Harnessing growth for the long-term with interoperability

For years, businesses in Growth Markets like Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Latin America have flourished, in part because they’ve been early adopters of cutting-edge technology.

With an innovators spirit, these fast-growing economies have built up an enormously diverse tech landscape, powering new ways of working and setting higher and higher performance standards. We’ve seen this happen across entire societies – digital payment adoption rates, for example, stood at around 50% in Asia-Pacific versus less than 25% in North America and Europe in 2020. But also, across enterprises – 72% of enterprises in Growth Markets use more than 500 enterprise applications, 10% more than the global average.

This eagerness to adopt the best technology for the job, from a variety of providers, has helped these economies soar. But it’s also resulted in a few unintended consequences. Enterprises operating in Growth Markets often end up running country-specific software environments, with significant fragmentation across borders due to different regulations or standards.

In order to continue their rapid growth while keeping side effects in check and remain agile in uncertain times, these companies must embrace interoperability. At its core, interoperability connects technology, people and processes by creating a common language across critical applications and systems. Interoperability eliminates silos, reduces duplicative efforts, reveals hidden bottlenecks and new opportunities, and builds better human connections. In short, it enables the compressed transformation that companies everywhere are seeking.

Our latest research, Value untangled: Accelerating radical growth through interoperability, found that that companies with high interoperability in Growth Markets grew revenue 2.5X faster than those with low interoperability. One-third of companies in the region are already capitalizing on interoperability.

When South Africa-based financial services and insurance group Liberty Holdings embraced interoperability, it gained a single view of the customer and expanded its claims service beyond traditional call centers and into new digital channels. The result? Individual claim processing times were reduced by up to 20 minutes. Thanks to an API reuse rate of 40%, the company was also able to roll out services to customers via WhatsApp within weeks, instead of months, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To take advantage of interoperability, companies must act now. The number of applications enterprises use is only expected to increase, and the bigger the tech stack the more difficult it is to retrofit interoperability. The benefits to interoperability can’t be overstated. When your technology talks the same language, your people do too. High interoperability leads to better collaboration and business alignment, enabling your people to act early and fast when making difficult decisions.

By focusing on three best practices, interoperability is closer in reach than you think:

1.????Leverage the cloud to instantly pull and query data across the entire enterprise.??

2.????Utilize composable technology to swap and plug-and-play smaller application components, enabling seamless data analysis and sharing for better decision-making.

3.???Focus on meaningful collaboration enabled by new ways of working, real-time data, analytics and AI. Functions and people can then work together seamlessly towards a common goal.

The sooner you start your journey to interoperability, the sooner you can start untangling the value trapped in your organization and race past competitors in growth, efficiency and resiliency.?