The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned a new reality for society, particularly in the way people work and go about their everyday routines. In 2020, the government imposed broad social limitations, banning almost all physical activity in a variety of industries, notably tourism and transportation. As a result, this new reality creates a gap for disruption for enterprises, forcing them to innovate with hybrid breakthroughs and use technology to ‘juggle’ operations that were previously done offline to online.
With this major shift in work culture, it’s no surprise that an increasing number of businesses are pivoting to focus on developing their business digitalization in order to survive and accelerate market share. This turnaround in growth must, of course, be complemented by improved customer experience, which is touted as one of the primary drivers of digital transformation. However, in order to construct a genuinely customer-centric business, they must also build a Connected Enterprise.
Adrian Clamp, Global Head of Connected Enterprise (Digital Transformation) KPMG, shared interesting insights regarding why Connected Enterprise holds an important factor in constructing maximum customer-centricity for customers during the keynote session of the CTI IT Infrastructure Summit 2022, which was held on Thursday, March 10, 2022.
What Is Connected Enterprise?
Connected Enterprise is a process of building an enterprise that is focused on the customer for a faster business model, where people, data, and technology may connect later in the process to raise the degree of performance that is oriented to the customer.
“Connected Enterprise is an excellent sort of digital transformation for making business models more customer-centric. This strategy connects all processes, functions, and interactions across divisions in a company, and focuses all of these components on meeting customer needs, producing additional business value, and, of course, driving sustainable development,” Adrian remarked during his keynote presentation.
Customer-Centricity Drives Connected Enterprise
Adrian emphasized in this keynote speech that one of the drivers for developing a Connected Enterprise is a focus on customers or customer-centricity. According to KPMG findings presented to IT Summit attendees, increasing the quality of customer experience is a key goal for organizations in 2021, with a proportion of 41%.
Furthermore, the survey of 820 respondents revealed several other priorities, including modernizing IT infrastructure (41%), ensuring customers have a seamless and secure experience (37%), increasing profitability (37%), modernizing business operations (36%), exploring new business models or revenue streams (35%), increasing the speed and responsiveness of businesses to serve customers well (34%), and improving the employe experience (33%).
Challenges in Implementing Connected Enterprise
Of course, it is not easy for all businesses to implement the Connected Enterprise in a short period of time. According to Adrian, there are a lot of obstacles that organizations encounter while adopting Connected Enterprise, such as a lack of customer centricity, the company’s lack of pace in developing, functions that are still siloed, and the volume of data that must be connected. Surprisingly, these factors hinder practically all sectors, not just a few big ones like banking, insurance, government, or healthcare.
“These issues occur under different conditions, but they exist in practically all industries. As a result, in order to connect divisions and promote customer-based digital transformation, companies must adopt a variety of initiatives in order to become a Connected Enterprise organization.”
Adrian went on to state that the strategy in question is the ability of businesses to understand the future of their sector and make predictions based on the current situation, such as studying where the business is going, knowing if there are signs of changing business models, and realizing what factors are most influencing it.
At this point, Adrian underlined that organizations should already be aware of the signals of change and how they can act to shift business models, as well as understanding how revenue pools change a sector. To keep up with fast-paced developments, businesses must be able to maintain the mindset of “knowing where they are and focusing on the value stream.”
“For example, if your company is in the automobile industry, you should be able to detect signs of changing customer adoption toward electric vehicles, as well as learn about technology advancements in autonomous vehicles. Of course, as a result of seeing this transition, your customers’ preferences will begin to shift toward mobility as a service,” he stated.
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Practices in Building Connected Enterprise
Adrian shows how businesses can most effectively use the Connected Enterprise. One of them is customer-centric thinking, understanding the sector’s future, and embracing modern technological capabilities such as cloud computing.
“By allowing mobile businesses to drive infrastructure and data growth, technology is critical to enabling customer-centric transformation for Connected Enterprise. In this situation, the cloud is also a large ecosystem that can help the business grow,” Adrian explained.
If the company successfully implements these steps, they will automatically create a Connected Enterprise with numerous benefits, including the ability to gain insight into the future of their sector, achieve value streams, have a better ability to connect between systems and divisions, have technology blueprints, and ultimately succeed in carrying out an agile digital transformation.
“From here, the business will build future performance that can be sustained, with greater performance and value that customers will experience. This approach will bring people from the business together to interact with the technology and data that will be used to achieve new, better levels of performance,” he added.
8 Advantages of Connected Enterprise
Adrian also explained that Connected Enterprise has at least eight capabilities to help companies create high performance and can open up significant investment opportunities.
1. Helping businesses execute insight-based strategies and actions
2. Encouraging businesses to deliver innovative services and products
3. Designing customer experience centered service
4. Create seamless interactions
5. Responsive operations and supply chain
6. Equal and empowered workforce
7. Fully digital technology architecture
8. Integrated partner ecosystem
“If businesses can take advantage of these capabilities, they will definitely have at least twice as much impact on their investment. This means that their options to grow and save costs will be greater, and the company will certainly become more agile,” Adrian noted.
5 Simple Steps to Become Connected Enterprise
Adrian outlines five ways to change your organization into one that fully embraces the Connected Enterprise. First, organizations must reorganize their businesses around their customers, such as considering the corporate sector’s future, capturing value streams, and understanding customer journey patterns.
In terms of the second, Adrian continued, businesses must be strategic in their use of contemporary technology to unleash new capabilities.
“Third, businesses must be able to construct a borderless organization in which they can connect business silos, technology silos, and the greater ecosystem,” Adrian emphasized.
Fourth, companies must be able to attain their level of value and performance by setting clear corporate growth targets, cost efficiency goals, and customer and staff goals.
For the last one, Adrian added, businesses must be more flexible on a big scale, with the measure in issue being at the enterprise, operational, and technological levels.
“It is time for all businesses to become Connected Enterprises. Embark this journey as effectively as possible with your customers, and from there you will be able to have more comprehensive growth and improvement objectives to be able to interact with each other, both digitally, operationally, and between employees,” Adrian concluded.
