Digital Accelerators: Processing Tomorrow, Delivering Today

Rankumari Iyer, CIO and CISO, Reliscale Consulting, underlines the importance of digital transformation in enabling organizations to turn the new normal into a winning position.

Why is it critical for organizations to accelerate their digital transformation efforts?

Digital transformation is no longer an option but an essential strategy for enterprises today. Before the pandemic, many organizations were oblivious to the idea of a fully remote environment. They had no security policies in place. Many of them were still working on desktops and had difficulty obtaining laptops for their staff when the lockdown was announced.

Digital transformation technologies can enable greater collaboration, provide customized customer engagement models and relevant insights from data, to help enterprises grow even in testing times.

To tackle any unprecedented situation like COVID-19, we need to be ready in terms of our infrastructure, having the right people, processes, and technologies in place so that the business is not disrupted.

What is the role of technology in driving employee productivity?

Employee productivity is a challenge in many places during the current times. More prominent companies have tools and technologies deployed in their ecosystem to track and monitor employee productivity, but many smaller firms do not necessarily have those solutions available. Since everything today is happening remotely, your people may be facing challenges that are unique to them. For example, they may not be getting the kind of work they want or have health-related issues.

Digitization helps in a lot of audits and compliances. In today's scenario, organizations cannot function effectively without deploying some productivity tool at some stage.

How has digitization changed client expectations?

The conventional ways of customer engagement are no longer relevant today. In the digitized world, your end-user needs a quick solution to a problem through a mobile app. It would be best if you have technological competence to track the challenges faced by end-users and address their concerns promptly. Deploying the right solutions and integrating them with relevant intelligence is very important. And that I think digitization really can help and enable that.

Rajesh Uppal, CIO, Maruti Suzuki, outlines the importance of digital transformation in the current crisis and how tech can help to improve enterprise productivity and ensure employee well-being.

How has the recent crisis pushed you to accelerate your digital transformation strategy?

Earlier, only about 10% of our people were allowed to work from anywhere, and when the government announced the nationwide lockdown last year, almost 85% of our workforce started working from home. The pandemic pushed us to embrace digital in a fast-tracked manner. For instance, we are providing training to around 500 to 600 people simultaneously. Even employee reviews, at the management level or department levels, are happening at regular intervals. For us, the digital model has been more effective than the traditional way of working.

What are the business learnings from the acceleration of digital transformation?

Many changes happened at a rapid pace. From changing consumer behaviors to demand patterns and processes, everything got shifted. The need for speed has never been this crucial. Much reinvention has happened, and this process will continue. That's a significant learning and focus for our leadership. Taking fast actions, making quick decisions, doing things in an accelerated manner has become very important.

Secondly, in the digital way of working, organizational communication has become much more focused, clear, transparent, and more frequent than traditional working.

What's your top priority today?

Employee health has emerged as one of the very, very core areas of our decision-making. People are working in isolation and facing many challenges. Our priority is to ensure that our employees, their families are safe and they have a proper work-life balance.

Anubhav Rajput, CIO at Cholamandalam Insurance, highlights the best practices to maximize the impact of digital transformation in the current landscape.

How have the last few months affected the digitization strategies of enterprises?

The most significant change is that now all organizations are focusing on digital transformation strategy strategically. Digital transformation has now become a strategic imperative. Organizations have realized that there is no other option but to leverage the possibilities and opportunities of innovative technologies across ecosystems and users. Secondly, the spending on some of the digital initiatives has now moved to non-discretionary from discretionary—for example, AI-based models or customer experience-led digital initiatives.

Is measuring digital transformation payback still a key concern for businesses? What changes have you observed?

Let me answer this question from my industry perspective. In the BFSI space, the movement towards the cloud started a few years back. The sector had realized the potential of the cloud a long time before. So, moving toward a cloud-first strategy was always important. And the question of scale was never a challenge since the cloud gives you the desired ability to scale, elasticity which on-premise would not. Currently, across businesses, there has been a growing understanding about adopting a well-planned cloud migration strategy, and with remote work has become a new reality, organizations understand that digital transformation initiatives will bring a positive return on their investments.

What should be the strategy for tech leaders to accelerate holistic enterprise-wide digital transformation initiatives without compromising on scope?

First and foremost, it is critical to know the actual need for business. Whether investing in automating processes, RPA, analytics, ML, or AI, first tackle the foundational capabilities. Find the use case and then start controlling and implementing. So, for example, if I were to implement an RPA bot, you need to have a small token of excellence in place now. You should know that you have the right decision regarding which process needs to be automated and have the clear RoI target in place. Business and technology stakeholders should be aligned and sign off on the transformation project to execute the project flawlessly. Governance and security are other critical aspects that need to be taken care of before implementing any new solution.

