Organizations have experienced immense disruption over the past year. Many have had to reinvent their operating models, their product or service offerings and, in some cases, even their entire business model. In the face of such disruption, there is no single solution for every businesses’ ills.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on organizations was immediate and in many respects irreversible. As lockdowns confined office workers to their homes, organizations suddenly needed the agility to enable remote work and reengineer processes to ensure the business could continue operating.

Catalyst for digital transformation

Organizations fortunate enough to be far along their digital transformation journeys could arguably adapt more easily to the disruption. For others, the pandemic has been a catalyst for accelerated digital transformation.

In a global survey conducted by McKinsey, executives said the pandemic had accelerated the digitization of their supply chain, customer interactions and internal operations

For most organizations, the initial impact of the pandemic forced the quick adoption of temporary solutions. Tellingly, the executives in the McKinsey survey said they expect most of these solutions to be long-lasting.

What does this tell us about how organizations should approach digital transformation in our still-evolving business environment?

For one, organizations are under pressure to adapt to immediate changes, but have to balance this with long-term priorities.

Meeting short-term pressures

Business conditions are challenging right now. Organizations need the immediate ability to leverage technology to improve productivity, drive innovation or unlock new revenue streams. There is great urgency in achieving certain business outcomes – enabling effective remote workforce management, or increased business productivity, for example – and technology plays a major role in achieving these outcomes.

There is also great pressure to achieve quick time-to-value for any investment into new digital technologies. Cloud-based projects provide opportunities to bring organizational capabilities more in line with modern customer demands, especially in terms of accessibility, cost-efficiency and other changes accelerated by the pandemic.

While every business may be unique, the challenges they face are often similar. Off-the-shelf technology solutions are often sufficient to meet business challenges and can further help contain the high cost and time investment of customization.

Building future competitiveness

But there is also the pressing need to build capabilities that will help the business succeed into the future. The arrival of 5G connectivity, the growing volume of sensors in IoT-based deployments, the power of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics: these are all accelerators toward a new world of innovation and competitiveness. Organizations cannot afford to focus only on short-term productivity gains and sacrifice their long-term innovation capabilities.

Instead, organizations need to identify immediate and long-term growth and innovation opportunities that are unique to them, and then bring in partners and technology providers that can help build capabilities to capitalize on those opportunities.

Toward intelligent enterprise capabilities

The ultimate aim of modern digital transformation is for organizations to become intelligent enterprises, which have the capability to seamlessly integrate emerging technologies with a powerful digital core to continuously turn data into insights.

Intelligent enterprises represent a step-change in the evolution of how technology is used to drive business outcomes and innovation, and can accelerate innovation, increase productivity and deliver outstanding customer and employee experiences. Becoming an intelligent enterprise is essentially an insurance policy against future disruption.

Organizations leading in the journey toward becoming intelligent enterprises have embarked on high-value short-term projects that help them deal with immediate challenges without losing sight of the transformation outcomes that will support their future growth. It is a careful balancing act but one that is essential: simply focusing on short-term solutions without some element of future-proof testing may result in sunk costs and missed opportunities.

The introduction of business-transformation-as-a-service with the launch of 鈥淩ISE with SAP鈥� this year is simplifying the journey that organizations need to take toward becoming intelligent enterprises. RISE helps organizations unlock the full value of their transformations sooner, helping build greater agility, no matter where organizations are on their digital transformation journeys.

Organizations have had a rocky time adapting to the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. For many, it was a catalyst toward greater adoption of digital technologies. But the disruptive environment of 2020 remains: organizations have to build capabilities that will enable them to continue adapting to further disruption. And now with new tools that make the journey toward becoming intelligent enterprises easier, organizations can leverage the latest technologies to ensure they remain successful no matter what comes their way.

This article was written by Isabel Papadakis, Africa industry value advisor at 51风流Africa

The post How to Navigate Digital Transformation in 2021 appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

For CFOs and public sector financial leaders, the new dynamic is creating risks to private and government institutions at a time when financial integrity is paramount.

