Gone are the days when an enterprise harbored a siloed approach, where different departments worked in four different corners and had their own set of organizational ancestry and lineage. Today, an enterprise, which has true global aspirations, needs to look beyond a siloed work culture. In fact, it has to work together in a wider ecosystem with a self-sustaining target to increase the profitability of all the other entities, which operate in the form of an extended value chain in the ecosystem, for its survival. This is an era where an enterprise has to think holistically and think in terms of building a platform economy “ not just for self-sustenance but also for those in the wider ecosystem.
A Digital Platform empowered by Smart Automation is the way ahead in such a shared economy. Necessarily, collaborative consumption, a sharing economy is the key to long-term sustenance in evolving business scenarios. Such shared economies are quite popular in mature business cultures such as Japan as well as Schengen, where economies evolve along with a shared and distributed model.
Today, even Services industry-based enterprises, such as those in the Banking Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector, are no longer lone wolves. Each enterprise is an immaculate congregation of smaller entities. While delivering business as usual (BAU), the enterprise may choose to grow a Digital Platform economy or a shared economy around building its organizational intelligence. Say, for example, a national Insurance player. This enterprise has the vision to grow its business beyond national boundaries. The enterprise naturally has to think disruptive in terms of building a Digital Platform powered by Smart Automation in order to grow organically and yet achieve a quantum leap for all those involved in the ecosystem.
How does the services industry
evolve on a digital platform towards a shared economy?
Usually, a services industry like BFSI has a Data to Intelligence journey at its core that moves, grows, and matures through seven brackets. First is the Data Ingestion, followed by Data Extraction, Workflow, Mobility, Dashboards & Analytics, Archival & Retrieval, and finally Collaboration. The enterprise can consolidate its strengths, delegate cumbersome jobs to external vendors, and buy interoperable products to build its core Digital Platform.
Following pointers could serve well in building the core Digital Platform for the sustenance of the ecosystem:
- Data Ingestion: A process-intensive
enterprise ingests data through multiple sources. Paper documents, mail,
email, fax, PDFs, MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, e-forms, and social media are just some of the sources. An intelligent data capture (IDC)
platform or intelligent optical character recognition (OCR) solution,
which has pre-processing features to improve image quality and post-processing features to improve data quality, is highly important here. Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms offer a higher degree of intelligent extraction using even unstructured or asymmetric data. This is a very important stage and can be delegated to an onboarded local vendor that is bound by strong non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). It can receive and capture the incoming data and index each entry in the system that eventually gets uploaded and stored in a Data Management System (DMS) and tagged to an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. This is the first step in a close working yet differentiated ecosystem, where each entity focuses on its own business competence. Each one processes one particular portion in a value chain and submits it to the next entity for further processing. For example: In the Insurance sector one entity receives and digitizes the incoming forms and submits them to the
Insurance underwriters in a digital format. - Data Extraction: Again, this stage can be delegated to an onboarded local vendor,
who can extract the information from the ingested data. This data can again be digitally converted to any specific format that is required as per statutory norms. This for example can be converted to HIPAA 837,
HIPAA 4010 to HIPAA 5010 required for Health Insurance claim processing or conversion to a required digital form required for extracting business intelligence, etc. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is important at this stage. It helps to easily communicate information between systems using surface-level integration. Essentially,
a low code no code kind of business software, RPA solutions enable the inter-conversion of data into different formats. - Workflow: The extracted information has to be routed through different
queues in order to optimize the workflow of the business process.
Workflows enable deeper integration between silos and expedite processes.
Business Process Management (BPM) consultants can be engaged here to standardize and streamline the processes across the enterprise. The standardization is quite important if the enterprise aims to tap intelligence that is generated from across various business segments and different departments across global markets. This is a cornerstone for building a Digital Platform powered by Smart Automation and is a stringent requirement for generating Smart Data. AI layers infuse a higher degree of intelligence in the workflow progression, where otherwise intervention is required. The machine learning part of the AI enables continuous learning of the algorithms, which get fine-tuned with the learning imbibed during each exception handling instance. Here, it is important to note that the quality of the data, which gets generated and refined at every stage, has to be impeccable. Smart Data is of prime importance in a shared ecosystem and a shared economy especially if the business wants to offer
personalized products. - Mobility: This is a core organizational function. Enterprises today want
their executives and value chain partners to be mobile and flexible. Here,
the enterprise can use sophisticated mobile application development
platforms (MADP) to develop apps as well as extend existing enterprise
software, including ERP and Analytics software, on mobile and other
handheld devices. Again, the enterprise can engage solution developers to
develop, deploy, and roll out the MADP based apps throughout the
enterprise. Mobility is quite essential to an enterprise so that there is
no scattering or loss of efforts of executives, who are out there in the
field and the data that gets generated is synchronized with
organizational repositories. Again, Augmented Reality (AR)
and Virtual Reality (VR) powered apps help executives use Head Mounted
Displays (HDMs) for meetings to exchange ideas in real-time and discuss
the live progress of even manufacturing projects in 360 degrees detailed
view. - Dashboards &
Analytics: This is a core organizational competence that an enterprise has in its technology stack and needs to be maintained in-house. An enterprise has to be in control of the enormous amount of data that is generated and derive real-time intelligence out of it.
Analytics is the essence of a Digital Platform and can be used to keep a
tab on the functioning of the Digital ecosystem and the Digital Platform economy at large “ making informed decisions and timely interventions,
where required. Highly interactive visualizations atop massive databases and data lakes help executives to slice and dice information in real-time
and analyze massive data in real-time. Here, the use of AI algorithms enables enterprises to discover different trends across the information that is generated. These inputs are very helpful in developing personalized products for targeted marketing across the evolving micro-segments. - Archival &
Retrieval: The enterprise can engage a cloud service or more specifically Software as a Service (SaaS) provider to
archive and retrieve its digital assets through proper indexing,
versioning, and tracking using relevant software tools. This is done in tandem with the technology mentioned in bracket 1. It ensures
consolidation of information received or generated from third parties and
multiple databases across the value chain. - Collaboration: Enterprise Content
Management (ECM) solution, which is interoperable with ERP systems and seamlessly integrated with the Portal Management System (PMS), is one of the center points in a Digital Platform economy. The information and intelligence assets from third parties as well as from internal departments need to be parked as well as stored for easy reference in a
knowledge-based Digital Platform economy, such as Insurance. ECM solutions can be integrated with email as well as different social media to increase the life of the content generated through these media. The ECM solution can be hosted on the cloud for a wider reach. This is the backbone of a
shared economy.
In summary
Today, enterprises need to increasingly reinvent themselves and continuously evolve so as not to risk business disruption. Reinventing oneself in the form of a Digital Platform economy powered by Smart Automation or interconnected shared economy around their Data to Intelligence journey not only increases business productivity but also helps all the other entities in the business ecosystem. The extended business ecosystem, which adds value at each intermittent stage, also provides succor during times of disruptions and allows to focus more on core business.
In an era where industry boundaries are already blurred, enterprises can overcome the disruptive forces by paving new paths and aligning and growing around more and more global entities harboring shared interests. This approach will not only create tremendous business value but also result in exponential growth across the wider business ecosystem through the process of evolution.
