Time for firms to partner with digital start-ups

Quick implementation, integration of digital platforms will enable partners to interact seamlessly

Digital transformation for many companies in India and also many sectors and companies worldwide has often stopped short of being truly transformational. This needs to change if Indian firms have to be truly globally competitive and even if they have to hold appeal for digital natives, who are increasingly replacing digital immigrants as the key customers and employees of all business corporations. Quick implementation and integration of digital platforms, which enable multiple partners to interact seamlessly, is the way to get this done.
 
McKinsey & Co, in a warning bell sounded for the information technology services industry a few years ago, had predicted that digital attackers, focused on digital solutions, would challenge long-held dogmas and beliefs about what services customers and employees would want and how they would want their touch points with the firm to look like. In many client situations, particularly financial services and retail and increasingly manufacturing and health care, the role of start-up “attacker” solutions is increasing, skillfully integrated into the process fabric of the organisation by digital consulting firms that understand both the domain and the digital opportunity.
 
A couple of examples of such attackers will make the opportunity clear. One major manufacturing company in Western India has already implemented two start-up solutions, Cloud IOT to transform information gathered from devices, sensors and information systems from the shop floor and even after the capital equipment is installed at the customer site; and Cloud Beat, which tracks the movement of the product through the demand chain of distributors and dealers through to the end customer. These solutions are putting predictive power in the hands of field service engineers and product marketers and enabling new opportunity share to be maximised for the company and its products.
 
In the HR space, for organisations across sectors like manufacturing, banking, insurance , hospitality and IT services, digital start-ups are challenging larger HR product suites by relegating them to “Systems of Record” status while creating new platforms that enable systems of insight and engagement to be created and deployed. Skills Alpha, one of the newest start-ups from the 5F World stable of digital solutions, has found the perfect solution to the problem of motivating millions of millennials, who are stuck in seemingly “dead-end” jobs, through extensive use of artificial intelligence, cognitive and adaptive learning methodologies. Skills Alpha is a platform that uses high touch engagement tools to provide a truly adaptive learning environment for the young learner, who is engaged by a “bot” from the minute she gets on to the platform, which enables her to assess her own aspirations and goals, look at alternative learning and career paths and get thoroughly engaged on a journey of content discovery, opportunity exploration and learning throughout her tenure in the organisation.
 
A sound argument exists for a new generation of start-ups focused on business-to-business (B2B) solutions like Cloud Beat and Cloud IOT or, in the case of Skills Alpha, on B2Bs to consumer ideas. Across a variety of horizontal functions like learning, sales productivity improvement, financial skills and vertical domain areas like loan management, actuarial services and digital community development and deployment in organisations, the discussion has moved from custom-built or packages software to multi-tenant platforms and micro-services that can be incorporated in the business and technology architecture of future organisations.  Starts-ups powered by mastery of new technologies and research into trends in key business and industry sectors are mastering the new space of digital platform engineering, forcing traditional vendors to become more ambidextrous and look for new innovative platform solutions to take to market while continuing to incrementally change internal and external business processes and systems in client organisations.
 
On the main theme of digital transformation itself, it is time for businesses and CXOs to look beyond anecdotal evidence of social media, mobile apps and digital marketing success stories reported by their teams and demand true transformation. For a couple of years, the debate over cyber-security of applications, infrastructure and data moving from corporate premises to the cloud had obfuscated the real cost and flexibility advantages of cloud transitions. And digital readiness was often equated to the number and velocity of mobile apps the corporate IT teams were able to buy and build to enable the company to appear digital in its processes and services. This has to change through completely recrafting the digital journeys of customers, supply and demand chain partners and employees, and will need, in large measure, deliberate investments in process re-engineering, culture and mind-shift changes to support the array of digital technologies that are available for deployment.
 
This author’s doctoral work, “Knowledge Management Maturity process in organisations could form an excellent framework for digital transformation as well.  While we can look at more details in subsequent columns, the premise is that organisations will move from anecdotal digital success through a stage of developing a serious understanding of stakeholder behaviour and expectations and finally digital platforms that will address stated and implicit needs for engagement of all stakeholders. Knowledge management itself will happen when analytics solutions are able to provide predictive and prescriptive solutions for these needs. In many corporations, today, the digital imperative and the opportunities to partner extensively and thoughtfully with start-ups to deliver the transformation have become topics for boardroom discussion — it’s about time that happened everywhere.

The author is chairman of 5F World and NASSCOM Foundation