Every business is keen to make sense of the digital revolution.
As power is increasingly shifting to end users with the intermediary
layers fast dissolving, enterprises are striving to survive in a world
that will look and feel very different from the one that we work and
live in now. Think open-source P2P money. Think Internet-based self-care
systems, including preventive and personalized medicines. Think smart
homes. Think connected cars. Think 3D printing democratizing the
manufacture of practically everything. With its roots in software and
computing, digitization is making technological expertise a core
differentiator across industries.
And the role of the technology
partner, in enabling enterprises to grow and innovate in this dynamic
environment, is rapidly gaining importance.
In a global survey
that we conducted to take stock of the expectations that enterprises
have from their technology partners, more than 500 enterprises spoke in
unison - they want technology and technology services to rise to the
occasion, transcend the silos of projects and mere execution, to
participate in a way that they impact the strategic core of the business
and create transformational value. The survey revealed four big
expectations from technology partners:
- Proactive and strategic advice during implementation on how transformational improvements can be made to existing processes, solutions, and systems. While simultaneously focusing creativity and imagination on finding new solutions to new kinds of business challenges.
- Manage transformation and articulate the value it brings not merely in terms of IT metrics, but also shareholder returns, customer acquisition, service and engagement, revenue growth, regulatory compliance, risk management, and competitive differentiation.
- Assume end-to-end ownership of large, complex, strategically important programs and drive consensus among key stakeholders. From technology-specific, business value articulation to buy-in from the top desk – it is all a part of the package that is expected to be delivered.
- When serving the same client organization, across multiple projects, share knowledge, experiences, and practices. Otherwise, enterprises are deprived of the full benefit of accumulated wisdom and end up spending more time and effort than they would like to, bridging project silos.
The results of the survey are an
affirmation of the position next-generation technology services
companies have adopted now – to not merely implement solutions, but to
also act as strategic partners to clients by aligning technology
programs to serve the disruptive and incremental innovation needs of
their businesses. For this to happen, there must be a shift in the
nature of the conversation with customers – from obsessing over
solution-building to focusing first on real problem finding. To be at
zero-distance from this reality, I recommend a five-point framework that
must be applied across all engagements:
- Look, learn, and improve: Best-practices and next-practices garnered from projects across industries can help scale innovation.
- Make ’what’ improvements: Ask what more, what other things you can do, within the engagement, to bring more value to the project.
- Seek out ’how’ improvements: Figure a better, more efficient way to do things – in an ongoing project.
- Clearly articulate business value: Help the business see the value of each improvement and innovation quantitatively, and substantively, in business terms.
- Disseminate knowledge: Share information about the improvements achieved so others may be guided by the experience. In doing so, we have to ensure that the information is decontextualized in strict adherence to nondisclosure contracts with clients.
At Infosys, the rigorous implementation of this
simple framework as a business imperative across the company, has
enabled us to help our clients in managing and forecasting, and looking
ahead and around the corners. It has enabled us to focus our energy, our
imagination, our intelligence on truly creating, rather than spending
more time and effort than they would like to, and charting a great
future for all of us. We achieve this by renewing, reinventing, and
teaching and learning together, doing more of the purposeful things that
we can be proud of.
I am sharing four anecdotal accounts from
some of our recent engagements where we applied the five-point
framework. These illustrate how we are renewing existing landscapes to
extract operational excellence and greater value, even as we work
towards new ways of growing and serving our clients.
We looked. We learned. We improved.
Infosys
partners with a technology company and global innovation leader known
to be several strides ahead of the industry when it comes to consumer
experience. As their technology provider, we share their vision of
creating the utmost seamless experiences across their range of devices
and consumer touchpoints.
Having architected an online presence
and conceived an ecommerce portal for several global retail majors, we
quickly spotted several opportunities this client’s online store
presented in opening up new selling options, and creating an even better
purchase experience for their customers.
The first improvement
was a one-click purchase feature, integrated in the home page to
minimize page navigation needed to complete a purchase. This let
customers choose, evaluate, and shop quickly and efficiently without
having to trawl through pages of marketing content and ‘optional
extras’. A collateral benefit would come by way of marginally lower
planned hardware capacity during new product introductions, thanks to
rationalization of store traffic. We also proposed an alert feature for
customers when out-of-stock products became available. Our third
recommendation was to provide a visual representation of an order
tracking in the store’s workflow so customers could check anytime to see
what steps remained before the delivery reached their doorstep.
These
improvements – inspired by simple, ubiquitous features from the retail
online world – is greatly enhancing the store’s user experience,
especially during new product introductions, delighting customers, and
generating additional revenue for the business.
