In a 360 degree connected world in which all audiences, including customers, stakeholders, investors, and employees are on a single platform, social media offers a crucial avenue for brands to develop direct relationships with their audiences.
Customers are more likely to engage with brands that deliver humanized solutions. From a marketing perspective, it’s important to create content that connects with people personally rather than a one size fits all approach. Relationships with customers can be strengthened by providing customer support channels through social platforms.
Helping customers on their terms, in their preferred application, helps improve brand loyalty and provides an opportunity to win back a customer that had a poor experience with a product or service. Lastly, brands can utilize social conversation to offer incentives to targeted individuals, ensuring high penetration amongst the customers you are trying to attract. All these efforts on social platforms are proven today to increase brand loyalty, win back dissatisfied customers and help in conquest marketing campaigns.
Social media has become a very important feedback tool for brands as it helps them to avoid blind spots around brand perception, product challenges/successes and reputation. It allows industries to identify opportunities and to drive customer engagement around certain topics based on sentiment or perception. From identifying market readiness for the product launches and campaigns to proactively combating misinformation and managing crisis, social media is helping brands to identify and manage customers’ perceptions through effective social conversation and intelligent digital marketing.
Social media has opened up a marketing channel that no one could have envisioned 15 years ago. The direct access to existing customers and potential customers in an environment of their choosing is unconscionably effective. The potential to go viral with little spend feeds social marketing budgets. But that yearning for virality has risks. An unforeseen messaging conflict or overlooked politically incorrect tone can result in devastation for a brand.
Marketing managers are required to create strategic approaches to take advantage of the benefits, while minimizing the risks. Some of these framework strategies are listed below:
Develop creative, personalized content; don’t come across as promotional
Generate synergistic partnerships with like-minded brands or influencers
Develop communities for unbranded opportunities
Leveraging social platforms to enhance traditional or digital campaigns
Evaluate all content for political correctness, its intersection with current events and for cultural sensitivity
ATCS is using the power of AI to analyze social conversation to provide qualitative and quantitative insights. Through social listening, we are advising customers on strategies for driving company reputation campaigns, product launch strategies, unbranded initiatives, and community development. Through storytelling, we are helping our clients understand their customers’ journeys with their brand or competitors, identify gaps in the market or in offerings, engage with their customers to provide value and connectivity and also to identify new opportunities in the market for new products.
Our programs help clients at any stage of the journey in their broader social initiatives. For example, in initial stages we have monitored for reactive listening based on crisis situations. We have also recommended monitoring unbranded conversation around relevant client topics and provided actionable metrics for campaigning.
If the client has achieved a certain degree of maturity when it comes to social listening, we help drive intelligent decisions based on customer insights. In this phase brands are provided with deep insights to support for market launches, market gaps, customer pain points, gaps in awareness and mapping customer journeys. At this stage we also provide a closed loop picture of the customers’ digital performance based on customer behavior across public social media, search and .com analytics.
As storytelling comes to the forefront of understanding customer behavior, ATCS India will take their social listening and insights development to the next level by enabling customers to realize their strategies through Marketing Automation. Insights are best used when applied to tactics and Marketing Automation is the next logical path for ATCS to take forward. As a partner of Salesforce, ATCS is able to leverage best in class tools within the Salesforce digital marketing suite to help clients create a comprehensive picture of their target audience and provide actionable insights for brand teams.
The presence of a skilled workforce and rapidly developing market in India positions ATCS to play a strategic role in the region. Overall, the Asia-Pacific region is brimming with economic dynamism and India is often viewed as the gateway. ATCS is already prepared to benefit from this economic environment with a strategy that focuses on the development, support and proliferation of MarTech.
ATCS has developed a digital marketing IT development and insights driven COE in India that can now serve the APAC region cost effectively and more aligned with time zones. To be able to provide intelligent and actionable social marketing insights from India is a rare commodity that demonstrates ATCSs commitment and confidence in the APAC region.
About the author
Rucha Pandit is a Principal Consultant at Advanced Technology Consulting Solutions Inc. With over 6 years of experience, Rucha has managed multiple roles at ATCS. She is currently at Montvale, New Jersey where she is responsible in enabling enterprise scale social media strategy for clients across industries and markets, supporting innovative capabilities, such as command centers, across clients, using social media trends and KPI in order to optimize client’s business insight and decisions. For more information, please visit herprofile.
To compete and succeed in a world where digital is everywhere, companies need a new focus on balancing ‘value’ with ‘values’, aligning their drive to create business value with their customers’ and employees’ values and expectations, according to Accenture Technology Vision 2020.
The 20th edition of Accenture’s annual report predicts the key technology trends that will redefine businesses over the next three years.
