 The digital transformation has become a reality in our country and indeed we have the Digital India movement or the campaign that was started by the government of India six years ago has now come to real fruition as we see digital transformation being adopted in each and every sphere of our country. Whether it is small businesses, startups, corporates, everybody is seeing digital transformation landscape becoming part of the digital transformation landscape and today we are here talking to Mrs. Arundhati Bhattacharya who is going to share with us as to what is really the setup or this landscape getting towards and how is it that we have reached here and where are we going forward when it comes to the digital adoption in this country. So welcome Mrs. Arundhati, we warmly welcome you to the Taken Innovation Summit by Entrepreneur and we are looking forward to having your thoughts in the next few minutes about what do you feel the tech transformation and the journey is going to be all about. Certainly the pandemic while it's of course given us enough nightmares and made us sit at home but I think it's also done the work of many, many decades in just about one year where there has been natural transition for businesses to move towards digital for people to adopt digital very quickly. So what is your thought on how is the digital transformation really going and what is it that you look forward in by 2025 to be the digital landscape map of it. So first of all thank you very much and I'm extremely honoured to be on this platform today. Regarding digital transformation you know it's obviously migrated from being something that was good to have to must have and it is true that you know the work that we probably would have done over a period of three four years is actually now being done over a period of few months because this is something that I had talked about a number of years back maybe six, seven years back and I had said even at that time that you know unless you have a very strong technology backbone and a very strong digital offering there is no way that we are going to survive into the next 10, 20 years. It is especially true for India I think and it's true for India merely because you know the numbers of people that we have and the income levels of people that we have it's very difficult for us to deliver all services through the brick and mortar route and the brick and mortar route also has an issue in the sense that it doesn't leave the kind of audit trails that you wanted to leave. Now digital is something that actually enables you to deliver services at far lower cost with audit trails and with personalisation because again your demands will be very different from my demands. Your requirements will be very different from mine. Now how do you ensure that the offering that you bring is something that is suitable to you and the offering that you bring me is something that's suitable for me? This kind of personalisation, this kind of you know individual attention that is required to be given is not possible in the physical space. You can only do that for large customers, you cannot do it for the smaller customers and if you look at India, India is all about the small person. You know the much of the entire population rests on the bottom of the pyramid and if you're looking at that you know digital and technology are the only things that are going to enable us to have a more you know equal society and I give a lot of emphasis on equality on ensuring that nobody is left behind merely because the tensions that are caused in a social society where you know you have the haves and the have nots and the positions are bifurcating or you know they are becoming, the gap is becoming wider. If that happens then actually speaking that society is bound to have a lot of issues, is bound to have a lot of unrest. So for us you know if we look at it you know just imagine the area of education. I think in the area of education if you see the quality of education you get in the rural areas and the quality of education you get in the urban areas there's a big difference. However today because of digital the same quality of education can now be delivered even to the rural areas. There is of course a need for infrastructure in order to ensure that this material that is now available and capable of being delivered is actually delivered for that you need the broadband communication, you need tablets in the hand of every student but the fact of the matter is that the solution is now in our hands and we know that even as we give the right kind of education to our urban population we can replicate the same thing for the rural population that they need not really fall behind. As I said you know there is the need for this infrastructure that needs to become much better for the country and NASCARM as a body has been interacting with the government and the government has been reiterating its commitment in ensuring that this infrastructure growth is really going to be pushed and is going to pick up pace and as that happens many of the social services whether it be education, whether it be health, whether it be just you know the delivery of subsidies, the delivery of you know minimum kind of you know support systems all of these you will find will become far better in quality and quantity and therefore I think you know if you look at what has happened in the pandemic what has happened of course is extremely sad frankly speaking it's not happened in a hundred years and I hope it will not happen in the next 200 or maybe more years okay but the fact remains that you know while there has been a terrible experience that we've had on the reverse side of it there has been benefits and these are those benefits. Absolutely I think in that sense if if some good has come out of the pandemic it is the digital transformation and its adoption in the country. Now ma'am I understand that digital transformation requires a lot of technology infrastructure to go inside in an organization or in a state or in a village wherever it is going to happen and bring a change but also it's about human change and people adopting true technology in a way that they feel that it's a part of their life so particularly where do you feel in what sectors in what areas in this country do you feel that this human change has come to happen together with the technology infrastructure that is being laid out. So I think you know Eddeck has taken to it very well so for that matter is not the health services if you look at for