Approach to Digitalisation – The tip or the iceberg ?
Saturday, July 18, 2015
We all know
the story of Titanic, the famous ship which sank because it hit a giant iceberg.
The tip of the iceberg could be as small as 1m above the sea level while the
rest of the iceberg could be hundred times longer and wider and be hidden below
the sea level. A ship would be grossly mistaken in its approach to the iceberg
if it judges it only by the tip visible to it and navigates itself based only
on what is visible to the naked eye.
What has that got to do with Digitalisation,
the latest trend in enterprise IT globally?
Digitalisation
is a huge opportunity for enterprises today. It is opening up newer markets,
making friends out of competition and enemies out of erstwhile allies. It is
many things to many people. For some it is simply a new name for creating
mobile App for a function which normally you did on a desktop or a laptop. For
most of the business and IT decision makers it conjures a grand vision of a
paperless enterprise which has been awaited for many years now. It is a
different matter that execution of that vision into realities needs us to
straddle many different problems at multiple levels, both with external world
and internal world of an enterprise. Successful cloud technologies across all
levels, reducing costs of bandwidth and mobility, Advances in Big Data
Analytics and IoT (Internet of Things) and proliferation of open API based
business models lead us to believe that the completely connected and
digitalized world is no longer a dream but a reality already facing us.
It is easier
said than done though.
Consumerisation
of enterprise IT and rapid advances in Mobility and internet penetration has
ensured that users are enjoying their place at the center which they have long
been deprived of. The advances in 60s and 70s and 80s were about large scale
processing, focus on enterprise systems and ability to manage and process
complex systems.
Over the
last decade, user experience and focus on the consumer has gained ground and rightfully
so. The business processes and technology advances are aligning themselves to
suit the user experience as against the earlier trend of having the user adopt
to the technologies and business processes which was the norm in 70s, 80s, and
90s.
However
large global enterprises have to deal with a complex stack of business
processes, Applications and Infrastructure built over a period of time to
deliver a seemingly simple user experience. Simple every day transactions in
every business, like withdrawing money from a bank or making an online banking
transaction involve multiple layers of this stack.
Large scale
Digital Transformations have to go way beyond making changes at the design
level or App level of how users navigate the digital interface which could be
the customer facing online platform or the intranet portals used by the
employees.
It is the
norm now to develop a mobile App for every need and redesign the web interfaces
to make them user friendly. That, however,
is just the tip of the iceberg.
If we want
to unleash the true potential of digital transformation and harness the power
of all technologies, enterprises need to look at the entire stack. This means
redesigning and simplifying the business process to suit the users and the new
realities, transforming the Applications landscape, rationalizing them and then
taking advantage of the agile and robust infrastructure technologies available
today. It also means using latest analytics and ITFM models to discover the
true per unit cost of a transaction is pre and post transformation scenarios
and accurately modelling the business benefits of digitalization for the enterprise.
It means using current models of cloud technologies when applicable and not
having to work with legacy systems. It means leveraging the power of APIs to
extend connectivity to multiple stakeholders outside your closed network.
One of the
examples of how the underlying stack impacts this is implementation of Digitisation in some of large government programmes. An
ambitious digitization programme in a government ministry which deals with
clearances of several departments never delivered the results because the
underlying process of approvals was so complex that it took several months for
approval of a license. A digitilisation of the process without simplification
of the process failed to deliver successful results.
In another
example at a Bank, ambitious goals were set to reduce the time taken for an
online customer facing transaction to reduce it from 2 days to a few hours over
a few clicks. However the programme could not deliver as the necessary
investments required in underlying Application architecture and infrastructure
were not approved.
There are of
course many more examples of successful transformations where the architecture
teams have taken pains to detail out the dependencies across the entire stack,
and business has made the necessary investments in transforming the underlying
stack for the multi fold gains expected to materialize. That is the right thing
to do but it takes time and patience and the rewards are worth the effort.
A rush to
focus on the tip while ignoring the huge mass of ice underlying the sea can
expose you to unknown risks, just like Titanic!
posted by Anirudh Joshi @ 9:32 AM,
4 Comments:
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At July 20, 2015 at 2:30 AM,
Kanish said...
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well written !
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At August 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM,
Unknown said...
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Very good article on digitization and success of digitization scenarios !
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At September 7, 2015 at 2:51 AM,
Unknown said...
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Nice post, we have to also recognize that now the world is very different and icebergs (threats and disruptions) sometimes arent even visible at all. The speed of the iceberg approaching the ship wasnt an issue in 1912 but in the 21st century that is often the reality. Hence its important to stay close to the market, identify the trends and needs early, then as your post explains superbly, build the solution and drive organization adoption rapidly.
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At November 23, 2015 at 5:52 AM,
Jeny Leon said...
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Good read.
Digitalization is fundamentally challenging the way we live.
Jeny J Leon
