Today in the realm of digital and cognitive, the companies need to incentives their teams to innovate and incentives failures. That cultural change or cultural shift needs to happen in an organization in today’s digital era, says Rajdeep Saha, Digital – Financial Services at IBM.
If you look across the banking, insurance, Micro finance Institutions (MFIs) or Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) sectors there are disruptions from customer preferences to your competitors who are innovating very different models, this forces the organizations to take notice of. For example, through Google Pay you can now buy a gold, very different model and banks are taking notice of it. So a lot of things are coming and to implement it we help the organizations in shaping their thought process, so as to guide them to some of the initiatives or strategies that they should bucket as a quick win and then progressively take it over.
Giving insights on the three elements which are important for any business model, Saha said, if you look at any business model the three important elements, is the ‘3D’ lens which is — to defend, disrupt and differentiate. These are the three buckets where companies strategy would lie and for each of these buckets, there are various technologies that are there out in the market. It requires a lot of deliberation and calibration of the strategy. With organization capacity and vision we need to move ahead as a joint team.
Emphasizing on the challenges, he said, the challenges which we are facing in the industry today are more from the regulatory perspective, customer, competition or coming together to telling an organization that you have to move out of your comfort zone. Hence, we looking today at the proliferation of technologies. Everyone is trying out, some of them have moved beyond the POC (Proof of concept) stage and some of them are still in the pilot of the POC stage.
What is a cognitive enterprise?
A cultural shift, a very different DNA is required for top driven. The CEO of a company needs to buy this vision and this has to percolate down to the last men standing. All of the companies have data that includes their own data which is a dark data, the data which is coming in from outside. This data builds the core strength of any organization.
Since now organizations have the data there comes the trust factor in the picture. It is directly near co-efficient. But what is missing in most of these organizations is capacity and capability, the skill gap. There are a lot of banks that are in sourcing most of the work across the technologies and it calls for skills. The companies work with partners to enhance these skills and then they slowly move in. These are part of the strategy to define when it should enter the cognitive enterprise. These are multi years programs.
The shift in the market today is towards the business-centric models. If you look at the NBFCs they have come up with co-lending platforms, large private sector banks, like State Bank of India has also come up with B2C platforms, few banks are planning to launch B2B agri-platforms targeting the Kisan.
Platforms are something that is here to stay and it is also taking a cue from the Non-financial service organizations be it OYO, UBER, etc. which is really prodding financial services to think differently to move out of the status-quo.
We need to have a balanced structure wherein we aim for providing extreme convenience to the customers.
Transforming your back office
What organizations need to focus today, doesn’t only include transforming their front office but also the back offices. Bringing automation, solutions that are relevant to the particular spear of work really makes sense for the customer journey and can get the needle down on the cost base. That’s our vision when we are working with the clients in how we can turn an organization into the cognitive enterprise. Look at three-four matrix that is really measurable and that will make a significant impact on how you deal with the customers.
There are certain key success factors that are required for any organization to reach there and most of these will go in parallel. This includes:
- Reinventing the workforce to ignite talent. We at IBM are doing a lot of interesting work using Artificial Intelligence to enhance the skill set of the employees not just within the company but also for helping our clients.
2. Trust and security: It is the core for enhancing the digital experience not only to the urban populations but to rural as well.
- Depending on where you are in your digital journey it’s very important to understand a specific inherent, specific DNA in your organizations.
- To defend, disrupt and differentiate.
