Amitava Sengupta on Digital Transitions

Digital has just become a part of our consciousness and our reality today.

Amitava Sengupta

Digital Transitions

Amitava Sengupta is the President and Chief Digital Officer of RPSG Group. In this role, he is responsible for planning, designing, and enablement of digital transformation strategies across the group companies. His interests lie in leveraging large scale data to drive intelligent decision-making, interoperable scalable architecture designs, new age technologies, and creating robust digital foundations. He holds a Masters and Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Jadavpur University Kolkata and has lived and worked in several countries across the globe.

What are the effects of an omnipresent, ever-connected digital world?

The Digital World, in my view, is so much integrated into our lives that the boundaries are now rather nebulous. If I do a journey map of what we go through as we traverse the day, we realise that both at work, at home, and at play –technology is the ubiquitous common factor.

Right from Alexa helping us choose the music to listen to in the early morning, the Garmin watch monitoring and reporting on our morning run, the GPS guiding us to our work destination of the day, the parking assistant helping us to safely park our cars, to the workplace solutions that help us get through our activities during the day - it has come to a state where we have stopped thinking about digital in any distinct way. It has just become a part of our consciousness and our reality today.

If you think back a few years, it was not always like this. When I started working, we did not even have a mobile device, we did not have a laptop that we would carry along, our televisions were not SMART TVs, our home systems were not connected to our mobile phones.

We have evolved in a way that we are very different from where we were 30 years ago – the evolution has already happened and technology and us are now one INDIVISIBLE whole.

With respect to the digital vision of a business conglomerate, what does it mean for an organisation to be digitally ready?

It is my strong belief that the goal of a business has always remained the same – drive-up revenue, and have profits grow, pretty much like the purpose of the ‘wheel’ to move forward, has always been the same. However, over a period, technology has evolved – we have gone from stone, to lighter wooden wheels, to adding axles for better speed and pickup, to rubber tubes to handle wear and tear, to engineered tyres.

Similarly, in business, we have moved from manual, to water and steam power, to electricity, to complex IT systems, and now on to advanced technologies like IOT, Cloud, BPA etc. Sometimes, technology has been so disruptive that it has moved beyond an enabling role to bringing in fundamental changes in the business model itself.

Today, Amazon, which is a technology platform is the largest retailer, the biggest fleet of taxis is a platform aggregator and so on. However, the fundamental objective of business has always been to improve efficiencies and profits, and reduce costs.

In reality, technology plays a key role in doing just that. To be digitally ready means the following things to me –

1. Have the technical capability to have an ‘accurate’ and ‘granular’ vision of the entire business operations and leverage the visibility to drive better decisions.

2. The capability to interact with the customers in a ‘safe and secured’ way.

3. The ability to leverage available technologies to improve ‘cycle times’.

4. Bring down ‘costs’ in each step – not only by ‘automating’ but through careful appreciation of what each of the steps mean and whether there are better ways of getting the same thing done.

5. And finally having a strong digital team in place that can look, evaluate, and guide the enterprise to take the right decisions and a business leadership that can consume this service.

In the personal space, how much digitally involved should one be so that there is a balance between the physical world and the digital world?

In my view, the divide, if you call it as such, has long ceased to be. Whether, we like it or not, digital technologies are taking a deeper route in our consciousness with each passing day.

If we think back how our daily lives have evolved over the last few decades, it will be clear that we as humans are long past that stage. Yuval Harari, the celebrated author and philosopher, puts it rather nicely when he says nowadays,we trust technology to make our daily decisions for us – where to eat, how to get there, which movie to watch etc. Now, just imagine how it would extend as it pervades to other areas of our lives – our education, career, marriage and other things. It is difficult to categorise this as good or bad. It is just the way things are evolving and we better learn to live with it.

That said, in my life in the western countries, I have seen that many people have taken up concrete steps and have disciplined their lives such that technology is less pervasive. In India, we have embraced it so much that sometimes I am not sure who is driving whom.

Technology has two fundamental edges over us:

ONE is interconnectivity, and SECOND is updateability. If we can leverage both properly, we can harness the capability to let it help us grow and improve. I see no reason for drawing a boundary and saying that we will not use technology for whatever reasons. Technology now creates music, paints, performs surgeries, and even runs companies independently. My point is that if it helps us, why not?