Just about every business is going digital – but to be successful you need a clear vision of what that means and what you are trying to achieve.
New digital technologies can provide a new way to do existing processes better, or they can enable a whole new way of doing business altogether. Both are beneficial but the digital strategy must be part of the overall business plan, rather than something that exists in isolation.
A fundamental starting point for an effective digital strategy is to focus on the customer experience for both internal and external users. Take into account the short and long term business and infrastructure priorities as well as understand the evolving mindset of clients, end-users and internal stakeholders in a constantly changing environment.
For instance, Indian banks have invested in providing online channels so that customers don’t have to visit branches for regular transactions. Yet they realize the importance of a personal touch and so are focusing their energies in implementing friendlier user interfaces and video banking – where customers can perform banking transactions or consultations via a remote video connection, which is particularly relevant for customer base which is increasingly mobile. Meanwhile, in the UK, the world’s first ‘mobile-only bank’ is now threatening to disrupt traditional banking practices by offering mortgage through its banking application.
Digitalization is part of many industries in India. For example, a recent entrant into telecom services sped up the activation of new subscriber accounts by using citizen identification data (UID), thereby eliminating the need for physical verification. Similarly, the government of India is using digital technologies to address unmet needs in the area of healthcare in association with a leading healthcare entity, and recently launched the Social Endeavour for Health and Telemedicine or Sehat to deliver telemedicine services to patients in the hinterlands of the country. Needless to say, the key drivers behind this massive change are cloud computing, mobility, IoT and analytics that are now overhauling not just the way IT operates, but also how it is delivered.
First step to Digital Transformation
According to a recent survey by Unisys and IDG, 72 percent of IT leaders agree that it is critical to modify the technology, processes and resources of IT to sustain or support a digital business model. Hence, it becomes evident that infrastructure management should be one of the key areas of focus for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT leaders.
As enterprises embark on a journey of digital transformation, the need to overhaul their IT processes, tools and infrastructure becomes more persistent than ever. The critical nature of the digital transformation process makes it imperative for them to focus on infrastructure management as the wrong strategies could potentially derail business operations resulting in potentially irreversible losses, both tangible and intangible.
Mapping business needs to digital transformation
CIOs today realize that every business is an IT business and digital is becoming the primary driver of business. However, clarity on business goals is a must have in the implementation of digital transformation. With newer technologies being introduced and picking up pace every day, it is quite easy to lose sight of actual needs. In this case, CIOs stand the danger of ending up with a differentiated portfolio of cutting-edge technologies and services that refuse to play nicely with each other. Needless to say, such a scenario can only push up costs, both operational and total cost of ownership and more significantly, encourage shadow IT.
For instance, enterprises these days are moving to SaaS (ServiceNow for service management, Skype for Business for collaboration tools, Office 365 for enterprise messaging), which is not only a cutting-edge technology but also provides great return on investment and is easily scalable. However, if one buys these tools and deploys them without a long-term digital strategy in place, the complete value of the tools, no matter how great, cannot be realized fully. Such as, the benefits of ServiceNow can be leveraged outside the realm of IT service management as well, but only with a well-integrated digital business strategy.
IT leaders also understand that choosing the right partners who bring in domain expertise to play the role of an effective consultant is vital in devising effective digital strategies. Effective consultancy needs to include a guided strategy for process improvement, technology assessment and also ensuring availability of the right skill sets internally to realize the strategy. The complex nature of the demand from enterprises has now lead to outsourced Service Integration and Management (SIAM) service by IT vendors.
CIOs playing the role of change agent
To ensure the accuracy of digital strategies, pertinent questions need to be raised and answered. What is the primary goal of the IT deployment – cost-saving or improved productivity? What are the gaps in the present IT infrastructure? Is there a need to put in place an integrated digital business strategy first or should the organization lead with plugging the gaps in the infrastructure? What are the cultural challenges impeding digitalization within the enterprise?
The role of CIOs has changed over the last few years as they move closer to business and not merely ‘taking care’ of IT needs. IT leaders are now expected to drive digital transformation across all lines of business in an enterprise. They now need to be in charge of not just piloting and the deployment of IT, but also ideation based on understanding the nuances of the overall business and the projected path of growth. More importantly, CIOs need to think like start-ups to foster innovation and stay ahead of the digital curve. Such an approach will enable them to better integrate digital tools and techniques into the enterprise information architecture and organizational model.
To summarize, IT leaders need to think like business leaders – they need to take into consideration targets for the next financial year as well as consider key technologies and trends shaping the industry and their impact on the business in the short and long term. More important, perhaps, is the need to set the criteria for engaging effective business partners who can in effect become business enablers while remaining cost-efficient.
At the end, what is important now is not the accessibility to new technologies which have more or less become ubiquitous, but knowing which to pick and how to leverage them in a way that is most relevant to the organization’s unique business needs and goals. With digital proficiency on the rise and set to get a further boost from recent government efforts to go digital, enterprises with sound digital strategies now have the opportunity to scale at an unprecedented pace through a combination of agility and creation of new services to cater to a constantly evolving digital world.
Avinash Garg, senior director, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Unisys India
