Organisations need to identify and tackle their complexities: Pega CEO

The need for organisational speed and adaptability has never been greater, however businesses are sometimes getting in the way of themselves when it comes to ramping up that speed.

During the PegaWorld 2022 keynote, founder and CEO Alan Trefler spoke to attendees about how they need to understand and crush their individual complexities.

Trefler said businesses have a desire to eliminate meaningless work, focus our energy on things that accelerate our businesses and to be ready for the next inevitable curveball.

“Yet despite best efforts we are heaping more complexity onto our workforce. We're making our operations more brittle and worst of all, we're ignoring opportunities to fundamentally change how we connect with our customers,” he said.

Business complexity isn't new to any of us but Trefler said it's important to understand what complexity means in the context in each business and then figure out how they can crush it.

Through speaking to their customers, Trefler said three key themes have emerged when it comes to understanding the increasingly complex intersection of technology the workforce.  

Firstly, hybrid work has changed, 38 percent of hybrid and remote workers are facing new challenges establishing work and personal boundaries.

Second, accelerating change drives more complexity.

“Three out of four workers, customers or client demands are increasing so fast, that it's making jobs more difficult. One of the three workers who say their organisation moves too slow to react to business change,” Trefler explained.

Lastly, employees have too many systems and not enough education.

“Workers are still navigating to many systems with inadequate training and dealing with painfully slow reaction time. To managing information overload, struggling to navigate internal processes and keeping up with rapid change,” he added.

Trefler said these top the list of business challenges that are adding even more so today versus three years. Despite all of that, most people said technology is critical to their success and vital to their jobs. 

“They need systems that can quickly update, that can work across all of their different customer touchpoints, in all of their different channels and connect everything across their complicated landscape,” Trefler explained.

“In fact, they're demanding it. The fact that they don't have this empowerment is part of why the great resignation is happening in the first place. We have a rare opportunity to hear and urgently address their needs”

Trefler said when harnessed this urgency has already driven incredible change.

‘We've gone through 10 years of modernisation in just the last year. We've made a lot of progress that we can do more. Now is the time to reset what we knew about digital transformation and create a new vision for the future.

“This is not just a moment in time, complexity is here to stay. But we can simplify things with the right architecture and the right approach,” he added.