Beyond SMAC – Digital twister of disruption!!

Have your seen the 1996 movie Twister, based on tornadoes disrupting the neighborhoods? A group of people were shown trying to perfect the devices called Dorothy which has hundreds of sensors to be released in the center of twister so proper data can be collected to create a more advanced warning system and save people.

Today if we apply the same analogy – digital is disrupting every business, if you stand still and don’t adapt you will become digital dinosaur. Everyone wants to get that advance warning of what is coming ahead.

Even if your business is doing strong right now, you will never know who will disrupt you tomorrow.

We have seen these disruption waves and innovations in technologies – mainframe era, mini computers era, personal computers & client-server era and internet era. Then came the 5^th wave of SMAC era comprising Social, 

Mobile, Analytics and Cloud technologies.

Gone are the days when we used to wait for vacations to meet our families and friends by travelling to native place or abroad. Today all of us are interacting with each other on social media rather than in person on Facebook, Whastapp, Instagram, Snapchat and so on.

Mobile enablement has helped us anytime, anywhere, any device interaction with consumers. We stare at smarphone screen more than 200 times a day.

Analytics came in to power the hyper-personalization in each interaction and send relevant offers, communications to customers. The descriptive analytics gave the power to know what is happening to the business right now, while predictive analytics gave the insight of what may happen. Going further prescriptive analytics gave the foresight of what actions to be taken to make things happens.

Cloud gave organizations the ability to quickly scale up at lower cost as the computing requirements grow with secure private clouds.

Today we are in the 6^th wave of disruption beyond SMAC era - into Digital Transformation, bringing Big Data, Internet of things, APIs, Microservices, Robotics, 3d printing, augmented reality/virtual reality, wearables, drones, beacons and blockchain.

Big Data allows to store all the tons of data generated in the universe to be used further for competitive edge.

Internet of Things allows machines, computers, smart devices communicate with each other and help us carry out various tasks remotely.

APIs are getting lot of attention as they are easy, lightweight, can be plugged into virtually any system and highly customizable to ensure data flows between disparate systems.

Microservices are independently developed & deployable, small, modular services. 

Robotics is bringing the wave of intelligent automation with help of cognitive computing.

3D printing or additive manufacturing is taking the several industries like medical, military, engineering & manufacturing by storm.

Augmented reality / virtual reality is changing the travel, real estate and education.

Wearables such as smart watches, health trackers, Google Glass can help real time updates,  ensure better health & enable hands-free process optimization in areas like item picking in a warehouse.

Drones have come out of military zone and available for common use. Amazon, Dominos are using it for delivery while Insurance & Agriculture are using it for aerial surveys.

Beacons are revolutionizing the customer experience with in-store analytics, proximity marketing, indoor navigation and contact less payments.

The new kid on the block is blockchain where finance industry is all set to take advantage of this technology.

As products and services are getting more digitized, traditional business processes, business models and even business are getting disrupted.

The only way to survive this twister is to get closer to your customers by offering a radically different way of doing business that’s faster, simpler and cheaper.

Do you need a Chief Digital Officer?

Today introducing basic digital capabilities and creating some pilots for customer interaction are days of the past. The challenges of the new digital age make the jumping on Digital Transformation inevitable and subsequently the need of executive like Chief Digital Officer is a no-brainer.

The recent times have seen the rise of the Chief Digital Officer, who sits next to CEO and is seen as instrumental to the future of the organization.

Traditionally, for the past several years digital was looked up as ownership of the marketing function, responsible for driving the organization’s online presence and connecting with customers, but now it is every department that has to contribute to digital enablement of customer journeys.

The spike in demand for Chief Digital Officers has been felt globally to drive digital across the organization.

Some of the CDO responsibilities are as below but not limited to:

• Define the digital strategy
• Map the digital capabilities to business strategy
• Leads digital transformation and customer centricity
• Providing detailed analysis of industry trends and developments in technology and customer behavior, both inside and outside the business sector
• Deliver analytics across customer touch points to enable better business decisions and enhance the customer experience  
• Use of all the digital transformation technologies like Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Internet of Things, API, UX etc.
• Responsible for the strategy for digital consumers, identify and implement relevant Omni-channel solutions 
• Embark on use of latest trends of Robotics, Drones, Artificial Intelligence, Beacons or NFC based payments, Blockchain etc

As digital is becoming a norm, every CXO will have to integrate their business and benefit from the CDO’s efforts.

Over the next decade, the Chief Digital Officer will be very exciting and strategic role for going near to customers.

