EDITOR’S LETTER
Say Hello to Illuminar, The Digital Enterprise Digest
Digital is shaping and changing our lives. Enterprises are leveraging digital technologies for managing their internal business processes as well as communication with their stakeholders including customers and partners. Consumer behavior is quantifiable like never before and leveraging these insights can define a winning business strategy and outcome.
A famous quote goes that the new Chief Digital Officer’s role is to turn the digital cacophony to symphony. You may ask who a CDO is? CDOs doing justice to this new function of convergence are experienced Informatics and Product Specialists. They are prepared for this challenging transformation mandate after gaining significant business experience across functions including Technology, Sales, Marketing and Business Operations.
In meeting with several large enterprises, I realize that there is sometimes a lot of duplication and inconsistency in terms of the way enterprises consider investments in digital technologies. Some enterprises for instance had simultaneous mobile sales and marketing initiatives using different technologies from different vendors. Some other companies used different and sometimes competing enterprise content platforms to manage their unstructured content. Several enterprises have business users take ownership to run a digital business and therefore take independent decisions in this matter. This often means many independent software pieces which do not talk to each other and worse, makes the organization fragmented. This often happens because the traditionally perceived P&L departments like sales, marketing, finance and procurement all often end up taking digital automation decisions based on departmental needs. The traditional IT Departments with no strategic mandate are not stakeholders in these key businesses decisions.
The new CDO evangelizes possibilities and creates the big picture using digital in concurrence with business heads. He / She then takes the leadership in executing that strategy by re-thinking through business processes and provides digital technologies that result in good cost-benefit in the mid to long term. The role itself encompasses aspects of innovation, brand integration, skill development, leading change management, technology evaluation and vendor management. The CIO is already playing several of these roles, while some could entail up-skilling – with say aspects relating to innovation or brand integration. So potentially a CIO could play the role of a CDO and be the torchbearer of this transformation journey. Irrespective of title, it is imperative to have technology capabilities combined with strong understanding of business to get the digital job done well.
This edition features an interview with Mr. A.Balaji, Global Chief Information Officer, UPL Limited, who has shared practical insights on how to create a solid digital agenda, what it takes for a CIO to lead the digital journey including the risks and challenges they face.
Please write your comments directly to me. As always, I look forward to hearing from you.
Have a lovely day!
Best Regards,
Srividya Kannan,
Editor, Illuminar- The Digital Enterprise Digest
editorials@avaali.com