Companies must architect their business for change

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Companies are re-imagining their business structures and operations to become agile, flexible, and responsive to scale up to Cognitive Enterprises. They are re-building business architectures, creating digital-led platforms, and aligning each layer with emerging technologies to collaborate, innovate and build market reputation.

To have a practical framework for progress and innovation across all business functions, organisations are exploring cognitive technologies such as Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT, Blockchain and more and making an impact. They are also taking data-driven decisions to cater to the ever-evolving demands of their customers and partners.

At the recently concluded ‘Building Cognitive Enterprises’ event organized by IBM & CNBC-TV18 in Mumbai, industry stalwarts discussed how companies can architect their businesses for change and shared their insights and journeys.

The leaders – T.V. Narendran, MD & CEO – Tata Steel; Vibha Padalkar, MD & CEO – HDFC Life; and Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, IBM India & South Asia – deliberated how companies are now deploying inside-out transformation, harnessing internal data hitherto untapped to create business platforms that are creating whole new value networks for the customers during a panel discussion.

“New technologies have the ability to process information. For an industry likes ours, which generates a huge amount of information – often times not captured – that allows you to institutionalise insights. A lot of good decisions may have been driven by intuition (in the past), that’s where experience comes in. (But) When you have the ability to capture a lot of information, have ability to run analytics on it, write algorithms on it, then you are able to institutionalise intuition and learnings,” said Narendran.

One of the key requirements to transform into a Cognitive Enterprise is data analytics. By mining data, companies can benefit from intelligent workflows driving new capabilities to create value.

“The real power of this transformation is inside-out purely because most of the organisations have this valuable resource they’ve been accumulating over years which is the data, and that data gives the incumbents a massive advantage. We believe that the next phase of disruption on scale will be actually caused by incumbents, or the ‘incumbent disruptor’, and the reason is power of data,” said Bajwa.

Today, technology allows businesses to capture much more information than they could in the past.

HDFC Life recognised this potential and invested in data analytics to recognise customer needs, empower sales force, incentivise tasks, ignite talent, and build tools to improve employee efficiency.

“If we were to do things differently and disrupt then this is the only way wherein we can use data, we have in a manner that can be put to use. Also, through AI, (it is important) for us to know that this (policy) is going to result in fraud, this is going to result in policy not being persistent, (it is) very important for us because we are in the business to pay claims… either you can shut the gate at the beginning or you can shut the gate at the end. And, we would like to shut the gate on frauds at the beginning and this (AI) allows us to do that with amazing amount of accuracy because when we hindsight it, we know that where we have said no to business and we have taken the right decision”, elaborated Padalkar.

The panelists also shared how data and AI helped their businesses in scale up improvements, drive a different stakeholder experience, expand business platforms, save costs, and improve speed of project execution. Hence, companies have to adopt new tech tools to transform into a Cognitive Enterprise and become businesses of tomorrow. Schedule a consultation with an IBM expert to know how IBM Services can help you get started.