Vamsi Krishna Ithamraju, SVP Engineering & IT Head at NeoGrowth Credit Ltd, shares his view on the key digitization trends shaping the industry and the future of work.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the pace of digitization?

I think the fundamental thing that has changed since the pandemic has begun is the mindset of people and the acceptance level of digitization. Whether it is the business leadership, the technology, or the end-users themselves, I think everyone has embraced change far more quickly because there was no alternative. For technology leaders, this was an opportunity to modernize their capabilities and fast-paced many delayed projects.

How can digitization be leveraged effectively by IT leaders to step up the game in business continuity, productivity, and agility?

There are two aspects here—one is at the technology level, and the other is at the human engagement level. From a tech standpoint, cloud-based and cloud-native technologies such as microservices architecture and containerized approach have become more critical than before. Not because they are superior in their architecture but because they make business continuity inherent to the architecture. Secondly, since significant employees of this country are now sitting at home for over one year, working remotely, and managing stress and emotions, it has become crucial for organizations to elevate their employee engagement levels. Businesses need to imbibe some level of work-break-fun kind of a structure.

What are some of the key trends emerging from the acceleration of digitalization?

There is much democratization [of technology] that's happening in the country for the last two years. Initially, we saw payments getting democratized with the UPI framework. Today everyone accepts UPI – whether a fruit seller or a well-established merchant. Digital democratization has started in the payments industry, and now sectors such as insurance, lending and wealth are going through the digitization wave. The second one goes to data democratization, making data (and related insights) accessible to everyone. It is going to revolutionize many things in the near future.

The Need for Digital Acceleration

Why choosing between scope and speed is not an option?

Disruption has been a buzzword in tech discourse for long. While it looked good in PowerPoint slides—why, it very effectively drove business continuity/disaster recovery solution sales—we all saw how it came to naught when the real disruption came; a disruption spelt C-O-V-I-D.

The datacenters and technology infrastructure that we so carefully protected from natural disasters like earthquake, flood and fire had absolutely no challenge. They were hale and hearty. The challenge that we faced was in giving secure access to people wherever they were.

Our enterprising IT managers could even manage to meet that challenge, fairly successfully and thus helped in keeping the business—and the global economy—running.

But one valuable lesson was learnt. Something, as children, our teachers taught us, albeit in a different context. You can score well, sometimes by picking up selected chapters and preparing them thoroughly. But that will not always work. You never know where the questions would come from. And the solution was extremely simple: do not pick and choose. Be thorough about your preparation.

Putting in our parlance, digitization cannot be done on a pick-and-choose basis. It has to be holistic and should map to your business operations and strategy. You cannot expect to do things ad-hoc all the time. It won’t work, and if it works, you have a huge new challenge these days; it is called security. Many organizations realized that the hard way. While some of the enterprises, far more mature in their digitization initiative, had a smooth sailing during the COVID disruptions, others who quickly put things together in an ad-hoc manner, were faced with enormous security issues.

There is no shortcut in life. And there is no shortcut in digitization.

In other words, the scope of ‘digital’ in your enterprise cannot be pick-and-choose, let alone convenience-based. It has to be absolute.

Unfortunately, slow-and-steady is not an option for the CIOs. Business is competition. If you stand still, the world will not wait for you. You have to take a holistic digital approach and yet have to move fast.

In short, it is no more a toss-up between scope and speed. It has to be both.

That is what we call accelerating digital. And the approaches, technologies, management practices, and of course, the people who make it happen could all be digital accelerators. A management initiative can be a digital accelerator as also a person driving digitization in an organization.

But even before we get into celebration mode, we need to analyze, question, ideate, collaborate, visualize and plan how to accelerate digital at scale. In other words, what or who can be digital accelerators? And how?

We will discuss some of those in depth here. Watch this space.

Digital acceleration in the age of new normal

Organizational digitization is complex and needs meaningful integration of people, processes, and technology for sustained benefits.

In these disruptive times, adopting new-age technologies has become a strategic necessity for businesses. Since the beginning of the pandemic, organizations are continually focusing on reinventing themselves to provide a swift and fitting response to business disruptions and ensure business continuity. Enterprises are rapidly embracing new-age technologies such as cloud, machine learning (ML) analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation to strengthen their processes and resiliency levels with aplomb.

The pandemic has proved to be a catalyst for digitization. During the crisis, digitization enabled many businesses to connect with their customers at a deeper level and also helped them iron out supply chain disruptions and automate critical functions.

