Our client was committed to jump-starting digital innovation in its finance operations, and especially by looking at learnings and best practices from outside the company. They desired an innovation incubator, and so they chose KPMG as their partner because of our experience with similar projects and our insights on the effective approaches to innovation that we have seen with other clients.
To take their goal of a Center of Innovation (COI) from concept to reality—and design the best COI model for this global tech powerhouse—we started first with leadership interviews across the finance teams to assess their current perspectives, perceptions and thought processes. How did they envision a COI working? What could it do for them? Then we drilled down further via discussions with the functional teams that sat within the finance operation, from accounting and payables to finance-specific engineering and data and analytics.
After capturing those perspectives, we facilitated (held?) a series of workshops to distill them down to an overarching vision and set of guiding principles to ensure those north stars tracked through the COI rollout and ongoing implementation and expansion process.
All of this informed our final, high-level recommendation on an operating model, the innovation life cycle, and how new ideas could be generated and cascaded to the right channels, at the right time, for implementation.
Underpinning our recommendations were:
- A capabilities framework, which helped identify the skills the finance team needed to develop and embed in their COI as a core functions for the group
- A more detailed recommendation on the key roles they needed to fill to accelerate the COI’s development
- An interaction model that outlined how the COI would need to engage other teams in the company—for example, technology, legal, customer service—to gain buy-in and show efficiencies for all
- A suggested governance framework and structure to facilitate everything from compliance to executive sponsorship
After the 8 week project, the client was armed with the highly detailed 60-day launch playbook that captured all of the insights above, as well a summary presentation for executive sponsors and cross-functional partners.
The end result: from ideas to a Center of Innovation roadmap, in 8 weeks.