-based and con­vert­ing those into tablet and app-based solu­tions. Dig­i­tal and data is becom­ing a neces­si­ty if you want the busi­ness out­comes to hap­pen at the pace they need to,” says Col­in Lees, chief tech­nol­o­gy and infor­ma­tion offi­cer at Open­reach.

Data is the new oil in business transformation

Data, now, is being used for gov­er­nance and organ­i­sa­tion­al con­trol, rather than pure­ly for busi­ness process­es, a shift that is enrich­ing deci­sion-mak­ing. Organ­i­sa­tions are also using greater amounts of exter­nal data to inform strate­gies. IT can no longer be in the back office.

“Tra­di­tion­al banks have come to a point now where, we’ve all got dig­i­tal prod­ucts, but are we run­ning dig­i­tal banks? Have we digi­tised every­thing end-to-end, that’s the next step in the jour­ney. It’s a change from a cul­tur­al per­spec­tive. It effects how you work and what you work on,” says Gavin Munroe, glob­al chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer for wealth and per­son­al bank­ing at HSBC.

There in lies the rub, busi­ness and organ­i­sa­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion, with informed data at the core, and at scale, is a sig­nif­i­cant project that can’t be solved with a new app, wid­get or a short-term project from the IT depart­ment. How­ev­er, organ­i­sa­tions are demand­ing change and at pace.

“The chal­lenge is the invest­ment. It is very easy to jus­ti­fy mon­ey for say prod­uct X needs to move to dig­i­tal so it will be bet­ter. To say to a busi­ness, we need to under­stand how the organ­i­sa­tion oper­ates and how that change affects us end-to-end is a big­ger issue, it may get nods around the board­room, but then becomes very chal­leng­ing to put that in as a busi­ness case,” says Woods.

How­ev­er, the poten­tial for cloud-dri­ven solu­tions and end-to-end vis­i­bil­i­ty, where data across an organ­i­sa­tion pro­vides valu­able insights dri­ving pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, prof­itabil­i­ty, bet­ter ser­vices, oper­a­tions and strat­e­gy is well known. It helps that IT solu­tions have also been the sav­iour for some organ­i­sa­tions dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

“The pan­dem­ic has giv­en us absolute focus. A lot of the suc­cess has come from the new tech we’ve invest­ed in, where it’s been built on cloud it’s been fan­tas­tic,” says Mark Reynolds, inter­im chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at NHS Dig­i­tal. For instance, the NHS web­site had an esti­mat­ed 873m vis­its in 2020, with some of the high­est num­ber of views ever, while the NHS App has seen a 912% increase in users.

Reynolds adds: “The issue is can we demon­strate fur­ther val­ue through dig­i­tal ser­vices. As dig­i­tal pro­fes­sion­als I think we need to shout out about fix­ing the things that are unseen, because you tend to depend on them in extrem­is.”

Data and digital now centre stage
for operations

There’s no doubt that the pan­dem­ic has accel­er­at­ed the dig­i­tal roadmap for many organ­i­sa­tions. It has empha­sised the impor­tance of being more agile, the push for short-term change, and the long-term need to trans­form organ­i­sa­tions for the bet­ter. For some, it has allowed them to final­ly put dig­i­tal and data capa­bil­i­ties at the core of their oper­a­tions.

“The oppor­tu­ni­ty is that a lot of cus­tomers have moved to dig­i­tal that weren’t there before. The pan­dem­ic has bro­ken down bar­ri­ers. It is up to us to keep them on dig­i­tal. We’ve tak­en our stand­alone dig­i­tal divi­sion and embed­ded it into our busi­ness to be one team,” says Munroe. “We now need to fig­ure out how to use data to engage with our cus­tomer in dif­fer­ent ways. We want to move to a more proac­tive engage­ment with the cus­tomer. For that we are try­ing to define the use cas­es. Open bank­ing is also dri­ving this.”

The fact is when data vis­i­bil­i­ty is at the core of an oper­a­tion it allows organi- sations to dri­ve real busi­ness change. Louise Bunting, chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer of Yon­dr Group, adds: “For us the chal­lenges are not what you can achieve tech­ni­cal­ly, it is what your bound­aries are cre­ative­ly. And that mix of func­tion­al and tech­ni­cal skills is very hard to find in peo­ple; that per­son in the mid­dle is also very hard to recruit and retain because they are uni­corns.”

Woods says: “The next trans­for­ma­tion is going to be a data trans­for­ma­tion. Data can be lever­aged in new ways that busi­ness­es have not even thought about yet. This is where true rev­o­lu­tion is like­ly to occur.”

The next 18 months there­fore offers many pos­si­bil­i­ties oppor­tu­ni­ties. But, it will depend on hav­ing the right peo­ple, sys­tems and tech­nol­o­gy in place.

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