Forrester defines digital transformation as the journey of moving to a digital-first business model with the speed and nimbleness to change rapidly, exploit technology to create lean operations and differentiation, and free up internal resources across the enterprise to do more complex tasks.
Zhi Ying Barry, a senior analyst at Forrester, goes on to comment that while APAC firms understand that digital is a business imperative, many continue to struggle to articulate and measure digital’s impact on the organisation.
“More often than not, digital teams measure initiatives in isolation and fail to quantify how digital promotes agility and innovation, improves operational efficiency, and improves the customer experience, the top three drivers of digital transformation in APAC.”
Zhi Ying Barry
FutureCIO contacted Leslie Joseph, a principal analyst at Forrester, for a recap of where organisations in APAC are struggling during their transformation journey particularly as it relates to business processes.
What challenges do companies using face in driving their digital transformation?
Leslie Joseph: 'Digital transformation' as a phrase entered our lexicon in 2011. Yet, over a decade later, firms still struggle to become digitally mature. Forrester's data shows that as many as 75% of companies in 2021 were still either at the 'beginner' or 'intermediate' stages in their digital maturity.
"Companies that lag in their transformation tend to struggle with a lack of organisational alignment or commitment toward widespread transformation. They struggle with making customer obsession a guiding principle across their strategy and operations."
Leslie Joseph
Finally, they struggle with rigidity in their enterprise processes that deters innovation.
How do business processes need to evolve to ensure organisations can succeed in their digital transformation?
Leslie Joseph: It is no longer enough to be merely digitally mature; in the post-pandemic world, companies must also strive to be 'future fit'. Future Fitness is the new driver of growth.
Forrester's research identifies three key characteristics of 'future fit' companies' processes: adaptiveness, creativity, and resilience.
Business processes are key to realising these three characteristics, as a company's processes are a manifestation of its future fitness. However, years of standardisation and sameness have resulted in companies struggling with outdated, manual, or non-standard processes that are breeding grounds for inefficiencies and for lack of innovation.
That said, technology exists today to help companies take a more data-driven, innovation-centric view of their processes.
Where does business process intelligence play a role as organisations move toward hybrid cloud environments?
Leslie Joseph: Process intelligence tools have evolved significantly over the past decade. Today's process intelligence tools can capture and analyse detailed insights into business processes that answer broadly two questions.
First, 'how can I optimise an existing 'as-is' process for greater efficiency'. Secondly, 'how can I re-engineer and transform a process and infuse it with technology (such as automation, AI etc.)'. Both these goals benefit greatly from a data-driven approach to business processes.
What tools do they need to drive business process improvements continuously?
Leslie Joseph: Companies today have both traditional BPM tools as well as modern process mining, modelling, and documentation tools available at their disposal.
Moreover, the lines between these product categories are blurring as vendors push for more complete feature sets across that allow companies to analyse, model, optimise, reengineer, or automate processes within the same tool, or easily across tools.
Why is having the right business processes important in driving corporate sustainability?
Leslie Joseph: A company's business processes must allow for seamless and continuous flow from data to insight to action. As sustainability metrics become more important to companies, plugging these metrics into processes can enable managers and business leaders to better understand how to improve their processes and drive better sustainability-focused outcomes.
Technology, as mentioned above, has a key role to play in enabling process visibility and enrichment.
The Forrester vision report, The Future of Business is Sustainability, commented that becoming an environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable business demands a profound and fundamental change. Like digital transformation before it, you can’t just bolt it on.
Forrester says traditional firms willing to start their multiyear transformation journey toward sustainability must embrace three key principles:
- Bold leadership. Lead with a bold vision that aligns your business model to a unique purpose.
- Sustainable execution. Drive action by integrating sustainable execution deep into your organisation.
- Aligned stakeholders. Align internal and external stakeholders by delivering on your sustainability pledge.