According to the 2020 report, ‘We, The Post-Digital People: Can your enterprise survive the ‘tech-clash?,’ even though people are embedding technology into their lives more than ever before, organizations’ attempts to meet their needs and expectations can fall short. As companies enter the decade of delivering on their digital promises – and in a world where digital technology is everywhere – a new mindset and approach is required.
While some have referred to today’s environment as a ‘tech-lash’, or backlash against technology, that term fails to acknowledge the extent to which society is using and benefiting from technology. Rather, it’s a tech-clash – a clash between business and technology models that are incongruous with people’s needs and expectations.
Of the more than 6,000 business and IT executives worldwide that Accenture surveyed for the Technology Vision report, 83% acknowledge that technology has become an inextricable part of the human experience. As part of the research this year, Accenture also surveyed 2,000 consumers – 70% of whom expect their relationship with technology to be more or significantly more prominent over the next three years.
Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology & innovation officer, said
Dazzled by the promise of technology, many organizations created digital products and services just because they could, without fully considering the human, organizational and societal consequences. Today we are seeing a tech-clash caused by the tension between consumer expectations, the potential of technology, and business ambitions – and are now at an important leadership inflection point.
We must shift our mindset from ‘just because’ to ‘trust because’ – reexamining our fundamental business and technology models and creating a new basis for competition and growth.
According to the report, continuing with existing models doesn’t just risk irritating customers or disengaging employees, but could permanently limit the potential for future innovation and growth. But tech-clash is a challenge that can be solved.
The Technology Vision identifies five key trends that companies must address over next three years to defuse tech-clash and realize new forms of business value that will be driven in part by stronger, more trusting relationships with stakeholders:
The I in Experience
Organizations will need to design personalized experiences that amplify an individual’s agency and choice. This turns passive audiences into active participants by transforming one-way experiences – which can leave people feeling out of control and out of the loop — into true collaborations. Five in six business and IT executives surveyed [85%] believe that competing successfully in this new decade requires organizations to elevate their relationships with customers as partners.
AI and Me
Artificial intelligence [AI] should be an additive contributor to how people perform their work, rather than a backstop for automation. As AI capabilities grow, enterprises must rethink the work they do to make AI a generative part of the process, with trust and transparency at its core. Currently, only 37% of organizations report using inclusive design or human-centric design principles to support human-machine collaboration.
The Dilemma of Smart Things
Assumptions about who owns a product are being challenged in a world entering a state of ‘forever beta’. As enterprises seek to introduce a new generation of products driven by digital experiences, addressing this new reality will be critical to success. Nearly three-quarters [74%] of executives report that their organization’s connected products and services will have more, or significantly more, updates over the next three years.
Robots in the Wild
Robotics are no longer contained to the warehouse or factory floor. With 5G poised to rapidly accelerate this fast-growing trend, every enterprise must re-think its future through the lens of robotics. Executives are split in their views of how their employees will embrace robotics – 45% say their employees will be challenged to figure out how to work with robots, while 55% believe that their employees will easily figure out how to work with them.
Innovation DNA
Enterprises have access to an unprecedented amount of disruptive technology, such as distributed ledgers, AI, extended reality and quantum computing. To manage it all — and evolve at the speed demanded by the market today — organizations will need to establish their own unique innovation DNA. Three-quarters [76%] of executives believe that the stakes for innovation have never been higher, so getting it ‘right’ will require new ways of innovating with ecosystem partners and third-party organizations.
Disrupters are already taking steps to address the gap between people’s expectations and today’s standards. For example, startup Inrupt is working on a data-linking architecture called Solid, which is designed to give people more control over their personal information by allowing them to store and use their data across the web through ‘pods’.
People could decide where their pods are hosted and determine which companies or machines can access them – revoking or deleting their information at any time, catalyzing Inrupt co-founder Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a web of opportunity for everyone. This is precisely the kind of human-centered approach that will define leading organizations in the future.
For 20 years, Accenture has taken a systematic look across the enterprise landscape to identify emerging technology trends that hold the greatest potential to disrupt businesses and industries.
The complete report can be downloaded fromhere. For more information, follow the conversation on Twitter with#TechVision2020.
Day two of Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Summit and Expo on AI Application & Digi-Tech, kick started with a thought-provoking panel discussion onAI in Public Service. The session highlighted the benefits of AI interventions in Agriculture, Smart Cities, Healthcare, Skilling, Education, Public Utility Services, Judiciary, and Governance.
In India, we are seeing a great opportunity for AI to support various processes both in the public and private entities. One of the areas where AI can be most effective is in the country’s judicial system. Currently we have 33 million legal cases pending in India. 84% of which has an average pendency of 13 years.
