But the past year has not been without its lessons. Our work with customers across Africa and the world has revealed several vital learnings and provide a glimpse into what we can expect in the year ahead.

My predictions for the year ahead include:

Prediction 1: Digital transformation will continue (but with new rules)

Last year moved the value of digital technologies to the top of every business leader’s agenda. Those organisations that had already invested in digital transformation could adapt more quickly and with greater resilience to the changes forced on us by the pandemic.

In 2021, organisations continued their digital transformation efforts, with remote and hybrid work models as well as digital customer engagement high on African enterprises’ agendas.

In 2022, organisations will ramp up their investments into digital technologies, but with one significant change: the days of large, lengthy, difficult and costly technology implementations are largely over. In their place is a new, more accountable model of engagement between organisations and their technology partners.

Technology providers will need to shift attention away from pure quarterly sales targets to a longer-term view of sales and performance. Customer engagements should focus less on products and features, and more on developing a deeper understanding of each customer’s challenges and building trust over the longer term.

This change will put pressure on tech providers and their implementation partners, as it requires fundamental changes to their operating models as well as new skillsets.

Prediction 2: We will all be leaders in the fight against climate change

With the Earth now 1.1°C warmer than it was in the 1800s, countries and individuals face a mammoth task in changing course and bringing the world on to a more sustainable path. The IMF estimates the cost of adapting to climate change in developing countries may reach $300bn by the end of the decade, while productivity losses due to heat stress reducing total working hours potentially leading to a global GDP cut of $2.4tn by 2030.

While it is encouraging that more business leaders are directly addressing sustainability – the topic is now 44% more common in corporate earnings calls than three years ago – what is urgently needed is action.

51·çÁ÷believes nothing less than a complete reinvention of the global economy will be required to create a world that stays within the 1.5°C threshold and so limits the damage of climate change.

Every organisation can choose to be an exemplar and drive change through exhibiting behaviours and making decisions that put sustainability front and centre, for example by becoming carbon neutral. This form of climate leadership can inspire others and pave the way to a more equitable and sustainable future.

For a lucky few, including SAP, there is also the opportunity to be enablers, through the provision of tools, technologies and services that replace outdated and harmful business practices and power the circular economy.

SAP’s Climate 21 software package, for example, allows our customers to measure and analyse the CO2 emissions directly associated with individual products they offer. Similarly Ariba, the world’s largest business network with $3.75tn in annual trade, can provide greater transparency in enterprise supply chains to enable organisations to make informed decisions over which suppliers prioritise sustainability.

Prediction 3: Innovation will be crucial (but not in the way you expect)

The word ‘innovation’ usually conjures up images of the world’s most ground-breaking companies, ones that invent products and services that create entire new industries, or new solutions that transform existing industries.

However, in 2022 a different type of innovation will be required. To meet our current and future challenges and deal with ongoing uncertainty and disruption, organisations will need to embed a culture of innovation that cuts across the organisation and transforms how people think about the challenges and opportunities they face.

Organisations will need to drive innovation in how they work with their customers, in how they approach sales, in how they provide continuous support, and a myriad other ways.

Such changes will be difficult and could lead to further disruption, so business leaders will have to ensure they keep the business in balance while building trust internally and externally throughout the change process.

Prediction 4: Our technology tools will mature to give us the best of all worlds

One of the common remarks we encounter in the boardrooms of Africa’s leading enterprises is the concept of best-of-breed. Organisations rightfully want to acquire the very best technology solutions to meet their needs and drive change and efficiency throughout the business.

Increasingly, business leaders are speaking of best-of-suite, which means choosing individual components of various different technology solutions and combining them in unique ways that are designed to deliver maximum value to the business.

In 2022, expect greater integration of technology solutions from different providers. For example, SAP’s position as the leader in enterprise resource planning through our flagship S/4HANA solution makes us a natural choice for hundreds of thousands of global organisations.

In response to the demands from our customers, 51·çÁ÷has invested heavily in integration to allow our customers the freedom to integrate the solutions of their choice with any of our technologies.

