Shared Thinking

Updates from October, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Ian Gotts 1:42 pm on October 29, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

  Mapping The Stakeholders In GBS Success 

  By Mike Gammage -TIBCO Nimbus

  I sat down with a recently-launched and highly ambitious Global Business Services (GBS) team to map all the stakeholders who will need to be engaged to ensure their success.  We rapidly filled the whiteboard (below – disguised!).

  

  It’s an extraordinary number of people,  across multiple functions and regions.  And this is not just about preparing for the launch for this particular GBS. This is about ongoing collaboration – and its scope is only going to expand as this GBS scales up on its five year program.

  This organization intends to adopt Nimbus to enable the collaboration across these diverse stakeholders that will be required to deliver outstanding service for its clients. Frankly, it’s difficult to see how else you could do it.

  End-to-end process - in the language of the business – is becoming the universal business language.  Wrapped within a robust governance framework, and delivered to users in way that supports them in doing real work, it’s the platform that can ensure effective collaboration across the complex and dynamic service delivery environments faced by most GBS organizations.
   

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  Ian Gotts 6:58 pm on August 21, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

  How To Simplify Global Shared Services 

  

  [This blog appeared in Sourcing Shangri-La blog]

  Most multinationals are almost ridiculously complex. It’s a barrier to innovation, compliance and sustainable improvement – and increasingly a C-Level issue. Simplification has been one of three strategic priorities at GSK, for instance, since 2008.

  So Deloitte’s report on reducing complexity in global shared services organizations is well-timed. Unfortunately though it misses the point.

  Deloitte sets out survey results which illustrate the prize.  Tackling complexity effectively, says Deloitte, can reduce the costs of delivering Finance, HR and IT by up to 20%, even in already ‘rationalised’ global shared services organizations.  And yet only 30% of CFOs believe that their efforts in tackling complexity are successful.

  The low-hanging fruit of labour arbitrage and automation were harvested long ago. ‘Getting a grip on complexity is’, in Deloitte’s words, ‘the next frontier in reducing costs [of Finance, HR, IT and other non-core support activities]‘.

  Which is great. But, alas, Deloitte’s report on how to get a grip on complexity is – frankly – very complicated. It could do with a complexity reduction program of the sort that it proposes. It presents interesting ideas but doesn’t join the dots. Its definitions of an operating model and a business model don’t quite work. Its attempt to define four different types of complexity – portfolio, organizational, process and information infrastructure – don’t hang together well. It’s light on governance and controls. It recognises the significance of master data management but doesn’t link it with process management. To its credit, the report clearly advises a focus on end-to-end process. But it dismisses ‘process flow diagrams’ in favour of an exotic visual value stream approach, the benefits of which would be incidental at best.

  More fundamentally, it overlooks what must be the 72pt headline to the complexity-slayer story: the power of process visualisation.

  End-to-end perspectives, expressed in the language of the business, with design principles that make it intuitive and easy on the eye. All managed within a methodology that blends compliance rigour with support for people doing real work, and ensures IT alignment.  This is what drives engagement in sustainable improvement and therefore, ultimately, in business simplification.

  And it’s not just effective in untangling process spaghetti, or bringing coherence to process fragments.  I’ve seen it to be equally effective in enabling organisations to escape the deadweight of enormous SOP document libraries and migrate to a far more agile world where end-to-end process provides the overarching narrative, supported where necessary by far fewer, and far slimmer, SOP documents.

  A picture being worth a thousand words etc, we shouldn’t be surprised that once people can see what’s going on, they are far better equipped to identify unnecessary complexity and collaborate to safely ‘make things as simple as possible but not simpler’ (to paraphrase Einstein, who never wrote on shared services, as far as I know, but knew a bit about complexity..).
   
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  Ian Gotts 9:54 pm on June 23, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

  Process – The Emerging Global Business Language #bpm #sharedservices 

  By Mike Gammage

  Anyone working on business transformation in a global organization will recognize McKinsey’s assessment in research published this week:

  “The structures, processes, and communications approaches of many far-flung businesses have been stretched to breaking point.”

  In Organizing for an emerging world, the McKinsey authors set out survey results – from 300 executives in 17 major global companies – together with their ideas for coping with ‘the cumulative degrees of complexity’ that globalization entails.

  Process, in one guise or another, is a recurrent theme. It’s further evidence that a business process management platform is coming to be seen as the essential infrastructure to enable effective and enterprise-wide collaboration on innovation and continuous improvement.

  The McKinsey authors dismiss, quite rightly, the view that it’s as simple as global standardization. Benchmarks, standards and industry models are invaluable guides but, at the end of the day, it’s often a complex calculus. Every organization is on its own journey: “No company’s restructuring should be viewed as a blueprint for that of another.”

  McKinsey’s respondents themselves identified process as one of the 3 weakest aspects of their organization (from a list of 12, so it’s serious).

  McKinsey’s conclusions are sound, and, again, process is the leitmotif throughout:

  - Don’t standardise more than is necessary. Which makes it vital to have a platform to manage effectively the ongoing tension between global processes and local variants.

  - Fit technology to the process, not vice versa. Break out of thinking that automation and systems are, in themselves, the answer. Which makes it vital to have a platform with an holistic and end-to-end perspective, capable of driving business-led global ERP implementations.

  - Listen to all the voices involved. Worry about adoption and communication. Which makes it vital to adopt a process management platform that engages everyone – not just process owners and IT. It must connect with process stakeholders and, as well, support those who execute process and encourage their feedback.

  - Implement from the top. Make clear accountability and strategic direction, and don’t be afraid eventually to mandate a new process. Which makes it vital to adopt a process management platform with a top-down implementation methodology, and a robust governance framework, capable of blending top-down command-and-control methods with bottom-up continuous improvement.

  So perhaps it’s like this. Today, global businesses typically adopt a company-wide business language to ensure effective communication.

  What we’re moving towards is a future where global businesses typically adopt as well a more advanced language to ensure effective collaboration. And the language that enables collaborative innovation, within a governance framework that makes clear roles and accountability, is end-to-end business process.

  Nowhere is this more true, of course, than in Global Business Services, where the capability to provide end-to-end process perspectives within a complete governance framework, integrated with documents, real-time KPIs, risks and controls, is rapidly emerging as a critical success factor.