instance the COVID app it sort of gives you the understanding of how much we have how far we have gone because the COVID app is extremely easy to register on you can get your appointments on it for your vaccinations you can get your certifications from it on vaccinations. It has a QR code so you know you take a print out of it or you just show it on your mobile phone and it can be immediately validated to see whether the thing is right or not. So you know health also has taken very well to this particular activity but if you look at all of the sectors so whether it be manufacturing whether it be retail whether it be media and communications I really can't find a single sector where you know this has really not been adopted. I have a 92 year old aunt at home and she is a person who obviously you know isn't able to go around much so the newspaper is her lifeline. Today she reads three newspapers on the net okay so something that I would not even have believed possible maybe even a few months back because you know we stopped taking physical newspapers on account of fears of infection and things like that and she couldn't stay without her morning newspaper so we taught her to read it on the computer and she doesn't know completely I mean she's quite independent about it and she reads it and in fact she finds it better because you know she can make the fonts bold enough for her to read it very comfortably. So you know the change that has happened whether it be for the youngsters or it be for the older people it's enormous and I really can't think of any particular sector that has not benefited from it it's very difficult to think of a sector that's not benefited from it even for that matter I'm on the board of a very large company and they are they have very large manufacturing manufacturing facilities now what do they do they even use things like drones now for surveillance to ensure that all of the equipment is working fine that there are no fires or no you know indications of anything going wrong similarly you know if you look at the oil and gas companies today for instance they can have entire 3d virtualizations of their platforms and those 3d virtualizations actually give you signals from ahead of time in case something is malfunctioning so that you know that particular stuff can be closed down and you can carry out all of the repairs even the repairs for that matter can be done virtually and as you know we are a software as a service company during this period when we were working we were working from home and we are continuing to work from home we have got into new negotiations closed deals actually implemented stuff and gone alive with those clients remotely everything has been done remotely so it's been an entirely new world that we have discovered that we can actually do which you know was never sort of even imagined earlier merely because there was no need for it but now that the need has occurred we find that so much more can be done and if you can do so much more remotely you can imagine what happens in the far reaches of our country if we only have the communication network going and the devices in the hands of the people so much more can be delivered to them than what has been delivered to them. Sure absolutely ma'am and given the fact that you know so many companies are adopting take on the business side small companies corporates startups you know what what is how do you envision the future of enterprise tech in India how do you see it growing in the coming years at NASCAR how are they envisioning the industry will grow as an enterprise tech in the coming years and particularly what areas I mean you know that sales force of course SAS is important but then there's so many technologies out there which are important for businesses so any any forecast that has been created towards it? No forecasts of course are there I wouldn't be able to give you the numbers straight away of the bat but you know there is going to be huge amount of of change especially on account of use of AI on use of ML that is machine learning use of robotics use of quantum computing use of things like blockchain so all of these things are stuff that are definitely going to make a very large difference to the way we do things from the way we do things now if you're looking at enterprise tech enterprise tech obviously is already you know changing pretty swiftly merely because they are now understanding that they need to be omnichannel you cannot only be either physical or digital and I think there at least in India where you have a pretty large number of people who are still you know not all that digital savvy and yet you have this younger generation that seem to be wired for digital even if they've not been taught it they can immediately you know they just sort of they are very intuitive about it right and I keep giving this example that you know if I bring a new phone home my daughter is able to find out far more functionalities on that phone than I ever will she does it within hours I take months and I still don't know those functionalities right so I've been using Google Meet now for the last 16 17 months and then just the other day she she told me why don't you whiteboard and I said how do you do it and she taught me now she nobody's taught her Google Meet right she's again learned on her own and they do it because they have some intuitive capabilities of doing it but because we have this very large proportion of the older generation like me you will not be seeing in India at least a total shift to digital right it will have to be a kind of a digital kind of a presence where there is a physical as well as a digital presence and depending upon times of when we can approach the physical for what purpose and when digital is good enough or when it's not possible to do the physical every enterprise now has understood that they need to own the customer okay owning the customer and not only the customer even on the supply side they need to have a number of channels to approach their supply side as well as the dealership side as well as the customer side having a single channel attached to any particular what should I say to any particular vertical is not going to work and that being the case enterprise is something that is really metamorphosing very very quickly as they shift towards ensuring that they are as good in the digital space as they are in the physical space so you will see you know even in retail many of the very large retailers who are totally physical now are becoming