Shailesh J.

Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay

&
Technology Club

Presents

Technology and Analytics Continuum

Data management and Disruptive Technology: -

Reshaping the way how business is done

20th March, 2016

1 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

Continuum
Continuum, the rolling seminar series, is the flagship event of the annual industry interaction sessions at Shailesh
J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay. The Continuums are held across the various domains of
management like Consulting, Finance, Human Resources, Marketing, Operations, Systems and Technology
Management. Continuums aim to cover the latest trends in management by inviting eminent speakers from
industry and academia. These seminars focus on the issues and challenges faced by management functions, and
aim at drawing insights from the knowledge and experience of the speakers.

The one day event provides a very good learning experience for the students. It provides a platform for their
inquisitive minds to interact with industry stalwarts. Enlightening sessions by eminent speakers are generally
followed by rounds of mutual interaction between the speaker and the students. This helps the students to get a
holistic picture of the industry trends. The event is a platform for deliberation, knowledge sharing and aims to
develop curiosity among the participants regarding specific aspects of the business. The event has been received
very well in the past by delegates from the industry and various business schools. The event has grown from
strength to strength over the years, and is now well acknowledged by the industry.

Technology and Analytics Continuum

The Technology and Analytics Continuum aims to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on the latest
developments in the field of technology management, analytics and innovation. The continuum provides exposure
to the students to leverage upon their strong technical background and facilitate the transfer of technical expertise
into innovations that impact the competitive market place.

By hosting this Continuum, we expect to achieve the following objectives:

 To understand how Technology and Analytics can be used as a strategy to gain a competitive edge

 To understand how companies manage innovations and process changes with respect to new technologies

 Understanding the importance and commercial advantages of IPR and IP policy

 To understand and consider the possibility of a career in Technology Management and Analytics

The Technology and Analytics Continuum explores myriad aspects across sectors, by initiating discussions on
issues at the forefront of the industry. Each Continuum consists of a series of events centered on a particular
theme. Eminent speakers from industry and students of management converge for a day-long event.

2 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

Technology Management Continuum 2015
Technology Management Continuum 2015 was organized on 14th March 2015 with a theme reflecting the role of
technology in transforming the businesses in a dynamic world. The Continuum saw a series of lectures centered
on the theme:
Transforming businesses through Technology Management:
“How emerging trends in technology have impacted Business environment”

The main motive of Technology Management Continuum 2015 was to highlight the significant role played by
technology management in businesses, especially with the advent of the digital revolution. The different ways in
which technology works towards providing better customer value and thus ensuring that businesses stay ahead of
the competitors were discussed in the Continuum.

Speakers: Technology Management Continuum 2015:

 Mr. Sudhir Kumar Mittal – Vice President and Chief Architect (Integration & Data) - Reliance Jio
Infocomm Ltd
 Ganesh Gupta – Global Delivery Head – Banking and Financial Services, Vice President, Syntel
 Mr. Vikas Malpani – Head – CF Groups, Co-Founder, CommonFloor.com
 Mr. Himanshu Laiker – Director, Business Development and Strategy accounts, Medtronic South Asia
 Mr. Nadir Bhalwani - Director, Technology Operations CRISIL Ltd
 Mr. Ashok Jambur – DGM – HRD and Training, Indian Oil Corporation Ltd
 Dr. Anand Deshpande - Founder and CEO of Persistent Systems
 Mr. Siddhartha Das, Director, Product Management, Capillary Technologies

3 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016
Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016 will be organized on 20th March 2016 with a theme reflecting the
role of technology and data management in transforming the businesses in a dynamic world. The Continuum will
see a series of lectures centered on the theme:

Data Management and Disruptive Technology: Reshaping the way how business is
done

The parade of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs is relentless and is unfolding on many fronts. Almost
any advance is billed as a breakthrough, and the list of “next big things” grows ever longer. Yet some technologies
do in fact have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, rearrange value pools,
and lead to entirely new products and services. Business leaders can’t wait until evolving technologies are having
these effects to determine which developments are truly big things. They need to understand how the competitive
advantages on which they have based strategy might erode or be enhanced a decade from now by emerging
technologies—how technologies might bring them new customers or force them to defend their existing bases or
inspire them to invent new strategies. Policy makers and societies need to prepare for future technology, too. To
do this well, they will need a clear understanding of how technology might shape the global economy and society
over the coming decade.

Big data and analytics have climbed to the top of the corporate agenda. Together, they promise to transform the
way companies do business, delivering the kind of performance gains last seen in the 1990s, when organizations
redesigned their core processes. And as data-driven strategies take hold, they will become an increasingly
important point of competitive differentiation. First, companies must be able to identify, combine, and manage
multiple sources of data. Second, they need the capability to build advanced-analytic models for predicting and
optimizing outcomes. Third, and most critical, management must possess the muscle to transform the organization
so that the data and models actually yield better decisions. Two important features underpin those competencies:
a clear strategy on how to use data and analytics to compete and the deployment of the right technology
architecture and capabilities.

