
Unlocking Digital Transformation
Today I am in Kochi, Kerala delivering a keynote talk titled “Unlocking Digital Transformation – Advancing Technologies” for a distinguished audience of the city. It was part of “Do Big” forum for CIOs that’s travelling across the country and sponsored by Tata Tele Business Services.
To hold the audience attention and deliver value, I started with the definitions I like – for what is digital and what is digital transformation.
Provided one example of digital transformation done by Babolat of Lyon, France on their designing of Babolat Pure Drive PLAY tennis racket. Then added my own example (fictitious) of how a food staples firm producing Rice/Wheat can reinvent at the root of their business.

Three phases of Digital Transformation:
- Experimentation at the edge
- Collision at the core
- Reinvention at the root
Every successful journey consists of:
- Thinking Big
- Start Small
- Scale Fast
Lastly, provided the audience with 4 questions that they can ask themselves before they start their digital transformation journey:
- What is the outcome that our customer desires? Is there more than one customer we need to satisfy?
- How does the customer achieve that outcome today?
- How can we (profitably) design a new experience for the customer
- How do we design the technology to power the above?


After my keynote, I moderated a panel discussion on “Digital the new norm” with Krishnanath Venkataraman (Chief Operating Officer, Caparizon) and D Devaraj Dharmaraj (Zonal Head – Enterprise Business, Tata Teleservices Ltd). They talked about success stories of their clients like a school using IoT on the vehicles to ensure students safety, client solutions reimagined with cloud backend and so on.


References to learn more about Digital Transformation:
- Book: Digital to the core – Mark Raskino & Grahan Waller, Gartner Inc.
- Book: e Digital Transformation Playbook by David Rogers (Author)
- Web: Microsoft’s real stories of digital transformation
- YouTube: What is Digital Transformation? by Ionology

