Enterprises see talent as the key to establishing digital command centers for process insight

Establishing a digital command center to offer multi-functional process insights can enable business leaders to test and learn to identify issues and design improvements. While data quality and digitization would appear essential elements in delivering such a center, it is the lack of qualified talent that enterprise leaders identified as their biggest challenge in a recent HFS Research study. We wanted to know the extent of implementation and adoption of multi-functional process insights. Poor access to skilled talent is slowing progress. A CEO of a global digital enabler told us, “Process intelligence is still a niche market, and as such, it’s hard to scale initiatives. We can’t easily find process mining consultants and analysts in the market.” Our analysis reveals the following:

• Seventy-four percent (74%) of enterprise leaders believe upskilling technical and non-technical talent or hiring technically sound talent will be the most impactful way of providing cross-functional visibility across key business processes, enabling higher efficiency and savings and improved CX and EX. Even employees who are technically sound in other domains will need training and support. The whole industry needs to learn how to work with such technologies, and enterprises will need to manage mindset and cultural shifts as much as technical change.
• Centers of excellence bring relevant expertise into organizations, and 31% of leaders say these must be expanded or established.
• However, the fundamentals are not in place in around a third of enterprises; 38% still say they need better data quality, and 31% believe their processes are not yet digitized. Those are unlikely to have processes that can provide enough data to support an effective digital command center.

The Bottom Line: Skilled talent is important in bridging the enterprise data gap that decelerates the journey to digital command centers.

Upskilling non-technical talent (like business analysts and accountants) is not an easy task, given limited knowledge about the process intelligence category in general. Staff will need to be trained from scratch, and that takes time. Once trained, these employees can be a long-term asset to enterprises. But enterprise leaders must not take their eye off the ball—digitization and data challenges they face must be fixed first. The talent needs something to work with.

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