'Customer Engagement Will Create Higher IT Value For CIOs'

In an insightful interaction with Biztech2.com, R Lemul Lasher, president-Global Solutions and Services, CSC, talks about the relevance of digital disruption at the enterprise level.

What is your take on the phenomenon of digital disruption?

There are a lot of upcoming technologies at this point that could be very disruptive to the existing organisation. Almost all of these technologies are coming out from the consumer sector. So they have all the characteristics of disruptive technologies – they are inferior in terms of functionality, performance, security and compliance and they can be very easily dismissed.

My advice to CIOs is to not dismiss them as they are being embraced by a generation of the population that the CIO needs to hire to make IT relevant to the business. There should be more of a policy of embracing and adoption of such technologies than mere rejection.

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What is the criterion for digital disruption and acceleration to occur?

Disruption means that it will fundamentally threaten the actual business model of a company. For disruption, the unit of analysis is the enterprise and not the sector. A technology is disruptive only in relationship to a business model, not in relationship to a sector.

It is important to recognise that these technologies can disrupt any business model and the same technology can be both disruptive as well as enhancing to the same company depending on how and when it is adopted and applied.

If the unit of analysis is the enterprise, how would you define digital disruption at the enterprise level?

Let me illustrate with an example. Dell and Compaq are in the same industry; the Internet is the same technology and it is disruptive to one while it could be applicable to the other. Another example is SaaS – for some organisations, SaaS is an enhancing technology while for others it is quite disruptive. It all depends on the business model and how value is created.

In such a scenario, where is the IT value coming from?

Increasingly, the IT value is coming from customers and not from people, who produce the IT. This is one of the big shifts that we’ve seen. It’s in the adoption of IT that value is being created and not in the creation of IT per se. So the customer has a better understanding of IT requirements and has a higher level of alignment in his motivation for the adoption of the technology. Therefore, there is a higher probability for innovation and adoption and value being created with customer engagement, rather than supplier involvement.

What are the key areas of digital disruption?

Key areas of digital disruption include – social networking, new media, information transparency, use of mashup technologies, new worlds of visualisation and virtualisation, new platform makeover, new computing models, access to the entire wave spectrum and smart devices. These are huge factors of disruption coming out of the consumer market that will in turn affect the enterprise scenario.

What strategies do you suggest for IT value creation?

The first is to recognise that value is being created by the consumer and the producer. Secondly, recognise the disruption relevant to your business model and make the necessary adjustments and organisational change to embrace it. Thirdly, create double deep capability and deep sophistication in technologies and business processes. Fourthly, create very customer intimate models in terms of how you engage with and deliver to the customer. These are the four key recommendations that I would make.

What trends do you see in the new media space? How will these affect enterprises?

New media is all about interactivity as well as about digitisation of physical print media and books. We are seeing new models being created, rather than just markets of hierarchy. These new models are socially created and digitally enabled, non-economic in nature but creating economic value at the end of the day.

These trends will have an impact on the organisational structure – how business strategy is formulated, how employee engagement is executed, and how suppliers and customers are entertained. It will also affect the execution of business processes. On the whole, it is a pervasive transformation that is potentially there.