How to become an Intelligent Enterprise?

The on-demand economy is changing the way we perceive and use technology. Today, businesses are embracing technology to adapt faster than ever. Organizations of all sizes have realised that smart technology can enable growth and ultimately help them remain relevant in an increasingly competitive environment. This is the first and foremost step of transforming themselves into an Intelligent Enterprise.

Intelligent Enterprise

An Intelligent Enterprise (IE) can predict and lead its markets digitally, empowering business process agility and activating insight. It can innovate, grow and transform markets in ways that were not possible just a few years ago. Not only this, it is also transforming various industries like Banking, Healthcare, Public Service, Insurance, Retail, Manufacturing etc. IE is not just restricted to technology, rather it requires right skills, culture, tools within and beyond the organization. It leverages emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), and analytics to enable the workforce to focus on higher value outcomes.

In this era of Intelligent Enterprise, an organization’s key role is to deliver the requirements to its customers.

Few components to be kept in mind while becoming an Intelligent Enterprise:

Intelligent Suite: To enable customers to automate day-to-day business processes and better interact with customers, suppliers, and employees through applications that have intelligence embedded. The intelligent, integration-ready applications can help manage customers, supply chains, networks, employees, and core processes. It is easily extensible – and offers a consistent and intuitive user experience.

Digital Platform: To facilitate the collection, connection, and orchestration of data as well as the integration and extension of processes in integrated applications. Organizations can manage data from any source, in any format – and rapidly develop, integrate, and extend business applications - with an open digital platform.

Intelligent Technologies: To enable customers to leverage their data and detect patterns, predict outcomes, as well as suggest actions. Drive rapid and continuous innovation to the digital transformation that combines intelligent technologies and services.

Bringing travel, expense, and invoice management systems together is a perfect example of the value of the Intelligent Enterprise. No longer is data in disconnected systems; we have visibility across all spending with one view. This means employees are free to do more meaningful work, giving them the opportunity to reimagine their business by providing insights to refine processes, ensure compliance, and stay ahead of market changes. Moreover, this unified experience delivers on the expectations of employees. By eliminating the complex and clunky user experiences that push users away and drive down adoption, Intelligent Enterprises accelerate value creation.

An Intelligent Enterprise has a lot of benefits. Firstly, it helps eliminating data silos and automate data wrangling and integration by recognizing unseen patterns – and provides new intelligence to service customers and employees. Secondly, it provides direct scarce resources to areas where they’ll have the greatest impact. Lastly, it builds flexibility and insight into the business processes to rapidly respond to change, pivot towards the right outcomes, and guard against disruptive competitors.

The Intelligent Enterprise is the concept towards working seamlessly. We should be able to get access to our systems from any device at any time, and the systems should be able to:

* Prioritize the work for us

* Make recommendations on how to tackle problems

* Handle simple and repetitive tasks in an automated fashion

The Intelligent Enterprise is more than just an automated business. It is embedded into solutions – so one can make sense of data in context and optimize via self-learning algorithms. Customers trust to help keep their business running smoothly, reliably, and securely. Responding to individual customer needs, engaging talent in new ways, and creating disruptive business models are critical business imperatives. The opportunities are endless, and one should be committed to helping customers discover where they are on this journey and how one can help them reimagine their business as intelligent enterprises. By becoming an Intelligent Enterprise, one can achieve these goals – and more.

Neeraj Dotel
MD, India, and SAARC, SAP Concur