Digital transformation – Reimagining businesses with a difference

Madhusudhan KM
Moneycontrol Contributor

In the digitally-driven world of today, strategic organisational direction for most businesses is not complete without weaving in a robust digital strategy.

The right approach to an effective digital strategy is to first re-imagine business processes and then think about how technologies can help realise them. Thinking of just "digitising" existing business processes, and not overhauling them, would only give incremental benefit, but that won't differentiate them from competitors.

For example, for millennial leisure travellers, booking processes could be completely reimagined by allowing one to search for "I have $1000. Tell me where I can go for a nice beach vacation".

This is a completely different approach from allowing travel searches based on an origin-destination pair. The latter assumes that the traveller knows exactly where he/she wants to go. The new approach could allow for way more exploration and discovery and an increased propensity to find what one is looking for and actually make a booking.

Such re-imagination of a business process involves building numerous software systems to enable these changes. In the instance mentioned above, it will involve tagging various locations, understanding the total cost of the trip (flight/train/bus, accommodation, etc.) and so on.

Once this is understood, a number of technologies can be brought together to realise this vision.

Technologies like NLP (Natural language processing) and NLU (Natural language understanding) could be used to build semantic search, big data technologies could be implemented to organize travel destinations and inventories in a different way and finally intuitive mobile apps could be employed to present a very simple interface to travelers.

While this is a simple example on travel, the same approach can be used in all domains.

Another example is in retail commerce. Almost all the e-commerce & m-commerce apps today assume that the consumer knows what to buy. This can be reimagined into “activity based buying”.

For example, "Suggest things to me to buy for my next trek to the Himalayas" or for a B2B scenario, it could be "suggest things to me to buy for a kitchen remodeling service". This means one should be able to build a composite catalogue based on the context of the activity.

While this is very powerful, it will have many ramifications on how the inventory is organized, how the search will work in the future, etc.

Leaders in any business should therefore invest time & money to re-imagine business processes thinking from end consumer/customer angles and then use the right technology to realize these reimagined processes.

Essentially, business leaders need to approach the fundamental need of
a consumer and attempt to realize it through technological means in order to ensure sustained success.

Emerging digital trends in the industry

While technologies such as Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and Analytics played a significant role in enabling digital transformation over the last 5 years or so, emerging solutions like IoT, artificial, blockchain and virtual reality/augmented reality will power the digital transformation over the next five years.

IoT will enable building intelligent systems like smart buildings/premises, smart cities, smart manufacturing, etc. At the same time, these smart systems will all leverage cloud for the infrastructure and analytics capabilities. They will further use AI algorithms to analyze the stream data on the edge and the cloud to take smart decisions on the edge and on the server side.

AI will also power the use-cases discussed above by enabling us to build “semantic search” and to continuously learn the buying patterns and then organize inventory for various contexts and activities.

Blockchain is going to be transformative and disruptive in nature, opening up completely new possibilities for businesses in every front. There are so many promising use-cases across industries wherein Blockchain can help re-imagine business processes.

Some of them are exchanging loyalty points across providers to enable end-consumers buy products and services, helping banks to cut down time on cross-border transactions, help protect IP in the media industry, etc.

New service lines opening up in the industry

For the IT service industry, these emerging technologies provide new opportunities to completely reimagine service offerings. Some of them are listed below:

• Consulting services to help organizations re-imagine their business processes and create a roadmap to realize the digital strategy
• Digital commerce to move towards Visual commerce, Conversational commerce & IoT- enabled commerce
• Analytics services can be transformed into “Insights as a service” by adopting newer techniques in Machine learning and deep learning
• Cloud based SaaS offerings can be created by creating IoT and blockchain based platforms
• VR/AR based services to reimagine User Experience by harnessing these technologies to build immersive experiences for end consumers and employees
• Helping organizations in building Centers of Excellence in AI, Blockchain, IoT, VR/AR, etc.

These re-imagined process areas can then be automated using emerging technologies like AI IoT, Blockchain, VR/AR, Cloud, big data  and analytics.

These emerging technologies, when harnessed properly, will create immense opportunities and possibilities for enterprises and IT service industry.

(The author is Chief Technology Officer at Mindtree)