Employees are the front line of operational transformation

At the recent HFS Super Summit, Yusuf Tayob, Group Chief Executive, Accenture Operations, sat down with HFS’ Elena Christopher. They discussed how Yusuf’s 20+ year journey with Accenture—doing pretty much everything but operations—has informed his current role, what he’s learned since taking the operations leadership helm in March 2022, and how operations increasingly drive transformation enabled by employees.

To be successful, companies must address problems in parallel rather than in linear frameworks

Elena opened with a question to Yusuf about positioning operations, ultimately wondering if operations services have any transformative potential—not just the “run the business” responsibility.

Yusuf’s response was crisp, indicating enterprises don’t have time for the linear, incremental transformation of the past. Clients today need their operations to be transformed in parallel. “Transformation of a firm’s operations must occur across silos, business processes, talent, and technology. Further, you must adopt a strategic managed services mindset to add a catalyst to the mix and drive the changes that are desired versus just aspired.”

Yusuf exemplified his point with a client example: BBVA, a Spanish multinational financial services company, worked with Accenture to combine analytics, AI, and automation to create a new “intelligent” banking operation to improve productivity, data-driven processing, and decision making while lowering costs by 30%. Simultaneously, the project helped BBVA upskill and develop its people to meet shifting talent demand. Now, 60% of BBVA’s sales are digital.

Yusuf further pointed out that changing the approach to operational services is essential early in efforts to meet a business’ transformation objectives. A leader can’t transform business operations by “winging it.” Instead, he suggested a business needs a framework or toolset to codify these efforts. His firm offers its SynOps platform as part of its service solution to help unlock value across disparate operations and systems. Yusuf refers to SynOps as a platform rather than a technology, facilitating the application of deep process and transformation expertise to drive change with data, technology, and domain experience.

The road to operational transformation is rough, but the outcomes are great

Elena commented that often “transformation initiatives” are major technology initiatives, and operations is something that happens later. She asked Yusuf to comment on the ability of operations to lead transformation.

Yusuf responded with a “bad example of a technology ecosystem that turned good.” He related a client example from a large firm using myriad technologies to interact with customers. Despite the presence of great tech and various technology initiatives, technology and its process owners were working disparately, which led to fragmented results.

Realizing that a change in how this large client operated was essential to improving their business, Accenture used process mining to identify inefficiencies and opportunities to create value. The approach helped the customer to identify a challenge in their collections department— fixing a gap in goods shipped but balances owned and not collected. With Accenture’s assistance the firm was able to implement a plan to plug the gap and recapture the value.

The solution was ultimately an operations-led approach to unify technology and processes, cutting through the silos of the technology ownership and helping the business recapture the value lost in inefficient business processes and practices.

Operational transformation can be a catalyst for evolving how a firm adds value to its ecosystem, but don’t forget the critical role of employees

Elena rounded out the discussion by hitting on one of the core themes of the Super Summit event—the power of ecosystems. She asked Yusuf to comment on the role operations plays in building ecosystems.

Yusuf went broad initially, responding, “In ecosystems, you start within the four walls of the enterprise, and as you go beyond them, you get business plus technology plus strategic service providers and others. Increasingly the more you can bring together and co-create, the better the outcomes are.”

He noted, “Employees are the front line of your ecosystem.” According to Yusuf, “Too often, we just focus on the business-to-business and business-to-customer relationships and how we are modernizing technology and processes to improve these. However, our front-line employees must be engaged and empowered to do their jobs better. Digitalization should give them the insights, tools, and capabilities to be more effective in this regard, and that is where we go in the following conversation. If we prioritize employee experience, we are directly impacting ecosystem creation and driving massive value.”

Yusuf added that by partnering with clients around strategy and operational transformation, businesses could prioritize the “why” of a requirement. By always asking, “Why are our people doing ‘x’?” rather than “What are people doing?” you establish the first step along the path to change. Accenture believes this approach increasingly lends itself to “transformative operations,” where operations can help lead the change within enterprises rather than react to change.

The Bottom Line: Enterprises need to consider the transformative potential of operations and employees’ role in developing future ecosystems.

Pressure on business leaders comes from many competing directions and in an often-overwhelming global context. To succeed, leaders must embrace non-linear thinking and realize today’s challenges are both complex and dynamic, not a simple transformation their business is going through.

Critically, enterprises must realize the vehicle for delivering operational change is not technology, digitalization, or the cloud. These are enablers. Instead, enterprises’ ability to enrich employee experience will determine measurable, long-term success in achieving the executive team’s operational transformation aspirations.