There’s a Monster in Your Back-Office
Blog: Appian Insight
There’s a monster in your back-office.
It’s terrorizing customers and end-users in every corner of your organization. But this is no scary creature from a Hollywood movie…
Nope, it’s the complicated software that controls everything in your organization from procurement and billing to supply chain management and regulatory compliance.
It’s a shapeless, digital blob that…
- Gobbles up bandwidth for organizational productivity…and…
- Discombobulates organizations with disconnected data silos, complex software stacks, and convoluted work flows, which in turn…
- Ticks off your employees, frustrates your customers, and undermines your success.
What sounds like a sci-fi narrative should make you consider the risks of missing the boat on digital transformation.
Unfortunately, only 27% of today’s businesses have a coherent digital strategy focused on creating customer value as a digital business, according to Forrester. If you’re a member of this tribe, you should be concerned. Here’s why. By 2018, 67% of the CEOs of Global 2000 enterprises will have digital transformation at the center of their corporate strategy, according to Gartner.
So what’s it all mean? Simple…if you don’t get on board with digital transformation, you risk getting left behind by businesses that do.
Are you okay with the consequences of that?
You don’t have to buy the adapt-or-die narrative. But ignoring it…yelling about it…cutting yourself off from it…is a recipe for failure.
On the other hand, it’s an opportunity if you embrace it. It’s not sexy to talk about digital transformation, or optimizing operational efficiency. But in the hypercompetitive, connection economy, you can’t compete and win without it. Unfortunately, most business leaders are too busy focusing on other things. For example, in a recent survey by eMarketer, 53% of business leaders said the top cultural barrier to digital transformation was competing priorities. 52% said they were stymied by a lack of familiarity with digital technologies. And, four in 10 said resistance to change was a barrier.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Imagine this scenario. You call the shots on operations for a recognized brand. You’re feeling the heat to comply with new regulations. On top of that, you’re also on the hook with C-suite peers to quickly deploy a more auditable self-service system, to meet a fast approaching deadline for compliance. The trick is to get visibility into every corner of your client services operation.
This is a sweet spot for Appian Business Process Management (BPM) software. Appian BPM software is user-friendly and easily deployed, with faster delivery times than conventional software solutions. The magic of BPM is that it’s simple, powerful, and easy to use. And, it allows operational decision makers like you to see all the moving parts in your organization, and how they work–or don’t work–together. In other words, Appian BPM helps you eliminate the risk of basing critical business decisions on incomplete information. As an operational honcho, what could be more important than that?
Rewind to the back office monster. There’s another kind of monster to tame as well. An emotional one, the stress of worrying about failure in advance, the what-ifs. What if your compliance deadline is missed? What if you don’t get the sale? The stress of worrying about that kind of failure might just be worse than the digital monster itself.
When you take this emotional monster out of the picture with Appian BPM, you get zero drama and a chance to do your best work, undistracted by worry and achieving operational success.
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