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New Exclusive ServiceNow Research [Downloadable Excerpt]

Written by Meghan (Lockwood) Rexer | 8/28/24
Editor’s note: Today’s blog includes an excerpt from ServiceNow’s recent research partnership
with Constellation Research to launch their new report, Future of Finance and Supply Chain
Processes Moving from Transactional Silos to Infinite Ambient Orchestration. You can also
download the full report here [add link].

Businesses today are under immense pressure to constantly innovate and transform to stay
competitive and relevant. However, a hidden obstacle often hinders these efforts: technical debt.
This refers to the long-term consequences of making suboptimal technical decisions, such as
using outdated technologies or neglecting code quality.

Technical debt can have a significant impact on a business's ability to innovate and adapt. It can
slow down development, increase costs, and even lead to system failures. To stay ahead – or
even on par – with the ecosystem means it must be addressed.

Organizations need to understand the common pitfalls they might not even know are due to
technical debt, to leverage new technologies like AI and drive modernization.

ServiceNow released a downloadable research eBook by Constellation Research focused on the
Future of Finance and Supply Chain Processes Moving from Transactional Silos to Infinite
Ambient Orchestration, and gives five specific examples of barriers to overcome:
 
Technical Debt Creates Quagmires for Business Transformation
  1. Rigid legacy monolithic platforms. Innovative leaders have extracted data from legacy
    systems, designed workflows outside of transactional systems, and built orchestration
    layers for user experience to work around brittle legacy software. These efforts require
    considerable time and expense to design for change.
  2. The endless wait for modern ERP and SCM upgrades. Customers have been waiting for their
    legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) vendors
    to not only move to the cloud but also to deliver flexible platforms to extend their core
    functionality. Most vendors of on-premises ERP and SCM systems have spent the past
    decade moving into the cloud and failing to add much-needed functionality and flexibility
    in workflows and processes. The lack of support for a digital and AI future is evident in
    the preference for financial engineering over functionality.
  3. Infinite integration nightmares. Constellation estimates that the average Global 2000
    company must bring at least 47 different systems into the enterprise to address end-to-end
    processes such as source-to-pay and order-to-cash. Most leaders cannot dedicate the
    resources to manually manage the updates to 47 systems and the integration points
    between them.
  4.  Data deluge sinkholes. The digitization of finance and supply chain processes comes with exponentially more datasets to consume, process, analyze, assimilate, and incorporate into existing systems. These systems cannot handle streaming datasets and the requirements of an AI-first business. Moreover, these systems were designed for human scale, not machine scale.
  5. Manual process minefields. From classics such as swivel chair integration to manual processes across multiple systems, innumerable failure points exist and are exacerbated as complexity increases. The shift to digitization is halted by the sheer lack of automation at scale. Without automation, these systems will fall behind.”
In recent years ERP transformation has grown, which is a comprehensive software
solution that integrates and automates various core business processes. It serves as a centralized
platform for managing and coordinating different aspects of an organization, including finance,
human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, and customer relationship management.
 
To Rick Wright, CoreX CEO, the focus is on connecting all the loose pieces within an
organization, “At least the people we speak to, they've realized that that's where the big value is.
It's not optimizing their little components, it's taking a step back and saying, ‘What is that end-to-
end process across four departments? And more importantly, how do you get, how do you build
an experience that people want to use?’” 
 
Digital transformation is the method of uniting and utilizing technology more efficiently, in the
last 20-something years it has been all over the headlines. Transformation, however, has many
iterations and is constantly building off each other.
 
 
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