Are we short of quality talent?
As businesses evolve and their information technology footprint grows, we allocate our best and brightest talent to the transformational projects and support the systems rather than spearheading growth and innovation.
Business and regulatory complexities, the bandwidth of resources, and tight budgets have always acted as constraints. This begs the question: Are we perennially short of quality talent, or are we?
Many enterprises are caught in a cycle where their most talented individuals are tethered to monotonous, repetitive mundane tasks. This not only inhibits focus on the business impact that these individuals and teams can drive, but also cultivates dissatisfaction in the employees, leading to attrition of precious talent.
And what’s been our response? We hire more, spend more on consulting, train new recruits, only to assign this high-potential talent focusing on urgent over important. This reactionary approach has unfortunately become the norm in many businesses.
Its a vicious cycle.
We then run our transformation programs and pour money into technology projects that again demand the best talent we have – further aggravating the shortage. Outsourcing has not been effective in transforming our business – we just tossed the ball (and our inefficiencies) over the fence for others to be as inefficient at a lower cost.
But is there a way out of this talent scarcity maze?
Certainly. The strategies that have worked well for some leading enterprises in liberating talent and enhancing performance:
- Simplify Target Operating Models: We have built hyperspecialized teams to improve productivity. But this specialization often leads to siloes, necessitating more intermediary roles. For instance, business intermediaries between procurement and accounts payable exist solely due to function-specific productivity targets. Why not cross-skill?
- Reassess Internal Barriers: While controls are essential, they sometimes restrict cross-functional collaboration. And these chinese walls restrict visibility and seamless cross-functional interactions. With the rise of straight-thru processing and ML based anomaly detection, do we still need numerous manual checks and approvals?
- Embrace Straight Through Processing: Instead of just automating tasks, let’s also identify tasks that can be altogether eliminated.
- Democratize data access: Provision real-time data, analytical insights, and anomaly detection tools for teams. This empowers them to address bottlenecks efficiently, rather than getting mired in manual transaction approvals or operating on single-dimensional legacy reports.
Our Options
The moot point is our willingness to look at and mature alternate solutions that will reduce repetitive effort while providing insights. The teams can act on these insights to drive outsized outcomes and enhance business performance by improving the competitive advantage.
A packaged solution using SaaS and AI: From our vantage of mid and back-office, simplifying business processes by adopting SaaS platforms and applying artificial intelligence is effective in addressing all of the four potential transformation initiatives in one package.
This releases the intense pressure on knowledge resources by codifying tribal knowledge and giving them the tools to further the domain outcomes.
At Midoffice Data we crafted a plug-and-play Data Suite (astRaiTM), that solves transactional and IT dispersion by applying domain-led innovation. astRai harmonizes the data, applies artificial intelligence to automate routine repetitive transactions and decouples dependence on tech upgrades and implementations. astRai also provides insights to address anomalies and enables data clean rooms to collaborate with your partners, therefore reducing friction and conserving effort in business processes.