In the current climate, enterprises must move fast to stay ahead of the competition and to ensure survival in the face of quickly evolving industry boundaries and business models. More and more enterprises are looking at digitalization to help them thrive and compete.

However, rushing headlong into digitalization can lead to trouble. Organizations can get bewildered by a kind of technology euphoria that leads to too-frequent strategy reviews, budget erosion, and, sometimes, very little headway on their transformation journey.

True transformation requires a thoughtful, strategic approach. It requires deep understanding of how users really interact with an enterprise’s systems, products, and services. It requires new platforms to ensure round-the-clock availability on all relevant channels. And it requires an infusion of artificial intelligence to generate new insights and to deliver experiences that are contextually aware, personalized, and differentiating. 

The best way to enable digital transformation is by thoughtful strategic planning. Wipro formulated an approach called an “art of the possible roadmap.” The roadmap identifies areas where digital technologies can be leveraged in innovative ways to build user-friendly and contextually aware products and services. To help enterprises create such a roadmap, Wipro developed a five-step approach (see Figure 1) designed to help enterprises reimagine their business processes with intelligent capabilities to realize strategic goals.

Figure 1: Constructing the Roadmap: A Five-step Plan

Step 1: Identify Relevant Value Streams

Many enterprises start digitalization at a granular level, like for a particular business unit or function or sub-business unit, but these rarely deliver the outsized benefits that companies are looking for – they’re just too siloed and narrow. Instead, start by analyzing the “value stream,” the path that extends from initial engagement with a customer or prospect all the way through to delivering a product or service as well as after-sales support and whatever tasks are required to build the ongoing relationship. 

Typically, an enterprise will have many value streams. Some example value streams might be “order to cash,” “prospect to customer,” or “source to pay.” The fact that there are many value streams means the enterprise will have to make choices about which value streams to start with on their implementation journey. Organizations have limited capacity to absorb too many changes in people, process, and technology that require multiple changes in their culture and behaviour. Value streams should be evaluated and selected based on business value, readiness for process digitization and technology maturity parameters outlined in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Factors for determining Value Streams for Digitalization 

2. Evaluate “Intelligence” in Value Streams

Once the value streams have been identified, each individual value stream needs to be broken down into value stages and assessed with respect to its potential for leveraging automation and intelligence, along two dimensions:

a. Intelligent Interactions: What is the potential to reimagine the way users in the value steams interact with more intelligent (i.e., AI-powered systems) considering the context of the moment of interaction? Each use case within a value stage can be assessed using multiple paradigms: empathy, speech, language, touch interactions, gesture interactions, and immersive experiences.

b. Intelligent Processes: This dimension drives the potential to reimagine how processes can become more dynamic and adaptive using cognitive/intelligent capabilities. Each value stage can be assessed using several possible paradigms:

• Sense and respond – Continuously receives and processes events from various source systems and responds by communicating decisions as a command or suggestion or reconfiguring system. For example, IoT predictive analytics can forecast issues with critical-path manufacturing equipment, thus avoiding production disruptions and maintaining revenue continuity.
• Digitization of processes – Examples include digitization of logbook processes in mining industry, leveraging ways to digitally capture or validate information from operators and using sensors and data historians to capture information about equipment.
• Conversational experience – A good use case here would be providing an interface that leverages natural language process and computer vision for field service engineers at an industrial OEM manufacturer to capture the actions/events performed in connection with a work order to auto-generate a service report and update install base.
• AI-based automation – Examples include calculating inventory using visual recognition, image processing, and machine learning; this kind of automation can help determine the gaps in reported inventory for high-tech manufacturing organizations.

Here is an real-world example of applying intelligence to value streams: Amazon has achieved impressive results from its 2016 acquisition of Kiva, a robotics company that automates picking and packing in Amazon warehouses. Using manual workers, Amazon’s “click to ship” cycle time ranged from 60 to 75 minutes; Kiva’s technology reduced this to 15 minutes.

3. Reimagine Value Streams

Business problems are complex – often too complex to solve by merely identifying digital opportunities and applying digital technologies. Enterprises should take an outside-in, customer-centric approach to reimagining intelligent value streams with design thinking workshops and crowdsourcing. For example, consider holding innovation workshops with all business stakeholders participating and present the latest digital technologies, potential capabilities identified in Step 2, and use cases across industries. These workshops also provide a forum for business stakeholders to really think about the status quo. This approach will help identify the initiatives/use cases that need modification in order to redefine employee, customer, or partner experiences and how processes will be executed in the new world of automation/intelligence.

