What is multi-cloud management?

Multi-cloud management describes tools and strategies that allow companies to control and monitor resources across multiple cloud environments.

What is a multi-cloud environment?

A multi-cloud environment exists wherever a single organization uses two or more of the same type of cloud solutions for specific, individual applications or services. A multi-cloud environment may consist of private, public, or edge clouds, combining applications running on more than one of the same type of cloud provider with on-premises operations. This makes it possible for businesses to enjoy the benefits offered by different cloud vendors and solutions, while also reducing, mitigating, or eliminating many of the disadvantages from each.

What are the benefits of multi-cloud management?

As previously stated, a multi-cloud approach may benefit organizations by allowing them to combine benefits from multiple cloud vendors. Multi-cloud management takes this even further, giving businesses invaluable support and control over their multi-cloud environments.

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What is operational excellence?

Operational excellence, is the goal of driving business performance through efficient and transparent practices to reduce costs and risk and deliver higher service quality.

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Operational excellence, is sometimes referred to as operating excellence or operations excellence. Both terms are used interchangeably and refer to the goal of driving business performance through efficient, transparent and value-add practices that will help lower operating costs and risk and deliver improved service quality and capability to the enterprise. Both operational excellence and operating excellence are sometimes shortened to OpEx.

Without a strong foundation that binds proper context with the right actions, organizations can’t align and deliver as one to reach their desired state with confidence. A unified organizational strategy designed to achieve operating excellence can help business leaders address their most common pressures that occur across operations, such as:

Reducing costs and running their enterprise service operations efficiently
Communicating to stakeholders a commitment to ESG initiatives
Demonstrating to shareholders that the organization is resilient
Operating their business efficiently and at scale

When different parts of your business work together, they work better. Depending on how your business runs, this might mean combining the power of business management, security, and even social and governance into a single operational platform. The result is the ability to construct processes that are effective, transparent, and trustworthy, putting your organization in a position to better serve all your stakeholders, whether that be your customers, your staff or the planet. Other benefits include:

Helps leaders remain strategic
Helps the organization create a competitive advantag
Has a positive effect on the environment by upholding the sustainability values of your customers and colleagues

Global Business Services (GBS)

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

Risk and resilience in real-time

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.

Strategic outcomes

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)

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.

Things change in an instant, it’s important that your operational processes can keep up. Automation can improve both customer experience and employee experience. When you can deliver predictably high service levels during unpredictable times, your customers will notice and thank you for it.

In the instance of customer service, it’s safe to say that not all issues are solved most effectively by agents in the contact center. Some requests are handled more quickly and easily through customer self-service. For more complex problems, support agents often need to work with other teams in the organization to address them. This is an example of automation at work to help drive operating excellence.

Start with your own employees’ experience first. To deliver seamless experiences for your customers, you must first look to your own operation. Begin to understand your employees’ roles and put the focus on how you can enable them to service customers properly.
Create digital workflows and reduce the number of manual tasks. Enable the automated assignment of tasks and implement reporting structures to ensure action has been taken.
Unify all systems, policies, and processes on a single platform. This allows your operations and technology solutions to scale along with your business’ trajectory in the future.
Find an implementation partner that shares your ambition, helps your organization grow, and has the potential to take your services to the next level.

The key component to driving operating excellence is to unify service delivery to enhance every business process across your organization. This is achieved by replacing a complex mix of different systems and management processes in the different business units with integrated, powerful workflows all on one platform.