Large-scale enterprises have a few things in common. A large enterprise has its business footprint across geographies. It employs a workforce representing diverse cultures, languages, and age groups and complies with numerous local laws. The complexities multiply when an enterprise has to manage multiple business units, branches, and teams. Taking speedy decisions gets difficult for CIOs due to the sheer size and complexity of the enterprise. A slight miscalculation or business IT alignment (BITA) misstep results in adverse, enterprise-wide impact, financial losses, and reputation damage. Today’s enterprises have to tackle some new difficulties too. Your organisation, perhaps, is no exception.

Difficulties range from changing regulatory environment, disruptive competition from start-ups, and rising expectations of the digitally empowered consumers. Given these realities, the only way an enterprise can take these challenges head-on is by embracing digitalisation. The advancements in technology have mandated that companies have ‘digital’ in their business DNA. For instance, mobility, one of the key pillars of digitalisation, can be harnessed to achieve productivity and efficiency goals while delivering a seamless user experience. A few forward-thinking organisations have succeeded in delivering great user experience by making their internal-only processes available to customers.

The self-service portals by financial services and e-commerce players, for instance, provide a wider choice to customers and also reduce the operational strain on these organisations. Let’s explore how digitalisation can yield greater operational efficiencies. One time-consuming activity commonly found across departments of a large enterprise is report generation. From accounts to HR to sales to warehousing to manufacturing-nobody loves it but does it, nevertheless. Report generation hampers productivity and clogs network bandwidth-these reports are shared with everyone as email attachments. At another level, it also makes life difficult for the analytics teams who have to make sense of massive unstructured data.

Providing relevant and well-designed app dashboards to every person may nullify these issues in one clean swipe. Sharing reports can merely be app based comments without having to send email attachments. The organisation can accrue huge time savings and free up its valuable resources for productive assignments. The corporate HR is supposed to play an empowering role. However, burdened by operational difficulties, the HR often struggles to turn its programmes effective. Take an example of on-boarding of new recruits and induction training. Given the multi-geographic nature of a large organisation, it is challenging (and expensive) to conduct onboarding and training sessions across time zones and locations. Ensuring that every new recruit attends these sessions is another challenge. Measuring the effectiveness of training-whether the employee has fully grasped the training content or not-is yet another difficulty. With the help of a modern, container app architecture, you can address these issues effectively.

—entrepreneur.com