Retail leaders in the digital age

Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal 1. But how can retailers lead and influence their staff during this digital disruption? Maybe it’s time to challenge retail leadership says Ken Silay, Partner, Innovator’s Equation. Ken suggests writing for Innovative Retail Technologies that “The truth is retail is run by old thinking and old metrics” and “difference between the old and new thinking in business creates a gap in retail leadership that will continue to get wider”.

Dr Ganesh Shermon, Managing Partner for “R for C Talent Management Solutions” (North America) recently highlighted the challenges retailers face. He said that retailers are confronted with dramatic managerial changes, given the convergence of the human mind, (Intellect), behavioral psychology (Cognitive), smart machines, and deep learning science and knowledge (Neural networks) as the basis for management actions. That’s really a mouth full!

The truth is that the old way of leading a retail business does not work anymore. But what should retailers do to get their businesses on par with the digital age?

Strategies that leaders should consider in the Digital Age

Prof Kamal Kishor Jain, Head of HR and Business Psychology Department at IIM Indore, recently said digital age leaders need to acknowledge the limits of their expertise. Additionally, the leaders should build a reliable network of knowledgeable experts to help them navigate through their choices. Prof Jain suggests the following:

Speed – is the most distinguishing characteristic of the digital age. No matter how fast you are moving to transform your business; the depressing reality is that you still probably aren’t moving fast enough.

Knowledge creation – we need to become more right brained to compete and survive. Leadership is not a noun, it’s a verb. The real charismatic leader is one who disseminates knowledge into his subordinates.

Primarily leadership qualities – leaders should be daring, caring and sharing. ‘Failing fast’ and ‘falling forward’ are critical precursors to success in the digital era. Such disruptive change requires leaders to be caring about people are affected by such changes. It is only by caring that a leader can elicit support from followers.

The Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an initiative of IMD business school and Cisco, and HR consultancy metaBeratung, have identified four competencies (HAVE) that business leaders need in order to excel in the era of digital disruption:

Humble – in an age of rapid change, knowing what you don’t know can be as valuable in a business context as knowing what you do. Therefore, digital leaders need a measure of humility, and a willingness to seek diverse inputs both from within and outside their organisations.

Adaptable – in a complex and changing environment, an ability to adapt is critical. The global reach of digital technologies has opened up new frontiers for organizations, shrinking once insurmountable continental divides and erasing traditional boundaries between territories. Dealing with the cultural and business impacts of this requires adaptability.

Visionary – in times of profound disruption, clear-eyed and rational direction finding is needed. Therefore a clear vision, even in the absence of detailed plans, is a core competency for digital leaders.

Engaged – painting visions for the future, successfully communicating these visions and being adaptable enough to change them, requires constant engagement with stakeholders. This broad-based desire to explore, discover, learn and discuss with others is as much a mind-set, as it is a definable set of business-focused activities or behaviors.

How can leaders change their retail business to digital?

It is impossible for retailers to change overnight from doing their things the old way to embracing the digital economy. Indeed, the process must get started and in quick time. Therefore, the ability to digitally re-imagine the business is determined in large part by a clear digital strategy supported by leaders who foster a culture able to change and invent the new 3. Kane et al proposed the following strategies for retailers to use getting their business to the digital age:

Create a strategy that transforms – when developing a more advanced digital strategy; the best approach may be to turn the traditional strategy development process on its head.

Get the right people for job – just as important as developing talent is reducing the risk of losing it.

Take risks – to boost risk taking in their companies, executives need to change their mind-sets.

Sparking new ideas – many new ideas arise through collaborative efforts among people of different backgrounds.

Telling the story – storytelling is becoming a popular means of gaining employee buy-in and organizational traction for digital transformation.

After all, it will probably require an extraordinary retail leaders to facilitate the move of their businesses from analogue to digital.

Businesses today are entering the generation of digital transformation. Social, mobile, analytics, cloud and the IoT, or the SMAC-IoT, are the five technology ideas that well comprehend the digital spectrum today.

Observing this spectrum closely, we will figure out that there is a common thread that links all these themes.

Can you guess that? We all know this thread as API – Application Programming Interface.

Web APIs are the defined interface or medium to give way for the interactions to happen between an enterprise and its apps. This enables the company’s digital assets to be consumable to any channel, and make the best out of the global Digital Core.

