I had the privilege to attend the Global Business Services day held by The Conference Board at PwC in New York City yesterday.

It was a dynamic, engaging day and, of course, “AI & GenAI” percolated into many conversations, but the great common theme from speakers, workshops and participants alike, was the value creation opportunity presented by “End to End” Process thinking, alignment and execution.

Many of you will know that I have become a little fixated on semantics recently, as ambiguity and misunderstanding are emerging as the root causes of so many failed transformation initiatives.

Even the word “Process” means different things to different people.

“End to End” is also highly ambiguous as even powering up your laptop is an “end to end” activity (another memorable quote from the day . . . ).

Everything has a start and an end, but our value creation focus is on the full cycle value streams in the business, Source to Pay, Demand/Customer to Cash and so on.

These are the “silo busting” opportunities.

In one talk, the complexity of these cycles were beautifully described as “End to End, Up & Down & Across”.

That embodies some of the reality of the challenge.

Thank you Carrie, Marta and Rolando for that memorable quote!

This all coincided with another excellent article on the same topic, “The Insidious Effects of Organizational Silos” by Tony Saldanha and Filippo Passerini. You can read that here . . . .

And this, of course, brings me back to the “playbook” addressing many of these themes. You can read more on “End to End Processes and the GPO” here . . .

Of course, there are many examples of “GPO with a little ‘G’”, a gPo rather than GPO! Thank you David!

Thanks for reading . . .