What is operational excellence?

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

GBS organisations 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 organisations 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 organisation. Organisations 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 organisation is considered risk resilient when it has the necessary resources and processes in place to foresee and deal with future challenges and capitalise on opportunities. It’s even more powerful when enterprises manage risk and resilience in real time.

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) programmes help ensure that enterprises address risks and meet compliance mandates. Today, these programmes 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.

Organisations with outdated GRC processes and tools are opening themselves up to unnecessary risk and placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage.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.

Organisations can drive their strategic outcomes by evolving their traditional approach to Project Portfolio Management (PPM) to Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM). SPM allows organisations to prioritise 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 centralising business demand.

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

• Roadmap strategy to maximise 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 organisations 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 organisations 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 operationalise the ESG pillars of your programme on a single platform. They interact with operational controls for strategising, 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.