AI can be used to deal with all previous cases that we have in our repository by extrapolating it by means of text-mining, multilayer perceptron [MLP] and deep learning. Leaving the legal system to focus on their core job, which is to solve and close cases on an agile basis.
Globally, AI has seen $45 to $58 billion investment during the last year. It is growing at the fastest pace of any exponential technology. The AI segment will be worth over $100 billion by 2025. This gives ample indication of the scale and opportunities in this sector. According to Mr. Dhanrajani, the companies that have adopted AI will take away $1.2 trillion worth of business from their competitors. In 2019 alone AI startups have received $14 billion investment across 600 funding events.
Realizing the importance of AI currently, 28 nations around the world are curating or drafting AI policies and strategies. India is one among them however where the country lags behind is in research. In India we have only 2000 to 2500 research papers submitted every year and China has 10 times more. Out of 34.8 million students coming out of our higher education system in the country only 18% are employed. The job opportunities in the new age will require skills that are not taught in our educational system and this needs to change.
India is uniquely poised to be a global leader in AI, and this is due to the diversity of our population generating a diverse set of data. Attaining a premier position in AI will require convergence of all stakeholders. Towards this, India need to focus on 3 broad areas i.e. Education – infusing new age courses and adapting personalized learning powered by AI, Enable – create an open innovation platform, a pipeline of AI centric solutions and their adoption and Ethics – Draft an operating framework within which AI can be developed, Mr. Dhanrajani elaborated.
The panel discussion highlighted the sectors in India where AI can make the most difference:
Agriculture – AI holds the key to unlock massive value from India’s agrarian economy by leveraging data to better predict and improve farm yield, speeding up agricultural finance, crop insurance, Kisan help centres and helping predict demand for agricultural produce. I.e. AI sensors in ponds help farmers to gain maximum value from shrimp farming through predictive maintenance.
Smart Cities – AI driven interventions can add substantial value in analyzing local intelligence to improve traffic conditions and providing predictive intelligence on infrastructure development. It can be used to decentralized and decongest major cities and play a key role in predictive maintenance activities.
Skilling – Utilizing AI to predict demand for skills and equip educational institutions with insights to train the future workforce.
Swachh Bharat – AI and specifically computer vision can help substantially improve the success of Swachh Bharat. AI is already being used in the campaign in a big way. There is a WhatsApp number outside every sanitation facility. The user can send photographs of unhygienic conditions without providing any details. The photo will be processed at a central command centre and a call will be made to the vendor within 45 seconds to fix the facility. This is all being done at a cost of Rs 2 crores a month only.
Healthcare – India’s high and diverse population makes it fertile ground for population health studies. AI can be employed to provide evidence-based treatment options and analyzing clinical notes to suggest a treatment procedure.
Governance– AI can power several governance initiatives ranging from security threats, RTI, potential fraud and corruption to improving the legal system, curbing human trafficking and tracking of missing persons.
With an objective of identifying and showcasing the best Start-up with the most Innovative scale deployment of Artificial Intelligence & Industrial AI in a large corporate environment CII in association with Accenture Ventures held the ‘CII AI Challenge’ which felicitated the best startups in each of the segment.
AskSid has been recognized as the Best Start up for Innovative deployment of Artificial Intelligence in large scale corporate environment. QualitasTechnologies has been recognized as the Best start-up for Innovative deployment of Industrial AI in large scale corporate environment.
As an entrepreneur, you can never stop thinking of what is the next best thing for your business. Essentially, what can help your business grow to greater heights? While you make elaborate plans, it is important to know of the trends that will take center stage in the year 2020.
Image Source
Like each New Year, businesses will witness several economic, social and financial shifts. Here is the business forecast and the changes that you can expect in 2020:
Cloud computing – The idea of cloud computing has been introduced a few years ago. However, it has taken a while for the trend to catch up. In 2020, you expect a growing number of businesses riding on the immense potential of cloud computing. Employing computer technology reduces the need for elaborate systems and hardware. It is regarded to be more cost-efficient while delivering more effectively. Cloud computing is likely to stand at the front-line of growing businesses.
Growth with sustainability – Today, world is recognizing the importance of sustainability in all walks of life. The business arena too is adapting sustainability as the need of the hour. There is intense pressure on resource supplies and this has in turn led to a building awareness towards this idea. From regulations to taxation and several other initiatives, the business forecast promises steps towards reduction in carbon footprint.
Easy financing – For a business to take off and sustain in the ever-evolving markets, it is important to have enough of funds. Fortunately, a large number of leading organizations provide business loans to small and big enterprises. You can access funds through business loan which is sanctioned within short periods. Additionally, you do not have to gather too many documents. The year 2020 will see a growth in funding options for big as well as small businesses.
