Digital Disruption is for real, and is here to stay: Cybage CEO

Digital transformation initiatives are those that leverage modern digital technologies to fundamentally transform the way an organization runs its business and operates through different business processes. There is a lot of talk about consulting engagements that an organization can get to jump start its digital transformation initiatives and harvest the benefits from improvised customer centric business processes over cutting-edge digital technologies. However, what is uniquely interesting is to see as to which program will eventually deliver the throughput as organizations invest in these transformation initiatives.

In conversation with Dataquest, Arun Nathani, CEO & MD Cybage, shares how Cybage presents a distinguished platform driven approach to embrace digital transformation tangibly.

Do you believe Digital Disruption is real
Absolutely! Digital Disruption is for real, and is for here to stay. Being an outside-in force driven by market and new customer behavior trends, there is no denying to the fact that we see disruption all around us. Whichever market segment we look at, all have gone through many changes. The advent and rapid acceptance of smartphones and social media has brought big disruptive changes. It is important to note that change was always there, but that the difference we see today is the pace of change. The good news, however, is that CEOs of technology organizations today see this disruption coming and are looking to add incremental value to their customers thereby leveraging the power of digital.

What, in your opinion, are the primary facets of Digital Transformation?
There are two important aspects of digital transformation – Enhancing Customer Experience and Improving Operational Efficiency.

Customer Experience and Operational Excellence are tightly integrated to each other and together complete the digital value-add loop. Today, digital technologies have enabled organizations to understand their customers much better than before because of access to a variety of data points. However, organizations in this age need to be more inwardly focused so as to consume and analyze these data points on customer experience. That requires organizations to be operationally efficient. New age digital solutions, such as Cybage’s ExcelShore, provide an effective platform to get operationally efficient and deliver an improvised customer experience as well. Truly, digital strategy is all about achieving that fine balance between the two to realize and deliver value.

And how does it impact in terms of technology areas?
While organizations focus on Customer Experience, Mobility has been a key technology component. However, today Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence complement mobility as some key areas of focus. In fact we are talking about the tip of iceberg as far as Advanced Analytics (Predictive / Prescriptive) is concerned.

You raised a good point and that points me to another question. We keep hearing about terms such as Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Predictive analytics, Cognitive computing etc. But are the organizations really gaining out of these or merely spending money?
Now this is an interesting phenomenon. On the one side, you have service providers who are flooding the market with new concepts and theoretical models and on the other side you have customers who find it hard to extract real value out of it. There is indeed a clear need for platforms that deliver a tangible value out of digital investments. Cybage has been one of the early movers in not only coming up with a tangible ready-to-use platform for digital transformation in the tech industry, but also by having been a consumer to this platform. Cybage is much ahead of the curve because we are using Advanced Analytics & Machine learning through our ExcelShore platform as our Non-linear growth engine.

That’s interesting; can you please elaborate on that?
Cybage uses ExcelShore as a platform to provide value to its customers. If you look at the current BI tools, they offer reports and dashboards and expect users to take smart decisions out of it. However, ExcelShore goes beyond that. We designed ExcelShore to deliver actionable insights to all the internal users. The word actionable is very important here. The action is not user dependent, and at the same time it uses the best Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Algorithms to provide optimized value to the customer.

This is slightly different from the conventional digital transformation initiatives that we see…
One aspect that I mentioned earlier was a focus on operational efficiency as an integral part of the digital transformation initiative. And that is where the industry may have perhaps only scratched the surface. As I see it, digital transformation goes beyond digitization and modernizing the interfaces. One way an organization can assess the impact of digital transformation is through improved bottom lines. ExcelShore’s framework on decision making and optimization has been perfected over time through closed feedback loops and algorithms that learn from it. I strongly believe that it is this value proposition that has a direct impact on digital transformation.