Carly Bleathman
Partner, Business Services & Outsourcing
In a digital-first world where technology is integral to every part of a business, here at BDO we’re seeing more companies embrace the opportunities innovation and transformation bring to help shape their future operations, reduce risks and create greater efficiencies. Here we share six key digital transformation opportunities you can adopt to get a head start as we move through 2024.
The insights in this article are from a series of interviews with our experts about upcoming digital transformation trends they believe could impact businesses in the coming year.
Extracted from an interview with Alisa Voznaya, Director of Risk Transformation
Digital transformation has long been identified as a key opportunity for businesses, yet many are still coming up against the same problems they were facing almost ten years ago. The main challenge? Change management: preparing and aligning people and processes to ensure new technologies are effectively adopted by employees across a business.
While technologies and costs are often a priority, many businesses do not consider the role of people until the very end of the process. This is not surprising, given how complex change management can be, but when managed effectively and people are considered at the start of the process, businesses can see great success. Communicating with employees and stakeholders early on can help build a curious and innovative culture where people are more willing and even excited to go on the digital transformation journey with you.
Ensuring leaders and employees know how to use these technologies effectively can help them work more productively, successfully evaluate likely threats and opportunities and their potential impact, and navigate the added complexity of their digital working environment.
Extracted from an interview with Alisa Voznaya, Director of Risk Transformation
It is inevitable that as the use of technology increases, the threat of cyberattacks will rise. The Global Risk Landscape survey found that 46% of businesses feel their biggest fraud threat comes from cyber fraud and hacking. Understandably, more businesses are undertaking additional work around mitigation and ensuring an environment where they are well protected. However, this does not leave enough time and resources to think about cybersecurity innovation.
Adopting a three-pronged cybersecurity approach, which combines risk evaluation with digital augmentation, can greatly benefit businesses across many different industries. Firstly, defensive mechanisms ensure securities such as firewalls, access codes, authentication and encryption are in place. Secondly, proactive testing aligned to the latest understanding of existing and potential vulnerabilities exploited by hackers, such as carrying out security risk assessments through penetration testing and red-teaming ethical attacks, can help businesses identify and take action against security gaps and vulnerabilities. Finally, ensuring there is digital awareness across the workforce can help employees feel empowered to support their business’ cybersecurity strategy, taking ownership of the risk in the organisation’s frontline.
Extracted from an interview with Carly Bleathman, Partner, Business Servicing & Outsourcing
When considering how technology can transform your finance and accounting strategy, it is important to take a step back and look at your people and processes to help identify what you are trying to achieve and understand how technologies can help you get there. Investing time, resources and money into new systems and advancements only to then realise you do not have a process that is fit for purpose would be a great waste.
Firstly, identifying the problem you want to solve, or the efficiency you want to create, is crucial before exploring the technologies that can help you achieve your goals; choosing the right tools or software that best fits your requirements and understanding how it integrates with existing systems within your business.
It is also important to review your data strategy as part of this process. High-quality data fuels the insights gained, enabling the identification of patterns to inform business decisions. However, simply possessing this data isn’t enough – it is crucial to understand how to leverage technology solutions to extract valuable insights from your data to elevate the quality of insights to drive strategic decision-making that supports business objectives. This is a particularly important area for CFOs striving to become CVOs , where there is increasing demand to integrate a growing range of business values into their reporting and forecasting.
Furthermore, bringing your finance team on this transformation journey is key; engaging employees with how new technologies will optimise and enhance operations can help foster faster adoption. It is particularly crucial that they understand how these new tools and technologies can be leveraged strategically – from freeing up staff for higher-level analysis by automating manual tasks in accounts, to providing real-time insights into workforce costs by transforming payroll systems. Taking the correct approach can help develop a data-driven culture within your finance function, where employees use actionable insights to help inform business decisions and drive growth.
Ultimately, developing a thorough strategy that defines clear objectives, outlines employee training plans and establishes ethical guidelines, as well as a detailed road map, will ensure your finance and accounting transformation aligns with your current processes, people and existing technology.
Extracted from an interview with Andrew Souyave, Digital Director
Businesses are currently in one of three stages; planning their digital transformation, in the middle of their digital transformation or attempting to reap the rewards and benefits of a digital transformation that has just happened. While many are facing different challenges depending on where they are in the journey, there is a common thread between them all: future-proofing their business.
So many businesses are undertaking a digital transformation because they are stuck 10 or 15 years behind current technology. To help mitigate this occurring again, there are key areas businesses should be considering when undergoing digitalisation. This can include adopting cloud platforms that adapt naturally to new digital trends, selecting systems with high degrees of interoperability and adaptability, and ensuring a team is built to focus on continuous improvement after go-live. Implementation is just the first step; continuous improvement is the full journey.
With the right planning in place at every stage, you should be able to move through the transformation process efficiently. This will result in future-proofed processes and systems that support every area of your organisation and can be leveraged by all teams while continuously adapting to innovation and change as technology advances.
Extracted from an interview with Ian Bowden, Partner, Head of Tax Automation & Innovation
From many years of working closely with our customers, a key lesson has emerged: businesses need to focus on data right at the start of the process. While many focus on the outputs of digital transformation, there is a huge opportunity to create cost efficiencies by analysing data at the right stage of the process.
In particular, finance functions can benefit from clarity of data to improve financial modelling. By taking time at the start of your digital transformation to understand what they need to be able to plan, allocate resources and mitigate risks, you can ensure your finance teams will have access to relevant data in the long term
Businesses should make sure they identify how they can capture, categorise and maximise data as part of their transformation, as this data can be used in the future to create greater efficiencies and drive further improvements. We recommend developing a data strategy at the start of your digital transformation process to help set you up for success.
Extracted from interviews with Sandi Dosanjh, Digital Partner and Leigh Anne David, Director Digital
It is predicted that the global managed services market will continue to grow over the coming years – and we can see why. Outsourcing IT and data services allows businesses to focus their in-house experts on technical development, provides access to expertise and offers an agile solution for scaling up and down at speed.
Outsourcing does come with risks, which businesses need to be aware of. Being dependent on third-party service providers can cause serious disruption if they suddenly close down, and there are also security risks to consider. However, there are steps businesses can take to help mitigate these risks and ensure service providers comply with their IT policies and procedures.
If you are outsourcing your IT and data services, due diligence on any third-party suppliers is essential. Assessing a provider’s risk profile, including what information they hold, the systems they can access and the types of data they have access to on a continuous basis can help minimise potential risks.