Collaborations – Business models have begun to adapt the idea of collaborations and the trend is expected to grow. The move comes as a great game changer as it can lead to the creation of more promising products and services within different industry.
Regardless of the industry within which you grow your business, you can expect immense growth in the months to come. Ensure that you re-imagine your business strategies to direct it on the most effective path. It is all about making your business indispensable through the available and growing tools.
The nature of risks is continuously changing and evolving at unprecedented levels and hence implementing a successful risk management program is the call for organizations looking to safeguard their hard-earned reputation.
Failure to do so could be detrimental, as many organizations in the past have realized the hard way. Paul McNulty, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General was noted to have said that – “If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance“. And this can be validated by the fact that globally compliance costs organizations roughly around USD 5.47 million, while non-compliance costs, including fines, business disruption and losses in productivity and revenue, cost around USD 14.82 million, which is almost three times the cost of maintaining compliance requirements.
According to a recent industry report, the enterprise governance, risk and compliance [eGRC] market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 8.5% by 2025, backed by the fact that organizations need to increasingly meet the demands of the complex regulatory landscape.
Integrated GRC platform is the only solution to help businesses manage risks across the organization while driving overall enterprise performance, while being flexible enough to keep pace with a rapidly changing environment – all with an industry-focus. As these platforms allow companies to meet their GRC targets by automating the workflow, the organizations are adopting GRC platforms to enhance their operational activities.
Compliance that is digitally enabled and data-driven provides a clear understanding on evolving regulations, so the industry leaders can anticipate risk. There are many regulations like – financial reporting regulations, export regulations, General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR], health and safety regulations etc., which companies must follow. Certainly, the business of doing business is not simple, and if the organizations are to achieve any measure of success by implementing GRC across the system, they need technology.
Regulation technology [RegTech] plays an important role in strengthening the monitoring and management of risks in the organization. Industry pegs the GRC market value to exceed US$ 47.1 billion by 2024, making it a pivotal component within every organizations corporate framework.
Here are a few key technologies in GRC that will define the next chapter for the industry:
Artificial Intelligence as a Service
Artificial intelligence [AI] in GRC is the need of the hour.As companies expand their digital footprints, cybersecurity vulnerabilities increase due to huge amount of data being produced. Surely, the demand for the intelligent use of accumulated risk data will only increase.
GRC solutions that incorporate AI and its application machine learning [ML], will play a major role. The key players in GRC industry shall offer AI-as-a-Service [AlaaS], particularly to industries where data is too valuable.
Big data to reinforce risk management
Big data can be extensively used in frauds and money laundering management. With businesses becoming more and more interwove, the threat of risk has increased, and hence big data analysis has become an essential tool for risk management. Also, it significantly reduces the cost of risk management, with automation and lower risk of failure.
RPA eases legal compliance concerns
Robotic process automation [RPA] can be an important tool to build more robust and effective compliance programs. It will support continuous control monitoring as well as full sample-auditing, making it easier to detect anomalies. All these advancements will enable GRC functions to deliver greater value, and act as true strategic advisors to the business.
Finally, the potential impact of Blockchain on GRC cannot be undermined. Blockchain technology can be used as an addendum to the best practices within the vast realm of compliance. The immutability of blockchain records equates to a verified chain-of-trust and proof-of-process for compliance.
With the introduction of new technologies, comes a plethora of unknown risks but also a wave of new insights and solutions for businesses. Certainly, the businesses of the future shall embrace new technologies to support enterprises and their activities, to be ahead of the curve on GRC.
Technologies like Machine Learning [ML], Artificial Intelligence [AI], Cognitive Computing, Robotics, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things [IoT], and more are transforming each & every sector in business. The traditional manufacturing industry is also at the cusp of a major revolution and these technologies & processes are the key enablers of the disruption.
Industry 4.0 [I 4.0], also termed the fourth industrial revolution is a transformation that makes it possible to analyze & gather data across machines and improve processes resulting in better productivity at reduced costs. Autonomous robots, Collaborative Robots [Co-bots], Industrial Internet of Things [IIoT] and Additive manufacturing are termed of the key building blocks of I4.0 [Source].
In the Indian market, 20 billion devices are set to be connected to IoT by 2021. The adoption of IoT and IIoT will span across different industries like manufacturing, retail, supply chain, automobiles, healthcare, etc. I4.0 is the future of automation & smart factories and these are some of the technological trends in 2020 that will enable Indian industries to march towards the fourth industrial revolution.
