Accelerating Digital Success: Reimagining Organisations for a Post-COVID-19 World

Dr Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman 5F World I Honeywell Automation India Lighthouse Communities

I was the CEO of Zensar Technologies for almost 15 years and we were one of the early pioneers in digital, handling leading global hi­tech companies, retailers and insurance companies. Lavanya worked with us handling Marketing Strategy. After I left Zensar, during 2016­-17, we started doing some research and came across some interesting points.

Almost 80% of digital transformation efforts either do not succeed at all or they don't succeed to meet the end objectives. They start off with a lot of expectations which are not delivered. As a team, we worked on it and, last March when Covid hit and many of us had to do work from home, we collaborated virtually to put together a model of digital success which can flip the percentage from 20% success and 80% failure to 80% success and 20% failure. Fortunately, we have had the opportunity to experiment with some companies and what we discuss here is a model that is working already.

Many of us are digital immigrants. We were not born with digital. I bought my first mobile phone in 1995, the big Siemens phone. The new generation are digital natives; they are born with the mobile phone. So in an organisation or even Digital India, we have a combination of many digital immigrants and a few digital natives. How do we get these people to work together?

The Digital Storm

The confusing part is also the exponential technologies available today, like:

• Cloud computing

• Internet of Things

• Mobile Technology

• Business intelligence /Artificial intelligence / Machine learning

• Augmented / Virtual reality

• Quantum / 5G

When we talk of these, the boardroom people get switched off and reach out to people who manage technology. We should understand why we do anything that we do. The prime focus must be to enhance productivity, wherein we want all our resources to perform better.

The second thing in this digital journey is that we want to improve experience. I manage digital as Chairman of Strategic Committee for State Bank of India. We launched YONO online service. Now it is growing at a rate that even we cannot comprehend. It is because it really improves the customer experience of dealing with the bank.

The third interesting aspect of digital is it enables people to find new business models. All these happen through a combination of digital and physical experiences, robotics, robotic process automation, IOT, sensors across the shop floor and cities. They connect the knowledge work. Manufacturing is being automated with tools like big data analytics. A time will come when we will no longer pay for capital assets as the Capex is moving towards Opex.

We have to look at the benefits in the bottom layer. For instance, 15% of global insurance is now available with usage-­based insurance. When people travel, they take travel insurance for that period alone. Most of e­commerce is being enabled by bots or social networks and cognitive shoppers. A day will come when robots will come and deliver what we ordered at our homes or cars. ABB has a factory outside Beijing where robots manufacture robots. So we can imagine the future that we are moving towards.

In Finance, blockchain and distributed ledgers will change the world. In Healthcare, we make sure that telemedicine works for us and consult doctors online. 3D printing is gathering pace. Thus we feel the impact of digital everywhere.

Earlier, companies' performance would be assessed by Return on Capital Employed (ROCE). Now people lookdown upon you if you employ capital. Uber for instance is the world's largest taxi company that owns no vehicles. Facebook owns no content. Airbnb does not own any rooms.

Their core competence is not asset ownership but data aggregation, knowing the customer and making sure that customer's demand and supply capability are instantaneously matched.

Three Digital Models

Three types of digital models are emerging:

• Cost Model

• Experience Model, and

• Platform Model

The cost model is going away as nobody wants to pay for anything. (Eg: Everything is free on LinkedIn.) At some stage, when we move from a free model, we pay slightly more, which is called the Freemium model. It is ultra­ low-cost aggregating of buyers, giving us price transparency.

Gradually, we are shifting to the experience model. People are moving away from theatres to Netflix or Amazon which tracks our preference, reminds us about a movie that we left watching half-way and suggests preferred movies. Everything is orchestrated for us. We get instant gratification. There is no ticketing and we face very low friction.

The most exciting is the platform model. It is about building ecosystems, crowdsourcing, communities, digital marketplace and data orchestration. We may adopt an experience or a platform model but we are moving away from the cost model. The companies which move away from cost models are the ones which tend to succeed more.

Covid – Pull and Push

The biggest pull of Covid has been social distancing and the push has been towards digital. We have been a social community but now we are all used to social distancing. There has been an explosion of new technologies. We don't need to master them but we need to understand them enough to be able to deploy them effectively.

Data and analytics is like a living organism. There are other aspects like customer journeys, new careers, skills and new leadership, innovation and BPR (Business Process Reengineering). There are so many pieces to the jigsaw puzzle and we need to put them together.

The Digital Journey of Businesses

• In 2014, we all started experiencing cloud computing and using our mobile phones for more than just making phone calls.

• In 2016, we started understanding Big Data, Analytics, business intelligence and using dashboards.

• In 2018, we started using the data to map new customers and improve employee engagement.

• In 2020, we are mastering digital collaboration. Everybody has to get here to be successful in business.