Figure 3 shows the “Source to Pay” value stream broken down in value stages. Each value stage has been reimagined along two dimensions of interactions and processes to come up with ideas and initiatives for interjecting intelligence.

Figure 3: Art of the Possible – Initiatives for “Source to Pay” Value Stream

Initiatives identified through the reimagining process will often need to be supported by foundational technological capabilities or platforms. Platforms play a crucial role in bringing together common computing infrastructure, cognitive capabilities, event-driven services, and contextual capabilities.

Ultimately, platforms influence strategy, partnerships, and business needs and have a huge impact on the business outcomes of digitalization. One of the key forces behind the success of tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Alibaba are the intelligent platforms they have built for their innovative products and services.

4. Define the Art of the Possible roadmap

The first three steps – identifying value streams, assessing them for the potential to become intelligent, and reimagining in light of digital technologies – will generate a set of initiatives to enhance experiences, embrace intelligent automation, and build platforms to support scaling. Now, analyze that set of initiatives using a portfolio-based approach, looking at use cases over a one- to three-year horizon and based on the organization’s strategic directions, market conditions, risk, and reward.

In the near term, the enterprise should focus on use cases where there are proven technology solutions today – but should also identify use cases where a technology is emerging but not yet proven at scale. Over the medium to longer term, consider selecting unproven use cases to collaborate with third parties to innovate for first-mover advantage in the market.

Many of these initiatives require challenging the status quo, taking risks, breaking rules, and challenging existing policy and governance models. It may be related to modifying an existing governance model, organization structure, change management, etc. These supporting initiatives should be included as part of the overall plan.

The plan requires buy-in from the executive suite to generate momentum within the organization, hence these initiatives should be co-led by both business and technical leaders.

5. Realize business benefits iteratively

This art of the possible roadmap should be implemented in the form of virtuous cycle – design, try, learn, and redesign – using a design thinking, DevOps, and agile approach to manage risk and derive the benefits quickly. Embracing agile concepts like “fail fast,” “minimum viable product (MVP),” “user feedback,” and “time boxing” will help ensure the roadmap takes the enterprise on a meaningful, valuable transformation journey.

While the benefits of the art of the possible roadmap are immense, they can be difficult to measure. How, for example, can a company measure competitive advantage, or how well they are embracing digital adoption? Organizations should develop a model that clearly defines and articulates all the required areas, and a reasonable way to measure them. It is also important to establish a feedback mechanism to facilitate continuous monitoring of outcomes once the model is adopted. Such a monitoring mechanism will translate the practices to tangible outcomes throughout the timespan of the project.

The Roadmap is Just the Beginning

The reason enterprises develop strategies is to generate real results. The art of the possible roadmap is a powerful approach to developing digital strategies and the journey to digital transformation – but the real challenge comes when enterprises begin to implement their roadmaps. Even when compelling commercial use cases have been identified and created, regulatory and social barriers can raise the cost and slow the rate of adoption. Moreover, it is critical that roadmaps and initiatives have very strong support from executive leadership – essentially everyone in the C-suite and the board of directors as well.

Intelligent capabilities are important not only to stay competitive, but also to survive amidst the changing industry boundaries and business models. Wipro’s “Art of the Possible” framework evaluates the intelligence that can be embedded in processes by infusing cognitive capabilities. This is supplemented by our expertise in the emerging technologies that identify future technology scenarios that can be leveraged to further transform business capabilities.

Rajnish Kasat
Practice Partner, CIO Strategy and Advisory Services

Rajnish has over 24 years of experience in building and managing global teams to deliver digital consulting engagements and architecture services across industries. He routinely advises boards of directors, CXOs, and executive management on various aspects of IT and digital.

Karthik Reddy Nareddy
Lead Enterprise Architect, CIO Strategy and Advisory Services

Karthik has 13 years of experience in advising clients on IT strategy, digital enterprise architecture, and cloud strategy. He has a blend of experience in strategizing and also, driving IT transformation implementation to ensure business-IT alignment.