We made it our business to make `what’ improvements
Two
years ago, Infosys was contracted by a global networking major for
end-to-end development and maintenance of their remarketing
applications, routinely leveraged by their executives to manage the
refurbished inventory. As the engagement progressed, several `what-if’
questions emerged for us. 4Data was scattered across BI reports and
collating consolidated reports meant days of manual labor. What if we
could provide insights on remarketing through a single window with a
360-degree view? 4What if these reports were interactive with features
that supported data trending and mining? 4What if the data could provide
foresight into potential opportunities, new markets, and products in
demand as well? We presented the client with a prototype for the
Insights Generation Platform, that could help create greater value for
them from our ongoing engagement in which we developed and managed
applications related to the inventory, wholesale quotations, and backlog
forecasting, among others. The insights platform would give the client
the much needed visibility into remarketing business data – including
sales by region, product, and manager – as well as key market and
product trends. The platform is estimated to potentially deliver several
benefits to the client’s remarketing business, including but not
limited to, identification and clearance of supply chain bottlenecks,
and better demand forecasting for refurbished products.
How we made ‘how’ improvements
When
a leading fashion retailer in the United States decided to tackle the
challenge of a shrinking customer base, they realized the need to
transform their online channel – and enrich it with ‘on-demand’
features. Infosys was contracted to deliver on this mandate.
Even
as we began executing the project, we realized the importance of testing
and its automation for effective solution delivery. We applied
ourselves to figuring out how we might innovate to improve and execute
this in the most efficient manner. Among the improvements proposed was a
custom UI Automation Framework, that leveraged an open-source tool for
progressive testing automation
(parallel to development) and to ensure reusability of test scripts.
Business layer testing was introduced to validate application logic and
other services that are a part of the application business layer. This
testing was facilitated in parallel to development, ensuring early
defect detection (and bug fixing) in the middle layers, thereby
facilitating faster time-to-market. Behavior Driven Tests were also
conducted to act as points of continuous interaction and validation for
testers with business users.
These efforts resulted in a 70
percent reduction in manual test efforts, with commensurate dollar
savings. With automation coverage in the range of 92 percent, the
detection and fixing of several defects were completed earlier than
envisioned, positively impacting the online channel’s go-live.
We articulated business value in terms that mattered to them
A
leading satellite and pay TV provider in the United States was looking
to renew their online portal, to counter the threat of new-age
competitors, and enhance viewers’ entertainment experience by making it
more personalized and consistent across touchpoints. As a partner in
this transformation, Infosys assessed their existing website and found
that its tightly coupled architecture was hampering scalability, while
inflating development and maintenance costs by forcing the client to
maintain separate websites for desktop and mobile users. The need to
transform the existing technology stack was obvious. Drawing upon
prevailing trends and our experience from other implementations, it was
apparent to us that we must advocate replacing the legacy packaged-based
architecture with cutting-edge, open-source (Angular, Node, Play /
Scala) technology. This would straightaway lower total cost of
ownership. We also clearly noticed that migrating the entertainment
stack to a responsive and adaptive architecture, which facilitated
customization and development as well as API-enabled integration with
multiple devices, would support unification of the entertainment
experience across television, desktop, and mobile. Further, the adoption
of a cloud-enabled, microsite-based architecture would bring
scalability and maintenance benefits.
With the help of a proof of
concept (PoC), we helped the client understand what this technology
transformation might translate to in business terms. We clearly
established, through a demonstration and statistical model that this
could bring 25 percent savings in development costs and performance
improvement for fully loaded pages, and video streaming of 40 percent
and 60 percent respectively. This helped engage senior business
stakeholders (and influenced buy-in) in what might have otherwise
remained an esoteric technology conversation.
We are committed to sharing the learning
The
shared knowledge of the improvements we have made, project after
project provide a halo, a great context around our collective abilities.
The context we find ourselves in is crucial to the tangible results we
deliver and the value we are able to create. Change the context, and the
same person with the same inherent capabilities, often delivers a
changed result. The great context that continuous learning and
reskilling can provide goes a long way in greatly amplifying our
potential, widening our knowledge, and puts within our hands the power
to create a better future for ourselves and our clients.
The ethos that’s behind it all
The zero-distance framework
has been instrumental in amplifying our potential, widening our
knowledge, expanding our creative freedom, and helping us use it all to
create a better future for our clients. This, in turn, is derived from
our culture of continuous learning and our adoption of the design
thinking approach to problem-solving with its equal-parts focus on
cultivating creative confidence, finding problems worth solving, and
creating path-breaking solutions with empathy for end users. I believe,
this approach, just as it helped our clients, can help any enterprise
not just navigate the digital revolution but also benefit from it by
bringing strategic changes to existing systems – renewing them to
perform faster, better, and cheaper, even as it creates ways to explore
new horizons that are absolutely unprecedented in expanse, vision, and
ambition.
infosys
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