iscover New tech requires new processes, not a retrofit of outdated approaches
TechnologyThe biggest gap that organisations struggle with culturally is the acceptance that they need to take the opportunity to transform their old ways of working in addition to the adoption of new technology, one BDO leader says.
Speaking with Accountant Daily ahead of his appearance at the upcoming Accounting Conference & Expo 2026, BDO Australia national digital advisory leader Nick Kervin said that most organisations believe they are better to change the technology to align to their existing processes and ways of working.
In many cases, he said, “the organisation then ends up changing the technology to meet their poor process and then complain about the technology being the problem”.
When attempting to redesign workflows and implement new systems, Kervin said that most new systems will have an ‘out of the box’ process; i.e. the standard way the system does Accounts Payable.
“Many organisations generally ignore this and then change the ‘out of the box’ process to meet their already poor process. In some instances, the organisation may re-design the process but if it’s done in isolation of the new systems ‘out of the box’ process, there may be a significant cost to change the system,” he said.
“The sweet spot which is generally disregarded is to understand the current, define what a better process might be and then align with the ‘out of the box’ offering to get the best balance between transformation, process improvement and lower implementation costs.”
Kervin’s presentation at ACE26 will discuss how organisations should define and measure whether a transformation has been truly successful, including through a number of non-financial measures including quality, customer outcomes and adoption.
“Many of these are not considered by organisations as part of the benefits of transformation. It’s important that organisations also understand how to measure lead and lag indicators to determine if non-ROI value is being created,” he said.
When asked about implementation fatigue as a recurring challenge in large scale change, Kervin suggested that an important strategy will be to appropriately resource the team to adopt the change and have the right support (e.g. backfill) not impact day to day service delivery.
“Fatigue becomes very real when the team is expected to deal with change and transformation on top of their day-to-day work. When the change is consistent, and roles are not backfilled appropriately, this becomes quite unmanageable.”
Kervin will be speaking at the upcoming Accounting Conference & Expo 2026, being held in Sydney on Friday 12 June, on the topic of ‘Transformation in Practice: What actually works’. To learn more about the conference, and to purchase tickets, click here.
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Jerome Doraisamy
Jerome Doraisamy is the managing editor of Momentum Media’s professional services suite, encompassing Lawyers Weekly, HR Leader, Accountants Daily, and Accounting Times. He has worked as a journalist and podcast host at Momentum Media since February 2018. Jerome is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in NSW, and a board director of the Minds Count Foundation.