Digitization in India is Impeded by the Lack of Right Infrastructure

While the penetration of digital currently is at a surface level in India, primarily due to the absence of the right infrastructure, the coming years will see stellar growth for the technology across verticals, feels Susheel John, MD, Document Imaging, AP Region, Kodak Alaris.

What potential and opportunities do you foresee for digitization in India?

The penetration of the technology is still at a very surface level in India. However, in the next five years, we see India as our biggest growth market in terms of growth rate in Asia. We have experienced astronomical growth rates in China in the last decade and we think India is ready to follow now with a stable government and more focus around digitization itself. Digitization is in fact the key priority in the eGovernance initiatives of the Government of India. As government is a big missionary in India, it is going to drive a lot of our market.

In which sectors are you currently seeing traction for digital technologies? According to you, which verticals are expected to ride the digital wave in the coming years?

Today, the major users of this technology are still the private banks and the multinational banks. Public sector banks have not started adopting the technology widely yet. A lot of the adoption is also impeded by the fact that we don’t have the right infrastructure because when you want to move images besides data then your bandwidth and other necessities are bigger. As that infrastructure gets established and as banks are mandated to reach out to rural areas, the potential will be huge.

Other non-traditional segments, for example healthcare, could be another major growth area in India for digital technologies as a lot of people take health-related services and all of these generate records. Especially with insurance being adopted today, these records need to be properly kept and exchanged with third-party companies. There are many standards that are being evolved worldwide for these types of applications and they can drive a lot of potential in India.

Ever growing eCommerce segment itself means the logistics business within India is growing. The growth in the logistics industry will also lead to the consumption of digital technologies. So I can’t think of one sector within India which won’t adopt digital.

How do you help the organizations on their digital transformation journey? What solutions do you offer on the software and hardware front?

Most of the communications methodology today is unstructured in nature. One can’t really look for specific key words to understand what is where. So our products and services include hardware, which helps us digitize documents and bring them to the digital world and be able to route them to the business world processes. We have software that helps us capture the documents, extract information from them and put it in digital processes, and at the other end or the higher end of the software, we have software platforms that not only take this information but also understand the information like a human mind. This is similar to how we understand the meaning of a communication and then we are able to make out, ‘this is a complaint,’ ‘this customer is requesting us for a change of address,’ ‘this is not a customer but a vendor who sent us an invoice for processing.’ The software understands all these different communications coming into the organization and further pushes it into business processes and creates business workflows to process those different forms of communication.

Can you give any example of your customer that has derived business value with digitization?

Let me give you an example of how the government has benefitted from our technology. For 2009-10 Census of India, the government used our technology to count the population. Typically, census is an extensive exercise in terms of scale and processes. To record the census, enumerators (who are teachers) first fill the block by every circle and then list the households within that block. Post this, they list the people that live in each household. The census also records data points, such as male or female members in every household, religion, and income levels. In fact, the last census also included information about goods in each household. Now, all this information was traditionally recorded in paper forms. What we did in the last two census was we brought back the papers to the centralized processing centers across 15 different locations in India. Here, over 500 mn papers were processed and digitized and then passed through certain specific software that helped extract information from these papers and put them into tables and databases. Thus, using digitization the government was able to bring down their spending by nearly 80% and actually finished the job five times faster.