Digital Transformation Driving Companies Back to the Basics

Digital Transformation is the latest mantra for companies; the latest big buzzword.

Of course, it's more than that. There's reality to the phrase as a survey recently released by PointSource confirmed. "At least a quarter of companies plan to invest more than 25% of their budgets in artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, voice-activated technologies or facial-recognition technologies. Yet over half of these organizations (53%) feel that they’re unprepared to effectively use the technologies they plan to acquire."

This is a telling finding. The companies recognize the potential of these technologies, and are jumping into their acquisition, but have not clearly determined how exactly they are going to use them.

The most basic element of strategic planning, whether it be corporate planning or IT planning, is to study the overall objectives of the organization and develop a plan that is consistent with those objectives - a plan that helps the organization to achieve those objectives.

Yet, Greg Ng, vice president of digital engagement at PointSource, points out that "Digital solutions and strategies exist to solve so many of the problems companies face today. But decision makers consistently struggle to parse down to just the digital capabilities that are right for them."

Therein lies the problem. finding those solutions that actually fit with the corporate objectives and will help to achieve them. It's an old problem, and the solution has been around for years - focusing on that aspect of corporate strategic planning that begins with defining the objectives, identifying the potential solutions, analyzing which solutions are likely to work the best, and writing action plans that will make them a reality. It's not as simple as it sounds, and not as romantic as re-imagining the company, but it's as essential an approach as it ever was, perhaps even more so. For more, see this article and the related study.

Fully Integrated Corporate Reporting

There has been a great deal of change in corporate reporting to shareholders and other stakeholders in recent years. Notable has been an increased reliance on the investor relations section of websites and inclusion on the sites of data oriented disclosures that encourage and facilitate downloading select data for analysis.

There are other changes that have been regularly promoted by various people and organizations but not yet widely adopted. This would include integrated reporting, under which sustainability and financial reporting are combined in an integrated fashion to provide a wholistic picture of the operations of the company.

Some companies provide a separate integrated report, whIch leaves the company with a situation in which they have three different reporting vehicles out for consumption – the integrated report, the traditional annual report and the IR section of the Website.

While these companies deserve recognition for their efforts to innovate, nevertheless, this multi-report world seems an inefficient and wasteful approach.

Perhaps it would make more sense to integrate all three into one single IR Website. At present, the annual report is usually included as a PDF in the Website. Sustainability and governance disclosures are usually included as separate sections of the website, separate from the IR Section. But it is never integrated. This despite the fact that the annual report is a relic of the age of print, and people rarely read the print version any more. Also, it is in most provinces not a legal requirement.

Although companies are usually tight for time in simply complying with legal and regulatory requirements and don’t have a lot of time for innovation, nevertheless innovation of this kind, where the number of reports could actually be reduced, would seem to be a form of innovation that could be very viable.

Perhaps reporting companies should include fully integrated reporting in their set of objectives for their business reporting activities.

How to Build a Smart Decision Making System

You want a smart decision making system? OK, it goes like this. Start with a body of good solid data. Not necessarily big data but data that is comprehensive in a particular important aspect of your business. Then, identify the business decisions that are prime subjects for automation. Add advanced data analytics that can be used to identify trends and dominant features of the data. Blend in some AI, that uses machine learning to identify the trends, anomalies and other characteristics and spit out optimum courses of action to advance business interests. Finally, identify the business processes that are used to make those decisions. Integrate the technology with the business processes, adjusting and modifying the processes where necessary.

Right away, we see some of the challenges. How good, really, is the data. Is it readily available, balanced, nuanced, rich? Is it in usable format and platform independent? Are the data analytics reliable, accurate and consistent? Will the decisions reached with the AI be consistent with business policy and culture? Fundamentally, how well can the data, analytics, AI and processes be integrated? What if any will be the role of people? How will we manage the changes in people activity?

With this quick glance at the landscape, it's easy to see why AI implementation is proceeding slowly. Management can envisage the benefits. But the devil is in the details.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of activity in the business world developing smart decision making systems. We can expect to see a lot more over the next few years.