What is operational excellence?

Global Business Services (GBS) can be defined as an organizational model designed to deliver end-to-end enterprise services within a single function that would otherwise be resolved within departmental shared services centers (e.g., IT, HR, finance, etc.).

GBS organizations are often put in place to drive scaled, cost-efficient delivery, while improving service quality and governance across the enterprise. In addition to owning “back office” operations, GBS organizations are increasingly being tasked with delivering advanced and complex enterprise capabilities such as transformation, continuous improvement, analytics and more.

GBS brings together these traditionally separate, siloed internal operational service functions into a single corporate support organization. Organizations that drive efficiencies through GBS, strive to:

• Connect end-to-end processes while reducing costs
• Provide unified employee service experiences
• Deliver shared visibility across all service cases
• Gain agility and ease of continuous improvement
  

What does it mean to be risk resilient? An organization is considered risk resilient when it has the necessary resources and processes in place to foresee and deal with future challenges and capitalize on opportunities. It’s even more powerful when enterprises manage risk and resilience in real time.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) programs help ensure that enterprises address risks and meet compliance mandates. Today, these programs are even more critical as enterprises around the world embrace digital transformation and cloud-based platforms. Such innovations enable workforces and customers to easily access digital services and processes, but these seamless experiences also bring increased risks.

Organizations with outdated GRC processes and tools are opening themselves up to unnecessary risk and placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage. These scenarios could be mitigated if enterprises implemented modern risk management and compliance practices embedded into digital workflows to achieve new insights and facilitate better decision-making.

Organizations can drive their strategic outcomes by evolving their traditional approach to Project Portfolio Management (PPM) to Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM). SPM allows organizations to prioritize and fund what matters most, build a roadmap to guide investments, communicate plans, and track progress. SPM empowers teams to plan and execute work in a method that suits their needs, while consolidating and centralizing business demand.

To create an SPM environment, organizations must follow three distinct steps:

• Roadmap strategy to maximize outcome
• Align investments to implement strategy
• Deliver value at pace using any methodology

Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) is all about driving business growth while building a more sustainable, equitable, and ethical future for the world. 

When organizations operate responsibly and pursue opportunities to solve societal challenges, they can deliver solutions for issues ranging from the climate crisis to poverty, inequality, and starvation. Such innovation from the private sector is a growing market. The benefits for consumers and the planet are immeasurable when a company chooses to behave responsibly and promote positive environmental and social practices.

While most organizations perform ESG activities, few have a cohesive, enterprise-wide planning and operational model or technology foundation to help them achieve their ESG goals as demands increase.

One ESG best practice is to integrate workflows that will operationalize the ESG pillars of your program on a single platform. They interact with operational controls for strategizing, managing, governing, and reporting ecosystem-wide. This silo-defying approach aligns your investments with your goals. It meshes ESG efforts with other corporate priorities and processes for optimal results.