INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH Mr. Sriram Gopalakrishnan,
Director – Business Solutions Centre (BSC) , V Group
V-Group is headquartered in London, UK and is a leading provider of ship management and maritime services to the commercial shipping, cruise, energy, and defence industries.
How do you believe shared services of the future will look like? What will they deliver beyond providing a fixed portfolio of scale services?
Shared services have matured from being a center for delivering labor arbitrage and process improvement to playing a more important role in enabling the organization from reacting to historical data to one which is more proactive, leveraging predictive outcomes.
With advanced technology such as bots and Intelligent RPA being more successful than 3-5 years ago, the primary scope of the SSC will soon be reduced to exceptions handling and that’s where the value add kicks -the access to data & the deep understanding of processes enables the Shared Services to become the central hub, delivering proactive insights, being a testing ground for innovation, and a strategic asset to enable the digital ecosystem.
What is 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?
What technology can do today is not the same what it could do 5 years ago.
Digital adoption and continuous improvement will remain the key focus areas for SSC organizations in the next three to five years. Cloud, RPA, AI will continue to be key digital drivers in the near future.
The introduction of design thinking concepts bought the customer back in the focus during problem-solving. This has enabled a lot more cognitive-based solutions & self-service options.
Organizations have started to rethink their Shared Services operating model on account of the digital transformation. The operating model should leverage a lot more “as a service” options to benefit from experts.
There is a renewed focus on talent management ensuring they stay relevant & ready to embrace the digital ecosystem. The profile of the shared Service resource pool is focused on subject matter experts, problem solvers, data scientists, etc.
How do you believe digital has enabled shared service organizations to deliver improved business impact? Could you please detail with some examples?
Leveraging RPA, analytics, and other digital technologies such as AI, chatbots and other forms of “intelligence” into their operations, shared-services organizations may be able to streamline processes.
Introducing AI into routine processes enables the software to go beyond pre-defined rules. For Example, It helps in better & enhanced automation for reconciliations & customer support apps.
Advanced Analytic insights predict the problem & help proactive resolution eg: in case of service desk the ability to study & predict customers based on their behaviors patterns from the past help ensure better first time right resolutions.
However, a lot of companies are not yet prepared for a full-scale shift to digital ways of working. Such transitions face challenges in the form of system integration, current process, and workflow design, talent and operating models.
Adoption is still relatively low because companies face several challenges in building digital shared-services organizations. How do people within shared services need to be reskilled to get ready for the future? What should enterprises be doing about it?
One of the key challenges organizations faces while moving to a digital ecosystem as mentioned above is around talent. This requires a revisit around the HR strategy and staff’s qualification. Both need to be aligned with the new expectations & increased complexity of processes.
The focus on reskilling the talent within the organizations should be on moving people from a “processing” mindset to becoming deep domain experts with an E2E point of view. Additionally training around problem-solving, change management & end customer mindset and the ability to deal with data will be a big plus.
Initially, organizations will have to draw a balance between hiring the skills externally v/s making the same from within. There may be too few people with data analysts, RPA development and machine-learning capabilities. While technical skills will continue to be the key but the true differentiator will be the ability of the talent to develop the capability to influence, the ability to understand customer needs and requirements & the desire to understand what’s happening in the wider landscape
Also, operations and IT groups will need to collaborate more closely to enable seamless delivery