Report

ThoughtLab has contributed to Cognizant’s How Digitally Modern Processes Make Great Experiences study. ThoughtLab’s insights are presented on page 13 of the report.

“At a time when experiences are everything, automating processes for speed, intelligence and fluidity will constitute a significant competitive advantage.

Businesses are in a time of great — and unanticipated — change. For the past several years, whether it was through analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA) or work-from-home capabilities, companies were already shifting quickly into new ways of getting process work done.

Then, in the wake of the prolonged pandemic, immediate priorities (e.g., “Everything that can go online, must go online!”) necessitated business interactions and transactions to be more connected, more simple — more “human.” Operating a business in these times of contagion has thrown into sharp relief the importance of establishing digital value chains between employees, partners, customers and suppliers that allow process work to happen effortlessly, flowing around any obstacles that get in the way and gaining intelligence over time.

The great challenge now is to hyperscale this type of “being digital” to the scores of processes that rely on the uber-critical systems, applications and operations at the heart of most big businesses — from processing insurance claims, to approving mortgages, to caring for patients, to growing personal wealth, to ordering a utility or new streaming service.

In short, the business climate of the 2020s has made it plain that without significant digital process improvement, there’s no way to deliver exceptional experience improvement. Case in point: Digital natives like Lemonade and Shopify and large disruptors like Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft have all built great experiences with increasingly sophisticated digital technologies that erase frustrating interaction points from formerly cumbersome and lengthy processes.

Behind the “great experience” are processes conditioned for simplicity — processes that are intelligent and seamless, and that minimize how work gets done in the background, to the point that the work becomes nearly invisible. With this deceptively simple formula, these experience leaders have been able to accelerate growth even through times of great change.”

The study explores how cities are using a broad array of assets and capabilities, which we term as “digital pivots” to move from “doing digital” to “being digital”. These assets and capabilities can enable cities to transform both digital service delivery and operations. Recommendations are informed by ThoughtLab and Deloitte’s global survey to identify challenges and track progress made by cities in improving digital service delivery and city operations.

Digital transformation in governments started as the “e-gov” movement in the late 1990s and focused primarily on providing online services or a digital avatar of governments’ physical services. Over time, this transformation journey evolved through different phases—back-office reengineering, IT infrastructure enhancements, cloud infrastructure, customer experience movement, interoperability, and the blending of physical infrastructure with cyber using sensors and IoT technology. But COVID-19 demonstrated just how far many city departments must still go to become truly digital-first organizations.

Companies need resilience to succeed in a world where disruption occurs suddenly and cascades unpredictably.

We define organizational resilience as the ability to maintain performance in the face of environmental, political, social, cyber, and other disruptions. The global pandemic reminded us that in an interconnected world, disruption can occur suddenly and cascade unpredictably. At the same time, some companies and governments weathered the COVID-19 challenge better than others. So what are the attributes that distinguish the world’s most resilient organizations? How should leaders orchestrate people, processes, and technology to take resilience—and its twin, risk management—to the next level of excellence?

To help answer these questions, we surveyed more than 1,080 senior business leaders across six industries in 13 countries around the globe. Company sizes ranged from $350 million to more than $5 billion in annual revenue.

Amid the increasingly complex business, economic and social environment of the post-pandemic world, companies need even greater intelligence to make fast, optimal decisions. For many companies, that means finding the relevant data – whether on-site or through a third-party – amid the fast-growing data volumes generated by our hyper-digitized economy and using it as a fuel for artificial intelligence (AI), a key ally in sound decision-making.

Most businesses already understand this. In partnership with Cognizant, we surveyed 1,000 senior executives from companies of different sizes across a range of industries in the US. Our research reveals that the majority of respondents (57%) believe the main benefits of AI are improved planning and decision-making, above even AI’s ability to support faster innovation and higher profitability.