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The severity of COVID infection seems to be waning, vaccination and antibodies are both on the rise, and employees are now more likely to be in the office and emotionally engaged than in the past two years. Those of us who are still here are the determined ones. We’ve escaped mortal danger that earlier waves of the pandemic caused at scale. We’ve navigated ‘The Great Resignation’ – the exploration of purpose and meaning by employees – and have either already made a career move or have decided to stay… both very powerful mindset and career stances.

As the great return to normality unfolds, it’s a good idea for businesses both large and small to consider two key themes for survival and growth in 2022 – Employee Relevance and Customer Value.

Employee Relevance

We don’t merely work for money these days. We need meaning, alignment, a deeper sense of involvement, accountability, respect, belonging, recognition, purpose and joy. If you asked a group of staff members what they value most at work now, I would argue that self-esteem factors rank significantly higher now than in pre-pandemic times.

We also don’t have time for friction. Office politics, gossip, inefficient processes, slacking colleagues, stigma, discrimination, unfair practice or antiquated tools and systems fall into the category of ‘yeah, we know it’s a problem but it’s not that urgent’ issues that businesses cannot afford to ignore any longer.

For employees, the elusive work-life balance challenge seems to have shifted where people now make time for work and life comes first, within reason. To drive productivity, revenue growth and profitability in 2022, businesses need to prioritise investment of time, energy and funding into the projects that will ensure employees want to work there and projects that remove the likelihood of giving them a reason to look somewhere else.

Customer Value

If you get employee relevance right, customer engagement naturally benefits as your internal culture has a knock-on effect to your customers, suppliers, shareholders and partners. Imagine the difference between a customer support consultant in a call centre who truly appreciates where they work and another who is disgruntled due to poor office culture. Now image the same comparison in a retail store, where your business is still trying to make the sale.

To determine customer value, we need the customer to tell us that the product or service they consume is adding value and to quantify or qualify this to some extent. We don’t get to decide customer value, we can merely perceive expected value. So, to achieve this, it means employees need to do a great enough job to convince a customer to make a purchase – be it online, in-store or through a partner, then we need to have the confidence and means to reach out to that customer in order to ask if the product or service was as expected and useful, and we need to convince them to give us the feedback as honestly and constructively as possible.

Seems achievable right?

Maybe… but the true measure of value delivered will be determined by whether or not they return to buy the same product or service, recommend it to others or buy from the rest of the product catalogue. Lifetime value can be measured once a customer repeats their buying behaviour or expands their range of products bought. You can start to drill down into their recency of purchasing, frequency of purchasing, typical monetary value per purchase, or total purchase value over time. As a business, if you achieve repeat purchase behaviour it means you’re getting something right. Either the customer loves the brand, or they value the quality of products, or they appreciate the way you personalise communication and appear to truly understand them.

In 2022, if businesses begin to put customer lifetime value top of mind, it will force the right line of questioning in every big business decision. Do we make those changes to the loyalty app? Do we invest in the track and trace capability, so customers can track their deliveries? Do we switch couriers or suppliers to improve lead times? Do we change the profitability dashboards, so that we know how much customers have spent on our brand? Do we create a single view of customer engagement and history so that our support teams know the status of orders or complaints when a customer calls in?

Progress

Good things come in threes, so a third consideration that lends itself to employee relevance and customer value is to measure progress. It’s no good introducing new processes or tools if you are not tracking the usage and value gained from those new additions. If there is a way to track data for one of these investments, do it and share the insights far and wide so that both staff and project sponsors can see the outcomes in near real-time. Providing some correlation between usage of employees tools and the reduction in sick days or growth in job satisfaction scores, or providing some correlation between customer-facing add-ons and the growth in customer browsing behaviour online or revenue growth, will do wonders to show the real positive impact being achieved through process and system investments.

Generally, when good news is shared in a transparent and authentic manner, it fosters a great working culture that is continuously improving and is willing to share and receive feedback as a means to do so.