Waves of Technologies

When we look deeply at the evolution of digital, we observe that:

• The First wave was about The SMAC stack — Social media, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud computing.

• The Second wave started when sensors and Bitcoin started coming in, enabling the Internet of Things or IOT. People started getting very fussy about User Interface and User Experience (UI/­UX). The blockchain enables multi­client transactions.

• In the Third wave, we started seeing computer vision and what Satya Nadella calls mixed reality — which is augmented reality and virtual reality.

We do a lot of work in the social sector and have Lighthouse communities. When people from slums wander into our Lighthouse and feel that they want to work, say in a hospital, but they are scared, we give them a virtual reality headset. Before they know it, they are transported to the operating theatre of a hospital and they see a person like them and are able to feel their pulse. They become confident of doing that job. Virtual reality is worth a thousand pictures because it gives the ultimate sense of immersion. Then, we also had in the third wave Robotics and robotic process automation and 3D printing.

The future waves will be about Quantum computing, 5G, Cognitive Automation, Social Listening, Augmented Collaboration and Cyber Security. Reliance Jio is very aggressive about 5G. We want to keep China out of 5G because we want to make sure that the crown jewels of information are protected from third-party providers. Quantum Computing can completely change the way we envisage the speed of computers. Cognitive automation is about doing things very intelligently like the human brain would do. Social listening is understanding what people are talking about on the internet and taking necessary actions by collaborating in an augmented fashion. All these must happen under the big umbrella of cybersecurity.

Industry 4.0 and New Frontiers

Thanks to connectivity, data and new technologies, new business models of automation are emerging in manufacturing. GE has a factory in Pune which is completely automated and is a role model. When we think that India's problem is unemployment, we wonder how this can be a role model. That is the paradox. These are issues that we need to address.

AI, MI and Analytics

Data analytics is converting data to information to knowledge to wisdom. When we started representing data in the dashboard and graphs, we felt better. People used computer analytics to say what went wrong in the past and wanted it to suggest what we should be doing in future. Amazon and Uber use these predictive models. That is the exploratory side.

Today's data management has moved towards predictive modelling, which predicts the behavior and prescribes, enabled by large volumes of data coming into computers. They use machine learning and artificial intelligence to make those predictions happen. The computer can differentiate a harsh tone from a meaningful conversation through cognitive intelligence. To put it in simple words, it started with what happened and transitioned to understanding why it happened and what could happen and what should happen. This framework of analytics has become a way of life.

When you think of digital, don't just think of improving your core operations. Think of how you can completely automate, informate and build new business streams.

Lavanya Jayaram, Executive Director - South Asia, Asian Venture Philanthropy Network

Lavanya Jayaram

Executive Director - South Asia, Asian Venture Philanthropy Network

When we talk of digital, there is an immense amount of exploration and a lot of jargon that is thrown around. But the real transformation for the industry through Digital, is that it actually took the conversation away from all these myriad technologies and rather refocused on the business itself and more importantly, to the customers. That leads us to Design Thinking!

Often, it is misunderstood that design thinking is for designers and user experience. But design thinking can be applied to anything in life —technology, business or computer interfacing. The steps involved in Design Thinking are:

1. Empathise 2. Define 3. Ideate 4. Prototype 5. Test 6. Repeat

Empathy

Design Thinking runs on the premise of having empathy for the user, as the first step. When Airbnb was launched, they incurred losses to the tune of 200$ a week. The founders, having been so excited with the transformational idea, wondered why it was not making money for them.

One of the founders started using the app himself and realised that the quality of the pictures showing the facilities that were part of the Airbnb network were terrible. He immediately rented a camera, visited all the facilities that were on their network, took pictures himself and uploaded them. Within a week, he saw a complete shift in the business and revenues started soaring. It had nothing to do with technology or deep analysis but just putting himself in the shoes of the user of the app. We know the success of Airbnb since then.

Define

The next step is converging on a definition of what the problem at hand is. If design thinking is used for a solution, we start with the user to identify what the problem could be. But in defining it correctly, half the battle is won. Starbucks wanted to do something in the digital arena. Many people were launching apps but Starbucks were probably the first to define the problem in terms of the need for digitalisation differently. They could have said that they wanted to create an app for coffee ordering. But they defined it as increasing customer convenience and loyalty, and believed that customer convenience would help them in shoring up the revenues.

So the app was developed drawing on the experience of what that customer would feel while ordering. They introduced a voice enabled feature, so people can order on the go while they are driving or while they are at work. By the time they reach Starbucks shop to have their coffee, it would be ready for them, where there would be a person at the counter offering their coffee with their name on it.

So that definition of the problem of improving the convenience was really a shifter. As someone famously said, the definition should not be too narrow that it does not allow creative freedom and at the same time, it should not be too wide that it is not manageable.

