The Modern Workplace, Are you enabling your business?

In today’s business, blending of personal and business use of technology devices for more productivity has become common place. While the tools and applications employees want to use tend to come from their world, they pose a security risk to the enterprise architecture.

Rather than fight this trend, businesses can develop strategies that will not just save money, increase business agility and collaboration but also improve productivity securely.

A single look at the business environment and the integration of such tools into the business has been greatly affected by fear, isolating users in administrative functions a complexity of which costs time, money, clients and losing out competitive advantage.

While the wider digital ecosystem needs to be built in such a way that it is possible to detect and prevent cyber-attacks, it is crucial that businesses also weight the impact of adopting enterprise tools that allow for collaboration, inherent to digitisation and common systems across the organization – Devices notwithstanding. The main objective being that of integrating communication and increasing collaboration between operations.

The 2017 Global State of Information Security Survey by PWC shows that today’s businesses are not only creating products but delivering complementary opportunities for customer engagement and growth. As more products and services (business or consumer related) become connected to the Internet – therefore a part of the business)more information is being generated, shared and stored; there has never been a greater time to proactively address interconnection needs than this one.

The face of tomorrow’s business

Further, a survey conducted by CDW reveals that (89%) of business employees use personal mobile devices for work and over two-thirds (67%) said their companies would lose competitive ground without those devices. Which builds a case for the mobile workplace and the value of mobile applications which can speed business processes and decision-making, accelerate sales and improve customer engagement.

When you look at businesses today, ever wonder what they will look like in the near future? While buzzwords like Business Intelligence, Big Data and the Internet of Things abound in the marketplace, the task of understanding how a business is performing, planning for the future and making decisions about products, pricing, competition, markets, investments or budgets is one that needs to be looked into now. Something that enterprises need to invest in to scale up.

Business intelligence has proven to help companies improve operations, make faster, better-informed decisions and achieve significantly higher growth. Research further has it that companies providing employees with fast access to data and easy-to-use analytical solutions deliver up to 26% superior revenue growth than others (Aberdeen, 2015 -Analytical execution for today’s midsize enterprise). Big Data takes this insight to the next level, focusing on predictive analysis, forecasting future events, behaviours and allowing businesses to conduct what-if analyses to predict the effects of potential changes in strategies. As devices connected to the Internet allow businesses to collect information along the supply chain, the combination of Big Data analytics with the Internet of Things will produce huge opportunities for enterprises.

The evolving value of Data to business  

As these profound evolutions of technology shape the new design in business management where users can no longer be isolated in administrative functions, user access to data is critical element to any business looking to stay ahead. Sage X3 is the next generation of Sage business management solutions taking away the complexity and cost to manage typical enterprise ERP software as it delivers a faster, simpler and flexible way to manage your entire business today, and well into the future.

This solution targeted at Enterprises, offers a Web user experience based on a range of new technology components recognized as best in class, industry leading and forward-looking for multi-browser and mobile usage, speed search, web service development and document management. User-centric, collaborative, participative and social, Sage X3 harnesses new technologies to help drive process efficiency, improve productivity, increase customer satisfaction and support better decision making.

Designed for the Cloud first, Sage X3 also recognizes the need to support pragmatic evolutions and changes in today’s IT strategies, allowing for deployment in a variety of environment, As a service, in a Sage-managed infrastructure a customers’ own infrastructure on-premises or in a private Cloud environment. The next generation of business management solutions is about managing complex processes in a simpler way different from the traditional complexity of managing typical enterprise ERP software; they are about speed, simplicity and flexibility for the future business.

Abel Makgato – Head of Sales Enterprise East Africa |Sage

abel.makgato@sage.com