The Need for Smarter SPEED
Cliff Justice
Stan Lepeak
Business success today is predicated on working both faster as well as smarter. Advances in information technology and telecommunications, as manifested in the Internet, highly complex enterprise software systems, and process automation, have helped enable organizations to work increasingly faster and on a global scale. In many respects, it is working smarter (or at least smarter than the competition) that has become the greater challenge.
Being awash in data that they can barely keep track of, much less turn into relevant and competitive information, is not a new problem for organizations but is one that is becoming increasingly acute. The challenge is how to take the wealth of data they have at their digital fingertips and turn it into actionable intelligence. Actionable intelligence is defined as contextual, targeted and insightful information that enables organizations to make timely, fact-based and forward looking decisions on how to best perform their business activities.
Core to creating actionable intelligence is excelling at knowledge management. While not to digress into some of the more arcane and conceptual aspects of KM, what is most relevant here is how to combine and leverage both explicit (e.g., facts, figures, formulas) and tacit (e.g., best practices, contextual experience, “tribal learning”) knowledge around a given business situation, challenge or problem. Excelling at gathering and processing explicit knowledge can enable organizations to run faster. Combining tacit with explicit knowledge can enable organizations to work smarter.
Organizations need to continually reassess what they are doing to work smarter and not just faster (and cheaper). It is easier to invest in more IT systems and capabilities to create and gather more data at a more rapid pace than it is to figure out how to leverage that data for competitive gain. Overcoming this challenge involves both understanding the key business opportunities and defining and honing a framework to address them.
One somewhat mundane though critical dimension to this effort is optimizing the supporting business and IT functions and processes that underpin all business activities. For example, how to run the finance and accounting function in a way that not only increases efficiency but provides key financial information to decision makers to make competitive gains, or increases effectiveness. Similarly, how to provide quality and cost-effective customer care while simultaneously using any customer interaction to gain insights on how to increase loyalty and cross and up sell goods and services.
Increasing efficiency and effectiveness, cross selling and up selling, and many other common business paradigms are nothing new. What has changed is how to excel at them. The volume and growth levels of accessible business data today are immense. The means to interact with employees, business partners and customers is rapidly evolving through the use of social media and highly functional personal devices. Speed is required to keep up. Knowledge is required to get ahead.
One approach to address these challenges and opportunities is KPMG’s Extended Global Enterprise (EGE) model. It provides a framework and strategic road map for enabling buyer organizations’ global business services strategies and operating models. Relative to actionable intelligence, EGE is underpinned by SPEED, or the Services Portfolio and Extended Enterprise Design framework. SPEED is used to assess the maturity, efficiency and effectiveness of supporting business and IT models, processes and systems in the EGE model. Ultimately, however, there are many approaches organizations can employ to balance working faster with being smarter. The key is to do so in time. Organizations can utilize the SPEED framework to assess how best to deliver core business and IT services in a way that better enable actionable intelligence across the enterprise.
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