To Create New Value, GBS Leaders Need Different Data

Today’s most ambitious GBS leaders are rethinking their mission. While the GBS function was once all about delivering services efficiently, today’s forward-thinking leaders are focused instead on something much bigger: creating new value in their organizations.

That shift changes everything: how they define success, how they partner across the enterprise, and what data they rely on. It’s also forcing a reckoning with intractable problems like low adoption of and satisfaction with GBS platforms (hint: those are both symptoms rather than root causes).

But that reckoning is due: right now, many organizations have something of a crisis of faith in GBS. A new approach is essential to regaining the trust of leadership and reestablishing a strategic role within the organization.

In this piece, we’ll lay out what the “new GBS” means for today’s leaders and explain how they can deliver on the new demands of the role by tapping the power of structured friction data.  

The Situation: GBS Has a Valuable Cross-Functional View – But It’s Focusing Narrowly on Service Delivery

GBS leaders have a valuable cross-functional view of their organizations. But in many cases, their focus is too narrowly on efficient service delivery.

It’s a bit like if you had a map of an entire city but focused only on making sure all train tracks were clear of debris. That’s important, but it ignores the fact that even clear tracks can’t solve certain problems. What about stations with broken elevators? People who smoke in the cars? Confusing signage? What about the need for more bus routes or bicycle infrastructure? And so on.

For employees engaging with GBS, the outcome is often frustration: they may have to take two smoke-filled trains to get somewhere a bus could go directly. Or, in GBS terms: they may have to navigate both Workday and ServiceNow to get expenses reimbursed or plan leave. They may have to complete a process that’s very efficient for the organization but creates a lot of friction for them.

In other words, the employee’s experience of GBS service delivery doesn’t feel efficient or simple or enjoyable.

That’s frustrating, especially when employees know that GBS leaders have visibility into the entire organization. Surely, if they wanted to, they could create better experiences.

This is the crux of the current problem facing GBS leaders. It’s the reason the function has lost the trust of many executives. And it’s also the source of the greatest opportunity for forward-thinking GBS leaders today.

We’re in a moment where the very nature of work is evolving incredibly fast. Automation, digitization, the advent of generative AI – these things have the power to fundamentally alter what work looks like. GBS leaders who recognize this and use this moment to rethink how they can enable work getting done will be able to add tremendous value to their organizations.

And GBS is the natural function to do this: because their work crosses domains (IT, HR, operations, finance, etc.), they have unique opportunities to…

• See the big picture.
• Spot new opportunities.
• Develop new ways of doing things that create new value for the organization.

To do that, however, they must regain the trust of leadership. They need to prove that they’re capable of creating this new value by solving persistent problems. And that means they need data that…

1. Accurately reflects what’s happening within the organization; and
2. Accurately tracks changes.

The Problem: Data Echoes Rather Than Useful Data

That’s no small statement. Historically, GBS has relied on data like ticket resolution and usage. And yet their goal was never to improve ticket resolution rates! These data sources were largely insufficient for the “old” GBS work of driving organizational efficiency because they didn’t directly measure organizational efficiency.

They’re definitely insufficient to measure the “new” GBS, which is all about creating new organizational value.

In fact, these data sources amount to mere echoes of the things GBS leaders need to understand:

• Whether employees can actually get work done
• What the experience of getting work done is like for employees
• Where that experience is good and bad
• Where changes are needed (i.e., which changes will make the biggest impact on the organization)

So why have GBS leaders relied on data “echoes” for so long?

The main reason is that, until recently, there hasn’t been a vetted way to measure more directly. Think about it: if I asked you right now to measure the quality of an employee’s experience for getting expenses reimbursed, what would you look at?

Better: if I asked you where the friction exists in the reimbursement process, what would you do?

And now consider this: if I asked you where the biggest sources of friction exist for employees across your organization, what would you measure?

Most GBS leaders – and really, most business leaders – don’t have an answer here.

But this is where the opportunity for value creation lies: first in recognizing friction and then then in conceptualizing ways to remove that friction so employees can do their jobs more easily.

Once you see it, it seems simple.

Now let’s talk about the actual data GBS leaders need to gather to identify friction within their organization.

The Solution: Structured Friction Data

A common misconception is that creating new value comes from adding new things, whether processes, technologies, or people.

In many cases, however, creating real value starts with removing the friction preventing people from getting their work done.

Once that friction is removed, productivity increases. Employee satisfaction increases. Time is saved. All three are major value adders for organizations.

So how can you remove friction? First you have to identify where it is.

To do that, you have to ask specific questions directly of the people who observe and grapple with that friction every day: employees.

FOUNT has developed a proprietary framework for asking these questions. The essential components include…

• Focused surveys of a statistically significant number of employees (typically fewer than 60).
• Nested questions about work moments (aka specific tasks) and touchpoints (aka the people, processes, and technology associated with those tasks).
• Structured representations of this data so GBS leaders can explore answers by employee tenure, age, gender, race, region, and division.
• Benchmarks so GBS leaders can compare responses to industry peers.

Friction exists where employee satisfaction (with a moment or touchpoint) is low and the impact of that moment or touchpoint (on an employee’s intent to stay in the role) is high.

For example, in a population of nurses, let’s say a moment like “maintain patient records” has a low satisfaction score but a high impact on a nurse’s intent to stay with an organization (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Structured friction data showing moments of high and low friction

A GBS leader who discovers this has a clear signal that that moment needs to change to improve retention and reduce turnover. But how?

The Application: Analyzing Structured Friction Data to Create New Value

In this example, a GBS leader might discover that one touchpoint involved in maintaining patient records has universally low satisfaction rates across tenure, age, gender, race, region, and division. That touchpoint? The electronic medical record (EMR) system being used (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Analysis of structured friction data

Suddenly, GBS leaders have a crystal-clear picture of where friction lies. Now they can turn to freetext answers from the survey to understand what about the EMR is causing such low satisfaction scores. Armed with that data, GBS leaders understand not just where the problem exists but also its exact nature.

Which means they’ve got what they need to partner with internal owners of the EMR and identify potential solutions.

Not only is this a much clearer picture of actual work than it’s possible to get from ticket resolution data, it’s also scalable and repeatable. It provides GBS leaders with a framework for identifying what exactly isn’t working so that they can spend their energy on solving the most urgent problems and delivering the most value.

We Can’t Build the Future of Work Without Direct Measurement

Future-oriented GBS leaders understand that their best path to shepherding in the future of work and creating meaningful business value is in reducing wasted time and removing blockers from employees’ lives.

To do that consistently and at scale, they need to be able to measure wasted time and blockers directly. They need to able to measure friction – not the host of proxy measures many are being asked to make do with today.

When GBS leaders are equipped with structured friction data, they will not only empower employees to do the jobs they turn to GBS for support with but also show themselves to be strategic drivers of innovation for the entire organization.

Ready to get to the core of the problems at your organization so you can be the one who identifies solutions? Let’s talk.