they're having their own digital channels and those some of those digital channels experiences really out of the world it's very good in the kind of experience that they are trying to give so the fact is they understand that you know you can't close down all the stores you don't need to on the other hand you also need to have this other outlet because at any point of time you will have different classes of customers different environments which you will need to continue to address in order to ensure that your business is not going through dips and ups and you know so that you have a consistent growth in your business as you would have in any normal times. Sure and ma'am you know it's with the adoption of digital transformation that is taking place we are also seeing another situation which is a tech talent crunch that is coming to happen in India there is you know and with SMEs corporates everybody sort of looking for more tech talent and of course you know enterprise tech itself looking for more tech talent there is overall a great crunch in at least in the short term that we are beginning to see how do we address that as a nation because you know now that we are stepping forward we don't want to step backward just because you know they're not enough fans who can manage it so what could be a solution to this? So you know we are already working pretty closely with the national skill development mission we are also working with various other academic institutions NASCOM has something going on the skill side where again we are partnering so most of these companies the tech companies they have their own platforms which enable skilling in a very gamified manner so it can be done from within an organization it can even be done from outside and many of these are free for people to use but it is a fact that there is a terrible tech crunch and the tech skills crunch I'll say and this is something that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible see just as China was the manufacturing sort of backbone of the world India actually can be the talent backbone for the world we have enough say close to a million people graduating as engineers every single year there is no other company no other country maybe other than China that's doing that now out of these quite a large number of them can easily be re-skilled in the right kind of technology that is required for this digitization effort to go forward also you know in respect of your own employees we have found that it is six times cheaper to re-skill an employee rather than to sort of do a lateral hire right so you know within the companies themselves there is a lot of skilling efforts that are going on so we have huge amount of enablement exercises that we do on a monthly quarterly basis to ensure that our workforce is kept up to speed at the same time we are working with the ecosystem because today you know a lot of people are hiring people who are implementing these applications they are hiring people who are actually buying these applications they are hiring because they want to have centers of excellence within their IT departments so as to be able to make the best use of the applications that they are actually putting out money for similarly you know companies like ours that's the OEMs they are hiring so there is a lot of hiring going on for research and development for engineering for even for support functions because after you've taken something you know you do need to have a support function to troubleshoot any issues that might come up and issues come up all the time you know that so you know you need people for the support function you also need people the tech industry itself is finding so much of requirement that you know you need tech people even for the selling motion so even the pre-sales piece needs technology oriented and enabled people so that you know they can actually demo to you put together demonstrations as to what this particular application can do for you so there are there are requirements at various stages of the entire cycle for tech-skilled people and there is a crunch for that there's no doubt about it but I think you know it's also a huge opportunity because none of this is really rocket science right just if you have already been a techie upgrading yourself is not a problem right even if you have not been a techie today the way the technology is happening you know there are various as I said various kinds of jobs that you can take up in the tech space and not all of them needs you to code in fact today most of the platforms have clicked not code so they are all no code no code platform right right so to that extent you know people from other areas can also get in and actually start understanding how how these whole thing this entire thing works you know me for instance even at my age I have come to work for a tech company with a Finns background I don't have a tech background at all but at the end of the day there are people that are coming from various other areas and they are coming into the technology industry because they find it interesting and because it is not all that difficult for you to at least understand the rudiments of what is being done and I would say that you know for all those people out there who feel that you know the end of the world is coming it is time for them to reskill themselves right reskilling is not such a difficult matter it can be done similarly for the youngsters who are coming up they need to be up skilled with the kind of skill you know the kind of things that we are looking for in the market and again that means that we have to work in partnership with government with industry with academia in order to get there sure and ma'am you know on a larger level how do you sort of advise a company which is getting into digital transformation mode to you know how do they plan this transformation I mean you know if one was to just sort of give them give an overview about a digital transformation roadmap for an organization which is let's say a mid-sized somewhere between a mid-sized to a large-sized organization how should they sort of do it in the right way what should be there they need to do it seamlessly because obviously they need to manage the consumer experience in a digital environment with their physical environment and then they need to sort of also budget things right you know what kind of cost for tech talent or for the actual technology proposition that they need to put in place so how is it that they should plan themselves better so