Digital Transformation - A Complex Opportunity with Potential to Transform Businesses

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Indian enterprises are on par with their global peers in terms of digital capabilities and are catching up in areas of infrastructure and processes which will enable their digital transformation. While there is awareness on the need for digital roadmaps in these enterprises, more has to be done to bring this awareness into action. However, government-backed Digital India initiatives, such as Digilocker, eSampark, eLearning, AADHAR linking, and direct distribution system, will catalyze this transformation and improve infrastructure and solution platforms. Simultaneously, an increasing number of enterprises across the country are moving to the cloud, implementing Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, and trying to understand customers better through analytics and social media platforms. As a result, tremendous opportunities are emerging for information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITeS) providers.

Digital Maturity of Indian Enterprises versus Global Benchmarks, 2017

Frost & Sullivan recently collaborated with NASSCOM, a trade association for the Indian IT-business process management (IT-BPM) industry, to release a study: Enterprise Digital Transformation: Evaluating Indian Enterprises. Based on an indepth study of 250 firms, suppliers, and users across verticals like healthcare, retail, telecom, manufacturing, and banking/financial services/insurance (BFSI), the study analyzes digital transformation strategies of Indian enterprises and assesses value propositions.

Some key vertical insights include:

• Banks invest 30% more in application for customer services over insurance companies, and the intra- company digital attitude in banking is higher than that of insurance companies. Retail banking can lose up to 55% of their business to fintech firms if they don't up the ante in terms of investment in digital transformation.
• In manufacturing, 87% of the companies with large and discrete manufacturing units use analytics to understand the distribution, demand, and supply factors. Around 70% of the companies that are leveraging open innovations (e.g. 3D printing) are small manufacturing units with revenues less than USD 100 million.
• Indian telecos are far behind global players with respect to automation. Investment in infrastructure, cloud, and managed services would aid to bridge the gap between Indian and global players.
• Retailers are motivated to invest in IT, and an 18% increase in budgets is expected in the next year. This will create great opportunities for service providers and solutions vendors.
• Hospitals are starting to use analytics more rigorously for clinical and non-clinical data in India: 43% of hospitals feel that integration and centralization are critical to create a platform to implement analytics.

“From small/medium to large-scale and government ones, Indian enterprises are revamping their infrastructure to set a path for digital transformation,” said Haritha Ramachandran, Associate Director, Digital Transformation (ICT) Practice, Frost & Sullivan. “Digital transformation will, however, require timely policy intervention and infrastructure for IT-BPM sectors to support cloud implementations and improve security. Furthermore, verticals such as BFSI are seizing this as an opportunity so their fintech peers do not disrupt them. At the same time, the manufacturing industry is also looking to take production lines to the next level with Industry 4.0.”

Frost & Sullivan observed that IT-BPM companies are looking forward to collaborate with telecos and consulting firms for holistic enterprise digital transformation (EDT) and change management, which is the key step for long-term growth.

Speaking of the report, Mr. R Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM, said, “With the rapid evolution of technology, digital solutions are becoming an integral component of business operations for enterprises across sectors. This is further fuelled by an increase in digital-savvy customers along with the necessity to stay ahead in the market. This study helps analyze and forecast digital transformation strategies of Indian enterprises, helping them transform their business processes.”   

The immediate challenges for digital initiatives in India is non-uniform connectivity, speed, and broadband infrastructure along with a scarcity of suitably-skilled personnel in the market despite an abundance of engineers. To address these obstacles, the Government and telecom providers are laying out fibre optic cables to improve the overall speed, while enterprises are allocating budgets to train existing and new employees.

About Frost & Sullivan

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