Moving with the digital times
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
The dome Brunelleschi designed for the cathedral in Florence was and is a miracle of the Italian Renaissance. It spans 44 meters, and it was built without scaffolding. It’s ingenious, it’s beautiful, and it was built to last. However, if the great architect were to return to us today, I’d bet he’d do things differently. Now, as then, he’d make best use of current tools, techniques, and circumstances.
A similar evolution has taken place in business transformation and outsourcing. At Capgemini, we replaced the “lift & shift” of traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) some years ago with our Global Enterprise Model© (GEM) – a mature, comprehensive model that transforms processes end-to-end across geographies and business units, ensuring the right teams and technologies are available to support these processes and their interactions with each other.
GEM has been a highly successful model, achieving significant improvements in productivity and ROI – but the world is moving on, and to help our clients keep up and even get ahead in the digital age, we have re-architected our model to put automation at its heart.
Introducing D-GEM
The Digital Global Enterprise Model©, or D-GEM, is a business architecture that puts automation first, providing flexibility to adapt to the changing digital landscape. It incorporates a complete overview of an organization’s processes with control points, accelerating the transition to transformed, future-proof processes.
The D-GEM levers – grade mix, location, workforce and management competencies, processes, pricing and cost allocations, and the governance model – are addressed in the context of the optimal automation strategy for their management and execution. It’s not just about choosing the best tools, but how they are best implemented, whether they should be owned outright or bought on an as-a-service basis, and how they can be future-proofed.
But before any of these issues can be considered, an even bigger question needs to be asked: in the digital world, what is the ideal shape and character this enterprise should take, and what role will automation play in its achievement?
Answering the big question
This question marks the biggest difference that D-GEM represents. Until recently, business transformation has been achieved via incremental step-changes; but now, we’re looking at a brand new, holistic model that defines a single, major enterprise-wide change from the bottom up.
Why? Largely, it’s because the rate of acceleration has changed. Developments in robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and other technologies are moving too fast for an incremental transition. It’s far better to create a universal, digital model that can accommodate evolution and not be thrown off course by it.
There’s no denying that the prospect of embarking on a single, massive, enterprise-wide transformation is a daunting one. D-GEM enables a pace of transformation that fits with an organization’s business priorities, resource constraints, and its ability to manage change. We’re confident that organizations will want to organize themselves for this transformation when they understand quite how much they stand to gain.
We’re not only looking at significant productivity gains up-front, depending on the speed of adoption, but driving business value through improved working capital, better customer experience, and increased revenue. We’re looking at aligning business processes for better outcomes and better visibility of corporate performance; we’re looking at straight-through processing and touchless business administration with continuous access to reliable data and information; and automated libraries that easily gather, store, and use knowledge, so organizations can determine what happened last time and what their best next actions are.
Best-practice strategies
D-GEM has not just emerged from GEM, but from other best-practice strategies for which we are known and respected:
- Our “Five Senses of Intelligent Automation” approach to technology helps us see our clients’ technology investments differently.
- Our ESOAR methodology (Eliminate, Standardize, Optimize, Automate, Robotize) to assess and address the gap between intelligent automation and our clients’ current situations, re-engineering processes to drive best practice and business value.
We’re very proud of D-GEM. Like Brunelleschi’s Dome, it’s smart, and it’s built to last – but we’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s beautiful too.
To learn more about Capgemini’s Digital Global Enterprise Model (D-GEM), contact: greg.bateup@capgemini.com
Learn how D-GEM enables our clients to be competitive in a rapidly changing, digital business context.
Greg Bateup has worked with clients to deliver business transformation and BPO services for almost 30 years. For the last few years, Greg has focused on the digital transformation of the source-to-pay function, and how organizations can not only drive efficiencies in the procurement function, but also drive compliance and savings.
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