Driving efficiency in the era of agility – part one

Today’s business ecosystem is more competitive than ever. Ever-changing customer demands, rising workloads, tighter regulations, and societal disruption have created a sink-or-swim environment where organizations either adapt and react or are left behind.

Process lies at the core of every organization. Step by step, employees and systems create outcomes that move the business forward. This isn’t anything new – the previous era of business was predicated on creating and managing process – but now we’ve begun to enter a new era: the era of agility.

Breaking the monolith

Having processes and systems in place isn’t good enough; they need to be malleable, adaptable, and scalable if organizations are going to find success. Unfortunately, the legacy systems in place at large, traditional organizations reflect the past era’s thinking. Large, siloed, and monolithic, these systems and processes are built to support specific functions. While they do this well, they lack the flexibility and connectivity required of today’s businesses.

Compounding the issue is the organizational strategy of these businesses. Teams are built around their single-use, monolithic systems and processes. While these groups are skilled at performing their specific process functions, their lack of standardization and cohesion is exposed by today’s need for exponentially more interconnected business functionality.

Not only does this model restrict the business’s ability to prioritize and accomplish tasks, but it also compromises the all-important end-user experience. Agility is so necessary today due to the rapid rate at which customer preferences evolve and change. Customer data – in every context – needs to fuel business decisions, and the old, monolithic approach restricts how far this data permeates inside the organization. Without data to drive business decisions, organizations are operating in the dark and being left behind by their more agile, customer-centric competition.

The power of scalability

Often enough, organizations have strong processes in place but issues arise when trying to add throughput to the process. This raises the second significant threat in this new age of agility: scalability.

A process put in place to translate resources into value will inevitably need to handle more resources if it is to create more value. Legacy processes and systems, however, are reaching their breaking point. Unable to address today’s required volume or support new technologies, these systems quickly turn from value drivers into value pits.

Within this context, when designing business processes, it doesn’t matter how agile, data-driven, or high-tech they are if they cannot handle the continued growth of the organization and the needs placed on the system.

Process optimization in action

Today’s process challenges aren’t merely a product of old tech or poor design; they stem from a rapid shift in customer demands and the profound increase in value placed upon agility and cross-organization insights and collaboration.

Now we’ve set the stage, we will detail how Capgemini and Pega have taken this new paradigm head-on, delivering agile, efficient, and scalable solutions that can be replicated across industries, in part two of this blog.

Author details

Amar Phadnis: Amar is a seasoned delivery lead with over 19 years of experience in assisting clients meet their strategic objectives and technology challenges. He is an expert in telecom engineering and construction processes with extensive experience in architecting solutions for systems. His specialties include solution architecture, engagement management, business-process improvement, and billing-quality assurance. With over 10 years at Capgemini, Amar became a Senior Manager on the Capgemini Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Pega Alliance team in January 2020.