How to make big data part of a long-term digital transformation plan
Big data and analytics go hand-in-hand with digital transformation initiatives, but consulting and services firm HCL Technologies recently found that many companies are not as far along with digital transformation efforts as they hoped.
Anand Birje, corporate vice president and head of HCL’s digital and analytics practice, believes that other factors are also contributing to the digital transformation challenge.
“Over the past four or five years, enterprises were pushed hard to do anything in the field of analytics, big data and digital transformation,” said Birje. “They were being pushed because there was this fear about what their competitors might be doing, so there was this feeling that they had to do something digital.”
The result was an avalanche of small proof of concept (POC) projects throughout organizations that were driven by the C-suite. “Organizations literally became ‘proof of concept labs,'” said Birje. “There were pockets of POCs all over the enterprise that included digital technologies, analytics, structured and unstructured data—and that changed everything from business processes to customer engagement. There were data science centers, innovation centers and experimental POCs where no one was certain whether they would prove out.”
What was lacking, according to Birje, was board-level knowledge about the different digital projects—and expectations for the business value these projects would deliver.
Organizations weren’t necessarily wrong in pursuing big data, analytics and digital transformation as a series of proof of concept projects, and there are still many recommendations that they should. However, many companies got so deeply engaged in new technologies and projects that they forgot the ultimate business values they were seeking.
“This is to be expected when organizations are experimenting with new technologies where they have little experience,” said Birje. “But what is different now is that a lot of this early experimentation is behind most companies. Now they are entering a natural maturity phase with big data, analytics and digital transformation where they must look at what they do much more strategically.
