INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH MR. NIKHIL MORADE,
Global Head – HR Technology & HR Shared Services function,
Cipla Limited
Analytics, Automation, and other data-driven decisions are becoming more widely recognized. What are your top recommendations for leaders who wish to shift their teams to a more data-driven culture?
Last decade or two organizations have had an emphasis on digitization i.e., moving from offline to online and the focus on data has not been as much as it is today. As they say, ‘Data is the new Oil’ and today we can see that the shift to data has happened fundamentally. In my opinion, leaders should increase demand and rely on data for their decision-making, reviews, governance, etc. So, this demand for data must essentially come right from the top which will set up the tone and culture for data-driven decision-making within the organization. Leaders must also ensure that the insights created from the data barring confidential data, should be as much transparent within the organization as possible. For example, in Human Resources, we have certain metrics i.e., data on how many people we hire, how many exits, some health metrics, etc. which can be made more transparent within the organization. So, as we build this culture of data being available within the organization, we see that people automatically start seeing that things are being looked at through the lens of data rather than judgment. Leaders must set up systems that give them data, analytics, reports, etc., and start demanding insights from the system which will set up a tone for the teams to spend quality time setting their processes and interpretation of data rather than creating data.
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 read, as per different surveys, that 70-80% of digital projects do not succeed they might not deliver what we intend them to deliver. To my mind, it all ties back to something very fundamental whenever you are thinking about any digital intervention. It is very important to not overdo in terms of how many things we must push to end-users. We must plan and prioritize better keeping value drivers in mind. Second, a potential issue is in the way in which an organization would commit resources – project teams taking up transformation projects in addition to their day’s job. Whenever an organization takes a digital transformation initiative, a dedicated full-time team should be responsible for solving the organization’s problems and they should take the onus of the project as well as should be accountable for the project. Third, I think when solutions are built, it is very imperative to have end-users in mind rather than building through purely technical lenses or around what a particular technology can do.
What are some good practices to build an agile and effective digital strategy?
I think a digital strategy must be strongly linked to the business plans of the organization; the rubber must be the road. You may be having a very sound digital strategy, but it is fruitless if it is not linked to your business plan. Today we see there is a huge demand for digital leaders to get processes automated, completely reduce manual touchpoints, and continue to enhance the experience of users. So out of all these demands, it is very important for digital leaders to pick and choose priorities on where they would want to bet funds and resources on and help move an organization from point A to point B.
Additionally, when we look to build a strategy, there is money, resources, effort, and time at stake so it is important to build success criteria that could be tangible or intangible, and ensure one has to continue to measure how one progressing against those success criteria. It is also important to keep measuring & reviewing achievements of criteria ongoingly during the project rather than at the end.
Have you read or experienced any unique ways to incentivize people towards faster adoption of digital solutions within enterprises?
As I mentioned earlier, to incentivize faster adoption of digital solutions, it is important to build solutions keeping the end-users in mind. If enterprises do this, they build something that is simpler and nimble enough for end-users to use it organically, there is no need thereafter to do anything in terms of adoption standpoint, only awareness of initiative needs to be created. Avoidroll-out of frequent changes; Stagger launches in a planned manner. Think about users, they are miles away from the technical world.
How has COVID-19 impacted the shared service operating model? What changes are you seeing?
If we look at how the shared services have evolved, we see that shared services started when decentralized, non-standardized processes were taken and made centralized and standardized through efficiency and scale. The second phase was marked by enterprises bringing in more and more technology and automation and freeing up time for employees. Now, a couple of years before COVID what we were really contemplating that third phase, potentially was if shared services can work remotely. There are a lot of drudgeries when you are working in ops. Having flexibility would address it to large extent and drive better performance and productivity in shared services. While we felt strongly about it, honestly, we could not implement it because we knew that there was not adequate trust in the system and if processes would run smoothly then.
Now COVID pushed us to operate remotely and that was a test for us in terms of whether our operations would sustain and whether we would be able to deliver employee experiences seamlessly fortunately everything fell into place for us and now we have enough trust in the system that our shared services can run remotely. Even today, we continue to run our shared services remotely.