2021 will see the emergence of a business environment where data dominates business strategy and automation becomes a native competency, ensuring processes run effectively in the cloud to achieve business outcomes that drive growth. AI will emerge as an orchestration capability across these fluid processes as effective digital businesses deliver their products and services much faster, cheaper, and more competitively than they could ever have dreamed of pre-pandemic. Digital and data is the only language operations now understand. OneOffice is where automation becomes a native competency, where human performance is augmented by unleashing creativity and personal interaction, where the immediacy of data creates insights to support decision-making that can make or break the firm. In fact, if you can’t operate your organization as one integrated unit where data flows freely back and forth across your process chains from your customers to your employees, from your front office to (what you used to call your back office), then you probably won’t survive much longer in today’s brutal Pandemic.
The change agents for this shift are a single data model and dynamic workflows in the cloud. These will enable cross-functional workflows and automation that are central to operationalizing the OneOffice. Only by finally overcoming the siloes and organizational boundaries, organizations will be able to react to changes in the environment in real-time and progress toward becoming an anticipatory enterprise. But we have to remind ourselves that this is a journey. Culture, people and processes are central to progress with this endeavor. Learn from organizations that have embarked on this journey and benefit from their lessons learned.
