Technology Can't Run Itself

How far can technology take you?

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Whether you’re walking the corporate hallway or its virtual equivalent, or attending conferences, the buzz about AI has reached a notable din. I've been thinking a lot about how technology can truly transform our businesses and wanted to share some thoughts.

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It’s clear that the right tech can open up growth pathways and streamline our operations, but it’s not the end-all solution. There’s more to the story, and I believe this journey requires a partnership between businesses, process engineering experts and technologists.

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It's More Than Just Tech

While technology is crucial in today’s digital-first world, it's really just one piece of the puzzle. Take cloud computing, for example—it offers incredible scalability and cost benefits. Mid-market firms that have embraced cloud services are seeing real improvements in their agility and bottom line. Data analytics and AI are tools that are helping businesses make smarter decisions and improve customer experiences. But to make the most of these technologies, they need to be fully integrated into our business processes, and that's not always straightforward.

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Pulling an excerpt from a report by strategy consultant, McKinsey, “There are no quick fixes. You can’t simply implement a system or a technology and be done. Instead, success means having hundreds of technology-driven solutions (proprietary and off the shelf) working together that you continually improve to create great customer and employee experiences, lower unit costs, and generate value.”

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The Challenge of Integration

Unfortunately, businesses struggle to integrate the myriad of technologies into their daily workflows. It's one thing to have the tools, but it’s another to fully utilize them without expertise or resources. That's where a lot of us hit speedbumps. Without proper integration, even the best tech can end up underused, leading to a disjointed customer experience and missed opportunities. Keep an eye on Microsoft’s AI and BI stack – there is a lot of hidden power here that we are tinkering with lately.

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As McKinsey’s report, “Wired to Outcompete” analyzes, “This [benchmarked] outperformance was propelled by a deeper integration of technology across end-to-end core business processes.”

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Why BPO is Part of the Answer

Here's where Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) comes into play. When you consider Premier BPO’s approach to co-sourcing, you can think of BPO not just as a way to cut costs but also as a strategic partner that drives value and quality. By streamlining business processes and improving tech adoption, together, we can make a huge difference. We pride ourselves on knowledge management and upskilling our teams to manage these technologies through a centralized shared services team (training, quality assurance, business intelligence, analytics, reporting, and proceed engineering). Below, you can see in our diagram that we pair people, account management, and technology to help drive outcomes for our clients.

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Engaging us for Technology Initiatives

We’ve always integrated technology with our services. For some clients, we’ve been developing custom tailored apps including customer facing portals. Last year, we also set up a special group, our AI Innovation Lab, to conduct research and experimentation that we can then leverage for our clients. This combined with our in-house strategy team has put us on a path that allows us to take our learnings and share with our clients.

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Technology by itself won't take you to the growth and trying to change processes without technology can only take you so far. The key is finding a way to connect people, process and expertise. I believe that "humans in the loop" will continue to be a way forward for companies trying to set up their businesses for sustained growth.

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Here’s a link to the McKinsey article-

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/rewired-to-outcompete

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