What is API management?

The need of the hour is data security and refinement to be fit for the desired purpose.

Once this is accomplished, the next step is to discover how to share the data or the APIs built on it? Making it available and accessible for other developers will be the primary step forward, for empowering and accelerating digital transformation across the global business environs.

That is where API management comes into picture.

API Management allows you to discover, create, manage and socialize your APIs from on-premise resources, and share the same internally or externally across the enterprise.

API Management Program can either be built in-house or purchased from a third party software development provider as a service.

Being more strategic, APIs enable much more than the mobile. API Management describes the process to publish, promote and keep a watch on the APIs in a more secure and scalable environment. The purpose of API management is monitoring the interface lifecycle and ensuring that the needs of the API developers and apps are met.

What Do API Management Tools Have in Store?

API management software tools come with the following functionality:

• Automate and supervise connections between APIs and applications that use them.
• Controlling traffic from individual apps.
• Make sure to maintain a consistency between API versions and their implementations.
• Enhances application performance with memory management and caching mechanisms.
• API protection from any kind of misuse, by providing shelter with security policies and procedures.

Pertaining to the current era, APIs are foreseen as the bedrock for several initiatives inducing digital transformation. Now, APIs are also frequently for enabling sales and marketing channels.

In the time to come, business enterprises across various industry verticals are likely to engage in the growing API economy. This participation may include them as API providers focused at driving innovation through partners and third-party developer environment. Therefore, it is essential that Software Development Companies and businesses from other industries associate to develop an API strategy that clearly depicts both short and long term targets.

The digital healthcare market is expected to touch $206 billion by 2020, as a joint study by SAP and Oxford Economics concluded that nearly 70% healthcare companies are planning to digitally transform their operations, while nearly 61% believe that this will increase patient satisfaction.

Most healthcare providers today have strong plans for digital transformation, and their efforts are changing the way they deliver healthcare through new and innovative methods. Hospitals today deliver ambulatory, inpatient, outpatient and day surgery services; patient record access; and telemedicine in different ways through their revamped processes and technology-enabled execution. Even as the providers are creating and delivering new digital products and services to improve clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction, they are also finding wholly new business models capable of value generation through new business models. Players like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple are also trying hard to carve out a market share for themselves, with varying levels of success.

As the healthcare sector turns compulsively to adopt a digital strategy, let’s look at how they are reinventing the way they perform through digitalization:

1. Using healthcare interoperability to enable the sharing of patient data across the care continuum of healthcare providers and stakeholders to provide coordinated collaborative care to one and all.
2. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is here, in a confluence of IoT, telemedicine and Telehealth technologies, bringing wearable devices like ECG and EKG monitors into use and playing a critical role in tracking vital medical stats to prevent or manage chronic illnesses and to provide virtual care to patients, increasing customer satisfaction in the process.
3. Wearable devices are making it possible to monitor patients in real time, obviating the need to physically admit them to the hospital. Virtual caregiving is set to allow aging people to stay home, even as their health status gets monitored for any signs of decline.
4. Countries with large populations with limited access to providers are turning to telemedicine, even as physician appointment wait times and Medicaid acceptance rates keep increasing year-on-year. Telemedicine is an important tool which enables even remotely located patients to access specialists as technology make it possible to match the right healthcare professional with the right patient, whether face-to-face or through virtual care portals.
5. Automation, AI and chatbots are making it possible for patients to reduce costs as they avoid visiting a doctor and obtain self-care instructions, as we use healthcare data and analytics to enable better treatment plans and patient outcomes.
   1. Chatbots are making it possible to handle routine medical queries using AI-backed messaging and voice systems, while machine learning improves the abilities of the chatbot with each interaction. They also make appointments, prove prescriptions, run lab tests, provide a smooth billing procedure and track health data.
   2. AI can replicate the capabilities of a human in processing information and making decisions, increasing the speed and accuracy of diagnosis. AI-enabled body scans spot cancer early, saving lives. AI is being used to explore chemical and biological interactions and to improve the formulations of old drugs and test the efficacy of new drugs without the need for expensive clinical trials.
   3. Big data analytics is leveraging health data and tracking epidemics by merging population data, health and migration statistics to help prevent epidemics, reduce costs and cure diseases. It’s also being used to detect identity thefts and healthcare frauds.
   4. Robots which assist a surgeon or perform surgeries themselves are now a reality, while others provide support to people with sensory, cognitive and motor impairments (comprising of nearly 20% of the world’s population) or their caregivers. Humanoid AI-enabled robots are helping lonely humans to remain independent longer with their company and conversations.
6. To enable healthcare providers and patients the required access to sensitive patient data in compliance with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the industry is turning to cloud computing rapidly.
7. The digital healthcare industry is also working to improve its digital marketing strategies by focusing on the quality of its content and its ability to convert visitors into patients as it increases engagement and provides the vital and relevant information it needs to share with the consumer.

