Technology in Business – Past, Present and Future

Technology in Business – Past, Present and Future

What triggered me to write this blog? – NASSCOM PRODUCT CONCLAVE – INDIA (Oct 26th and Oct 27th 2016)

I had a chance to meet Industry leaders in technology and also young innovators from India who are working in the space of IOT (Internet of Things), Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and many more new areas.
Technology in Business – The Past (Technology being part of Business) 

During the Late 90’s and early 2000, India was seen as a place to invest in the field of IT (Information Technology), due to its population and the added advantage of language over 36486973-technology-imagesits neighboring nation, China. There was a large demand for people with any engineering background, not keen on their computer skills. IT Industry hired them in thousands and trained them for years to make them productive. During this period, technology was seen as an enabler to automate the operations of an organization, allowing them to reduce manual work and think productively to improve their business. Thus, IT Industry developed systems to manage operations of an organization, to help them save time and reduce cost in their day to day activities. During this phase, there were a lot of areas which could not be automated, as there were no solutions to many of the problem statements of different industries.

Less than 20% of the software went live and was used by the customer, the remaining could not be delivered because of quality issues, changes in customer requirement at the time o
f delivery, or inability to deliver as per the timeliness. This has led to various improvements and research in the field of IT.

Technology in Business – The Present (Technology drives Business)

Today, Technology drives business – customer’s expectation from technology is more than what they can do by themselves. That’s how the industry has changed. In the last 5 years, mobility has become the need, for faster and inexpensive access to things. This has revolutionized the way software development had been working for a long time. New terms have taken its place such as IOT, Big Data, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence which have become an easy reality. Operations software is not the need, the need is much more. Industries are looking for ways to reduce cost, and they seek technology to support them in all possible ways. IT Industry has to gear up quickly in order to respond to the needs of the current generation customer. The present has to predict the future by connecting the dots based on the events happening within the industry, and other industries too, which can impact your business. When you connect the dots, the industry can see the opportunity to innovate and survive.

The below flow chart gives a glimpse of the evolution of customer needs:

technology

Technology in Business – The Future (Technology will Own Business)

               The Future – Everyone wants to know it today, so that they can become super power in the world. I am much excited to write this section of my blog, because the future is full of excitements. Technology is going to become “The King Maker”. Any industry wants to be a leader in their respective field. One has to invest on the right technology which can change the way they do business in order to save costs and bring profits.

Soon Technology will own the Business in the future – why do I say that? Because I think so. If the technologists understand the business of various domains, they can give better solutions with the
help of it. So it means deep business understanding is very important for technology companies. In the present & future, the technology company should take the lead and explain to the Industry (Customers), on how effectively they can change their current management of things to a better approach (Futuristic approach), in order to save cost and increase profitability.

Mobility has changed the way, we see the world today. Because of mobility, many new things are becoming a great reality, especially IOT (Internet of things), Big Data, AI (Artificial Intelligence), VR (Virtual Reality).

As I have some experience in the space of “Shipping and Logistics”, I would like to share some examples from it. There are lot of problem scenarios in this industry which cannot be fixed by a windows or web based application. This Industry has started to look for mobility as a solution for some of their problems, especially problems related to hardware, faster and easy access to things which can save a lot of cost. There is high potential in this industry for IOT, Big Data, Data Analytics and in future, AI and VR.
How do I say it, is the next question? As I see it, some problem scenarios of this industry can be fixed by IOT. Just as an example, tracking the containers with your mobile, sensing temperature, volume of liquid inside the tank container, about container damages. This can provide a lot of data which can be converted into meaningful information with the help of Data Analytics and Data Science. Doing this, leads to a lot of patterns, which can be used for Predictive Analysis of any business. At the end of the day, it saves cost for the companies. Consider monitoring the container movement from anywhere in the world, knowing about the damages in detail; where it happened, who is responsible for it – You could do and monitor things from anywhere in the world. What I am sharing in this blog is to my knowledge, but there is an ocean of opportunities in the industry. One can speak to experience personnel in the industry to look for problem scenarios, and see whether technology has a solution for it, which I am sure it will. If you see value in it, Innovate it – Remember, One has to connect all the dots in order to innovate.

Technology companies should be in a position to help various industries change their traditional approach to a modern approach of operating, which can save their efforts. To do this, technology companies have to invest in the space of domain research and look for innovations. One Innovation that can change the way the industry functions today, can make the company a leading force.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            -By Vinodh. PL

Disclaimer:The views expressed in this blog are the writer’s and are not an indication of the company’s view, action or strategy.