Until now, companies that wanted to scale up their employee workforce and operational teams were forced to rely on outdated hiring processes, a myriad of internal spreadsheets and siloed to leverage only internal data to make decisions — resulting in small to larger-size businesses leaning on guessing games to make some of the most important, long-lasting decisions their company might face.
Luckily, we’re now living in an age where we have a wider and deeper access to data than ever before — and finally, we have the outcomes-driven technology to activate that data in service of eliminating guessing games and producing successful outcomes for businesses and their customers, says Dharmesh Trivedi, managing partner at DXFactor, the company on a mission to instill outcomes-driven digital transformation.
New ease-of-use digital transformation platforms are emerging to help transform organisations by defining the “what” at the beginning of their digital transformation journey and then leveraging data to prioritise, identify, and deliver successful digital outcomes.
In particular, for companies looking to scale their operations, this new digital transformation technology means they could potentially generate successful growth in multiple areas: finding new operational efficiencies in the right places, understanding exact talent requirements, hiring from the right talent pool, and choosing the right geographical locations with the right infrastructure needs for new operations centres.
When it comes to making these crucial business decisions, companies who employ this next wave of outcomes-driven technology will be able to capture an edge on their competition by making data-driven and extra-informed choices for their business.
The magic behind this new era of technology is the fusing of a company’s historical internal data with external industry data to help make an organisation’s smartest decisions yet, before they invest a single penny into a proof-of-concept or new technology initiative — leading to a predictable successful business outcome for the organisation and its clients alike.
This new predictive way of transforming a business is not only revolutionary but also pioneering, as guaranteed business outcomes will usher in a new economic era: the Outcomes Driven Economy. To thrive in this next business climate, businesses will need to learn how to use digital technology to aid them in making smarter decisions never even dreamed of before, which will ultimately influence their place in this new Outcomes Driven Economy.
Here’s a three-step guide every company should follow to reach new measurable outcomes:
Step One: Escaping analysis paralysis
For many businesses, finding the “What” at the beginning of digital transformation, or finding their most critical pain points is one of the most difficult parts of knowing how they can scale efficiently and effectively. As more innovative technology and solutions have become available across industries, it’s becoming more common to see businesses implementing droves of various technologies, software, and proof-of-concept projects just for the sake of having them — not necessarily for solving an actual problem or bringing a company to new heights.
However, when we consider the inverse companies who are succeeding today, and are positioned to continue winning, it’s easy to see the difference: These organisations focus their efforts on implementing only the technologies, software and projects that will ensure successful outcomes for their business — resulting in their investments always leading to new and expanded growth opportunities.
With so many choices available today, it’s easy for businesses to get overwhelmed. For some, it’s hard to pinpoint where they can most effectively optimise costs; for others, the internal data is so dirty that it’s hard to know how to make important decisions. Data is one of the biggest pitfalls for most businesses: On average, corporate data grows at 40% per year, and 20% of the average database is labeled dirty. This means that most companies are struggling to accurately use and analyse their data to find meaningful, actionable outcomes — and all too often, end up in analysis paralysis.
In particular, most organisations are left to manually find the most cost-effective geographical location to set up their next operations or customer success facilities, without sacrificing the quality of talent pool and appropriate infrastructure needs in order to run the business. Now imagine being responsible for conducting this highly strategic and highly visible work yourself: Searching for the right talent in the right place would probably take you months or years of multiple rounds of iterations and debates among the leadership team before coming to a conclusion.
However, if you leveraged outcomes-driven technology, built on artificial intelligence and fueled by domain-specific algorithms to conduct your analysis to help make your decision, this entire process could be done within weeks — and your new operations could be up and running in a fraction of the time, resulting in not only a quick decision but the right decision backed by hard data.
Switching to an outcomes-driven approach
At first glance, many top decision-makers may scoff at using an outcomes-driven approach: “If I knew what I needed to transform to get results, I would have done it by now.”
But let’s take an example of a top-tier, U.S.-based cybersecurity company who is trying to scale its engineering and customer success teams while optimising resources. They may be having trouble pinpointing the necessary employee skill sets needed to facilitate job functions, or finding the best location to open a new office that will not only reduce the cost of labor but also optimise all resources and increase team scalability, without sacrificing the quality or availability of talent.
If the company only looks at its own internal data housed in a mixed bag of spreadsheets and paper-based data — all with no continuity to be able to analyse — it would be impossible for them to analyse various markets to identify talent skills, salary ranges and other crucial demographic information necessary in order to find not only cost savings, but instead decipher the optimal mix of resources like the best location to open new offices, a way to reduce costs and still have access to valuable talent pools, which will then allow them to successfully scale their business and crush their competition. Many cybersecurity companies consider Latin America, Asia, and India for engineering or customer success teams — but how can they know for sure which location is the best for their particular circumstances?
If the cybersecurity company fuses its internal data with all of this external market data, they could see a massive range of possible positive outcomes: a reduced hiring cycle, increased productivity due to better skill sets, quickly set up a new operations centre in the perfect location, and realise huge cost-savings in the entire team-scaling process, resulting in the optimal mix of resources for success.
Disrupt, or be disrupted
It’s time for organisations to graduate from the traditional decision-making process to data-driven business transformations, powered by new and inventive digital transformation technologies. As more of these solutions make their way into every industry’s business operations, delivering speedy execution and quick ROI, our economy will finally begin to depend only on positive outcomes, more than anything else. If businesses don’t start taking advantage of outcomes-driven digital solutions in this economy, they will risk falling behind and eventually fail in this new era.
The impact of not driving positive outcomes has already begun to show its ugly face in today’s business climate: 52% of Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 have already disappeared. This scary statistic proves that executives and department heads are expected today more than ever to transform their company, disrupt the status quo and generate new ways of business growth and expansion.
The good news is that the tools to help you achieve this transformation and succeed in this new era have arrived, and are accessible to all types and sizes of companies. Using outcome driven digital transformation platforms to scale and expand, businesses could see hundreds of thousands to billions of dollars in cost-savings, hiring cycles cut in half, increases in talent pools and efficiency and productivity doubled thanks to understanding what the optimal mix of resources is for the business to thrive. The only question remaining is: Will you use them and will you thrive?
The author is Dharmesh Trivedi, managing partner, DXFactor
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