Digital healthcare is undoubtedly disrupting the healthcare scenario in various ways, requiring a complete revamp of processes before the newer efficient ways of delivering healthcare can take effect. Even the insurance sector is turning to digital transformation using out-of-the-box projects in health insurance, which adopt a value of care approach instead of focusing on volumes. For all these innovative new approaches to take root and become a norm rather than the exception, organizations must not only adopt and exploit the advantages offered by healthcare digital transformation, but also engage with and motivate their workforce to gain the requisite skills to make the best use of these facilities.

In the last few years, healthcare has joined other industries in the quest to deliver better customer experience. This has brought about a fundamental change in the healthcare industry and they have now shifted from volume to value of care of patients. The evolution in the cloud, data and mobile technologies has disrupted the health care industry.

The disruption has forced insurance companies and healthcare providers to move from a health system driven model to a customer oriented model. The behavioural needs of the modern customer has also changed and they now demand both control and choice.

Digital transformation is revolutionizing healthcare. It has helped connect and apply data, communication and technology to engage and redefine customer experiences. Most people have a misconception that digital transformation is about automation of jobs, processes and technology but it is much bigger than that.

Digital transformation requires you to rethink all your business processes. It is all about using data and digital technology by putting the needs of the customer at the centre of the business. If you want to succeed in the transformation, you need to look at the entire ecosystem of the company and determine ways to drive more value to the customer.

Optimize Clinical and Operational Effectiveness

Digital technology has helped improve quality and outcome of healthcare services. Consumers are now able to access and analyse information, so that they are able to make informed choices. Innovative solutions are offered to improve quality of care and efficiency of services. The new technology has helped reduce clinical variations.

Operational Analytics

The operations are streamlined and this helps reduce costs. Clinicians and executives are now able to share information and analyse the structured and unstructured data to make informed choices. Structured (electronic medical records) and unstructured (handwritten case notes) data can be brought together to get insights and uncover actionable intelligence.

Clinical Analytics

The quality and outcome of health services are drastically improved by creation of powerful data models. The healthcare professionals can collaborate and share insights in new ways. The accuracy, completeness and consistency of health information is improved by resolving problems that are caused by bad data.

Medical Data Storage

Innovative and new technologies in the healthcare industry is generating more data than before. Digital technology has enabled healthcare providers to store the data and utilize it in the best possible way. The data can be used to optimize patient care and anticipate the emerging health trends.

Technology has helped create a system of engagement with patients. Physicians will be able to get more information about their patients and this can revolutionize the services that are provided to customers. Health professionals can explore and navigate reports faster.

Digital transformation is an ongoing process that puts customer at the centre of healthcare business. It is important to look beyond technology to drive innovation. If the healthcare industry wants to keep pace with digital disruption, it needs to engage with those that it wants to please, its consumers. Failure to engage with the customer can result in the industry operating behind the times.

Digital transformation, in the context of a business, happens when it fully leverages a mix of digital technologies to transform its activities, processes, competencies, and models, keeping both present and future shifts in mind. The question we want to answer here is whether DevOps and Cloud are essential to such a transformation, and if so – why?

Let’s first consider DevOps and what it signifies for your digital transformation efforts. DevOps is also a fairly new concept to most people. DevOps is gaining in importance as most software companies are providing the software as a service, and operating their product on behalf of their customers. It refers to the participation of operations and development engineers in the entire service lifecycle of a product, from design through the development process to production support. It is also characterized by operations staff making use of many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work, automating agile methodology. DevOps changes development as a whole and specifically redefines cloud development by enabling responsive development in real-time to meet the needs of the business.

