Join ISG’s CMO, Paul Gottsegen, as he interviews ISG Advisor, Prashant Kelker, about enterprise agility trends and predictions for 2022, especially the ones most people have missed: agile financial operations and architecture.
Transcript:
Prashant
We are seeing a trail of moving away from large ERP programs to – like we discussed earlier – continuous transformation in this angle and partners play a huge role in this.
Paul
How do you make it there?
When we think about the technology stack and the processes at any organization, how do you become more agile so that you have the wherewithal to transition to this continuous mindset, or as you're making changes to what seems like a consumer experience interface. Like you said, with the curbside pickup, you have to be very agile to changing your backend, because it's really mainly a backend order management. Or invoicing or whatever issues.
So, talk a little bit about enterprise agility. I know it's a topic that comes up with a lot of our client base, and you have a lot of experience talking to leaders about this. What can you tell us about what you're seeing?
Prashant
Oh, that's a lovely question, Paul. Actually, let me use this question to go beyond what is being spoken about in the press. The press talks about organizational agility in in the form of culture. And I want to tick that box and move on to the topics that are not spoken about – and that is financing and architecture.
The best strategy of organizational agility will be brought to its knees by the legacy architecture. You won't be able to move. So, if we can apply the word “agility” to how one should think architecture, one should think as de-layered as possible.
Now, thinking as de-layered as possible unfortunately means that ERP or software-as-a-service is not always your answer. The very fact that you can buy software for a process shows that every other organization is actually doing that process already. It's not going to differentiate you.
I think the world is a mix of SaaS, ERP and, like in the old days, bespoke development.
So, thinking architecture in terms of delayering because that delayering gives you the best flexibility. And you should also be doing very careful buy versus build, and not going too much towards buy. I think the innovativeness comes in the build part.
Now, if you want to bring this to life, you’ve got to start looking at how you think CapEx and OpEx, and that's where the finance part comes in. It’s the “how?”
- How do you go away from annual budgeting towards delayering continuously?
- How do you go from thinking of a budget for a program to doing agile sprints?
These are the new problems which interest us at ISG.
About the authors
Paul Gottsegen
Paul is President, ISG Client Experience, managing the firm’s marketing activity globally, including demand generation, branding and communications. He is a leader in the firm’s work to establish and maintain a leading position in AI and new technologies and to capitalize on the opportunities they present. From 2019 to 2023, Paul led the ISG Research business to great heights, and continues as Chair, ISG Research.
Paul was a classic product marketing leader for PC hardware for the first 20 years of his career, including launching the industry’s first network servers. He has since applied that product marketing experience to CMO roles in large services firms. While marketing is his “center of gravity,” he has led large sales organizations and has been a general manager with full P&L responsibility.
Prior to ISG, he was the Chief Marketing Officer for Mindtree and Infosys, completing end-to-end branding and marketing turnarounds. As Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at HP, Dell Inc., and Compaq earlier in his career, Paul led product marketing, revenue marketing and enterprise alliances for the network server businesses.
Paul is Board Chair of the Gastric Cancer Foundation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brandeis University and an MBA from The Wharton School.
Prashant Kelker
Prashant Kelker is President, ISG DACH, and Chief Strategy Officer. A globally recognized thought leader in AI and technology-led transformation, Prashant is shaping the firm’s strategic blueprint and bringing together all advisory capabilities to guide clients in the DACH region through the convergence of AI, digital technology and enterprise operating models.
Previously, as Partner, Americas Consulting, he led the effort to be the first sourcing advisory firm to establish a reference architecture for applied Generative AI with the 2023 ISG State of Applied Generative AI Market Report and played a key role in the development of our highly successful ISG NEXT operating model in 2020. Prashant joined ISG in 2012.
Before joining ISG, Prashant was a Technology Director at Accenture, where he won and established several new accounts and created digital offerings on mobility and predictive analytics. He earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and a BE in Electronics from Bangalore University in India.
