Creating Smarter Enterprises through Digital Transformation By Mandar Marulkar, Chief Information Officer at KPIT Technologies

Creating Smarter Enterprises through Digital Transformation

Mandar Marulkar, Chief Information Officer at KPIT Technologies | Monday, 02 May 2016, 05:09 IST

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The internet has not only opened up a whole new world for people and businesses everywhere, if it were a country, its population would be more than double that of India. A recent United Nations report states that around 3.2 billion people are online, comprising 43.4 percent of the world’s population. Out of this, around two billion people have active social media accounts. People across countries are connected to each other; discussing and debating current topics, trends and ideas.

Sharing opinions, thoughts and constantly being in touch on a common platform brings about a culture of community amongst online users. Companies have started embracing social media tools to leverage this community culture to enhance business processes. 

Using cloud and mobility platforms for collaboration of internal and external stakeholders

Statistics from India’s recent Social Media Week states that the average Indian spends around 2.5 hours a day on social media. Taking a cue from this, organizations can leverage this behavior and bring together individual employees on a common platform, with the aim of effective and efficient collaboration. While telephone interactions pose the challenge of different time zones, emails do not guarantee instant discussions. Additionally, the latter does not provide scope for exhibiting reactions. It is therefore necessary to build an infrastructure that allows employees to connect on a real time basis, with conversations that lead to immediate action.

Unified communications platforms are being utilized by many companies with a global workforce. Essentially, this means that enterprises integrate various communication tools under one medium, including- email interface, instant messaging, and IP calls and video calls. Such a platform also enables sharing of files, documents and presentations.Moreover, employees can even access this through any handheld device; not restricting them to desktops and laptops. The advantage of this flexibility is that companies can include larger number of employees in networking and employees get the added advantage of mobility.

Leveraging enterprise social platforms for innovation and networking

An efficient cloud and mobility infrastructure enables employees to have timely access to information, meaningful discussions and subject matter experts. This in turn has a positive impact on their productivity, resulting in business growth. Such systems of social networking within the organization bring about proactive engagement. It enables the management to understand interests of employees, making it easy to assign right tasks to the right people. Interactive platforms like these make solving customer problems faster by utilizing the crowd sourcing approach. It also streamlines processes like appraisals, reward and recognition systems, reaching out to help desks of various departments such as HR, IT, Applications, etc.

Winning an edge over competitors through digital transformation

Having majority of information, interactions and processes on a cloud platform enables organizations to collate and analyze behavioral data. Companies can get meaningful insights on how employee sentiments are at different times, how they help each other out etc. Enterprises can also extend digital transformation to their partners and customers. This would also include active participation of customers in product development. The platform will be such that they can share their suggestions and opinions as and when the work takes place. This would open up a whole new arena of dialogue and collaboration, ultimately adding value to the end customer.

Along with the cloud comes a pool of data, in turn bringing about security concerns

Moving data and applications onto the cloud understandably brings about security concerns. Organizations should therefore adopt foolproof cloud computing strategies. Apart from a private cloud, companies should also embrace the hybrid cloud to avoid storing all their data in one place. With private cloud, public cloud and dedicated servers working together, hybrid cloud solutions reduce technical hurdles, maximize benefits of every element and are cost effective.

Security also depends on the devices that people are consuming information from. If data is consumed on hand held devices, then we should use tailored tools to integrate the enterprise mobility space. Through this we can control and keep track of the corporate information which is being consumed. Infrastructure should be such that when the data is restricted within the cloud; it does not get stored in the device consuming the information. Files that have been downloaded should get deleted after a predefined timeframe, thereby keeping information safe and protected.

Global companies need an integrated approach- Cloud is the way to go

No matter what the business, industry or sector, global as well as small enterprises should take the cloud way and integrate with internal and external partners. Effective communication is crucial for carrying out business successfully. Companies should therefore make sure that easy accessibility to information and people is present at every level. Organizations opting for digitization will surely witness reduction in complexities, increase in productivity and innovation, resulting in measurable business growth.

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