How can you make better decisions with intelligent operations?

Here in global IT, we like to think we are always ready for the “next” as well as the “now”. In recent years we’ve invested heavily in digital technologies, infrastructure and a collaborative culture—and that certainly paid off when the pandemic struck. In fact, it’s our intelligent operations that help us to maintain business continuity, whatever change comes our way—tapping into the power of automation, analytics, artificial intelligence and our ecosystem of relationships to elevate our decision making.

Managing change is something we often talk about with leaders around the world. Whether its IT hot topics, sharing our own experiences in the field, or developing thought leadership, we can offer practical solutions and steps to guide our clients to be future-ready. I’d like to tell you about a great report has come out recently that does just that—and I think it will really resonate in the light of recent challenges within your business.

Change how work gets done

Fast-track to future-ready performance is a study that explores the connection between business operations maturity and performance. So, in 2020, Accenture surveyed more than 1,100 C-suite and VP-level executives across 11 countries and 13 industries. We identified four levels of operations maturity: stable, efficient, predictive and future-ready—and discovered what makes future-ready organizations (just 7% of the sample) different to the rest.

As we have seen in our own organization, technologies can drive efficiency, insights and increasing capabilities. In fact on average, the future-ready organizations we surveyed show a 2.8x boost in corporate profitability and 1.7x higher efficiency than those at other levels. Even more impressive is the prospect of US$5.4T in added global profitability which has been left on the table due to insufficient operational maturity.

If your operations maturity could do with being more future-ready, here’s some things you could do:

1. Know the ultimate goal: future-ready organizations think big and start with the end goal in mind—scaling leading practices and getting their business and technology functions to collaborate fully. Global IT has introduced global digital business services working across corporate functions and our business groups to streamline client account and business unit management in a radically different way,
2. Know the key steps: Three areas of activity can make your operations more intelligent— automating at scale, augmenting human talent with technology and committing to data-driven decision-making using better, more diverse data. Accenture is now 95% in the cloud and we’ve realized enormous benefits, such as infrastructure optimization based on data, new infrastructure provisioning and intelligent automation that increases the consistency, speed and quality in our business operations.
3. Know how to leapfrog maturity levels: Partnership models, anchored by a shared vision and mutually beneficial commercial terms, help deliver transformational value and experiences. Accenture’s close collaboration with Microsoft and SAP has helped us innovate to achieve our strategic goals. Today, Accenture is among the first enterprises to run its production SAP S/4HANA® system on Microsoft Azure's next-generation virtualized architecture at scale. It’s helping us to be more agile, improve security, lower total cost of ownership and simplify operations.

If advancing operations maturity can boost your company’s efficiency and profitability, then why not start now? Take a look at the full report to find out more.