4 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

Underlying Themes
Listed below are the some of the suggestive and non-restrictive sub-themes for discussions:

Improving Business IQ for Sustained Competitive Advantage driven by data

Data and the key insights that can be derived from it have emerged as powerful strategic assets for businesses.
Decisions supported by data insights can give a company a strong competitive edge, by enabling it to adapt more
effectively to changing market conditions, drive operational efficiency throughout the organisation and seize new
opportunities. Companies that are slow to adopt analytics, on the other hand, run the risk of being disrupted and
outmaneuvered by faster and more agile, insight-driven competitors.
To reap the benefits of analytics, a company should look to transform into an insight-driven enterprise. With the
internet of things generating large amounts of data, costs of computing plummeting and more intuitive
visualization tools on the rise, now is the time to adopt a data-centric approach to business for a competitive
advantage.

Data Analytics emerging as the key influence behind business decisions:

With great development in semiconductor storage devices, the issue is no longer about owning the most data,
rather it’s about how to derive insights from it. In other words, how to transform data into insights and then
insights into a real business advantage. With the advent of social media and portable devices like smartphones,
tablets, everyday a gigantic amount of data is created. But to what extent is this being leveraged by the companies?
The reality is, turning mountains of data into valuable, practical and actionable business analytics is not nearly as
straightforward as people believe. To gain more concrete understanding of the opportunities and challenges that
data analytics (D&A) presents, KPMG carried out a survey in 2013 where they interviewed 144 CFOs and CIOs
of major companies around the world (the ones with annual turnover in excess of $1 billion). A few key insights
are given below:

 69% consider Data Analytics to be crucially or very important to their current growth plans
 56% said to have changed their business strategy to meet the challenges of big data
 42% consider integrating data technology into existing systems and/or business models to be the biggest
challenge their companies have faced regarding data capture
 85% said that one of their biggest challenges with analytics, specifically, is implementing the right
solutions to accurately analyze and interpret data
 75% expressed some level of difficulty in making decisions around analyzing data
 Respondents said that their biggest barrier to implementing a Data Analytics strategy across their business
is in identifying what data to collect
 Although there was a general consensus among the respondents about the importance of data and
analytics, nearly everyone agreed that they could be utilizing in a better manner

5 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

There are successful examples of companies such as Amazon and Google, where data analytics is the foundation
of the enterprise. But for most legacy companies, data-analytics success has been limited to a few tests or to
narrow slices of the business. Very few have achieved what we would call “big impact through big data,” or
impact at scale. The potential of data analytics requires the building blocks of any good strategic transformation:
it starts with a plan, demands the creation of new senior-management capacity to really focus on data, and, perhaps
most important, addresses the cultural and skill-building challenges needed for the front line (not just the analytics
team) to embrace the change. Descriptive and predictive analytics have increased greatly in popularity due to
advances in computing technology, techniques for data analysis, and mathematical modelling. Desktop tools can
easily create reports and summaries of analytic results that help decision makers readily understand the findings
and their implications. These tools create tables, charts, and graphs to present the data visually, which can help to
clearly communicate the meaning of the data. The companies, who have braced analytics in the right manner,
have been able to attain the following objectives:

• Cost reduction from big data technologies

• Time reduction from big data
• Developing new big data-based offerings
• Supporting international business decisions

Nowadays the use of analytics is not limited within the technology firms, it’s being used in every aspect of
business decision making. There is little doubt that every business can benefit from becoming more analytical in
understanding its customers, performing its operations and making its decisions.

Driving Customer Engagement through Technology:

Customers are everything to the business and without them there would not be any business. Customer
engagement is of paramount importance for any organization to sustain in the long term. The benefits that
emphasize the importance of customer engagement are
 Understand customer needs and expectations
 Discover factors that encourage customer involvement
 Identify 'at risk' customers and implement measures to prevent client defection
 Reduce churn, increase retention and identify up sell opportunities
 Enhance brand loyalty and company reputation
 Acquire new customers through word of mouth marketing
Customers are transitioning to communicating and buying through digital channels. This has increased the
importance of customer engagement manifold. If we look at the future, what is trending from an organization
perspective is integration and from the customer perspective is mobility. A customer is not going to wait long and
organizations need to leverage the technology to be responsive to the customer needs and changing lifestyle.
Marketers consider engagement to be the definitive umbrella term for online mechanisms that deliver competitive
advantage to those employing them and contribute to the creation of “loyalty beyond reason”. Engagement is

6 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context and, more specifically, engagement is
a prospect's interaction with a marketing communication in a way that can be proven to be predictive of sales
effects. The online experience, where competitors are a mouse-click away and peer-to-peer communication
subject’s brands to forensic scrutiny, has to be skillful enough to sway an empowered, informed, and increasingly
skeptical consumer.

