Three Imperatives for Digital Transformation
Rahul Gupta is the Global Head of Technology Services at Conduent.
At Conduent’s recent Continuum ’18 client conference, I had the distinct pleasure of talking with our customers and partners about the importance of innovation in a company’s growth story. At no time in history has it ever been more accurate to say that staying essential to your customers requires constant reinvention.
It’s a simple fact that better business outcomes result from the practical design and implementation of technology and innovation. That technology and innovation looks different for every company, and it also varies greatly across industries. But as we work with our clients, we view technology as the practical application of science. Our goal is produce repeatable, high-volume data with intensive interactions across all the industries we serve (from patients to consumers to plan members, constituents and more).
At Conduent, and within our technology innovation team, we’ve identified three imperatives for digital transformation that are relevant to everything we do, and I believe these three imperatives will apply in varying degrees to any company that operates in the pursuit of digital transformation.
1. Innovation must be a part of who you are
In today’s world where human expectations are that every interaction is more personalized, immediate and intelligent than the last, every company across every industry is finding itself in a position where innovation is no longer an “add on” to the way they do business. Innovation must be #1 in the way they approach their business — and in everything they do. Regardless of the industry, the size of the company or whether they’re selling their services in a B2B or B2C environment.
At Conduent, every technology we pursue and every technology decision we make is in service to our customers and their end users. Innovation is part of our DNA, and our job is to help our clients confront the new realities of today’s service expectations. When businesses aspire to innovation from the top down, it’s much easier for them to adopt the right set of solutions to modernize and transform their business processes, end to end.
2. Data intelligence must be at the forefront of every business decision
We live in an increasingly interconnected world generating enormous amounts of data every second. According to Forbes, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are being created every day. For perspective, if 2.5 quintillion US pennies were laid flat, they’d cover the surface of the earth five times over.
However, it often seems that the more data we have, the less we understand it. What if we could change that? To create successful business outcomes, it’s imperative that we do.
We believe that new and transformative insights about any client’s end-users customers are often “hiding” right there in plain sight. Through cognitive analytics, companies gain the power to more quickly uncover those insights.
One of the enduring challenges and opportunities facing any organization is how to use their own information effectively, in combination with other publicly available data assets, to extract maximum value from it. At Conduent, our data scientists are developing advanced analytics tools that consolidate and analyze massive amounts of data from multiple sources to yield completely new insights for our customers.
3. Digital transformation must happen on a continuum
Any business that’s focused on digital transformation must recognize two very important requirements. First, you will never be “finished” with your digital transformation and second, it’s unrealistic to think that every element of your transformation can be accomplished through the use of one solution or technology set.
It seems logical but as humans we are prone to forget that we must constantly be looking forward to what’s next on our technology journey. Within the Conduent Technology Innovation team, and throughout our own operations, Conduent’s job is to help our clients confront the new realities of today’s service expectations by providing solutions that help modernize and transform their business processes, end to end.
To do that, it’s important to take a holistic approach to reinvention, applying solutions from across the innovation continuum to help our customers remain essential to the end users (customers) they serve. Within that framework, we understand that no one technology partner has the answer to every business problem (including us). That’s why we are technology agnostic.
So, rather than choosing one technology over another, we bring together many to achieve seamless digital interactions for our clients’ specific needs. With our digital platforms as the backbone of our solutions, we deploy technologies interdependently to achieve our clients’ goals. Any organization can take a lesson from this: to be successful, it’s critical that we always continue to evolve and never get stuck in a technology rut where we’re forced to choose the lesser of two evils for a long-term solution.
Summary
At Conduent, we leverage the power of innovation DNA and data intelligence across our innovation practices to individualize the user experience, bring real time interactions to those users, and derive intelligence and insights from those interactions for our customers.
These are the imperatives of digital transformation that we believe every company can harness in its own individual way – to create a human-centric experience that drives deep business value, creates customer loyalty and sustains long- term success.
Want more insights? Download the eBook, Disrupt or Be Disrupted: 5 Key Actions Business Leaders Must Take to Stay Relevant.