Creating and sustaining digital acumen with managed services

To navigate ongoing turbulence, digital agility is a must. In fact, according to a recent KPMG survey of US-based business leaders, it’s one of the top objectives of transformation projects.¹

This agility—enabling quick response to changing business needs—can improve market relevance, customer centricity, revenue growth, and risk management.

But to succeed, firms need more than a vague aspiration to “become more digital.” Instead, they must quickly and tangibly increase their digital acumen—across the front, middle, and back office—so they can continually transform while pivoting at the speed of the market.

One way is with managed services.

In this operating model, companies can leverage the advanced technology and critical domain expertise of leading service providers—in areas such as cybersecurity, cloud, analytics, and AI—for knowledge-intensive processes throughout the enterprise.

Managed services, usually packaged in a multi-year subscription, are delivered remotely with predictable costs, measurable outcomes, and the option to flex up or down to meet changing needs. These services help companies get the deep digital acumen they need to continually evolve, in areas like:

• Cloud transformation. Taking business to the cloud requires a mindset for ongoing transformation, as software vendors continually release new functionality. But most companies lack the knowledge and resources to keep up with this rapid innovation.
  Managed services providers bring the missing acumen, including the deep technical proficiency for testing, customizing, and deploying functionality—plus the business expertise to translate SaaS features into strategic benefits for the organization.   
• Cybersecurity. Many companies are aggressively building customer-facing applications, but in addition to creating new opportunities, these create new attack surfaces. The best managed services providers know how to embed security techniques into development and delivery pipelines, enabling companies to quickly and safely launch new tech.
• Regulatory compliance. In regulated companies, hundreds of thousands of transactions are often flagged each month for potentially suspicious activity, requiring qualified professionals to monitor them, keep pace with changing rules, and prevent backlogs that spark the scrutiny of regulators.

A managed services approach, on the other hand, can bring automation, data management, and domain expertise to transaction monitoring and other compliance processes. This way, companies can continue evolving with digital payments, while managing risk, improving the customer experience, and increasing stakeholder trust.

In an era of volatility, digital agility is becoming a minimum requirement to compete. And progressive companies are exploring new operating models to build it.

Learn more about KPMG Managed Services.

¹ KPMG LLP, Racing to Tomorrow: Digital agility becomes indispensable