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\\Accenture Report:
Enabling Technology Interoperability for
the Future of Work

By Ghadeer Redler
Staff Writer, Technology Innovation,
Workday

Today’s business environments involve continual change—in opportunities, partnerships, pressures, and technology. But it’s difficult for organizations to adapt quickly when their digital systems can’t easily interact and exchange data. Complex tech stacks and incompatible legacy systems act as speed bumps, requiring employees to use manual workarounds and navigate disparate interfaces and datasets.

As new technologies emerge and the number of enterprise applications continues to climb, interoperable technologies that enable applications to easily interact with each other are quickly becoming a strategic priority.

When enterprise applications are designed to work well together and share data seamlessly, organizations are able to move at the speed of business. And teams across the organization, especially the core functions of finance and human resources (HR), no longer have to spend time managing the interoperability of data before analyzing and acting on it.

An Accenture report based on an international, cross-industry survey of over 4,000 C-level executives, reveals a new business reality: “compressed” transformation. Over the last several years, 1 in 2 enterprises underwent compressed transformation—meaning the company either carried out a single large transformation faster than ever before or managed multiple transformations in parallel. In other words, the report gives facts to the generally held feeling that organizations are now experiencing more and faster change.

Accenture’s research shows that interoperability not only enables compression in transformation at both speed and scale, but also leads to significant, quantifiable business outcomes.

After achieving a higher level of interoperability, companies gain greater efficiency, agility, and productivity, as well as improved customer and employee experience, value, and growth.

Consider, for instance, just a few of the study’s eye-opening stats. High-interoperability companies unlocked 82% additional revenue over 5 years and grew revenue 6x faster than their low-interoperability peers. Higher interoperability also freed up nearly 2 hours per week for employees who no longer had to spend time toggling between applications. And high-interoperability companies were 15% more likely to improve the customer experience and 11% more likely to sustain compressed transformation.

A roadmap to greater speed, fewer bumps.

For many organizations, the past few years have made clear the need for speed. But the urgency to act hasn’t abated, and the Accenture study points to supply chain volatility, among other factors, as ongoing reasons companies should compress their transformation efforts. But it’s hard to integrate new technologies and processes when the average company uses more than 500 applications from multiple vendors, and when 80% say they will buy more applications from additional vendors in the next 2 years.

In order to achieve interoperability, there are a few steps to consider:

Create a foundation for data integration and a unified source of data truth that underpins business applications.
Enable process orchestration to create adaptable workflows, automate previously manual functions, and support business operations.
Move to using composable business logic, where your digital capabilities can be quickly and confidently combined and extended to create new applications and experiences.
Create user interface interoperability, so work can surface across any channel.

While showing the path toward interoperability, Accenture’s report also uncovers shared obstacles. Among respondents, 60% are held back from improving interoperability because they struggle to align their application strategy with overall business goals, 57% cite lack of buy-in from senior leadership, 44% lack a clear return on investment or business case, and 34% believe interoperability is simply too expensive.

Top obstacles to interoperability include:

Working with legacy architectures that are not open or built to connect
Dealing with too many applications with unclear ownership
Misaligned digital strategies among IT and business silos
General apprehension

These impediments result from a bad technical foundation—but they can also be resolved by adopting an open, inherently adaptable foundation. Interoperability is “the great unifier,” according to Accenture, because it marries data architecture with business strategy.

How Workday unlocks interoperability.

It’s important to note that interoperability is both a broad strategic priority and a narrow technological one. Companies that have achieved high interoperability have three key traits in common, Accenture’s research reveals: they leverage the cloud by default, use composable technology to connect across apps, and spark human collaboration across silos.

Workday enables organizations to adopt the strategy they know they need while bringing them to a more adaptable, scalable, and extensible technological platform. Born in the cloud, Workday is a composable system with built-in high interoperability—enabling meaningful collaboration by uniting the front, middle, and back offices.

Uniquely, our intelligent data core unites financial, people, planning, and third-party data, as well as analytics processes from across a company’s ecosystem. It eliminates data silos and dramatically simplifies the process of collecting the right data at the right time for finance and HR, as well as gaining insights from that data.

Workday takes interoperability even further by embedding AI and machine learning (ML) into the core architecture. Workday AI and ML capabilities enable advances such as anomaly detection, intelligent recommendations, and skills-based talent cultivation and retention practices. In all these applications of AI and ML, the human retains control while being freed from manual, complex processes.

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