Tag: digital transformation

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Cloud and Digital are Transforming Business

Businesses, whether small or large, must change how they operate. They need to find ways to leverage the technologies and influences shaping society. Transformation is essential for companies to face today’s rapidly changing environment and embrace the opportunities it provides. This means mapping out a strategy and prioritizing activities which will fundamentally shift the operation towards greater intelligence and agility.

Digital transformation is about changing how businesses operate at a foundational level. It involves transforming processes and capabilities. This is done to leverage digital technologies across all strata of the business. 

Change in business is an ongoing process and not a one-time activity.

Transformational change is enabled in large part by cloud technologies. Cloud computing solutions are in high demand. They allow businesses to scale easily and affordably. They also provide the mobility and remote access that workers require. 

More fundamentally, cloud computing services improve collaboration by users. They also enhance collaboration by applications. This improvement enables seamless integration of functionality and data from various sources.

Microsoft Azure platform provides infrastructure and services previously available only to larger businesses and enterprise IT departments. Noobeh, Mendelson’s cloud services team, uses Microsoft Azure to deliver SQL data warehouses for structured data. It provides data lakes for the storage of unstructured and different data types. The Azure Data Factory and Microsoft Fabric are used to transport, transform, and weave it all together.

Converged wired and wireless networks and smarter telephony solutions deliver location and usage data that were not previously available to most IT departments. Today’s imaging technology can easily reduce a picture to searchable and identifiable metadata. The introduction of IoT brings an even further integration of data from virtual and physical realms. This enhances potentials for intelligence. It also improves understanding and interaction.

Mendelson Consulting recognizes that true transformation is guided by the vision and objective but is supported through operational efforts.

The collection of data for inspection and analysis is the first requirement. Only through the proper establishment of processes and workflow is the required information developed.

Mendelson Consulting partners with businesses to define the scope and strategy for advancing into the digital future. They take fundamental steps to introduce greater agility in platforms and services. These platforms and services support an ever-changing business environment. They also ensure visibility, which drives greater business intelligence and operational insight.

jm bunny feetMake Sense?

J

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Next Generation Accountants and Businesses

Understanding the value and application of information technology is the cornerstone of building a successful “next generation” accounting or consulting practice. Professionals are finding that new opportunities to engage with new and existing clients comes from closer involvement with client financial and operational systems. Collecting and analyzing data, integrating applications and automating data exchanges, and leveraging cloud platforms and services is rapidly becoming the next level of “standardized” service offered by many professionals.

The pace of change is increasing, which makes it increasingly important for business owners to wisely select their technology partners and solutions. While many accounting professionals consider themselves to be the business owner’s trusted advisor, their clients often seek advice on increasing efficiency and reducing costs from software and IT consultants instead.

Yet conditions will change and could force the client business to make adjustments that impact the applications and services supporting the operation. Do the solutions in place have the agility necessary to meet changing business needs, being adaptable enough to meet new conditions or orientations? This is where accounting professionals can help their business clients make the right choices to address current and potential future needs.

Even as information management paradigms continue to shift, accounting professionals can help their business clients achieve better business performance and profitability through innovating workflows and increasing process efficiency. Whether or not the existing systems lend themselves to these efforts remains the question, and represents an area where the professional could provide great value.

Accounting professionals should look at services they can provide to clients that have direct and meaningful impact on operational efficiency and resultant profitability.  These areas represent not simply cost and efficiency improvements, but speak to quality of service and sustainability as well, creating better and repeatable outcomes that can support the operation even as operating conditions may change.

Improving data collection and analysis provides the foundation for understanding more about the operation, and delivers the insight required to identify areas where performance might be improved and then to prove the outcome.

Automating data exchanges and imports, eliminating redundant entry and the potential for manual errors, establishes structure in processes which can then be streamlined to deliver consistent and predictable results.

Utilizing cloud platforms and services allows the business to utilize the infrastructure required to support operations while providing a level of affordable scalability that doesn’t push the business beyond its reasonable boundaries.

What this discussion touches on is the subject of digital transformation and what that really means for small businesses and the accounting professionals who support them.

Rather than performing the accounting and financial work as after-the-fact participants, accounting professionals should help their business clients take a new view of processes and activities performed throughout the business, identifying areas where new approaches can be applied to increase efficiency as well as agility, developing a stronger foundation for growth and profitability. 

From the adoption of paperless and electronic workflows to merging social media with marketing and support activities, digital transformation represents an ongoing effort within a business to fundamentally shift from manual processes to electronic exchange, and expanding considerations beyond physical boundaries to include the virtual, as well.

All of this represents new opportunity and enhanced value for the accounting professionals ready to help their clients become “next generation” businesses.

Make Sense?

J

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Focusing on Transformation

Focusing on Transformation

In January of 2007, Network World published an article stating that “user satisfaction with software as a service (SaaS) is starting to slip, but customer interest in this method of outsourcing IT functions is continuing to grow“, and says that recent survey results clearly demonstrate SaaS being “a dominant force going forward”.  That was 10 years ago, yet the same message is being played out today as managed services and hosting continues to grow in popularity. IT outsourcing makes sense for thousands of businesses, whether the software is part of the package or not. Today, outsourcing IT is almost an imperative if the business is to keep up a competitive pace.

