Joining a digital platform will certainly accelerate the transformation journey
Published on : Monday 21-10-2019
Digitalisation is imperative but enterprises are still struggling with implementation. How can begin the process?
While digitalisation is imperative, different organisations are at different stages of maturity in the process and there is urgency being created to transform, in most cases from a digital transformation task team. There is no doubt that transformation needs to happen but more important is the assessment of current stage and asking some clear questions on where we are, and where do we want to go – aligning different stakeholders and putting a charter in place. There are three important steps: a) digitising the data, b) digitising the process (digitalisation) and then c) creating a business model (digital transformation). I think it’s critical to know where you are in journey to start the process with right alignment.
For many organisations, the stumbling block is the silos, which ironically, digitalisation seeks to break. Is this a classic chicken and egg story?
While it is not exactly a chicken and egg story, given that a change management mandate can force break the silos, but to be able to leverage the benefits of digitalisation by enterprise, showing the right digital vision with road map is important eventually different departments or parts of the organisation possess the specific information, which needs to be leveraged so that silos do not form again. It’s important to check the digital engagement – is your workforce also ready and prepared to adopt digital culture?
Is joining one of the digital platforms the only way for an average enterprise?
Joining a digital platform will certainly accelerate the transformation journey, however I believe each organisation is unique and they need to plan their digital transformation journey in a way best suited for their current state of affair looking at their digital culture and maturity. It all depends on your business if you are dealing with large of transactions and have huge data like ecommerce or banking you would probably be good with Amazon or Microsoft. If the data generated by your products are quite unique you may want to have your own platform
Often, companies get bogged down in discussing technologies rather than outcomes. How should an effective CTO deal with this?
This is a very important aspect and this is widely seen in many organisations wherein people start talking about AI, ML, Digital Twin and Blockchain without actually thinking about how to first put the business and client at the centre and then analysing what data to capture, what processes to digitalise and how to create new business models using the new technology at hand. The simple idea is to go from business and find what technology can enable for first level transformation, next will be to understand the technology and see what business can be disrupted with this technology.
Finally, is multiplicity of vendors creating conflict in the process?
The multiplicity of vendors only creates some confusion if not conflict as each of the platform vendors have different core DNA. For example, if we take the example of Digital Twin as one of the areas, you have product lifecycle vendors like Dassault Systèmes, Siemens and PTC with 3DExperience, Mindsphere and Thingworx™ while large industrial company like GE had Predix and then large software/cloud company Microsoft coming with Azure Digital Twin. Each of these companies has different strengths and their marketing team would define what is digital twin and underlying imperatives slightly differently.
Lokendra Panwar is a chief revenue officer at Algorhythm – a company dealing with transforming and optimising supply chain. Lokendra is a Digital Transformation evangelist and has seen the entire digital product evaluation over the last twenty years. He has been on enabling side of technologies as contributor and has also been on the service provider side actually using various virtual product development and industrial automation technologies.
Lokendra is a post graduate in manufacturing systems engineering from prestigious Indian Institute of Technologies, Kharagpur. He likes to read and travel when he is not thinking about technologies