The Need For Digitalization

Recent demonetization shook the country and many startups have lauded the move. This has led to the immediate need for digital payments and subsequently more digitalization in its relation. But this is not just bound to the demonetization periphery. The need for digitalization is today, the state of the art in business technology is moving from the pioneering efforts of e-business to a more complex theme of services digitalization. Digitalization does not center on technology, but rather on capturing value through improved productivity and performance. Digitalization is the need of the hour which will transcend companies to the future. 

Importance of Digitalization in India

The transformation of twenty-first century business is under way. At the heart of this wide-ranging transformation is the use of technology to digitize complex services. Firms are systematically creating new services by rewiring and integrating existing business processes.

The time is ripe for Indian companies to pursue digitalization whereby digitized resources, such as cloud-based software and machines equipped with digital sensors, are transformed into new sources of profitable revenue. In the nearby time, various components of the digital ecosystem in India including the digitized consumer, generation of digital data volumes, e-commerce and tech-savvy talent pools are expected to mature.

Digital India

The Digital India project aims to benefit the people in remote villages with help of IT services, therefore these firms and their employees should work for the welfare of the rural areas too. Just like the availability of amenities such as roads, schools and electricity is important to bring out drastic changes, now the information technology, optical network (and) broadband facility needs to be added in the list of fundamentals. Beyond home ground, India can be the biggest example of successful for globally. With a vast geographic spread and a huge population, anything that works in India will surely work anywhere else.

Aptly, Narendra Modi quoted, “In this digital age, we have an opportunity to transform lives of people n ways that was hard to image a couple decades ago.”

Mobile and Internet

India has around 684 million mobile users where mobile and internet technology is really catching on in the market, transforming the lives of citizens in the farthest corners of the country and creating new business models. Internet, as is obvious, is the platform that bridges the divide between rural and urban India. Indian enterprises are ready to embrace disruptive technologies to keep up with the pace of change in today's world. Also, the government's vision to establish 100 smart cities is another area of great opportunity for digitalization.

“Our India site is our largest global development centre outside the US - one out of four of our engineers is based here. I'm proud that our Smart+Connected Communities initiative was born out of our experiences in India. The India site has helped us develop disruptive business solutions, and it has created new go-to-market channels and technologies for emerging markets,” quoted John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems.

What To Digitize?

The most important question is “What to digitize?” “How do we digitize?” but “What is our focal point that ties together our ongoing process digitalization efforts?” What focal point is guiding your digitalization investments? To help companies embrace digitalization systematically, it is important to define a framework for achieving efficient as well as profitable digitalization. Here is a proposed framework from an Accenture report:

• Create awareness and ownership around digitalization: Help people throughout the organization understand what digitalization is and what advantages it offers, and foster a sense of ownership around digitalization at the highest level.                                                  
• Design a digitalization roadmap: Putting customers at the center of the roadmap, design a digital business value tree and a digital operating model mapping the technology and skills required to harness the true power of digital assets.
• Digitalize business model: Make the right choices about your customer value proposition, resources, profit formula and performance metrics and nurture the capabilities and culture needed to support your business model.

Besides, companies might need to reinvent the entire business process, including operating models, skills, organizational structures, and roles need to be redesigned to match the reinvented processes. Data models should be adjusted and rebuilt to enable better decision making, performance tracking, and customer insights. Digitalization often requires that old wisdom be combined with new skills.

Conclusion

As the business environment changes, so must its underlying processes need a change. Companies that digitize processes can improve their bottom line sales and customer-experience. The value at stake depends on the business model and starting point but can be estimated by allocating costs to end-to-end processes and benchmarking against peers.

(References: ptgmedia, Accenture.com)