Ideation

The next phase is ideation. Ideation is to bring in as many diverse ideas as possible. Uber Eats have adopted design thinking. In the ideation stage, they ensure that there is an interdisciplinary meet frequently, to ensure that there is a huge diversity.

Their design team visits restaurants on a quarterly basis to be aware of what the customer experience is. They ensure quick iterations and innovate constantly.

Prototyping & Testing

An interesting example here is the launch of Braun electric toothbrushes. The founders talked about using IOT, having music streamed when people are brushing their teeth and so on. But the designers who were brought in, took user feedback and arrived at the suggestion that the founders were looking at the wrong set of features for customer-delight — they brushed aside these features and instead incorporated solutions to real customer problems and came out with a prototype with a USB charger and a facility to order the head of the toothbrush while brushing. It was a big success and they adopted it. The next step is to test the prototype with users. You test. You repeat. You take the feedback back into design. And while we have been discussing each step of the design thinking process, the cycle is really nonlinear and you can keep going back and forth on various stages. And it is a continuous process.

The customer journey involves the following steps:

1. Visualization of every touchpoint with the brand

2. Setting targeted outcomes

3. Detailed buyer personas –understanding their motivations and pain points

4. Full journey mapping and brand interaction planning

Many companies have seen the importance of design thinking. Companies like Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys have all acquired design houses and integrated them. Some others like Accenture have home­grown their design thinking teams and have made it part of their project delivery. Some examples of agile transformation during Covid: Unilever rose to the occasion with the global demand for sanitisers hitting the roof. They converted their deodorant line to manufacture sanitisers and their output went from 700K to 100 million per month. National lockdown was announced in the third week of March2020, and Swiggy launched Swiggy Genie, in the second week of April2020 – in the middle of the lockdown to deliver groceries which were in high demand. These are instances where agile thinking helped the businesses and customers.

Dr Uma Ganesh, Co-Founder & Chairperson, Global Talent Track

Dr Uma Ganesh

Co-Founder & Chairperson, Global Talent Track

Digital formation is forcing companies to rethink how they connect with customers. The same concept is very much relevant in the context of employees too. In reality, most organisations have been either pulled into the digital transformation process without being prepared. They have an organisation structure, learning process and performance management systems that were designed for a pre­digital era. When they carry them into the post digital phase for the digital transformation journey, there is a huge disconnect.

Seeking Enjoyable Experience

People today — whether they are digital immigrants or natives — have experienced dealing with organisations like Flipkart, Amazon and others in their day-­to-­day life and to an extent, they are being mollycoddled by the pleasant experience with them as customers. Employees also have similar expectations from their organisations. As people are so critical for the success of the company's journey, we need to address some of the core dimensions of how people are brought into the organisation, how we deal with them while they are in the organisation and how they learn. Employees are really looking for an enjoyable experience where the digital tools and digital environment need to be in place. People no longer work in silos, so the culture cannot be driven by a top-­down approach.

Employees & Their Aspirations

They want to learn on social networks. They like to connect with coaches and experts available within or outside the organisation and work collaboratively with various teams. The learning contents must be made available, personalised and customised and curated for specific needs, at specific times, for specific individuals based on the styles that they are comfortable with. This is where AI and BoTs come in.

An enjoyable work experience includes four dimensions:

• An organisation must enable employees to achieve their aspirations by helping them to identify their aspirations and the skill gaps to achieve them.

• Creating the skills ecosystem.

• Providing coaching and mentoring support.

• Recognizing that there is a lot of learning that is going to happen through peers; and facilitating all these four elements.

How Can We Enhance Skill & Culture?

• Employee journey has to be reimagined.

• The Attract-­Enable-­Retain continuum has to be digitised.

• The needs and style of millennials and Gen Zs must be understood.

• Content is no longer the king; it must have Learner Centricity.

• Learning must be augmented with AI.

• There is a strong case for creative, inquisitive and profound leadership.

Dr Ganesh Natarajan

Organisations innovate in three ways:

• Through ambidextrous innovation, which is a combination of incremental and disruptive innovation

• Through employee innovation networks, and

• Through open innovation

To sum up, opportunities in the next normal can be given with the acronym — DARQ world:

Distributed Ledgers and Block Chains everywhere

AI will completely reimagine the future of work

Reality will be Mixed – Virtual, Augmented

Quantum Computing & 5G will make anything possible

Digital Five

There will be Business Process Reengineering across various sectors. The Digital Five for Digital Reengineering are:

• Mapping Journeys of customers, employees and partners

• Edge Technologies like AR/VR, IOT, 5G, Quantum, etc.

• Processes –Robotics and Robotic Process Automation

• Data and Analytics

• Culture

Maturity Model

The Six Steps that are needed in a Maturity Model for accelerating digital success are:

1. Understand stakeholder journey 2. Choose / adopt suitable Technology

3. Carry out Business Process Reengineering

4. Innovate

5. Enhance Culture and Competencies

6. Use Data and Analytics