Bridging the digital acceleration gap with data-centric approach
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Damian Leach, CTO of Workday in APJ weighs in with his views about digital acceleration, and the role that data can play.
EITN: What is the digital acceleration gap?
Damian Leach: The digital acceleration gap started to form during the COVID-19 pandemic and widened over time, as organisations with greater agility transformed faster compared to others that were not able to adapt. The distance of growth, change, and digital agility between these two types of organisations is known as the digital acceleration gap. It is also the gap between the pace of change driven by new opportunity and digital transformation, and the ability of an organisation to capitalise on it.
According to a global study Workday conducted, more than half (52%) of business leaders surveyed say that there is a growing gap between where their businesses is, and where it needs to be for it to be competitive.
To bridge this gap and stop it from further widening, business leaders will need to take a more proactive approach towards data collection and analysis, as well as adapt or transform existing employee talent and in turn their business culture. This will be imperative to business to both survive and then grow.
For example, we have observed that technologically agile teams that build a strategic foundation of cloud benefitted from the elasticity, extensibility, agility, and scalability of cloud SaaS applications during times of change. They were able to swiftly adapt business processes and operational structures accordingly, to ensure both the needs and the experience of customers and employees were satisfied and so they stayed ahead of their competition.
On the other hand, businesses that relied primarily on infrastructure-heavy solutions faced challenges during the pandemic, as they had to keep up with operational demands while concurrently dealing with supply chain disruptions that affected the delivery of hardware required to upgrade capacity, modernise, maintain, and replace legacy systems. The resulting inability to adapt quickly to meet new demands meant stagnating business growth or negative growth in some cases as they fell further behind.
EITN: What IT investments should CIOs prioritise to ensure that IT teams can continuously meet the demands of the business as it evolves?
Damian Leach: A robust digital strategy is key to ensuring that organisations continuously adapt to the changing business landscape. For this to happen, CIOs should focus on three main priorities: building digital resilience; leveraging IT for business agility; and finally improving core systems to allow flexibility for systems integration in partnership with business stakeholders.
First, CIOs should focus on building digital resilience by investing to migrate as many of the legacy systems on premise to the cloud. They should also explore in creating agile teams and automate processes for IT operations. Where possible, CIOs should adopt predictable Software as a Service (SaaS) models for applications to help businesses move away from high capital expenditures (CapEx) investment programmes.
In addition, CIOs should support and foster an organisational culture that promotes business agility. This involves moving away from long, multi-year programmes towards agile scrum-based project management frameworks and practices where employees are constantly able to pick up new skills and digital capabilities. According to the same global study, only 33% of IT leaders are prioritising faster acquisition of targeted talent and the development of new skills to ensure their teams can meet the shifting demands of the business.
Finally, CIOs should look towards future-proofing core systems when investing in digital infrastructure. This includes purchasing systems that do not have closed ecosystems and investing in Development Operations (DevOps) that drive strategic change for all core applications. When looking at systems that are not able to be moved to the cloud immediately, explore means of integrating them to the cloud such as by means of creating a single, centralised data model. This in turn will provide business integration standards such that business applications can integrate to the new central core.
EITN: How can IT teams improve the quality of the data they collect? “APJ CIOs are more likely than their global counterparts to be planning investments in quality, usable data – 43% see this as one of their top priority.” What is influencing their decision to do so? And what is your definition of quality, usable, data? What can Workday do to facilitate use/acquisition of quality, usable data?
Damian Leach: Good quality data and strong data hygiene are the bedrocks of highly productive and efficient IT solutions. To collate high quality data, CIOs should implement stringent data policies that do not have too many data points. This means only collating data that fulfils the criteria which had been intended of it.
First, CIOs should focus on building digital resilience by investing to migrate as many of the legacy systems on premise to the cloud. They should also explore in creating agile teams and automate processes for IT operations. Where possible, CIOs should adopt predictable Software as a Service (SaaS) models for applications to help businesses move away from high capital expenditures (CapEx) investment programmes.
