Business Data Challenges – Hints & Tips
Improve Your Business Performance
by Dr Neil Patrick – Director Client Services @ Winterhawk
All companies want to achieve their goals and make a profit from their resources. Business performance is a key indicator of a company’s success and building a strong brand.
Improving business performance is relevant to all organization sizes from startup to mature, and those undergoing a digital transformation. And critically make the C-suite’s lives easier. Performance can be tracked by indicators such as operating margins, customer retention, employee churn, losses. How best do we stop them heading in the wrong direction?
In my opinion if one peels back all the management layers, the root is with people, processes, technology, data, nth party relationships, and AI.
Providing assurance over these foundations will help improve business performance and create an attractive business. Except they are often seen as obvious and are overlooked or given less investment. But it actually takes the attention to details to ‘move the needle’. Done wisely it doesn’t cost a lot either.
Here is brief examination of some of the root causes:
- People: there is a high-risk assumption of safety especially with digital transformations that the shiny new system is as secure from inappropriate user access as the legacy system which is not the. Incorrect user authorizations also lead to data breaches, thefts and violations.
- Processes: actual business processes are usually different to those designed leading to errors, thefts, policy violations. This can compromise process consistency & reliability. Especially during a digital transformation.
- Technology: are patches up to date? Are IT policies properly? Which key business solutions are running on which systems? Especially during a digital transformation.
- Data: how many copies or aggregation variations of data are being used throughout the business? Is access to data managed, are processes touching data managed?
- nth party relationships: Always tricky especially in the modern world of co-opetition relationships. Aside from supply chain risks, there are also for example human rights due diligence risk.
- AI: This is such a big topic it deserves a post all on its own. Let me just say that AI impacts all of the above, positively and negatively. Software can provide assurance over AI agents.
Mitigation of the above is most effectively delivered by integrated, centralized, ‘friction less’, and automated assurance type software.
Examples of good software choices include SAP Risk and Assurance Management alone or integrated with SAP Signavio, and linked to SAP Identity Access Governance. All of which will integrate with your SAP ERP systems whether legacy ECC or part of RISE or GROW.
Take a closer look at SAP RAM here
About the Author
Dr Neil Patrick
I should note that for the last 5 years until joining Winterhawk I have been SAP’s Solution Manager for SAP Risk and Assurance Management (SAP Financial Compliance Management when it was first released). I was instrumental in bringing it to market and helping it grow to the innovative solution it is today. I am still passionate about the solution, and I’m very pleased to now be at Winterhawk adding client value to deploying the solution.