However, the most significant challenge around accelerating digital change has been adapting to the change more rapidly and frequently. Due to the pandemic-induced rapidly fluctuating customer preferences and unstable demand and supply equilibrium, businesses have to refine their processes and strengthen their digital capabilities faster than ever.

What’s changing?

In 2020, organizations focused on digital acceleration essentially to ensure business continuity. While organizations that had leapfrogged early reaped rich dividends, many others were forced to start their digitization journey. They primarily focused on evaluating their legacy technologies and deploying point solutions, say, a mobile app or a website, for improving processes in the new normal. Others were at the second stage of digitization, where the focus was on integrating different digital platforms and making each of those platforms connected with data.

In 2021, after gaining new insights and experiences, most enterprises are expected to leverage new-age technologies in each of their core activities to minimize their operation cost, secure their processes, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

In the post-COVID-era, enterprises not only need to re-examine their business needs, but they also need to create value for their users or customers. The new normal and the changing workplace scenario have made it imperative for tech leaders to transform their outlook and involve key stakeholders in their decision-making process. Applying new technology to any of the existing processes needs to be well discussed and well measured. While crafting a plan for digitizing any function, businesses need to remember that companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Apple have redefined customer experience and set new standards of creating connected customer experiences. The benchmarks are already there, and customers want similar experiences from them.

Ingredients of a successful digitization strategy

While there are many success stories around the way many organizations have implemented digital technologies at an unprecedented pace during the COVID-waves, it is also true that several others have failed because they had no well-defined roadmap. Some of the critical questions that are needed to be addressed by organizations before taking digitizing route include: Is it required for our business? Do we have a talent transformation plan in place? Can we achieve agility and flexibility through this transition? What are the short-term and long-term gains for us? And do we have a robust data collection methodology before I process it for business gains? Strategically, the success of digital initiatives in any organization depends on how well these programs are run and taken to the next level.

The foundation to the success of digitization includes the integration of people, processes, and technology in an organization. For businesses, it is paramount to pick the right technology to acquire new unique capabilities to remain ahead of the competition and engage their talent for an enterprise-wide digitization approach. But that’s come when the organization reaches digitization maturity, where they can confidently leverage the data and integrate the science of analytics, automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in their bid to automate processes, speed up innovation and deliver customized experiences. To ensure long-term benefits from digitization, enterprises should develop a conducive framework or action plan to capture relevant customer data and insights. People are comfortable with the transformation and have complete trust in the change management process. Right talent upskill programs should be conducted to ensure that there is minimal disruption when the transition happens.

Last but not least, for successful digital acceleration initiatives, tech leaders also need to ensure that a proper monitoring mechanism has been in place, which gives them clear visibility around different applications, their governance process, and the threat assessment.

In a country of a billion, digital acceleration is about survival.

India is a country of billions. For any consumer business, the size of the addressable market could be anywhere between a few millions to a few hundred millions.

Nothing is as exciting to a business as such as large potential customer base is. No surprise, the new business plan—whether of a startup trying to enter e-commerce market or a multinational looking to capture a new consumer goods segment—always starts with this ‘huge potential’.

And many manage to have dream start too. But some of them peter out soon. What differentiates the winners from the rest is not how they capture the imagination of the customers. If you have had a great start, you have captured the imagination of your customers.

Where they struggle is that they fail to scale up smoothly. Despite huge venture money being thrown to businesses, many just fail to scale up. And in India, business is all about scaling up. And quickly so. We are talking in millions, may be a couple of hundreds of them.

In the increased digitized business of today, this scaling up has one necessary, if not sufficient requirement: digital acceleration.

Take the scenario created post the pandemic. Overnight, many companies shifted to remote working. People stayed at home, as lockdown did not allow them to go out. Children had to do classes online. People did not have any option other entertaining themselves digitally.

So, whether you are an internet service provider, an OTT provider, an online education provider, an online retailer of essentials, or a collaboration services provider—unless you jacked up the speed overnight, you could become a ‘has been’. It is all about customer experience. And a large part of that experience, online, is about speed. Speed of delivery of online services for sure. But speed of execution—ramping up—as well.

And with a customer base of millions; maybe a few hundred million, in some cases. It is very, very different from a market where the total population is not more than 50 to 60 million.

So, getting from one speed to another, in a limited amount of time is extremely important. Oh wait, isn’t that what physics calls acceleration?

So, business acceleration—and in some businesses, basic survival—is now a lot about digital acceleration.

And lest we forget, we are indeed talking of a market opportunity of millions!