Some of the well-known brand’s CDOs who have steered their companies on digital are:

•  Adam Brotman of Starbucks
• Ganesh Bell of GE
• Daniel Heaf of Burberry
• Atif Rafiq of McDonald's
• Lubomira Rochet of L’Oreal

The true measure of a CDO’s success is when the role becomes redundant, as a high-functioning digital company does not need a CDO.

Digital Transformation in Banking - my POV

The digital banking landscape has never been more dynamic than it is today. 

The number of people going into branches to do their banking is falling dramatically. Customers are changing the way they bank, which requires banks to be flexible and agile.

A lot has changed about today’s customers. In this digitally connected world, customers search, learn, communicate and shop with technology. Easy access to abundant information, web connectivity & smart phones which are key characteristics of the digital age, may have impact on customer loyalty. 

On top of that new competitors & new technologies are impacting the banking industry faster and to a more significant degree than ever experienced.

With rising pressure from agile digital competitors, whether fintech startups

like Sofi, Billguard, Wealthfront and Moven, or larger entrants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, every financial services organization must think like a tech company.

Today’s banks are facing various head winds that require shift to digital:

• Channel overload – mobile, online, branch, ATM
• Growth required – competition from non traditional players
• Budgets are allocated to risk and compliance

Banks are introducing digital financial advisers called Robo Advisers, which helps customers to make more informed savings and investment choices.

Recent analysis shows that over the next five years, more than two-thirds of banking customers are likely to be “self-directed” and highly adapted to the online world.

Consumers already take great advantage of digital technologies in other industries like booking flights and holidays, buying books and music, and increasingly shopping for groceries and other goods via digital channels.

Banks are using fintech companies to co-develop new services that meet their business needs in areas such as money management, payments, lending and mobile on-boarding.

There are several challenges in digital transformation:

• Data quality as it is coming from disparate sources
• explosion of Big data sources like social, audio, video, beacons data
• Lack of data integration across various lines of business
• Resource shortage to develop and maintain digital solutions

Some of the trends in Digital Transformation:

•  A Blockchain based payment system
• Increased focus on data science – machine learning, Artificial Intelligence
• Lending industry consolidation

How to start this digital journey:

• Understand and assess what customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders want.
• Map the customer journey for each touch point.
• Analyze the quality of experience and identify the challenges to be resolved.
• Prioritize and deploy social, mobile, analytics, cloud, IoT as necessary.
• Test and move fast on failures to new innovations or business models

Banks must focus on humanizing the digital relationship, not digitizing the human relationship. They should use any technology or innovations which has to ultimately benefit the consumer.

Blockchain disrupting many industries !!

Until recently, Blockchain was a term only known to geeks and specialists. But in the last six months it has become a buzzword.

In very simple terms Blockchain is the act of recording events in a database. The database itself is referred to as the Blockchain. Once data is added to the Blockchain, it cannot be removed from the database or altered in any way. The Blockchain therefore contains a verifiable record of history.

What is unique is the absence of a trusted third party (a bank that we visit or to which we log in with a key, an Amazon.com, eBay or whoever you know and trust…) and the fact that the information is recorded publicly, rather than on secured servers behind firewalls. This means that transactions can be faster, cheaper and easier to access, while maintaining security.

The Blockchain enables entities to digitally transfer money and other assets directly, securely and near instantaneously.

The Blockchain reduces the settlement window from few days to maybe a few hours. All the financial industry is based on managing that window. An international transfer could take as long as five days to settle, during which the counterparty can fail or the exchange rate can change or you can have a credit risk. Lots of people, working on managing that risk which is completely reduced, or even eliminated, and all those people and technologies that manage that risk are becoming irrelevant.

Credit card network companies are using the Blockchain to enable micropayments, whose value would typically be too small to process in the traditional manner due to the fixed costs of credit card payments.

Visa, Nasdaq, Citi, Capital One, Fiserv and Orange have come together and invested in Chain.com. They will gather twice a year in a Blockchain working group to discuss their learning.

There are many other industries apart from Finance, who are trying Blockchain:

• Follow My Vote is a non-partisan organization on a mission to restore faith in the democratic process. 
• PeerTracks, aims to offer a music streaming platform that lets users listen to music and use the Blockchain to directly pay the artists with no intermediary
• Visa and DocuSign unveiled a partnership that used Blockchain to build a proof-of-concept for streamlining car leasing, and making it into a “click, sign, and drive” process

As digital innovations in technology change the way that money moves around the world, businesses need to keep a close eye on Blockchain and be prepared to adapt and transform their services accordingly.