Disruption challenging public, private sectors

For the private sector, the disruption from closing offices and suddenly relying on a mostly remote workforce has created new challenges. Employees are now working outside the boundaries of corporate firewalls and, in some cases, on unsecured devices. Enhanced cybersecurity is critical; the World Economic Forum has warned that cybercriminals have escalated their efforts to capitalise on the unfolding tragedy of Covid-19, putting companies, consumers and public sector organisations at immense risk.

In the public sector, government departments at national, provincial and municipal level are facing their own challenges. The response to Covid-19 has required a reprioritisation within various government functions to support the unprecedented large-scale coordinated effort at all levels of government to limit the impact of the disease.

For example, Treasury has announced it is centralising the sourcing of all personal protective equipment from suppliers. In the heavily regulated public sector, this centralising of sourcing can add additional complexity to procurement and public finance management practices to ensure finance teams functions within the bounds of good governance.

Add to this the disrupting effects of major budgetary constraints and poorly-performing state-owned enterprises and public sector finance teams are in for a challenging period.

Private sector companies, already dealing with a struggling economy and low consumer and business confidence and now battling with a major world event will similarly have to enhance their governance, risk and compliance efforts to ensure business integrity is upheld.

Three priorities for improved risk management

So what are public and private sector finance leaders to do to manage risk in such an uncertain and disruptive environment? Three immediate priorities stand out: protecting the business through better risk management, process control and audit planning; improved access control; and putting comprehensive security measures in place to protect critical data.

Protecting the business starts first and foremost with visibility. Managing risk during times of great uncertainty or disruption requires that finance leaders have a holistic view of risk. This requires them to have a single financial source of truth 鈥� an accurate, integrated source of data that can inform financial decision-making within all company or government functions.

Having a clear view of all risk elements gives finance leaders additional agility to adapt to changes in the operating environment and business model. Many organisations will need to reassess their business strategy to take into account the impact of the lockdown and continued disruption from the pandemic.

Using risk scenarios and modelling to understand the organisation鈥檚 exposure to risk gives organisations a clear view over the impact of emerging opportunities on the company鈥檚 risk profile. In addition, it helps finance leaders make better decisions by linking current and future risks to business value drivers.

With a single financial source of truth, companies should also seek a single platform for managing policies and compliance procedures. This enables streamlined processes that align controls and policies with business goals and risks.

Audit planning will also require a second look: tools for better managing scoping, risk assessment and project management of internal audits can save precious time and resources. Real-time analytics can play a hugely important supporting role by enabling companies to scan large volumes of data with increased accuracy in detecting and preventing fraud and errors.

However, with business models changing rapidly 鈥� most noticeably the rise of remote workforces as people are confined to their homes 鈥� effective access control is becoming even more important than before. Sudden changes in an organisation鈥檚 workforce as a result of the pandemic could lead to conflicts with segregation of duties and hamper access to critical authorisations. Without full visibility over user functions and permissions, companies will struggle to remediate issues or introduce mitigating controls.

CFOs and finance leaders should enforce a segregation of duties framework that avoids having a single user create, approve and monitor transactions. Where segregation of duties is not possible, management should be able to monitor users鈥� transactions and ensure users have appropriate authorisations to maintain accountability.

Organisations should strive to provide secure access to applications and data across cloud and on-premise solutions, and use predictive detection of fraud and errors in transactions to maintain business integrity.聽Interpol has warned that cybercriminals are taking advantage of the pandemic by attacking computer networks and systems while most of the world鈥檚 attention is on dealing with the coronavirus. The FBI has found that reports of cybercrime have quadrupled since the start of the pandemic.

Here, enterprise threat detection and other security measures play a vital role in identifying, analysing and neutralising the rising tide of opportunistic cyberattacks plaguing public and private sector organisations. CFOs and finance leaders need real-time intelligence into system vulnerabilities to ensure cybersecurity threats are mitigated before systems are compromised.

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