Technology plays a vital role in an organization and its ability to evolve with the market continually increase value to customers. It has been rightly quoted that, ‘Digital transformation closes the gap between what digital customers already expect and what analog businesses actually deliver’.
Digital transformation looks different for every company, it is hard to define that applies to all. The word ‘Digital’ means differently to different people. Generally digital transformation is defined as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Even organizations that are well down the digital transformation path face tough ongoing hurdles, like budgeting, talent struggles, and culture change.
Many veteran CIOs and IT leaders from different verticals have shared their views on Digital Transformation, top priorities for their companies and the challenges faced by them to bring digital transformation.
Best Practices adopted by Organizations
Sandeep Pradhan, CIO- Exide Industries discusses about SAP Leonardo platform from which they are going to develop apps for the customers, service technicians, R&D and other stakeholders so that they can use and monitor pro actively for better customer experience.
Talking about the digital transformation Sandeep Pradhan says, “Exide battery is a garage purchase; it is always under the bonnet or under the steer cases. We would like to change these perceptions from a dump device to a smart appliance with the help of IoT technology. We are going to install one IoT device on the battery so all the customers and other business stake holders can connect it through the IoT devices.”
Hospitality industry is a very critical sector where patient comfort and their experience matters the most. On this backdrop CK Birla Hospitals have adopted various technologies. Viloo Williams, CIO, CK Birla Hospitals says, “As a hospital we have a lot of improvements coming in the levels of infrastructure. From an information technology perspective, one of the best practices that we want to bring in is how to improve the speed of delivery of the services to the patient, and towards that we are bringing in the digitization. Mobility is one of the areas where we want to bring in more digitization. We want that patients can connect to us from anywhere and they do not have to always walk into us, then the data what we collect from the patient and how soon we can reach the data back to the patient in the form of reports, investigations or the test results and so on. So that is the area where technology can help us a lot. Mainly it is how quickly we can connect to the patient, deliver the treatment to the patient and the patient can be sent back home in a satisfied manner. So we are working towards technologies to help us in that.”
Viloo points out giving the right treatment at the right time with the right technology is the focus of the moment. Mobility is the major focus area for her right now. As a CIO, she perceives, “IT has been given a lot of importance today because everything is based on technology and we are the people who know the technology. We investigate what kind of best technologies we can bring to hospitals and therefore the rest of the CXO group of the management look up to us for the technology solutions.”
SPML Infra has adopted an E-procurement system integrated with SAP as best practice. The company has been able to digitize humongous amount data and also it has advance OCR search facility to search documents.
Ayan Mukherjee, CTO-IT, SPML INFRA says, “We have embarked on a journey of actually digitizing all our previous records into a cloud based document management system. Probably in the last six months, we have uploaded around more than lakhs of documents with a search advance OCR search facility. So that anything which is a scan document, user can search from a scan document as well. So, it gives an edge of actually searching a document during a legal arbitration.”
Ayan thinks digital transformation is impacting each and every individual of the organization. Speaking about the challenges he says, “Our main challenges are specifically in a remote site where the 2G network does not work. We are looking for solutions, which specifically can capture the attendance and the time sheets of a labour or an employee, and connects to the net. Then it gets synchronize into the cloud database and we can download it from the cloud database at the head office.”
To Bibhas Sen Choudhuri, AGM-IT, Neotia Healthcare Initiative, digitization stands for migrating their infrastructure to cloud. Neotia Healthcare Initiative is focusing on digitization of OPD as maximum data generates there and it can be easily available to doctors.
He highlights, “We want to involve doctors and patients together in a more user-friendly way to access the data for their health benefit and how doctors can be more accessible to the patient for any kind of help. We focus to digitize the OPD first, from where the maximum information of the patient can be available to doctors easily and whatever doctors subscribe that can be digitized and stored for future reference. So, this is the most important area we are working on.”
Bibhas claims to face challenges to move the entire infrastructure with the running data. He feels the major challenge is to take out the data from the in-house infrastructure and move to cloud.
Suvendu Sarkar, CIO, Dream Bake considers IT budget should be less and work load should be high and the return of investment as top priorities. The company has implemented VMware solution which is redundant and has also reduced hardware loads.
He says, “We are working on private cloud. We are already implementing the VMware which is reducing the entire hardware load from eight servers to two servers. In the two servers, one is redundant, without which the company will not be running because the entire software servers are loaded on these two hardware boxes and it is redundant. So if one is off by any chance, another will take place of that.”
Man Mohan Goyal, Advisor IT Corporate, Tide Water Oil Co. (India) (Veedol) perceives CIOs are expected to be a very agile adopter of the changing business needs. In Veedol, for digital transformation they have adopted SAP. But he feels the change management is the biggest issue today.
“The best practice that we have adopted in Veedol is SAP. SAP is a very strong way to do whatever you like. Based on that, we have developed within SAP, a warehouse management system. We are doing secondary sales Information System, which again to be integrated backend and linked with SAP apps to the free force to mobility theory apps and new mobility solutions. So it's a whole range of thing that we are working on right now.”
