Does Your Designation Read Chief Digital Officer? These Five Tips Will Make Your Job Easier Companies should try to balance their investment in traditional businesses and look at developing new business models.

Every other company in India and globally is looking at options to maximize businesses with technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain etc. The first step towards this direction is to adopt digitization and appoint a chief digital officer, but is that enough?

According to Accenture's recent study, $1 trillion (almost of half of India's GDP) was globally spent on digitalization last year. But the results do not seem to be promising enough.

Sarajit Jha, Chief Digital Value Acceleration, Tata Steel, feels that businesses are still deploying digital technologies in silos and many even without a proper roadmap. As a result, they continue to play catch-up in the race to digital reinvention.

With technologies revamping not just the processes and businesses model, but also customer ecosystem, Accenture suggests six tips for the CDO that can help them work out their digital reinvent strategy.

#Digital Nucleus

Firstly, the companies need to transform their elemental process, including engineering and production processes along with their business model. For instance, Bajaj Electricals has set up a dedicated IoT centre to act as the fulcrum of its digital transformation.

"The center aims to make an extensive use of real-time analytics to help its B2B and B2C businesses make data-driven decisions using dashboards and advanced modeling. The company is also working to ensure consistent deployment of digital technologies across its value chain," The report noted.

The company also replaced its manual bill discounting process with Yes bank-developed blockchain system, making all of its transactions.

#Innovate Your Business Model

Apart from digitalizing its core businesses, companies should try to balance their investment in traditional businesses and look at developing new business models.

For example, last year in June 2016, Mahindra Tractors started a farm equipment sharing platform called Trinngo. Through the platform, farmers could use tractors from both the company's fleet and private players and pay based on their usage.

#Customization

With the advent of technologies like big data, AI, and virtual reality, improving customer experiences should be one of the most important agendas of the company's digital reinvent strategy.

Combinations of these technologies will not just help companies in bringing down their operational cost but also provide customized products and services to the customer.

#Work Force

The rapid adoption of technology and digitalization has created a dismay related to job security in the market and the CDO's need to address this issue.

How can you help? Accenture, in its reports, says, companies need to give a try to collaborative approach like Tata Steel's program. To build a digital ready workforce, the company has fostered one-to-one relationships between millennial employees and the more experienced leadership team, which will help the latter to catch up with latest trends.

#Ecosystem

Companies need to create a robust ecosystem with not just their suppliers and distributors but also with start-ups. Such relationships will help the company scale new business models rapidly across the digital value chain.

In fact, during a recent interaction with Entrepreneur India, T-hub's COO Srinivas Kollipara insisted that there is a need for large corporate collaboration with start-ups for innovation. T-hub is one of the largest incubators in India and has worked with companies like Intel, Samsung, and Boeing on programs related to corporate innovation.