Talking about smart manufacturing processes, Wienerberger is one such company that proved to be a leader in producing clay-based building materials – wall, roof, facade solutions. It is the world’s No.1 brick manufacturer. The company is constantly engaged in leveraging technology and innovation to provide world-class building material solutions. Under the brand name Porotherm Smart Bricks, Wienerberger India has been manufacturing perforated Clay Blocks that are designed to provide improved durability, ease of use, and many other benefits that aid in cost-effective wall construction [Source].
Heavy Duty automation and the use of technology has made Wienerberger, by far, one of the largest clay block producers in South East Asia. With hi-tech robotics aiding the production process of over 70,000 large format blocks which is equivalent to 630,000 regular bricks per day, it is evident that the need for electricity is very substantial. 95% of the factory requirement is met through renewable energy including solar and wind. To cut down on emission the factory converts fossil fuel to a sustainable energy source, that is converting coal to natural gas as a fuel.
We were invited to Wienerberger’s Kunigal factory that is located in the Tumkur district of Karnataka in November 2019. Due to a busy schedule, we could not come up with a timely post on the same. Better late than ever!
Wienerberger AG, announced an investment of Rs. 30 crore in their Kunigal factory and the announcement was made by Christof Domenig, CEO, Wienerberger Building Solutions. The announcement was made on the company’s 200th anniversary and 10th anniversary of operating in India at Wienerberger’s factory in Kunigal.
The investment will enable the company to support its expansion plans including an upgrade and an implementation of new equipment in the factory, converting to natural gas as a fuel and launch of new building solutions that will enable construction practices to be simplified and faster with less resource consumption.
Wienerberger launched its first operation in 2009 in India wherein the company started production of its Porotherm smart clay bricks out of its Kunigal factory. Since its operation in India, the company has built more than 45,000+ apartments across South India and 15,000 independent houses in addition to building many other prominent and prestigious hospitality and educational institutions.
Myself, along with fellow bloggers and journalists had an opportunity to take an insider’s look in their manufacturing facility that uses state-of-the-art technology like Robotics and has extremely energy-efficient manufacturing processes. The impressive part about the factory tour was that the entire factory is managed by less than 20 people and robots were engaged for material handling.
The unit uses sustainable practices in manufacturing through the usage of natural additives like granite waste, rice husk, sawdust, and coal ash as inputs. Totally 30,000 units of power is consumed on a daily basis, out of which 95 percent comes from solar energy [Source]. The representatives of Wienerberger also shared their valuable insights on smart manufacturing and I4.0. More details about the Wienerberger’s India factory can be found here.
So far the company has managed to channel over 92% of its electricity needs is used from solar and wind energy. This has helped Wienerberger India to successfully set benchmarks for the building manufacturing industry across the country and the world at large.
To mention a few of the high-end automated machinery used in the factory are:
The factory is also highly equipped with a full-fledged in-house laboratory and product development facilities. Currently, Wienerberger employs about 250 employees in India. The company is also strongly associated with several CSR activities like providing primary healthcare facilities and affordable housing in the vicinity of the factory.
Christof Domenig, CEO, Clay Building Materials Europe, Wienerberger AG, said
The investment in our Kunigal factory operations will include converting from solid fuel to a cleaner and sustainable energy source – that is natural gas. When it comes to using electrical energy in the factory, 95 percent of the factory requirement is met through renewable energy sources of solar and wind.
Despite there being no such mandate, the measure to introduce natural gas as a fuel is a decision taken by Wienerberger proactively to ensure a drastic reduction in carbon emission, although it will incur additional cost for the company. Wienerberger is continuously striving to convert its production processes to low-emission energy sources.
Sharing his insights, Monnanda Appaiah, MD, Wienerberger India, added
With the Rs. 30 crore investment, we will also be upgrading our machinery and install new equipment with the latest technology that will enable us to scale up the production by up to 25%. The products manufactured in Kunigal offer significant technical advantages over conventional walling materials apart from being environmentally friendly and cost-effective.
We are also actively marketing and supplying clay roof and facade solutions across India and are also planning to expand the product portfolios for these offerings that would be extremely relevant for the Indian climatic conditions and consumer preferences.
Wienerberger’s India product portfolio currently includes clay building materials solutions for walls, roofs, and facades. Wall solutions include products like Porotherm HP, VP Load Bearing, Thermobrick, HP Grinded + Dryfix System; Roof Solutions include Koramic and Tondach, and Facade Solutions include Aspect.
Reverie Language Technologies, leaders in comprehensive full-stack Indic language localization and user engagement solutions and NASSCOM co-hosted #RevHack, India’s first Indian language-based hackathon. On Saturday, January 18, over 200 participants battled it out to build solutions to drive ‘Language Equality on the Indian Internet‘.
