Digital Transformation – start with core
Today, overused word by most of the CIO’s is Digital transformation. CIO’s are asking CEO’s to spend dollars on digital transformation to improve the reach of organisation. They want to provide actionable insights to management in real time, new generation user experience that feels like Facebook to all the employees and develop smart, connected product that can communicate with their organisation from customers place.
However, today, most of the digital transformation initiatives are not able to reap the envisioned benefits. Common reason is investment done on front end digital technologies without changing the core. Organisations are cutting budget on core technologies to fund digital initiatives. In our opinion, this is a flawed strategy. If your core not able to support digital technologies then invariably all initiatives will give sub-optimal returns as data, the new oil in today’s world, required to fuel digital transformation resides in core.
There are two school of thoughts, one which speak about ‘Front to back’ digital transformation and another one is ‘Back to Front’. Let me explain what both thought conveys, before we dwell into which one is better. ‘Front to back’ starts the digital transformation with most customer facing technologies and then digitise the core. On the other hand ‘Back to front’ starts digital transformation with core technologies and then digitise the front end technologies. Both the approaches has its advantages like ‘F2B’ can have tangible results quickly that CIO’s can showcase to management on the other hand ‘B2F’ can provide digital core that can fuel most of the digital transformation over long run. Experts have their views on which approach to follow. In my opinion, ‘Back to front’ in the long run provides stable back-end with digital capabilities that can easily integrate with front end technologies and provide a seamless digital transformation, even though the benefit realisation horizon is comparatively longer.
There are many companies that have SAP ECC. as the core technology. AS SAP will continue to support ECC till 2025, most of the companies are not thinking about digitising core till 2025. They are at various maturity stage in digital transformation with their digital quotient in the range of 23 to 43. According to us, CIO of such companies should reconsider their strategy as their digitisation initiative requires a digital core to digitally transformed business.
Digital core needs to empower business users with actionable insights, to go beyond automation to predictive suggestion and to connect not only departments but to the world. SAP S/4 HANA provides real time insights using in-memory technology and also performance is optimize to handle more number of transactions.
Ken consultancy has strong practice in implementation or migration to S/4 HANA. Our unique methodology helps client to migrate or implement in accelerate execution without business disruption. For details http://kenconsultancy.com/s-4-hana-services/ or contact us http://kenconsultancy.com/contact-us/