COVID-19 has created massive disruption across industries on a global, unprecedented scale. Measures designed to limit the spread of the virus upended the established rules of business and accelerated digital adoption levels across the region, at both the organisational and individual levels.
Research by Google, Temasek, and Bain found COVID-19 to have driven a permanent increase in digital adoption levels across Southeast Asia, home to some of Asia Pacific’s largest and fastest-growing internet economies. Forty million new users in Southeast Asia came online for the first time in 2020. Putting things in perspective, a total of 100 million new online users were registered between 2015 and 2019.
With customer interactions more likely than ever to be digital in nature, businesses have responded in turn, adopting digital-first strategies and practices to remain competitive.
Digital Transformation Isn’t Straightforward
Having an effective digital transformation strategy in place has turned into one of the most vital functions for businesses at this time, being essential to propel them into the digital age of growth. Organisations’ risk much, including long-term survivability, by not digitalising.
According to McKinsey, digitalisation has become a business imperative in the post-pandemic reality, with the most successful companies today leveraging technological capabilities to stay ahead of the curve.
However, business leaders often face difficulties in getting the workforce to recognise, accept, and meaningfully adopt any kind of change. A common reason behind this challenge is that business transformation programs are often conceptualised by external management consultants, and thereafter simply fed down the chain of command for execution.
The working teams, not being consulted or involved in the strategizing and planning stages, naturally experience challenges incorporating changes in the course of their work.
At the management level, the introduction of new procedures may overhaul established organisational hierarchies. It is human nature for people at the top of these hierarchies to feel intimidated, and thus react in a hostile manner. At times, they might even overrule intended changes coming their way, with ongoing transformation programs losing their purpose as a result.
Compounding the issue, the decentralised nature of today’s organisations and the increasing adoption of digital platforms means that processes in an organisation are more often than not connected, making digital transformation programs even more challenging.
This means that performing a simple upgrade to an IT system could spark a chain reaction that causes numerous seemingly unrelated business processes to stop working as intended.
This is where adopting a Business Process Management (BPM) approach can help facilitate and accelerate business transformation programs.
More effective digital transformation via BPM
The core philosophy behind the BPM approach is that it revolves around structuring working processes and breaking it down into piecemeal bits of information that can be digested quickly and easily.
This enables decision-makers to communicate the rationale more easily behind the transformation program, facilitating its acceptance and securing support among working personnel.
Paramount to success is for any change to be supported and proactively adopted from the top-down. To avoid alienating management personnel, business leaders could explore having a transformation working group report into the top levels of the organisation as part of their BPM approach, ensuring that any change is adequately discussed, assessed, and accepted.
By analysing processes at every level of the organisation, BPM approaches can also provide insights into gaps between current, accepted ways of working, and where the company is looking to move towards.
The overarching system, as mentioned above, has everything to do with the challenge of persuading people at all levels to make changes that are aligned with the direction that the organisation wants to grow in.
On an operational level, the structuring of working processes that is part of every BPM approach helps to clearly illustrate the relationship between each platform or process.
This reduces the complexity involved in corrective measures, enabling the root cause of any issues that may arise from digital transformation to be identified and resolved.
An example of an organisation that had registered success in digital transformation via a BPM approach is the UK-based Standard Chartered Bank. The bank implemented a BPM initiative to identify and streamline processes between its business and IT functions, integrating disparate IT systems which provided real-time visibility of business performance and a central view on customer data.
This provided a boost to overall business excellence by enabling the bank’s relationship managers to spend more time in direct contact with their customers instead of trying to find the right data for the right customer to engage in the right actions.
Conclusion
Today, there is no doubt that digital transformation does not exist in a vacuum and will always be a part of a larger business transformation. Experience tells us that success can be driven by a transformation group consisting of employees – both management and working-level – across all levels of the organisation as part of a BPM initiative to effectively transform the business for a digital-first reality.
Organisations that have enjoyed the most success in their transformation efforts typically have in place a single management system that undergirds all strategies, operational models, processes/systems, roles, risks, providing decision-makers with visibility around and how each of these aspects is related and have an impact on each other.
