forbes.com
Certinia's Report Highlights Disconnect Between Sales, Delivery, and Customer Success
Certinia's report reveals that only 36% of teams proactively collaborate across sales, delivery, and customer success, leading to a delivery gap that impacts customer experience and profitability.
- What is the "Delivery Gap", and what are its primary consequences for businesses?
- The Delivery Gap is the operational friction caused by disconnected systems and siloed teams, hindering effective scaling. Consequences include missed expectations, strained client relationships, margin leakage from unbilled hours and poorly staffed projects, and elevated employee turnover.
- How does the lack of integration between different business functions affect a company's profitability and operational efficiency?
- Disconnected systems lead to manual data reconciliation, outdated resource management, and an inability to track true profitability due to data residing in separate systems. This fragmented model creates inefficiencies and hinders confident staffing decisions.
- What are the key technological and operational changes needed to close the Delivery Gap and build a "Connected Enterprise", and how will this impact future business success?
- Closing the gap requires a platform-native architecture, shared accountability across teams, and a shift from function-specific KPIs to collective measures. This will create operational certainty, enabling confident strategic investments, risk mitigation, and scalable use of emerging technologies like AI.
Cognitive Concepts
Framing Bias
The article frames the 'Delivery Gap' as a significant problem for businesses, emphasizing the negative consequences of disconnected systems and the benefits of a connected operating model. The narrative focuses on the challenges and potential losses associated with disjointed operations, creating a sense of urgency and highlighting the need for change. Headlines like "When Services Fall Short" and "The Mandate For A Connected Enterprise" immediately establish this framing. This framing might inadvertently downplay the successes some companies have achieved with less integrated systems, thus creating a potentially skewed perspective.
Language Bias
The language used is generally descriptive and avoids overtly charged terms. However, words like "erosion," "strained," "friction," and "drains" subtly convey negative connotations. The repeated emphasis on "disconnected" and "fragmented" systems reinforces a negative image of current business practices. While this is not necessarily biased, it could benefit from more neutral alternatives, such as "unintegrated," "separate," or "independent." The phrasing around the 'Delivery Gap' is strong and may overstate the problem.
Bias by Omission
The article focuses heavily on the challenges of disconnected systems but could benefit from including examples of companies that have successfully navigated these challenges or have alternative strategies to manage operational efficiency without complete system integration. While acknowledging the limitations of point solutions, it doesn't explore potential advantages or scenarios where these might be sufficient for specific business needs. The article also omits details about the cost and complexity involved in implementing a fully connected enterprise model, which could significantly impact smaller businesses' decisions.
False Dichotomy
The article presents a somewhat false dichotomy between "point solutions" and "platform-native architectures." While acknowledging that integrating new capabilities shouldn't mean rebuilding business logic or duplicating data, it doesn't fully explore the spectrum of solutions that fall between these two extremes. There may be intermediate steps or strategies that organizations can employ to gradually improve integration without necessarily adopting a completely platform-native approach.
Sustainable Development Goals
The article emphasizes the importance of connecting sales, delivery, and customer success functions to improve operational efficiency, increase profitability, and reduce employee turnover. A connected operating model leads to better resource allocation, reduced margin leakage from poorly staffed projects, and improved employee satisfaction, all contributing to economic growth and decent work.