How to create an enterprise transformation roadmap- Valutrics

Beating the odds

Many senior officer committees resist — and there will likely be a high price to pay. According to 2016 research from Innosight Consulting LLC, the average tenure of companies on the SP 500 has been on a downward slope. It was 33 years in 1965 and is expected to shrink to 14 years by 2026.

I believe companies can beat this projection if they are willing to refocus from cost reduction to growth and create and execute on an enterprise transformation roadmap. That means aggressively looking at the new global techno-society and deciding how to compete.

This enterprise transformation must be driven from the top with a new corporate market and operating vision and a solid strategy on how to achieve that vision. This means that the company will need to invest in itself and commit to controlling its evolution. It also means casting off many of the time-honored concepts of business operations and IT support and building a strong collaboration between the business and enterprise architects who will design the new operation and the process architects who will build it.

CIOs and CTOs will need to rethink IT capabilities and how the business and customers will be supported. The first step will be figuring out how to transition from the old, legacy IT and business operations to a flexible, collaborative model. This new operating model will integrate the business and IT sides of transformation with culture redesign and change management, delivering a result that includes people, process and technology. 

Companies will need to create a long-term IT investment plan and eventually replace the current IT infrastructure with more integrated technology, minus the manual and program work-around activity taking place at so many businesses today. Eliminating legacy applications that simply impede change and require a high overhead of specialized staff will reduce process bottlenecks. And new, flexible tools — such as those for business process management suites (BPMSes), robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) — will need to be licensed and integrated. These tools will likely need to support business at multiple locations and may or may not be cloud-based. So the plan will need to consider communications capabilities as well.

Fortunately for CIOs and CTOs today, technology is being delivered to help them create a new service architecture, one that enables continued use of legacy application functionality and data. Both BPMS and RPA tools support APIs that can interact with legacy applications. The result: a hybrid environment of old and new technologies that delivers flexibility through the BPMS and/or RPA environments.