Death by Digital - Start Transforming

Death by Digital: Most of the S&P500 will be gone by 2027

At current churn rate, 75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027 (Source: Innosight, Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America). That’s a survival rate of 1 in 4 over ten years. Corporate life expectancy is in freefall in the Digital Age. Most companies are simply not prepared for the onslaught of digital disruption. The survivors will be those that are prepared for digital transformation.

Exploiting technology such as cloud-based applications gives you the flexibility you need during the transformation: incorporating best practices and at the same time driving down IT application costs.

Finance (with IT) is where the struggle for survival will be won or lost. Therefore you must modernize your finance & IT systems by moving to cloud. By 2020 Finance staff will spend 75% of their time on decision support, predictive analytics and performance management. Today the figure is only 25%. (Source: Finance 2020: Death by Digital‐The best thing that ever happened to your finance organization, David A.J. Axson, 2015).

Alternative Routes to Survival:

Begin from the Core or Begin from the Periphery?

Transform the digital core and gain agility: Transformation is a journey and not a destination. Your core finance, human resource systems and other back-end systems should evolve from efficiency to agility! Transform your core systems such as your Enterprise Resource planning, human capital management, performance management, etc. to a robust and scalable cloud based platforms. Such a transformation provides the agility so that finance can focus on influencing business outcomes through decision support, predictive analytics and performance management.  Moving Accounting, Finance and Human resource processes and systems to an integrated cloud based platform allows CFOs to adopt new finance operating models to support their digital business strategies that has native social, mobile, analytics to enhance collaboration and agility.

Driving such a transformation, irrespective of whether you are a sporadically growing organization or an indiscriminately disrupted one, is not easy. It requires strategic thinking, audacity to stay successful and senior leadership sponsorship.

Modernizing independent processes or business functions: Journey to cloud depends on your business needs and can vary for organizations and industries. Consider your organization’s appetite for innovation and pace of change.

Look for quick wins by modernizing processes that add critical value.  For example, you can adopt single process to improve contracts or adopt planning and budgeting in the cloud to address a full business function.

But we can also go further and enable end-to-end business processes like record to report and plan to produce.

Even if you take the route of taking this journey at your own pace, don’t end up creating another problem – having separate cloud for the processes and shift the problem to “integrating” all these cloud applications! The path you take should allow for seamless expansion so that the same “data model” is used in your next step and never have to do the “integration”

So it should not matter where you start, you should ultimately realize the value of complete transformation in the cloud if you follow one of these paths to its conclusion. But start before it is too late.