Goyal continues, “For the coming year, top priority is full rollouts of the warehouse management system not only at the plants, but at all the depots that secondary sales, which is an ongoing project now. The secondary sales monitoring and analytical system together with the fact that we are planning to extend it to tertiary and beyond sales till the final end consumer point. Because we are in the lubricant manufacturing industry, so, there are many stages of the product moving till it features the end consumer.”
For digital transformation, Adrish Mukherjee, Senior Manager (E.R.P.), Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers chooses to maintain total transparency in their entire process of approvals.
“The best practices in Garden Reach Shipbuilders are that we are going from traditionally old organization to digitally savvy organization. Being a government organization, all our processes and approvals are a very lengthy process. Now, we through a workflow process have reduced that to a large extent and on the website each approval stage is uploaded and it is as transparent that everyone knows where in a particular stage any approval or any process is stuck. It is being as transparent as that. The best practices in our organization that we are supporting are total transparency. From a traditional organization transforming to a transparent organization is the best practice that we are supporting and we are implementing now in our organization.” comments Adrish.
While implementing this he also casts some light on the challenges faced by him. He finds, “The biggest challenge is the mindset of all of the people. In our organization it is common to have people working for more than 20 years and whereas any new implementation is not taken in a very open sense as they feel that their freedom will be curtailed. So that freedom is one of the challenges and learning a new way of working after working for more than 20 years is another challenge.”
On building some of Kesoram Industries’ existing server, operating system and databases Sonam Mallik, Head-IT Manager finds challenges to invest on both the platforms like the legacy platform and upcoming technologies.
On adoption of best practices Sonam points out, “The best practice is on top of SAP we have identified a lot of needs from the segment of customers, support service providers and employees. We are trying to build those requirements with the skill of our in-house team.”
He continues, “We need to keep the legacy data and applications as well as we need to go ahead with the demand of the time. But investing and keeping pace with technology both the things is the most challenging thing. The top priority is to reduce the cost of production. So in line with that, from IT perspective, we need to give all the supports or we need to identify which are the areas where IT solutions can help in reduction of cost of production. With the changing time my role has transformed from a facilitator or support service provider to the business driver.”
Concerns raised by CIOs
To make West Bengal as one of the three leading states in the country in technology space Suvayu Ray, Associate Director, Advisory - G&PS, PWC claims to improve the business opportunities in the state. “I help the Government of West Bengal to bring about digital change in the way they work with the different stakeholders in the whole ecosystem. Right now, the focus is more on employment and how emerging technologies can help in the growth of the state in creating new job opportunities and new investment opportunities. So, the focus is on emerging technologies, like Blockchain, AI, IoT, embedded technologies. We are coming up with a lot of Center of Excellence (CoEs) and Center of Innovation, where we have global experts, providing training to students, as well as two different MSME sectors, so that they can take advantage of technology, improve their productivity, marketability and reach out to a bigger market. Thereby creating more investments in the state and creating more jobs.” comments Suvayu.
According to him, “The biggest challenges with these technologies are probably India is about 20 to 30 years behind some of the leaders in the world. Possibly whatever we are trying to do, we will reap the benefits in 10 years from now. Right now it is more of a development phase. The awareness and the skills are not there. So those are the challenges that we are facing.”
Prioritizing business security Biswojit Sen, Head - IT, Gujarat NRE comments, “Mostly we have to find it out weather cloud computing is secured or not. If the company goes for offline then cyber management security will be of major concern.”
A company always depends upon the CIOs or the IT- Heads for the IT decision making. He feels it is a challenge to adopt new facilities of IT which should be adopted by the company. About deploying the latest technology he says, “The main challenge is the ROI. Most of the companies nowadays need to check why we are going for cloud computing, what facilities we will get from it and how we can get the ROI from this. ROI is the concept of business, but from the technology point of view, we are trying to find it out whether it is secured or not, because data is online on cloud.”
Whereas Software technology Paths of India (STPI)’s Additional Director, Manjit Nayak focuses on STPI’s ESTP scheme, which is basically meant for IT industries as well as the electronic industries. “STPI is working across the country with almost 59 centers, meant for IT industries as well as the electronic industries. The services are available in the tier 2-3 cities creating employment opportunities. Now, STPI is creating more than 21 Center of Excellence (CoEs) across the country. We are also trying to promote startups and innovative companies, SMEs those who are in the field of in electronics and IT. So in the entire ecosystem STPI is acting as a catalyst providing government benefits to the industry. And I hope industry will be benefited out of the schemes and the facility available by STPI.”
To Conclude
Various organizations from a diverse vertical are undergoing different challenges. Though there are challenges, the best part is that everyone is hopeful to win over the challenges.
They are not looking at them as challenges but as opportunities. There may be areas where they need to work upon but they are ready to work upon. With the help of technologies they are trying to overcome those challenges and while deploying those technologies they are confronting different challenges and are also overcoming them.