RevHack drew participation from experts and enthusiasts who aim to build multilingual tech solutions for Indic language first Indians. Themed around creating an ecosystem for solving problems in digital Indian language space, the participants used technology to build and deliver a functional prototype that solves the problems in Indic language content creation and localization. The participants had access to Reverie’s language APIs – Speech-to-text, Text-to-speech, and Neural Machine Translation.
India has a literacy rate of 69.1% and only .01% of Indic content is available on the internet for consumption. While there will be 536 million language first digital users in India by 2021, there still is a long way to go for achieving “Language Equality on the internet”.
Arvind Pani, CEO and Co-founder of Reverie Language Technologies, said
With the first edition of #RevHack, the company aims to inspire coders, developers, and the student community to create innovative Indic language technology-based solutions so that the internet can be truly accessible for all. Our regional language users can progress beyond browsing and India can realize the potential of the next 500 million users.
Anand B and his team comprising of Anirudh S, Abinav C, Vrishab Krishna and Luv Singhal, of Class 11 from National Public School in Indiranagar, won the hackathon. Theirs was the youngest team at the event. With their hack, phonetic sounds of any Indian language can be converted into into braille characters.
Anirudh said that the language to braille translation software can be extended to any Indian language, as Bharatiya Braille [unlike Latin braille] is based on sounds or phonetics and not on the alphabet. “The software has incorporated all sounds from many Indian languages. Every sound corresponds to the arrangement of dots,” he said, adding that Braille was chosen as it was one of the neglected languages in the country.
Several developers focussed on plugging gaps in rural health care services. Mumtaz Irtheqa Ahmed and his team from MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology developed a computer-based software that allows patients to tell the computer software their symptoms and basic information like age, and weight, which then links them to a medical expert. The doctor would receive the inputs in English or a preferred language. Likewise, all ladies’ team from Dayanand Sagar University created an Indic language add-on to Google Assistant.
ThoughtWorks, a global software consultancy, successfully concluded its India chapter of ThoughtWorks Live 2019 in Bengaluru on 28 November 2019. The event was an invite-only conclave specially designed for today’s digital CXO. The conclave hosted opinions and insights on the theme; Accelerating Digital Fluency. The day’s sessions discussed what it takes for businesses to not just become, but stay a digital course.
This blog has a long-standing association with ThoughtWorks as it also had a detailed coverage of Technology Radar Summit by ThoughtWorks which was held in June 2019.
Why the delay in coverage of ThoughtWorks Live 2019?
You might be wondering what took us so long to cover the event on this blog? Since October 2019, I moved into technical and business writing and more time was spent on acquiring clients who could use our services. Though it is like a freelancer kind of a role, I would term myself as a rookie entrepreneur who is using his blogging and technical skills to enter into an entire new domain:). Watch out this blog where I would writing more about the transition from being an engineer to a so-called writer!
Coming back to ThoughtWorks Live 2019, the event was a wonderful opportunity for tech-enthusiasts to learn from industry experts and thought leaders in the industry. These folks shared their experiences of building Modern Digital Businesses. Since the theme of the event was Accelerating Digital Fluency, all the talks focused on building a digital mindset that is needed to create differentiated customer experiences.
ThoughtWorks Live 2019 – The attendees
Apart from selected journalists and technology bloggers, the event witnessed a total of 111 participants that also constituted industry experts like
Lathika Pai – Country Head, Microsoft for Start-Ups [Profile]
Dr. Vivek Raghavan – Chief Product Manager and Bio-metric Architect, UIDAI [Profile]
Jaspreet Bindra – Digital Transformation Advisor to ThoughtWorks [Profile]
Ashish Grover – VP – eCommerce, Falabella S.A, & Head of Technology, Falabella India [Profile]
Avinash Raghavendra – Executive Vice President & Head – Information Technology, Axis Bank [Profile]
Anil Kumble – Chairman, ICC Cricket Committee & Former Indian Cricketer [Needs no introduction 🙂]
Each of these thought leaders shared their their expertise & experiences on stage and it was an immense learning opportunity to all of us who were the ‘selected few’ to be invited for the event.
There were close to 100+ C-level customers of ThoughtWorks, prospects and analysts who shared exceptional feedback about the content, sessions, experience zone, and interactions with their leaders.
ThoughtWorks Live 2019 – Birds eye view of the event
The event started with keynote sessions by ThoughtWorks practitioners [Nag, Gunjan, and Gary], followed by a fireside chat [Avinash Raghavendra] and lightning talks by some of the eminent practitioners from the tech industry [Lathika Pai, Vivek Raghavan, Ashish Grover], followed by a panel on data moderated by Jaspreet Bindra and the last session was with Anil Kumble [Former Indian Cricketer in conversation with Smitha].