It’s important to digital transformation lies in:

1. The DevOps culture and set of processes enable the creation and improvement of products at a much faster pace, offering continuous software delivery, improving functionality and encouraging innovation. The collaborative way of functioning also reduces complexity and encourages innovation and aids digital transformation efforts.

2. Companies today are required to change the way they function, they are required to shorten work cycles, increase the delivery frequency and experiment continually to ensure that their products are responsive and innovatively designed to meet the needs of their customers. DevOps meets these expectations.

3. With DevOps, developers are not working in silos anymore, not knowing what operations want. They don’t write code and submit it and ignore the matter after that. They now have improved visibility into the way the application operates and are responsive and agile enough to make sure that it meets user needs.

4. DevOps is especially useful to a cloud development project as it improves application development speed-to-delivery to meet business needs faster, responding faster to user requirements and lowering the costs of development, testing, deployment, and operations.

5. The cloud platform offers a centralized enterprise system for DevOps to test its development, deploy it and go to production easily, without a distributed enterprise system which complicates such development.

6. Most private cloud computing providers support DevOps systematically on their platform, making DevOps cloud-centric to enable continuous integration and offering tools for continuous development, as well as centralized governance and control over the various departments.

Centralized development and shared test environments lead to waste while polluting the test data and creating a greater demand for resources. When leveraging cloud-based resources, the endless wait for capital resources to be approved and made available is over. With DevOps in the cloud, it becomes very easy to track the use of resources by application, developer, user, data, etc., lessening the need to track them separately. This mutual dependency is making DevOps drive the growth of cloud, reinforcing each other while enabling the growth of the enterprise itself.

What Is Digital Transformation?

The Global Center for Digital Transformation says that “organizational change is the foundation of digital business transformation”. That’s because changing the nature of an organisation means changing the way people work, challenging their mindsets and the daily work processes and strategies that they rely upon. While these present the most difficult problems, they also yield the most worthwhile rewards, allowing a business to become more efficient, data-driven and nimble, taking advantage of more business opportunities.

Define ‘digital’ in digital transformation

While the focus is on changing how the business works at every level, technology underpins all digital transformation projects. But what technology?

Obviously this changes as time goes on, but typically businesses want to adopt technologies that help them harness and make sense of the vast quantities of data they are sitting on, as well as preparing for trends like the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile.

That means analytics tools are high up on the agenda, as well as cloud computing, which lets you store data outside your own data centre, potentially closing this down. You might also want to focus on collaborative tools, like file-sharing, mobile devices, and apps, that let your employees work wherever they are, and which give them instant access to information – especially useful for salespeople visiting customers, for instance.

What Digital Transformation Means For Your Business?

Accepting and moving toward digital transformation doesn’t simply mean jumping on every technological bandwagon that comes along. Doing that is like putting a bunch of cut up vegetables in a pot and calling it soup. Unless you put the right ingredients in the pot and turn on the stove, you’ll never make soup-at least not soup that anyone wants to eat. Instead, each company has to spend some time thinking about what digital transformation really means for them.

Companies need to think about transitioning core business processes and digitalizing the client/business process first. They have to think about which applications, platforms, and solutions fit into their culture, daily operations, and budget. There is unfortunately no cookie cutter solution that businesses can opt into. It’s a process that requires personalization and a knack for following trends.

Digital Disruption And Focusing On The Consumer

Digital disruption is another key term that describes what digital transformation can do in society at large. Smartphones created a disruption, Uber created a disruption, and wearable technology continues to create disruptions. With each key technological advancement, the daily lives of consumers change a little more. The norm is shaken up, and the advancement adds value to consumers. Businesses that take advantage of the new changes, and who understand how these changes affect daily life, can modify their practices to meet the needs of the consumer.

Consumer-centrism is one way to ensure that you’re meeting the demands of the digital age. Knowing where your customers are interacting online and how you can meet them on their own turf will enhance your ability to make their lives easier and to make sales. Every business has to think about digital transformation and the power of disruptions now. There is no longer time to take baby steps and get your feet wet. It’s a sink or swim environment for many businesses.

