Dataquest Technology Innovation Summit Celebrates NextGen Digital Leaders

Every enterprise in order to survive and thrive in the digital economy needs to have a well-meshed emerging tech (New Age)strategy. They need to seamlessly integrate the new with the old, and in some cases completely overhaul legacy IT. Emerging tech is the key spoke in the digital hub. The CIO has to ensure that emerging tech initiatives have a clear business case – in terms of operational efficiency and/or new revenue opportunities. This may include considering how connected products can be monetized and how the value of data can be leveraged. More than having a long-term roadmap, experts say that it is more beneficial to take an agile approach, which facilitates rapid cycles of experimentation and evaluation.

This is what Dataquest Technology Innovation Summit & Awards held recently in Mumbai decoded. The conference on the theme: Adoption of New IT for the New Normal, was curated with the aim to unravel the adoption of emerging tech dynamics both from the supply and demand side of things.

The conference also celebrated leading CIO, CDO's and business heads who have inked a successful emerging tech strategy and applied to their respective business domains. While NextGen Digital leaders are all about how CIOs/CDOs have applied emerging tech into their IT organization. The Change Agents award is all about how tech business heads have  used emerging tech to change their business delivery and upped the service efficiencies. The awards were given by distinguished academician  Dr. D B Phatak, Professor,  CSE, IIT Bombay, who was also the Guest of Honour for the event.

SETTING THE TONE

In his inaugural address the CDO of Kotak Mahindra Bank, Deepak Sharma, talked about how emerging technologies like AI to IoT has disrupted the enterprise landscape and talked about how Kotak Mahindra has taken an early lead in adoption of emerging tech for its own use. " We have taken a multi-pronged approach to technology adoption and out strategy is based on three horizons. While horizon one is all about focusing on the core, horizon two is all about inducing newer tech. Horizon three is all about re-inventing and reimagining for the future, " observed Sharma.

In his keynote address, Arun Karna, MD, AT&T shared his insights on how digital is driving an intelligent networks and talked about how everything is defined by software and how companies are taking on to emerging technologies to deliver superior services to the customers.

In his address, Venugopal N, Director, Security Engineering, Check Point, dwelled on the topic, "Connected Everything". In which he shared interesting insights on how security has become paramount and how hackers are coming out with more innovative ways and hacking on to connected devices. he also talked about how Check Point takes a lead in addressing these security concerns.

THE PANELS UP CLOSE
The conference had 4 focussed sessions. Session one had leading speakers like Rajesh Pandita, CIO of ThyssenKrupp India, Sunil Makkena, CIO, Cyient and Prasanna Lohar, CIO, DCB Bank. The crux of their talks revolved around how adopting progressive technologies like IOT, Analytics ML and RPA are altering IT organizations and they suggested key best practices. What emerged out of their sessions was that a  judicious blend of Analytics, IOT, RPA et al  can one create a progressive emerging tech ecosystem. For instance, IoT is being referred to as the next big wave after internet and mobile that will affect our day to day lives. The way we do business contemporarily will have been impacted hugely on the evolution of IoT in the times to come. The communication of things is changing drastically and is evolving to a common standard globally on a phenomenal scale. Experts say that a lot of technology companies, product companies, services companies, and consulting companies are investing their money in adopting new Open and Global standards for the evolution of IoT which is getting immensely popular and is one of the key ingredients in driving IOT led adoption.

In Session two, AI took the centerstage. The speakers took a deep dive on Navigating the AI Maze and why it is the key-spoke in the tech hub. Sunil Rawlani from MetamorphosYs, in his presentation took a philosophical approach and linked how AI from science is manifesting itself into interesting use cases. Meanwhile, Rajnish Khare, CIO at HDFC Bank talked about how AI has impacted his bank in multiple ways, and how it has led to understanding the customer better.

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, Chief Consultant, at AgileITVantages, took a drilled down approach to AI and walked through how enterprises can embark on a successful AI roadmap and succeed in it. Meanwhile, Suresh Iyer, CIO, Blue Star shared his insights on how better to Align AI with business goals and mesh it for greater accuracy.

The third session is all about Infrastructure for Digital in which speakers talked about hyper-converged infra and how new age datacenter will alter the enterprise computing dynamics. The final session took a deep dive on the cloud and how IT consumption patterns have changed over the years.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

At the end of the day, what transpired out of the conference was that many of the organizations are creating cross-functional and multi-disciplinary groups focused on rapidly developing and evaluating prototype products. The main focus of CIOs would be on business outcomes. CIOs would be the crucial catalyst for organizations for capturing and harnessing the potential of emerging tech. They should ideally have the following priorities:
• Identify business outcomes and subsequent ROIs
• Evaluate & expand employee skills based on new technologies
• Regular evaluation of security and data privacy related issues
• Align skill sets with organizational objectives

Clearly, adopting emerging tech is the next step in IT evolution. It brings people, machines, data, and organizations together in a large ecosystem. CIOs need to play a significant role in enabling emerging tech in their organization with advanced support, equipment, infrastructure and skill sets. Emerging tech is reshaping enterprise IT, requiring CIOs to be more visionary, more collaborative and more business-minded.

The key sponsors for this event were Check Point Software, AT&T and Finesse.