Digital transformation has taken place in different phases in the last 18 months, which is leading to a business transformation.
So, what is the impact of business strategy or how important is it in the process of digital transformation?
This was discussed in the panel discussion at W.Media’s Digital Week South Asia edition titled ‘How digital transformation in the right way can refresh your business’.
Moderated by Shalil Gupta, Chief Business Officer, Mosaic Digital. The panellists included Eric Vas, President, Bajaj Auto Ltd. Anindya Karamakar, Head- Digital Transformation, Aditya Birla Capital. Rajat Teotia, CTO, Junglee Games. Arvind Sekar, Lead- Partner Sales Engineer, Freshworks and Ankur Arora, Director & Head, Digital & Innovation, Sodexo India.
Impact on the business
“I certainly believe that unless you put a strategy, digital transformation will fail. That’s my personal view. And I come from this perspective that if you look at strategy, there are fundamentally four pillars of strategy”, said Eric Vas
According to Vas, the first pillar is the consumer, second is the product, third is market place and fourth is technology. He further added that today more than 50% of India’s population today own smartphones.
There is data and 4G at fairly low prices, extra competition because of the telecom sector.
So there’s a fundamental shift happening at the consumer end. Similarly on technology, there are many fundamental shifts in relation to how consumers can connect with you in relation to what information you can give consumers, which you couldn’t get one.
He further pointed out that business strategies transform digitally while enabling the transformation. When one looks at a business it is important to look at the consumer and the market place first.
Integrating digital transformation into the system is an important area to look at as organisations are complex environments with a lot of people working together and it could often lead to digital disruption.
“Now one way of looking at digital transformation’s impact on the business strategy of an organization is for any organizations to have a digital or new digital community of people created for both internal facing and external facing customers. So it could be employees working for an organization. It could be external customers reaching out to an organization for it’s a product or service”, said Arvind Sekar
He further added that there should be a pool of people and digital communities should be made out of it. Digital transformation is not only about the tools or software.
It is about enhancing the customer experience in every possible way. Customers expect organisations to be available everywhere. The organisations that adapt these needs grow faster.
Transformation relating to a huge pace of innovation
“Digital transformation is not about tools or a particular process or, automating some manual work. It’s about how we can improve our business to deliver the products and services as per customer’s expectation. And while doing that, we have an opportunity to reshape the entire business” said Rajat Teotia.
In terms of the business of games for example which is risky business where one can never understand the needs of the customer then there are certain factors that help one mitigate the risks.
New features are deployed to every game or product and data science is added to every feature.
“Data processing pipelines and machine learning are used in order to identify how one can leverage those things in order to get customer insight in a manner that we can make a data informed decision.
And over the course of time, the few things that really help is changing our platform and integrating new technology, how we process data, how we collect insight, how we do reporting, how we do decision making as a cohesive, refined process in order to improve our company and the services we provide over the course of time” added Rajat.
“When you want to digitize your business and business is not about the technology, which is available out there, but it is all about understanding objectives.
And once you have decided where you want to be, it’s allowed you to figure out how you want to reach there and that’s when you look for technologies that one would want to use to reach their destination, pointed out Anindya Karmakar.
Customers in the current times also advise the organisation to bring about a change in terms of the digital transformation but at the same time they wish to interact with them.
There is a huge amount of digital transformation which is going on at the moment especially due to the pandemic where people have adopted virtual ways of interacting with each other and indulging in other activities.
“In today’s world, if you want to actually develop a product, you have to look at some other innovative delivery models”, Karmakar added.
Data plays an important role in the process of digital transformation. The collection, integration, storing and using data helps in accelerating the process of digital transformation.
It is also important for people to have the new skill sets. Soft skills for example is important for organisations to undertake for their employees.
With digital transformation there also comes automation.
“There are different ways organizations are implementing digital transformation, and for some people, digital transformation is probably a digital tool implementing to automate the internal processes or technology enabling processes.
So for us probably that’s, that’s still IT. Digital transformation consists of four pillars, customer centricity, innovation, data and digital innovation”, said Ankur Arora
He further underlined the importance of the customer centric behaviour of the organisations which is a very bold move as it may not align with the legacy processes and the business strategy needs to adapt to the consumer.
Building a positive work culture is extremely important because the collaboration of the employees will play an important role in the transformation of an organisation.