Good data hygiene can also be practiced through the means of sorting and centralising data according to the business remits it helps to support. Storing data on cloud-based applications also make it easier for IT professionals to swiftly access and utilise the relevant data for their respective projects, whenever and wherever they require.
To effectively close the acceleration gap, companies will need to invest in obtaining quality data and harnessing cloud-based solutions. Fortunately, our studies have noted that many CIOs across APJ are planning to invest in quality, usable data – which we believe is a sign that the APJ region is becoming a fast-emerging hub for digital acceleration and quality IT practices. By focusing on digital agility as well as speed, CIOs can ensure their organisations are better placed to capitalise on market opportunities and drive successful operations.
At Workday, we take a strategic, unique approach towards enterprise software. We prioritise an adaptable architecture and a unified data core, creating intuitive experiences for our users. Our platforms are purpose-built with agility at its core and evolve as fast as the business landscape does. This means that from functions of configurable security to embedded machine learning, our technological solutions can meet evolving needs and empower users with quality insights from real-time data that enable smooth business operations.
We also deliver innovation continuously to our customers and in 2021 released over 1000 new features alone, these were not delivered as part of lengthy upgrades rather part of the standard release cycle we apply to all our customers at once globally.
EITN: How does an organisation balance priorities surrounding cybersecurity, compliance and data privacy in today’s digital-first landscape?
Damian Leach: Today’s technology leaders are tasked with the responsibility of securing and protecting customers, employees, as well as intellectual property data of their companies in an environment where security threats are increasingly complex.
At Workday, our top priority is the security of our customers’ data. We employ rigorous security measures at the organisational, architectural, and operational levels to ensure that our customers’ data, applications, and infrastructure remain safe. In employing cloud-based solutions and moving away from legacy systems and controls, organisations are already taking a step towards more secure digital platforms.
For these reasons, IT teams should be highly demanding of the vendors that they work with and ensure that they possess the necessary standards, verified by third-party audits and certifications, for digital security and privacy. Such standards include Service Organisation Controls (SOC1 and 2), International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO 27001, 27017, 27018), as well as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF).
Finally, we also strongly advise investing internally in building a strong IT team comprising experienced Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) personnel to do the due diligence needed. Organisations can also boost their security posture by putting in place a formal and comprehensive security programme that upholds the security and integrity of customer data, protects against unauthorised access, relevant security threats, and data breaches.
EITN: How can IT teams help provide services to bridge the gap between what businesses want to do and what can be achieved with existing infrastructure?
Damian Leach: Transformational partnerships will elevate the profile of IT teams as a key driver of business strategy from a technological perspective. With clear digital strategies to effectively leverage data and technology, IT teams can enable business leaders to unlock greater value and more meaningful work in their organisations.
CIOs have an extremely vital role to play in setting strategy and advocating for and deploying cloud-based IT systems that allow greater agility. For example, newer IT systems that are SaaS-based and cloud-native have integration hooks into third party systems.
As work becomes more digitised and decentralised, it is all the more critical that IT teams work hand-in-glove with their operation teams to ensure operational synergy and the development of technological solutions that are best suited to the needs of business. This allows IT teams and their operational counterparts to identify potential business opportunities and work with agility to develop the solutions needed to tackle business issues and drive positive outcomes.
CIOs have an extremely vital role to play in setting strategy and advocating for and deploying cloud-based IT systems that allow greater agility. For example, newer IT systems that are SaaS-based and cloud-native have integration hooks into third party systems.
This means that eco-system consolidation opportunities will arise for the business over time to enable the centralisation of data to a single, secure source that supports any device at any time. This shift to a simpler UX and single data model for the IT eco-system will not only provide an improved foundation for end-user experience and analytics on demand, but also provide greater opportunities for benchmarking, sentiment analysis, source to pay, finance and people planning, and also ESG via machine learning. This dramatically removes legacy manual processes for the businesses and employees whilst also removing the need to engage IT for support services through automation.