As the core focus was on Digital Transformation, there was extensive usage of the keywords in all the talks!
ThoughtWorks Live 2019 – Event Digest
The event was kicks-started with opening remarks from ThoughtWorkers – Gunjan Shukla, Market Partner – South East Asia, ThoughtWorks India, and Nagarjun Kandukuru, Business Principal – Artificial Intelligence.
Opening Remarks – ‘Digital an unkept Promise’
Below are some of the key takeaways from the insightful talk by the ThoughtWorkers who spoke about the prominence of Digital Transformation and why just building a mobile app cannot be termed as Digital Transformation.
Often businesses forget that ‘Digital’ and ‘Transformation’ are two separate words. Business leaders need to understand that ‘digitization’ is different from ‘digital transformation’. For instance, simply building a mobile app cannot count as a strategy anymore. You have to rethink how you manage demand, add value throughout the delivery cycle, and handle procurement or hiring. As a result, digital transformation is indistinguishable from business transformation.
Operating models aren’t keeping up with the demands of digital transformation. Legacy processes are deterring businesses from realizing the full potential of transformation. The key to effective transformation lies in shifting emphasis from profit/ROI maximization to client experience optimization, while putting power back in the hands of those who are creating solutions for your clients.
There are gaps between strategy and execution because ‘innovation’ and ‘scalability’ aren’t doing the Tango. Building teams that are capable of dealing with unpredictability, and driving inclusion [and not just diversity] can help address these gaps, because a good idea can come from anywhere.
Digital Transformation isn’t about becoming a faster caterpillar, rather the aim is to morph into a beautiful butterfly.
Do have a look at the insightful talk on ‘Digital an unkept Promise’ below:
The presentation on ‘Digital an unkept Promise’ is availablehere.
Keynote – Digital Fluency : ‘Connecting the Dots of Digital Transformation’
The next session was the keynote by Gary O’Brien, Principal Consultant & Organizational Designer, ThoughtWorks. His talk revolved around catering to the needs of the digital era and how to serve the modern digital businesses that are outcome-driven rather than output-driven.
The Digital Era is marked by three major shifts – heightened client expectations, speed and tech-driven value delivery.
Increasing client expectations requires businesses to develop ‘client obsession’ – that means aligning all practices and processes to create more value for your clients. Value is different from benefits, and it does not inherently exist in any business. You need to create value for your clients, and find ways to do so quickly, consistently and continuously.
Modern Digital Businesses are those that are outcome-driven rather than output-driven.One way to achieve outcome-orientation is to define your desired business outcomes first, then work backwards to identify measures of success, and design work to meet those measures.
It’s also critical to build a Test & Learn Culture that’s guided by capabilities, scalability and profitability. You can leverage knowledge to understand what ‘value’ means to your clients and use insights from data in a strategic manner to tell if your clients are responding to shifts in your offerings.
We’ve identified the five building blocks of a Modern Digital Business and our Digital Fluency Model was born out of the realization that not all businesses need to focus on all these blocks in equal measure. Your Digital Fluency is therefore aspirational – it’s where you are versus where you want to be; also, achieving this fluency is a non-linear process – you need to understand how investing in these blocks can maximize your client’s experience. Your fluency pattern is therefore your unique digital signature.
The Digital Fluency Model is our response to how digital transformation is being handled and spoken about in the market.
To summarize, Digital Fluency isn’t a race, rather its journey unique to every business.
Do have a look at the insightful talk on ‘Connecting the Dots of Digital Transformation’ below:
The presentation on ‘Digital Fluency – Connecting the Dots of Digital Transformation’ is availablehere.
Lightning Talk – India Stack : Driving Transformation Through Digital Public Goods
The session by Dr. Vivek Raghavan was by far one of the best sessions where he spoke about the various aspects of the India Stack, financial inclusion, and UIDAI. Below are some of the key takeaways from his talk:
Moves in support of financial inclusion in India have seen acceleration due to increased political will, a proactive central bank, and ‘India Stack’, which refers to a set of technologies that address the three layers of financial inclusions – Identity, Payments and Data Empowerment.
These technologies and the supporting infrastructure were all built over time – a decade to be precise [2009 to 2019]. A verifiable unique identity was fundamental to enabling financial inclusion therefore it had to be backed bio-metrics, while also being simple. Aadhar aimed to give every Indian that unique identity using basic data – name, date of birth, gender, and phone/email.
While we have been successful in addressing Identity and Payments, data empowerment is still a challenge – users currently don’t have access to their own data. Account aggregators could restore the balance in the system by determining who stands to benefit from all this data. We are trying to drive the shift from using data to sell to the consumer to using data to empower the consumer.
