Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 17 | Page 46

CIO opinion is an imperative that cannot be avoided. One of these sees a financial services company that has embedded an ECM system into the heart of its client origination process to ensure the capture of documents both meets FICA processes and is effectively archived and easily updated. This company provides credit card facilities and, as such, has to undertake limit appraisals for customers regularly and these require that documents be recaptured and updated. While this process is digitised internally, customers are still expected to submit paper documents at the branch or hub. In order to improve this process, the business is in the process of deploying a true digital capture mechanism that will enable the customer to use a mobile device to capture the document as an image and upload to their profile. This is one example of ensuring a robust framework is in place to take advantage of new opportunities. Were there no EIM solution in place, the second phase of adding digital capture would not have been as seamless. On the flip side, another case study highlights an oil company, which had 46 INTELLIGENTCIO “ DIGITISATION ALONE RESULTS IN MANY PROVABLE BUSINESS BENEFITS. implemented a contract management system to digitise its supplier contacts but had not integrated this solution with its existing business process solution to enable contract processes to be managed across the enterprise. A major customer of this company tendered for a logistics supplier contract, but it was not recognised internally that the customer and supplier were the same entity and the relationship was therefore not leveraged. Had customer records of this company also been digitised, the deal would most likely have been signed, sealed and delivered. So, where to from here? Datacentrix offers a number of starting points to help customers take digital transformation from a plan to reality. While it is dependent on company size and complexity, the first steps would be to engage in a single or series of workshops to fully understand and shape the digitalisation journey. These workshops would deep dive the business drivers and priorities, the current system’s landscape and the business case. From there, a digitalisation roadmap will be presented that shows practical steps that the business needs to take to implement a new or optimise an existing framework while preparing or piloting new areas. The focus at this stage is on business impact. The keyword here, however, is ‘journey’ as this is a multi-year commitment that sees digitalisation become part of the company DNA, with milestones that will deliver (and prove) value. It is a journey that is both transformative and disruptive and a commitment to this vision is key in delivering an agile enterprise that can quickly take advantage of the opportunities that future technology presents. n www.intelligentcio.com