you know there is a Mackenzie study and this was of course I think just as the pandemic was starting that said that almost 80% of companies had started the digital transformation but only 3% had finished it right so that shows you how difficult it is to do this transformation unless you have the right methodology for doing it now I would say one of the first things that is required is the CEO buy-in unless the C-suite is completely bought in and completely committed to this exercise it's very difficult to get it down the first and foremost is the CEO buy-in the C-suite buy-in but once you have that you've then got to extend the buy-in to the rest of the organization right because unless the rest of the organization also welcomes the change because it is a change it is a change of humongous proportions for very many organizations now unless and until you have an open mind towards the change you are then actually you know sort of pushing against the tide and that's not easy okay that's not easy to do so if you have tailwinds instead of headwinds then you know getting there becomes much faster the second thing I think that you need to understand is how digitally mature is your organization if you see the goal could be the same for everybody but you may need to climb two steps to get to the goal or you may need to climb 20 steps to get to the goal you have to be realistic about how many steps you need to climb and then you know you need to set your expectations accordingly right you will still get to the goal but instead of getting to it at one leap which a company that has two steps to climb can do if you are at the one of those companies that has 20 steps to climb you need to break it up into pieces to see what needs to get delivered at which stage and then still do the transformation but do it in a much more orderly manner and do it in a manner where your expectations are not getting constantly sort of you know belied or constantly you know not met so that you know a disappointment sets in that should not happen so when we are taking up a project it is important both for the customer and for the seller to do a very clear understanding of where the customer is and then what will be the effort required in order to get to another place right that is the third thing that is very important to do and the last but not least thing I think is the ability to really do the change management because you know the implementations of technology is not really a big challenge it can happen but once it has happened if I don't have adoption then the whole thing is wasted so I need adoption and for adoption what I need is for people not only to have the buying but also to take the trouble to understand how to do it and then get on with doing it initially it may not be very comfortable okay it never is but then subsequently once you have got over that first inertia you know as per the laws of physics the inertia is something when the car starts moving it needs maximum power to get to the first movement after that movement becomes much easier right it is the same with these transformations the first move out always needs far more effort once you are past the first block thereafter you will see things falling in place so if you are looking at what should be the roadmap for a company in order to do this they first and foremost must understand the requirements secondly they must be convinced that yes this is the right way to go about it thirdly they must create buying from the entire organization and fourth they must do change management in a proper way only when this happens then only you will find you know successful implementations and successful implementations are always joint efforts they are not efforts only by the company or the customer or only by the seller or only by the implementer they are all joint pursuits with everybody understanding that this is the goal and this is how we get to it if it is done in that manner there is no reason why there should be any disappointment sure no man that's so well put in I think it's a journey that one has to do in a digital transformation and therefore it's important that it's a together exercise instead of then first doing it and then trying people to put them on the job and getting them sort of be woven in into the system thank you so much for talking to us ma'am it's been such a wonderful session with you and you know so many ideas and so many takeaways that have come out of this session for people or organizations who are today looking to get into technology and for startups who are there and growing out there in fact subsequently we're going to move into the entrepreneur awards where we'll recognize some young startups and organizations who are doing really well so any message that you want to give? Yeah of course I think the startups are now turning out to be the backbone of the country you know I really and truly get excited at some of these startups and the ideas that they have brought to the table the amount of work that they have done in order to actually you know get that idea to be live because you know I believe that the law is very clear that is if for an entrepreneur if there is anything that can go wrong will go wrong the fact that all of these people have overcome that and they are still here and they are qualifying for these prizes it just tells me that you know these people are outstanding guys outstanding people and the thing is they are not only creating value for themselves they're creating value for the company for the country they're creating value for others you know so to a great extent I would say that you know they are really and truly contributing to the making of our nation our nation is one such where you have to be you know self-sufficient you have to be there out there getting your own thing done because there is not too much of a support system to enable you to do it the fact that these guys have been able to really you know still rectify the ideas they had and put the business on the ground they need huge congratulations for it so my congratulations to all of the people who actually won the prizes but also to the people who competed for them it's important to compete and even they are creating great value in the ecosystem though they may not be actually recognized by prices over here but they are recognized by society as doing something which is really very important so my best very best wishes to all of them. Thank you very much ma'am and it's been wonderful speaking to you here today. Thank you.