Planning Ahead For Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is both an end result and an ongoing process. You have to make the initial move, and then you must continue to evolve or be forced out. There is no quick fix for digital transformation. When you sit down with your team to discuss your company’s digital future, think about the near future, but also the long-term goals of your company. To maintain relevancy, you will need to implement digital solutions that keep your company moving forward into the digital era and not standing still or moving backwards.

At every step, think about the business experience. What can you implement to streamline in-house operations? What can you implement to facilitate customer interactions? These aspects that will drive your digital transformation. For some companies that may mean adopting an integrated payment solution so that customers can login to an online portal and pay their bills. For others, it may mean getting on social media and posting relevant content on a regular basis. Any move to the digital space is part of the digital transformation.

Over the long term, the digital experience will shift. How can you make changing an easier part of the business process? Transparency, a group mission toward digital relevance, and constant listening to customer behaviors may all be important for shifting your company’s focus away from legacy business practices and to a more digital oriented future.

If your business is seeking to get into the race of digital transformation, it is important to act right now. Late adopters can have serious disadvantages since the competition is already in the domain. If you are looking to adopt a business model that utilizes a digital core, we can help. Embrace the digital transformation with the best developers to get to the forefront of change.

Are you looking for the digital transformation companies in IT sectors? The good news is that many companies are offering such services. Before picking up the right option, one must familiarize with the services and offers. The proper IT services can improve the ranking of your business in the competitive world.

Information Technology has been the “buzz” word smoothening with digital transformation trends. There are many different tools to make your work easier along the Internet technology. Amidst all the speculations, different computer-based systems have made businesses much more accessible. For all kinds of digital transformation work like-Website designing, Mobile Application Development, and Internet marketing have transformed from computer work to supercomputing work. All variety of processes has smoothened with accuracy and perfection regarding Applications. There are a lot of IT services companies carrying out the work in the right way for you.

Benefits of Working in IT service companies:

• One can move quickly in the progress of succession.

• You can get to work with senior professionals in their work.

• You’ll able to forge a close relationship with your team leader.

• You will get more and more to learn, off the track too!

• You will learn about the Inbound and Outbound sales.

• You can move quickly with your ideas.

• You can match yourself in the proper way of functioning.

• You can stretch your creative skills at any point in time.

• It’s adequate training if you ever want to launch a business yourself.

Services- IT Industry

Internet Marketing

With Internet Marketing, it’s about solutions for all your internet marketing dilemmas. The understanding of futuristic competition, the IT services make you make your brand visible across valuable search engines. The reforming industry of IT is into new technologies introduction, Consumers’ habits evolution, with a thinking of making things different.

The Internet marketing approaches include:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

2. Pay Per Click Services (PPC).

3. Content Marketing Services.

4. Search Media Optimization/Search Engine Marketing (SMO/SEM) services.

App Development

The proliferation of mobile applications development is of utmost competence offering eminent and quality apps within a committed time frame and finances within your limits. In the different developed and developing countries, the mobile developments services are result oriented initiating from close client’s requirements to app development. This lead to national dominance by connecting power of bondness. From Augmented reality to visual reality, Windows Phone, Microsoft’s next-generation mobile operating system is fast becoming a distinguished substitute to IOS and Android interfaces, have been used in new approaches for smoothening the work efficiency.

The App Development services include:

1. iPhone applications.

2. Android applications.

3. Windows Phone applications.

4. Blackberry applications.

Website Development

People are always looking for creatively designed technically sound prerequisite regarding the websites. The web development is catered for both complicated and straightforward business requisites. An aspect that is thoroughly considered while creating the sites is to use only the futuristic technologies to ensure that the location is visible to the worldwide audiences.

The Website development services comprises of:

• ASP Dot Net development

• PHP development

Website Design

With Website design, you get a hook to the response from technologies to interact with, such as the laptops, desktops and smart devices. The plan has been an inescapable part of this process, with revolutionized people work in chores. Today, for everything that we do, we have a mobile application for it, and the haunting of working on new things doesn’t seem to fade any sooner. It’s all about revamping your web presence from scratch or your already existing website.

The Website design services comprises of:

1. Graphic Design

2. Banner and Logo Design

3. Landing Page Design

By working in IT services companies, you can get high productivity rate, involving equal risks/profits. It’s always working a way to be on the safer side, with stabilizing the work with the fresh mind.

