What are the top 5 things that companies undergoing a digital transformation must pay heed to?
To begin with, please understand that your digital transformation initiative is the beginning of a continuous journey of improvement by connecting disparate systems and making them smarter; listening to your customers, your production and service delivery systems, and your people in real-time; by analysing & correlating data coming from sensors and various other systems to find exceptions and to forecast/simulate possible scenarios so as to take right decisions at right time.
To make this endeavour a success, we must pay attention to a few key things:
- Clear objectives: You must have clear objectives on why you are embarking on this journey, based on which you define your acceptance criteria, which will help you take right decisions on timelines and budgets as well.
- Customer at the center: Put the customer at the center. Use your digital transformation initiative to continuously analyse and understand customer needs and to dynamically design, develop and deliver products/services to meet everchanging customer needs.
- Future proof: Remember we are just at the beginning of this digital transformation wave. As we move forward, there is bound to be a whole new set of technologies, architectural patterns, business models, customer engagement channels, and so on. How do we architect and implement this initiative in a future-proof manner to the maximum extent possible is the most important thing to keep in mind always.
- Security & Privacy: Build security and privacy right into the solution architecture and not as an afterthought by complying with laws of the land and paying heed to customer concerns.
- An integrated digital platform: An integrated digital transformation platform like Fluentgrid Actilligence not only helps integrate disparate systems for aggregating and analysing data, it also helps monitor the progress of the initiative itself against the objectives set forth at the beginning.
In your opinion, does India Inc need to accelerate its digital adoption pace further?
While Indian IT firms are driving the digital transformation of global majors, the Indian industry has just begun the journey and there is a dire need to accelerate the pace so that we don’t lose our competitive advantage in the global market. Fluentgrid’s major industry verticals smart energy and smart cities are spearheading digital transformation with nationwide smart metering and smart city projects with massive investments. These projects are contributing to widespread capacity building in digital technologies across the country, which would have a cascading effect on other industry verticals as well and position India as the digital transformation services leader.
Please share a remarkable story of a digital transformation project from the past year
Last year we implemented several smart metering and smart city projects, which are true digital transformation projects harnessing technology to provide real-time operations visibility and customer delight. However, what gives us immense satisfaction is how we were able to support our smart city customers in their fight against COVID. The integrated command and control centers set up by us in several smart cities were converted into COVID command centers to not only trace, test, treat COVID patients but also to monitor the availability of hospital beds, oxygen supply, and so on.
About Murali Krishna Gannamani, MD & CEO, Fluentgrid
Murali Krishna Gannamani founded Fluentgrid in 1998 with a mission to build innovative products and solutions that help transform power utilities into modern and efficient organization. Fluentgrid started as an information technology products and solutions company headquartered in Visakhapatnam Smart City, India and has transformed into a Global company now. Fluentgrid is spearheading digital transformation of energy utilities and smart cities globally, with robust software products and proven turnkey solutions.
Mr. Murali is the recipient of many awards in the past including the recent The Economic Times Inspiring CEO’s 2021, The Economic Times Most Promising Business Leaders of Asia 2020 & Asia Pacific Entrepreneurship Award 2016 – Most Promising Entrepreneur. Fluentgrid under his leadership has won many Awards: Fluentgrid’s Utility Operations Center on Cloud for UPPCL Client Won the ISGF Innovation Award 2021, ISGF Innovation Award 2020 for the Best Smart Grid Project in India by a Technology Company, IBM Beacon Finalist Award 2015 – Outstanding Smart Cities Solutions, among others.