The India StackHow UPI Works
Every Indian is interested to know about Aadhar and how it has helped drive financial inclusion in India. This talk appeals to each one of us and should not be missed!
The presentation on ‘India Stack – Driving Transformation Through Digital Public Goods’ is availablehere.
Lightning Talk – Driving Digital Transformation by Leveraging Startup Innovations
Lathika Pai, Country Head, Microsoft for Startups, MENA & SAARC spoke about her journey as an entrepreneur, digital transformation, and Microsoft for Startups. Her talk will definitely appeal to anyone who has an inclination towards start-ups or who is interested in the overall eco-system.
Below are some of the key takeaways from Lathika Pai’s talk at ThoughtWorks Live 2019:
It is not about what technology can do, but what you can do with technology.
Disruption has become the norm across industries.
Two important constituents of Digital Transformation are empowering employees and engaging with clients.
The Indian Startup Ecosystem is vibrant, with 27 Unicorns in under 7 years. We have $51 billion in funding across 2773 funded startups.
Watch her entire session below:
The presentation on ‘Driving Digital Transformation by Leveraging Start-Up Innovations’ is availablehere.
Lightning Talk – Digital, The Great Leveller
Ashish Grover, VP – eCommerce, Falabella S.A and Head – Technology, Falabella India spoke about how going digital has created transparency in their business units, and enabled collaboration between geographically distributed teams.
Below are some of the key takeaways from the talk by Ashish Grover:
Falabella, a 130-year-old legacy integrated business with operations in retail, financial services marketplace, and real estate has been on a mission to optimize instant engagement at speed and scale.
Thanks to digital, geography is no longer a barrier, processes are more streamlined, speed is easier to achieve, and so is scale.
Through their transformation journey they have learned that empowering expertise is the answer to business woes. They look at it through the lenses of meritocracy, diversity, product thinking, aspiration and purpose. They’ve also paid attention to building feedback loops, simplifying processes, creating transparency and winning the support of leadership.
You can watch his entire session below:
The presentation on ‘Digital, the Great Leveller’ is availablehere.
Celebrity Chat
This was the moment that many of us in the crowd were waiting for! Being a die-hard cricketer myself, I have always admired Kumble’s bowling skills, especially the flipper. I have always admired him as a great cricketer and a coach that transformed the Indian cricket team.
Anil Kumble – Former Indian Cricketer spoke with Smitha Hemmigae, Head of Marketing – ThoughtWorks India about his cricketing and coaching journey and how digital technology can be leveraged more to improve the game.
Below are some of the key takeaways from Jumbo’s session:
Anil Kumble has seen multiple formats emerge and grow during his playing career and has excelled in all three cricketing formats – Tests, ODIs and T20. This session looked at Anil’s life and experiences through a digital lens.
When questioned about the rapid pace of change, in both cricket and business, Anil Kumble said tracking change is always overwhelming. Instead, simplifying things to look at constants helps him stay focussed – a great piece of advice for business leaders too.
In the context of his legendary performance in the India v/s Pakistan test match where he scored 10 wickets, he spoke about how one great performance can lead to heightened expectations. “You are only as good as your last game“, he said – perhaps another word of advice for business leaders. Much like cricket, business too demands consistency.
Anyone who has admired Anil Kumble’s bowling skills would definitely enjoy the session as he draws similarities between the game of cricket and business in this insightful session. A must watch…
Other than these sessions, there was a panel discussion on “The importance of Data” titled Data is not the new Oil. It is even more Powerful! The participants in the panel discussion were Hemant Misra, Head of Applied Research, Swiggy; N.S. Nappinai, Cyber laws Expert; Govind Shivkumar, Principal – Investments, Omidyar Network; Jaspreet Bindra, Digital Advisor & Blockchain Expert; Sudhir Tiwari, MD, ThoughtWorks India.
There was also an interesting Fireside Chat on the topic How to Accelerate Digital Fluency in Banking. Avinash Raghavendra, EVP & Head – IT, Axis Bank in conversation with Sandeep Reddy, Head of Financial Services Practice, ThoughtWorks India.
During the social gathering 13 distinguished analysts from Gartner, Forrester, Everest Research, ISG, Avasant, and HFS Research shared positive views on how ThoughtWorks Live is different from events by other service providers.
On the social media engagement front, the event received significant traction through the evening and was trending #1 in Bangalore and #15 in India. You can find the tweets on ThoughtWorks Live 2019 here.
ThoughtWorks Live 2019 – ‘Accelerate Your Digital Fluency’
Though we are late in writing about ThoughtWorks Live 2019, the learnings of the sessions will be applicable for many more years to come! So go ahead, and gain wonderful insights from the talks presented by the thought leaders present at ThoughtWorks Live 2019.
