McKinsey recently issued a useful report - Accelerating the digitization of business processes. The growth of efficient online businesses has raised the expectations of customers for service and product quality. McKinsey reports that, “many traditional organizations can’t meet these expectations. As a result, attackers born in the digital age can swoop in and disrupt the market through rapid delivery of digital products and services combined with advanced algorithms and full access to information.”
They go on to add that, “To meet these high customer expectations, companies must accelerate the digitization of their business processes. But they should go beyond simply automating an existing process. They must reinvent the entire business process, including cutting the number of steps required, reducing the number of documents, developing automated decision making, and dealing with regulatory and fraud issues. Operating models, skills, organizational structures, and roles need to be redesigned to match the reinvented processes. Data models should be adjusted and rebuilt to enable better decision making, performance tracking, and customer insights. Digitization often requires that old wisdom be combined with new skills, for example, by training a merchandising manager to program a pricing algorithm. New roles, such as data scientist and user-experience designer, may be needed.”
Sounds like a great opportunity for consultants. I hope that it goes beyond that to not only enrich the consultants but also help the consumer and employee. I have seen great successes and failures in the drive to improve business processes through technology. McKinsey offers some advice that I agree with. First, start at the end state and work back. Second, Tackle the end-to-end customer experience. I would also add to include the end-to-end employee experience and make sure it is aligned with customer needs. The report goes on to offer some useful advice.
