INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH MRS. GEETHA RAMAMOORTHI,
Managing Director,
KBR
Many enterprises find themselves challenged by inflation and are seeking new ways to secure their future. Despite the impending recession, companies are set to invest in digital transformation like never before. In your opinion, what kind of opportunities does investing in digital allow you to explore?
Going Digital is no longer an option, it has become an absolute necessity for businesses to stay relevant. There are two facets that provide opportunities for value creation, viz; internal improvements which help drive operational efficiency, and external client-focused smart solutions pivoted on automation and data-driven approach, which help open new revenue streams and catalyze margin expansion.
Examples of internally focused digital investments are the use of RPA in HR, Finance, etc to reduce manual efforts and improve quality, accuracy, and efficiency, and the application of blockchain in building smart contracts that lend themselves better to immutability, provenance, and traceability.
Examples of external applications in the infrastructure sector are the use of Machine Learning to derive patterns from data mined from information captured on highways to analyze the wear and tear of stretches, which can be used to predict road degradation based on certain parameters. These predictions can be used as pointers to take preventive measures to avert such degradation.
Another example is, given the focus on carbon emission reduction and the move towards Net zero, smart tools to calculate the embodied carbon will be very valuable for companies in the buildings, energy, and industrial sectors.
According to a recent global survey, 40% of respondents cited innovation as a primary goal of digital transformation. But as we know innovation has its own obstacles. What do you believe are the top roadblocks to innovation?
In my experience, the top 3 roadblocks to innovation are misplaced priorities, complacency, and lack of commitment from top management.
Performance measures do not typically cover innovation and most organizations focus merely on execution based on existing approaches and frameworks that may be at least a decade old. A lack of focus on innovation in performance evaluation does not help build an innovative mindset.
A lot of this is linked to complacency and the false sense of security where employees believe that business will continue to remain the same in the future, even though business models are getting disrupted fast, and technologies are becoming obsolete rapidly.
On top of this generally, there is hesitancy or lack of commitment from management to invest in innovation, as they fear the ROI may take longer to become visible. This often discourages innovation and employees are not incentivized to innovate.
Overseeing a company’s digital transformation requires you to understand the milestones and pitfalls of the journey. What should be on a managing directors’ radar for their organization’s digital transformation?
To fast-track transformation, holistic and unwavering support and commitment from top management is key. To continue measuring business success and future resilience through the traditional lenses of productivity and cost is no longer going to help futureproof a business; the approach must evolve to become more future-focused shifting from cost reduction to value creation, and a reasonable window must be allowed for realizing the ROI of Digital for a business to be able to succeed in the journey. It is not merely the early adopters but the mature believers in digital transformation that emerge triumphant.
A Managing Director’s focus must be on ensuring there is a clear strategy understood by all the players, a well-defined customer value proposition, a road map with milestones, proper allocation of funds and resources to deliver the initiatives, robust program management, benefits tracking and reporting, all of which must be underpinned by an agile approach that allows continuous feedback from stakeholders which lends itself to course correction where needed.
Cultural change can drive digital transformation efforts that are necessary to support innovation and implement customer-centric strategies. What are some of the good practices in creating and sustaining a digital culture?
The fundamental focus would have to be on training, coaching, and educating as the first step. The efforts in driving a cultural change must be twofold: firstly, the senior leadership needs to be trained to understand, appreciate, and believe in digital transformation, failing which a lot of time can often get wasted in repetitive presentations and pitches for budgets and funding. Also, the right behaviors required at those senior levels to foster success built on trust and collaboration need to be encouraged.
Secondly, the people that deliver the products or services need to be brought up the learning curve and to do this effectively, it is important to have a set of Digital Champions who own the responsibility of educating and driving change and are fully empowered by the leadership to push the agenda ahead.
Above all, celebrating success and rewarding digital solutions will help drive the focus effectively.
A lot has been said about why digital projects fail or succeed. In your view, what are the top 3 factors that never fail to contribute to the success of such initiatives?
I would say the top 4 factors that have made a difference and helped companies succeed are:
Relatability
You need to answer the question of ‘what’s in it there for me’ for every key role. Whether one is an Engineer, Project Manager, Sales leader, or function head, the organization needs to detail how the transformation is going to benefit him or her in their role. This could be efficiency improvement, better outcomes for projects, lower cost for functions, higher predictability, and the like, and could vary from one persona to another. Cracking this conundrum has proved to be a game changer for companies that saw successful transformations.
Use cases
Seeing is believing; to get the buy-in of key players, you must undertake pilot projects and go through the grind of implementing and showing the benefits; in other words, having use cases with tangible and demonstrable benefits makes a huge difference in helping convince even the non-believers. I have seen this paying off even in the least digitalized sectors.
Tolerance for failure
Fostering a culture of innovation and R&D alone is not sufficient to drive transformation; having tolerance for failure and encouraging continuous experimentation with an agile framework is key. The traditional waterfall approach must give way to a more flexible agile model and teams need to be trained in the new ways of working. Companies that embraced this approach were the ones to rise to the top of the table of the world’s most innovative companies in a short span of time.
Training and upskilling
One factor that can make or break is the commitment of a business to investing in talent development and training to make its workforce fit for the future. Learning and upskilling must be a continuous process wherein, a culture of self-learning and intentional learning should be encouraged, whilst also incentivizing and supporting people that prioritize it. Fast-tracking the careers of key talent and supporting their professional development can never go wrong in providing a competitive edge to companies that adopt it.