Top Accenture Executive Lists Steps to Leap from ‘Efficient’ to ‘Future-Ready’

The leap from being an ‘efficient’ organisation to being ‘future-ready’ may seem daunting but Manish Sharma, Group Chief Executive of Accenture Operations, has said that though there have been great improvements in operational maturity in the past three years, there is still a long way to go as far as artificial intelligence (AI) is concerned. A recent research by Accenture found that less than 20% of organisations in the efficient stage of operational maturity expect to have scaled AI in the coming years. He said the research found over 60% of businesses were stuck in the ‘efficient’ phase three years ago.

• Sharma pointed out how one-third of the organizations remained in the efficient phase while the remaining shifted to the “predictive” phase by their ability to use automation, analytics and blended data to increase human talent and their capacity to better predict and position for market changes.
• In an interview to a journal, Sharma classified a few important paradigms that could radically transform any “efficient” organization into a “future-ready” one. According to him, companies should think and envision big, and should have the will to go beyond the incremental change.
• He said a company must put cloud infrastructure at the core as the workers could only supersede if they are provided with seamless information to work with. He called for boosting up institutions with better and more diversified data. Better decisions to enhance the company could only come with having actional data at your fingertips, he said. He further stressed that a company must be gripped with scale automation, AI, and combined solutions with leading practices.
• According to Sharma, a company must foster a technoscientific workforce and expand them with the right technology. He feels an energetic workforce would always allow leaders to tap into an expanded talent pool of specialists when they need them. He pointed out that to build a complementary ecosystem, a company needs connections that bring together skill sets and diverse data.