Emerging Area in Analytics and its relevance to the Banking Sector

The Banking industry is a fast growing sector in India. According to an IBEF report, the banking industry in India
has the potential to become the fifth largest banking industry in the world by 2020 and third largest by 2025
according to a KPMG-CII report. In order to stay competitive, banks in India are taking the data analytics route
to lure new customers, retain them, find opportunities to upsell and cross-sell and minimize their own losses. One
of the first instances of the use of analytics can be traced back to the early 2000s when HDFC Bank Ltd, put in
place a data warehouse and started investing in technology that would help it make sense of the massive troves
of unstructured data captured by its information technology (IT) systems.
With the analytics engine in place, Banks can track every aspect of a typical customer’s financial habits. The
analytics tools also give the bank insights into personal habits of its customers, allowing it to promote offers
accordingly. Analytics is also used to reduce chances of money laundering by identifying suspicious activity such
moving money to multiple accounts, finding large single-day cash deposits, opening a number of accounts in a
short period of time or sudden activity in long-dormant accounts. Using analytics, the banks also able to keep
track of credit histories of customers and can hand out loans accordingly.

Robotics Process Automation and how it is changing the ITES landscape today
Robotic Automation aims to use a computer (a.k.a. robot) to manipulate existing application software (CRMs,
ERPs, help desk and claim applications) in the same way that a person works with those systems and the
presentation layer to perform a specific task.

The use of the word “robotic” to describe this rapidly growing field is somewhat misleading. These are not the
robots of science fiction with artificial intelligence. Currently, the phrase ‘Robotic process automation’ is used
to refer to the use of sophisticated computer software that automates rule-based processes without the need for
constant human supervision.

For enterprises, IT companies, BPOs and shared services that use large scale, high-volume human labor, with an
intrinsic exigency for productivity and cost efficiency, RPA technology adds impetus to business innovation and
profitability. It enables organizations to configure software robots that automate manual and repetitive rule-based
tasks at a fraction of the cost of their human equivalent, and to integrate without disrupting the legacy system.
Robots are easy to train and see the interface like a human. They can act as automated assistants and are designed
to collaborate with humans while permanently reporting on progress.

7 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

Benefits of RPA includes: Scalability, Significant cost reductions, Self-build capabilities, New business
negotiations/sell strategy, Leveraging existing talent, Governance and reporting, Accuracy and Improved process
analysis and improvement

RPA performs straight-through processing tasks by reading applications through dedicated APIs on an operating
system either prior to application display or on the screen. Besides the ability to work on different kinds of
applications, these robots are able to organize the procedural knowledge learnt over a period of time into a shared
library to be used by other robots.

In doing the above, they create a gold mine of opportunities for businesses. No longer will IT departments,
especially in large organizations, be burdened with IT and process legacy. No longer will tactical needs wait in
queue for IT department’s nod and budget approvals. And, process re-engineering will not take as long as it does
today. BPOs will now use their industry insights into creating automated vertical-specific solutions while passing
on the cost benefit to their clients. Their own labor will be reskilled for tasks requiring intelligent decision-making.

Data analytics opportunities and challenges in offering engaging services to smart

phone users
By 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating revenue of more than $77
billion and making apps one of the most popular computing tools for users across the globe, according to Gartner,
Inc. As a result, Gartner predicts that mobile users will provide personalized data streams to more than 100 apps
and services every day.

Mobile apps have become the official channel to drive content and services to consumers. From entertainment
content to productivity services, from quantified-self to home automation, there is an app for practically anything
a connected consumer may want to achieve. This connection to consumer services means users are constantly
funnelling data through mobile apps. As users continue to adopt and interact with apps, it is their data — what
they say, what they do, where they go — that is transforming the app interaction paradigm.

Currently, apps often provide an opportunity for brands to reach and engage with customers in a direct way, and
therefore data coming from the user is often treated as a resource. This is especially true of free apps, which in
2013 account for 92 percent of app downloads. App users are providing troves of data and often accept advertising
or data connectivity in exchange for access to the app.

Brands and businesses are already using mobile apps as a primary component of their user engagement strategies,
and as the use of mobile devices, including wearable devices, expands into other areas of consumer and business
activities, mobile apps will become even more significant.