Users need and demand mobility and will get their anytime/anywhere access to applications and data however they can get it. Businesses require agility in their technology, which is difficult when significant investments in hardware and infrastructure must be earned out prior to any new investment. Making systems accessible from outside the firewall, securing them in a reasonable manner and keeping them up and running all the time so users can access at any time is not a job for part-time IT.  Keeping the systems on and available at all hours requires full-time IT management, and this is in part what fuels the popularity of outsourcing it all.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) goes a long way toward helping businesses manage their IT costs in that the systems are part of the service.  The hardware running the application, the storage of the data and the support accompanying the solution are all part of the package.  Unfortunately, the SaaS solutions is not generally the only thing in use by the business, so continued reliance upon PCs, desktop software and locally stored data causes IT management costs to persist.  One size does not fit all, even with online application services.  Although customizations and add-ons can help a single app become a broader solution framework, there is usually something left behind that ends up anchoring a process or function to the desktop, device or local network, and requiring IT management and administration to go along with.

Application hosting services compete somewhat with SaaS in that the systems and management of them is included in the hosting service subscription fee.  While the business user retains licensing of applications and the flexibility of using the software already embedded in the operation, the organization is enabled to focus on operational improvements and not on the underlying systems supporting them.  By reducing or eliminating the requirement to directly manage and maintain servers, complex networks and user working environments, businesses are able to focus their in-house technical energies towards innovation and improvement. The centralized nature of the system facilitates new collaborative capabilities while allowing the business to build on the knowledge and base of information already invested software and processes.

Outsourcing IT service provisioning and management is just a baby step towards improving the business agility and positioning the organization for growth. Real digital business transformation begins with a change in the business mindset: not simply a focus on operational processes and improvements, a new strategy should evolve where the enterprise is situated to interact with its market seamlessly, at any time and all the time.  Businesses that wish to compete at this level must consider whether or not purchasing and maintaining their IT infrastructure is where they wish to focus their energies or if they’d rather invest their technical talent towards market building and transformational objectives.

Make Sense?

J

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Cloud and Digital are Driving Change in Professional Practice

Accounting and Finance Professionals: Cloud and Digital are Driving Change in Professional Practice

Accountants and financial consultants working in public practice are experiencing a revolutionary change, evolving from documents and paper-based processes with after-the-fact reporting to real-time business management and providing services which support daily decision-making.  The underlying cause for this evolution in business accounting is the technology: cloud and collaborative computing models are enabling much closer and regular interaction between accounting professionals and the businesses they serve. Even more, technology is taking its proper place in automating once tedious activities, allowing professionals to focus on causes and results rather than on transactions.

What is the real impact this is having on the accounting profession?  It’s forcing a new focus and attention on change management within the practice, and is causing professionals to recognize the requirement for standardization of processes and development of controls which are the foundations for creating sustainability in a business.  The goal now is placing reliance on process rather than people, which establishes the basis for intelligent automation.  Standardization of processes does not require that the firm lose its personality.  Rather, the mission at hand is to imbue the organization with its unique flavor and approach and to use process automation to develop and support consistency in the functions performed.

While cloud computing models allow accounting and finance professionals to work closer with their business clients, it is important that the practice look at those client interactions and develop standards for processes supporting frequently performed functions.  These operations generally represent the activities within the firm which generate the highest levels of profitability due to the consistency in approach and repetition of tasks, and are the activities to apply intelligent automation to first.  Those activities or engagements which represent the “one-offs” are often the most costly for the firm to perform, and therefore may not be the most profitable of activities and are certainly the most challenging to support with any significant level of automation.  It is in this area where AI will find useful value in the practice, where a more informed answer than simple process automation is required.

The surprising finding when looking at many professional practices with more than one partner/professional involved is that these firms often fail to develop even the most basic of standard processes which apply throughout the firm.  Rather, each partner or professional has “their way” of handling things, which challenges the supporting personnel as they try to deal with multiple working methods. The result is a lack of consistency in the service delivery to the clientele and reduced productivity and profitability for the firm.

The thing that these firms are failing to recognize – the light bulb over their heads that just isn’t lighting up – is that cloud computing and collaborative working models aren’t designed just to enable and facilitate a closer working relationship with clients.  They’re also able to be applied inside the professional practice, enabling a more productive and efficient workflow which addresses the strengths and capabilities of the entire organization. And it doesn’t stop there.  Businesses are relying upon their accounting professionals to provide guidance and develop controls and standards to support the client transformation from paper-based to digital operations, and embracing the entire realm of data and interactions associating with the business. Digital transformation in a client business demands transformation in those firms who serve it.

As professionals learn to go deeper in client operations they would do well to look internally, too, exploring how increased attention to process automation and consideration for the firm’s own “digital transformation” might lead to great profitability through market differentiation and improved performance.

Make Sense?

J