There are only 365 days to make an impact this year and some of those have already passed by in the haze that is New Year. To make this more tangible, try to commit to identifying one project that will improve employee relevance and one project that will improve customer value by the end of January. Don’t worry about how to deliver the projects just yet… just use the process to begin asking the right questions and getting the buy-in from colleagues and executive management to commit the right level of focus and attention to these two themes this year. Do this, and 2022 will be off to a great start!

This blog first appeared on .

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Business leaders across the continent have had their hands full, from enabling remote work on a previously unprecedented scale to adapting to disruptions in the global supply chain, enabling e-learning for millions of youth – not to mention ensuring business continuity in the midst of a once-in-a-generation crisis.

Some changes in behaviour – such as the growing adoption of online shopping, telemedicine and digital channels for engaging with service providers – are likely to outlive the pandemic. Other behaviours – such as in-person teaching and working from the office at least some of the time – are likely to return once it’s safe.

Organisations need the flexibility to adapt to these multi-faceted changes while also improving the accuracy of the decisions they make regarding which route to take.

Speed or certainty?

McKinsey believes and will continue to play a leading role in guiding how businesses should adapt to ongoing uncertainty. The argument is that, by prioritising speed, organisations could make rapid decisions, act on emerging opportunities more quickly, and so improve their chances at overcoming the immense challenges created by the twin forces of digital disruption and the global pandemic.

Speed is certainly important, but there is no competitive advantage in making poor decisions quickly. The prevailing disruption and continued volatility requires that business leaders make decisions with certainty.

To make good decisions, business leaders need accurate sources of data, and the tools to turn that data into insights that can guide decision-making in real time. The modern business environment is simply too complex and volatile to rely entirely on so-called intuitive decision-making. Good quality, accurate and complete data integrated to an intelligent suite of business applications gives decision-makers greater scope for decisions that shift the needle of the business.

For example, responding well to changing customer demands is nearly impossible without knowing what those demands are. Having access to customer experience management tools that can track customer expectations in real time and guide how the business responds to those expectations removes much of the trial and error of manual decision-making. Integrating the customer experience management tool with an automation layer further increases both the speed and accuracy of that response.

Hybrid work models raise the stakes

The impact of the pandemic means most organisations are operating on a fragmented basis. Teams are working from home, making in-person methods of employee engagement and performance management almost totally obsolete, at least for the moment.

Without new employee engagement tools that can effectively mobilise and support teams around common business objectives, organisations could see falling productivity and negative effects on aspects such as product development or customer experience.

New management tools can provide measurable insights into the employee experience, which can assist managers and leaders with making better decisions over the types of support they need to provide to their teams.

Advances in data and analytics also bring data-driven insights into the boardroom, with technology solutions that connect the top floor with the shop floor to give C-level executives granular insight into the total performance of the business.

To harness data and technology for greater certainty in decision-making, organisations need to put certain building blocks in place.

Tools to create certainty in decision-making

In order to achieve a single accurate view over the organisation and empower decision-makers with actionable insights, organisations need to build intelligent enterprise capabilities.

In simple terms, this means using the latest technologies to turn insight into action across every aspect of the business, in real time. Integrated business applications – such as enterprise resource planning and human capital management solutions – powered by next-generation technologies such as artificial intelligence help transform end-to-end business processes.

Experience management solutions give insight to the sentiment of customers, partners and employees, while business process intelligence and automation enable organisations to immediately act on insights and opportunities.

At the foundation of the intelligent enterprise is cloud, which gives organisations the ability to simplify and scale their systems landscape without sacrificing performance.

Cloud empowers businesses with the certainty of a quicker time-to-value, without the upfront capital outlays required of on-premise deployments.

With cloud-enabled intelligent enterprise capabilities, organisations can achieve the speed needed to stay ahead of competitors and other disruptors while maintaining the certainty of measured, data-driven decision-making.

And with new tools such as RISE with SAP, organisations can start building intelligent enterprise capabilities no matter what stage of their digital transformation journeys they find themselves.

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