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Fostering Agile Industry Leadership Needs a Strong Technology Backbone
Across the world, we see a wave of disruption driven by technology. This is significantly impacting not just the way organizations function but also the way that people live and work. This quantum of change that is sweeping societies is not restricted to any particular region or geography. Instead, it is being felt across geographies, economies and industries.
In many ways, this massive disruption, often dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, has levelled the playing field for organizations. As a result, once leading organizations often struggle to compete with agile newcomers that manage to transform entire industries with relatively few resources. For incumbents, this signals a need to explore how best they can rewire their organizations and transform their business models to respond to the changing environment.
The need for change isn’t just necessitated by aggressive competitors. Today’s customers too are becoming more demanding than ever, with ever-increasing expectations.
In such a scenario, the future belongs to those who are bold enough to embrace change and be innovative. The answer, of course, lies in technology adoption. Organizations today have no option but to leverage digitization wholeheartedly to survive and compete in this new reality.
Embrace robust technologies
There needs to be a sense of urgency when it comes to embracing the latest and greatest technologies, whether cloud, AI/ML to gain competitive advantage. Organizations need to first evaluate them and determine if they are a good fit and are in line with overarching organizational goals.
In our experience, we’ve found that there are far-reaching benefits that can be accrued from using the right technology to advance your business goals. For example, one of our clients, a retail enterprise was looking to expand across multiple countries around the world, for both traditional retail and e-commerce formats. We worked with them to deploy a Microsoft Azure platform solution with separate e-commerce application instances for each country for autonomous operations. The retailer was not only able to bring better integration with backend system but also achieved enhanced visibility across the enterprise. This enabled the company to scale seamlessly.
In another instance, we worked with a US-based pharmaceutical company with a presence in more than 50 countries. It operates 2,000+ websites hosted by 200+ infrastructure service providers. By investing in a unified cloud infrastructure to enhance its digital marketing, the company was able to accelerate product launches by reducing time-to-market for new websites from six weeks to one week.
Such broad, sweeping impact across the organization is absolutely critical.
Extreme automation for better utilization of human potential
Extreme automation can also help significantly amplify human potential. A large part of an organization’s activities revolve around keeping the lights on. Functions that are mundane, repetitive, or are tactical in nature should be automated so that employees can focus more on driving innovation or strategic initiatives.
Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, is a great case in point. Its objective was to improve overall IT operations efficiency. By leveraging Infosys Nia to automate repetitive business and IT processes, Pfizer was able to achieve results across various areas including compliance, application availability, ad-hoc report generation, stakeholder communication and standardized user management. Overall, Pfizer achieved a 10 percent reduction in total cost of ownership and automated 17+ business processes. In addition, it also saw a 15 percent increase in joint team productivity and 22 percent increase in productivity related to critical operations requirements.
By effectively leveraging adoption of digitization, cloud, AI/ML, and automation, companies can help significantly amplify both human and organizational potential. Having said that, technology for the sake of technology serves no purpose. Always ensuring that there is a stronger alignment between technology and business outcomes is absolutely essential.
Becoming a Live Enterprise
The environment around us is changing rapidly, be it economic, social or commerce. It is extremely important for organizations to adapt to these changes in order to survive. In order to move along with the times, it needs to be nimble in its response to the changing markets, business needs and consumer choices. In other words, an organization needs to be a Live Enterprise or a living, breathing organism that is capable of responding and adapting to the changes around it in an optimal manner in order to succeed.
How can technology help here?
Given the dramatic nature of change and complexities involved in adapting to this change, current systems are simply not equipped to handle this shift. Automation, data and algorithms and a platform-powered approach can help enterprises get deep insights, improve and hasten decision making and achieve efficiency. At Infosys, we are working closely with our clients to help them become Live Enterprises by completely reimagining the way that they function.
To sum up, a strong technology focus that is aligned to business goals is key to establishing an enduring industry leadership.