8 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

Wearable devices will use mobile apps as their conduit for data exchange and user interface, because many of
them will have few or no user interface capabilities. Offloading that responsibility to the mobile device means the
wearable devices will depend on apps for all types of user input or output, configuration, content creation and
consumption, and in some cases, basic connectivity.

Mobile apps are often a vehicle for cognizant computing, in which the data gathered through the use of the apps
and the analytics around it are becoming more important in both volume and value. In fact, it can be so
sophisticated that through their solution providers, consumer brands know a lot about any individual consumer,
such as the consumer's demographic data, location, preferences, habits, and even his or her social circle, in some
cases.

The amount of data generated by millions of smartphones users, combined with the rapid rate at which this data
is created, makes it difficult for standard processing technologies to analyse the massive amount of data.
Furthermore, the data is pulled from a variety of sources including the app store, social networks, web reviews,
data based on location, actual device content like music and past searches, and more, making it even more
daunting to analyse the data. Standard processing technologies simply can’t analyse this high volume, high
variety, and high velocity data. Only “big data” technologies often used from network analytics to drug research
development and beyond, are designed to collect, manage and analyse massive amount of diversified data.
Applying big data technologies to the agile app world raises two main constraints:

1. Massive computing resources. Fortunately, developments in cloud computing, a technology allowing

companies to easily rent and use “by the hour” computing resources from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft,
have made these resources much more accessible, even to start-ups and single developers.

2. Talent. Although there are many off-the-shelf tools to assist in coping with the massive amount of data,
various situations still pose significant challenges that require domain specific knowledge. Precise experience
with data handling, including data-working with distributed, non-relational data bases with terabytes of data, and
prior experience with algorithms, including machine learning, natural language processing, and dealing with noisy
data, are truly required to make full use of the valuable big data and the insights it can provide.

Web Services and Engineered system: Innovation driving the ROI

Web services may top the IT world's buzzword and hype list these days, but unless it can show a real return on
investment (ROI), it will go the way of many other much-hyped technologies. Before deciding on an ROI for a
Web services project, keep in mind that there are two different types of possible ROIs — an ROI for a project
that will generate new revenue, and an ROI for a project in which time and money will be saved. As a general
rule, it's easier to figure out an ROI when new revenue is generated than when you're focusing on cost-savings,
simply because it can be difficult to accurately figure out how much money and time a project actually saves.
Engineered Systems Help Simplify IT, Power Innovation. With the IT environment getting more complex, the
technology infrastructure market is undergoing a shift towards integrated systems .In addition to the growing need

9 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016

for simplifying IT complexity, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and enhanced security are factors driving this
trend. Single-stack solutions like Oracle's Engineered Systems are expected to be an overriding trend for the IT
industry. Integrated platforms on the other hand combine hardware and software for a targeted functionality
whether it is to manage big data, power cloud or consolidate databases. Enterprises are realizing that consolidating
workloads from multiple machines onto a single, engineered system works faster; is less expensive and just makes
good business sense. Innovation may be particularly in vogue today. However, the most successful companies
have long since known its value. Southwest Airlines—one of the few profitable players in a beleaguered
industry—innovated by renegotiating the customer interface, offering a no-frills service in exchange for lower
fares. Wal-Mart innovated by reconfiguring its supply chain.

IOT & Big data : Changing the landscape of traditional business

In the past, organizations could not access data sources easily. Neither did the computing power exist, nor did the
ability to pluck relevant information rapidly from massive amounts of text, video, audio and graphic data. But
today the technology has improved to the extent that clear, powerful, and informative visual models give clarity,
depth and context to the river of information.

Cloud computing becomes faster and cheaper to more organizations every year. They can now access not only
structured data within their own organization, but data stores from industry and government sources. By accessing
multiple data sources, each employee can analyze information quickly and help improve their organization's
decision-making and performance.

Even though the technology is still in its early days, the data from devices in the Internet of Things will become
one of the most important things for the cloud and a driver of petabyte scale data explosion. For this reason, we
see leading cloud and data companies bringing Internet of Things services to life where the data can move
seamlessly to their cloud based analytics engines.

These facilitate businesses to go from an innovative idea to actual product or service quickly by removing big,
upfront capital investments in technology and staff. They also allow businesses to scale up or down quickly,
providing flexibility when responding to changing customer demands.

In addition, the new technologies let managers, information professionals and entrepreneurs quickly analyze and
evaluate complex data by reviewing graphs, charts, and reports to make better decisions about the future of their
organizations.

All these presuppositions can appear varied from each other, they’re all linked by the need to work with data
quickly and conveniently. As Big Data changes and new ways of working with that data pop up, the details shift,
but the song remains the same: everyone’s a data analyst, and there’s never been a more exciting job.

10 Technology and Analytics Continuum 2016