INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH MR. DEEPAK KUMBHAT,
Director, Finance Shared Services,
Ramboll
Award winning Business Leader (20 years’ experience) with collaborative approach to successful transformational leadership, engaging with business stakeholders at C-level and 3rd parties. Setting up and growing Shared Service and Outsourcing Centre, significantly driving change management, business transformation, project strategies, redefined operating models, organisational design and benefits realisation.
How do you believe shared services of the future will look like? What will they deliver beyond providing a fixed portfolio of scale services?
Changes that previously occurred over many years are now happening over months or a few short years, and some organizations are leapfrogging previous steps to achieve the maximum potential opportunity in the shortest possible timescale.
A strong and obvious commitment to the COE is the driving force in modern-day shared services.
Areas of Change Management, Data Management, Automation, and Process Improvement are new additions and trends that will solidify in the coming years.
What are shared service organizations doing to deliver game-changing performance from their shared services? Is there any change in terms of preparedness that you’re seeing now versus say five years back?
A defining trend going forward will be “fewer & larger.” This contrasts with the alternative strategy of “smaller & localized – but more”.
The shared service is now seen as a perfect launchpad for “automation at scale”.
There is an opportunity for Shared Services to develop additional competencies that can take advantage of automation and the bountiful rivers of data flowing through processes – to come up with new, value-adding services.
How do you believe digital has enabled shared service organizations to deliver improved business impact? Could you please detail with some examples?
There is also the growing recognition, acceptance and leveraging of what has been called the “hybrid workforce”, made of both humans and supporting robotic process and broader intelligent automation.
Significant performance gains realized through the digital workforce – particularly in quality, productivity, and fewer errors – there are still obvious challenges to be addressed.
Lack of change management emerges as a key culprit in limiting automation effectiveness. Again, preparation, planning, education and involvement are all key themes that serve to minimize the anxiety that is very easily unleashed.
Automation should be treated as competency and not a task specific tool e.g. distinction has to be drawn between Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as task specific tool or a value driven competency. Companies who treat automation as competency will ride the digital wave at its breaking edge from those safely playing in the breakwater.
How do people within shared services need to be reskilled to get ready for the future? What should enterprises be doing about it?
People are doing jobs they were hired to do yesterday, but those jobs are now gone. We need them to do the job that exists today. If they are not seeing what the opportunities are, they are not empowering themselves and they are not stepping into the gaps.
There is a great need to create techno-functional workforce i.e. functional expert who can work with digital workforce.
Functional know-how is going to play a critical role in moving towards digitisation, so it is important that we make these functional experts techno functional. It is going to be very expensive to hire digital work force with surging demand, also it needs a lot of investment to make them understand the functional needs and fit for purpose solutions.