What it takes to be a leader amongst leaders
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
Serving the world’s leaders
Our ambition is to be a leader amongst leaders; we want to provide the best quality digital transformation solutions to the world’s largest, most complex, and widely distributed companies. That means ensuring excellent and consistent service in each of our global practices, bringing to bear all the advantages of Capgemini’s scale for our clients. The recognition from ISG is a great milestone to let us know we’re on the right track, but we’ve still got so much more we are looking forward to doing in the future.
I’ve been at Capgemini for over 21 years, and in that time, I’ve worked with thousands of people and seen the group transform it’s working model several times. I think the most recent reorganization though has been the most productive and the most positive for clients. Over the last few years, we’ve evolved from a distributed model where territory practices had autonomy and were encouraged to act independently, to one built around global drive and now with a unified go-to-market approach. Centers of Excellence (COE) allow us to take the best practice developed anywhere in the world and apply it consistently everywhere else – it means customers in Rio de Janeiro get the benefit of our latest innovations in Paris, and clients in Sydney get the same service as those in New York. We’ve developed a global use-case portal, which helps us to circulate these cutting-edge ideas in real time, so every practice benefits from them equally. From a client perspective, it also means we are perfectly positioned to serve the needs of multinationals, responding to their macro business objectives as well as local requirements.
Digital transformation at scale
That scalability is vital to our digital transformation philosophy. For many years, the general trend for applications was built around a large ERP deployment, with increasingly complex coding to include more and more operations of the business. Our approach, which we’ve developed with enterprise clients such as Volvo, Maxeda, and Cognex, strips that bloated ERP back to its critical functions, or digital core. We help companies build a powerful yet manageable ERP engine for their business-critical internal operations, and then construct layers around it using SAP and other vendors for the business innovation and differentiation. That means new processes and new digital services aren’t locked into the ERP system, and can flow with speed, helping businesses make agile decisions and to continuously transform their platforms over time, rather than having to go through a huge overhaul every decade when the ERP becomes unsustainably complex. We call this approach “Renewable Enterprise,” and it was one of the areas the ISG report picked out as a strength for Capgemini.
We also work closely with clients to co-create a roadmap for this process – the foundation of successful digital transformation. Because while there is a lot of noise in the market about ERP and digital transformation, there’s not so much about the people and change management required to make those dreams a reality. We don’t want to just install the tech for clients and hope for the best; we need to help them bring every single employee on the journey with them.
Take DevOps as an example – IT teams aspire to it, but it can be frustrating and confusing for other people in the business. How do you adapt when the programs and processes you use day to day keep changing? The roadmaps we develop with clients have continuous business enablement at their heart – a combination of in-person training for larger, more-critical, and frequent challenges, and ongoing online support for more ad-hoc changes. For example, we can set up pop-up support windows on new fields of every online process that staff interact with, whether it’s on desktop or mobile, to explain how to use it properly. This comes in the app, without needing to download any new software, and can be rolled out globally.
This kind of managed change is ideal and very realizable even for a massive, international workforce. We know, because we’ve done it for ourselves – in six months, we’ve had enough staff trained and certified in the full range of SAP solutions (with a primary focus on SAP S/4HANA) that we are now the number-one company in the world for SAP-certified experts.
What working with Capgemini feels like
While the recognition by ISG of our market-leading SAP proposition is exciting for all of us at Capgemini, it’s the outcomes for customers that I’m really interested in talking about. What can you expect from working with Capgemini now and in the future?
To begin with, we’re constantly expanding our industry-specific solutions. The breadth of Capgemini’s work gives us the advantage of being able to cross-pollinate best practices, both between clients in the same sector and with those in different industry niches – and our global use-case portal, mentioned above, compounds this. We’re especially focused on doing even more to address the specific challenges faced in areas including manufacturing, automotive, retail, consumer products, energy and utilities, among others.
But most of all, I think the findings in the ISG report confirm what’s most important: that our ambitions are just as large as yours. We’re set up to align with your business strategy, your workforce and your geographic spread. We have the tech expertise and the industry experience to support you as closely as possible. And our aim is to ensure that you can be the leader in your industry, no matter how complex and wide-ranging your business is.
Please reach out to me to start the conversation on how to become the renewable enterprise of the future – today!
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