Digital transformation is key not only in-terms of short-term growth and market share, but also to ensure their long-term survival and relevance. Digital platforms and ecosystems can drive efficiencies, and through new and unexpected collaborations, create new value for businesses and for customers. Digital maturity across industries have been classified into personas such as: beginners, conservatives, fashionistas & digital masters with digital and leadership capability driving their business transformation.

The digital age has brought about a new way of thinking on process and operations. Smart devices with digital capabilities are seamlessly offering direct benefits to industries around productivity, efficiency, innovation and decision making.

Today’s millennial enterprise CEO priorities are innovation, speed to market, public trust and human capital which leads to initiatives around digital and data driven business. The CIO priorities are to manage both innovation and operations. While on one hand it is to increase transformation, efficiency, security, on the other hand it is to cut costs & time for new service, maintain, simplify IT models & infra and improve business process.

The business outcomes of a digital transformation program decides its critical success factor or value proposition. These could be around customer experience transformation or enterprise user efficiency. People, process and technology are critical factors for success of any transformation program.

It is imperative that a digital transformation is applied to the end to end process and not in a piecemeal manner. An extremely jazzy and digital customer acquisition front end with a manual / semi manual process at the back office or vice-versa will never lead to the desired business outcomes. So a complete digital process automation leads to innovation, efficiency and trust and that becomes one of the critical success factor for the transformation program.

Change management is another critical success factor for a digital transformation. People / resources directly or indirectly involved in such a transformation determine the fate of any such initiative. Concerns around perceived loss of control of a manual / semi-automated process, push back on any change, adaption of any innovation should be managed by a structured change management process comprising of clear communication, management direction, creating collaborative environment to address organisational cultural challenges.

Technology plays a key role in the success of an adaptable digital transformation. However instead of technical knowhow or features of a software or hardware, it the ease of implementation, design thinking, smooth transition and program management with a finesse that stands out and results in an acceptable digital transformation which gets applauded both externally and internally.

So a CDO / CTO / CIO whoever is leading the program, needs to keep a few of the finer things in mind and to plan while going about a digital transformation program.

More and more businesses are seeking to digitally transform their organisations to meet the ever increasing demands and expectations of the modern, technically sophisticated customer. But few are prepared for the internal disruption this causes throughout the entire enterprise, which is why culture change and change management is so important.

For digital transformation to be successful, businesses need to adopt agile methodologies, processes and working practices. Becoming an agile business requires a cultural change. Similarly, as digital transformation is largely driven by the changing demands and expectations of customers, customer-centric strategies are a must and successfully developing and implementing these new approaches requires a more integrated and fluid organisation.

Laying the Foundations of Digital Transformation

Businesses whose digital transformation projects fail are usually guilty of failing to lay solid foundations:

• Agile
• Customer-Centric
• Omni-Channel Experience

Laying these foundation stones requires huge culture change within the organisation and managing this process is challenging. Unfortunately, if your organisation wants to be successful, it is unavoidable.

Culture Change

Due to the ever changing and ever evolving nature of the modern world, businesses need to cultivate a culture of perpetual revolution.

The days of businesses setting a strategy for the next 5 years, then waiting for the business execute that strategy, are long gone. Setting a 5 year strategy is still important, but the need to be able to rapidly pivot that strategy at will is fundamentally important to the long-term strategic success of the enterprise. Most businesses, especially big and established companies, are difficult to turn and this is why aggressive new market entrants are able to sweep in and digitally disrupt industries, markets and supply chains. Established companies are too slow to respond and by the time they have mounted a meaningful response, the new entrant has established a strong position in the market and is almost impossible to remove. Companies need to be able to pivot quickly to respond to new market entrants and changes in the competitive landscape.

Similarly, as new technologies emerge, customers and other major stakeholder group’s demands and expectations change. The innovation roadmap you are following today could be redundant in weeks or months. Agility enables quick pivoting of development roadmaps, rapid transformation of customer-centric strategies and the re-engineering of omni-channel customer experiences.

All these cases cause enterprise wide disruption and with the frequency of these disruptions rising, a culture of change and constant revolution is a must.