Some companies assume that by hiring a bunch of geeks and launching an app for their product or service, a business can somehow transform to a digital one. However these approaches never work according to the chief executives of three companies that have plenty of experience assisting businesses transform. For them, any transformation can only happen when a company’s leadership prioritises and aligns strategy to a digital transformation. 

Ramesh Shanmuganathan, Executive Vice President and CIO of John Keells Holdings, Chinthi Weerasinghe, Chief Executive of Mitra Innovation, and Thushera Kawdawatta, Chief Executive of Axiata Digital Labs, discussed how companies can approach digitizing in this latest Re:start21 webinar. 

Re:start21, is a series of discussions, organised by Economynext.com and Friedrich Naumann Foundation Sri Lanka office. 

Imran Furkan was the moderator. He started by asking why many digital transformation initiatives fail to achieve the outcome set out at the start, and the key ingredients for success. Excerpts of the conversation…

 Ramesh Shanmuganathan: Today, a lot of people use the word ‘digital’ very loosely and therein lies the bigger problem. More and more C-level executives don’t really understand digital terminology. Digital transformation is a broader subject compared to technological transformation, and people need to understand that.

People think digital is about marketing, having a mobile app or website or ecommerce site. There are various nuances of definitions floating around even in boardrooms, unfortunately. When you have a traditional executive leadership, who doesn’t understand the nuances of digital, the entire economic context of digital is misplaced.

People don’t look at digital as a lever that can pivot their growth, but as a bolt on things, which probably can do something – and that ‘something’ is not known. So the bigger challenge is leadership commitment to digital transformation, alongside the organization’s cultural change.

 Today, digital transformation is not a technological transformation that can be applied to a set of geeks. Without the organization’s buy-in, a transformation of this magnitude is never going to be successful. A lot of people say ‘I can hire a PhD from MIT and put a few geeks together, and I have this fantastic digital unit that is going to transform this organization,’ which is a fallacy. People need to come to terms with that as well.

 The other aspect is the duality of digital. Today, there are start-ups, which are greenfield, and organizations like John Keells that are brownfield. So we have to look at the duality of digital to transform the core whilst looking at the fancy stuff that can be disruptive. That is where most organizations, especially in the brownfield arena, are failing, because they’ve not understood there is a duality that is significant.

 When you already have scale, you have a presence in the market. So you don’t have to build from scratch like a start-up. Your entire exponential potential is in terms of the duality.

 When moving to the digital phase, you have to shift from a linear value chain into a value ecosystem that’s about collaboration, co creation and co-innovation. A lot of executives are fighting shy of that, because they are control freaks who want to do everything from A to Z. Focus in terms of the value saying ‘I’m good at manufacturing, let me focus on that; I don’t have to focus on supply chain, I could collaborate on supply chain.’ That kind of platform thinking is also lacking.

In summary, all of these aspects have to be looked at to be successful and they are contributing factors to the failure that you mentioned.

 Chinthi Weerasinghe: A lot of digital transformation fails because it’s not just about transforming your experience for customers. It’s very much about transforming oneself, your organization. If you think of digital transformation as an opportunity to overhaul your process, talent, operations and through that overhaul your relationship with customers, you’re bound to think of this in the right way.

 It’s not just about having a fancy app. Pardon the expression, but it’s like lipstick on a pig. You really have to overhaul everything. Organizations are going on an agile journey, thinking completely different to be able to drive success.

 Thushera Kawdawatta: You need to look at digital transformation in three buckets – viz. people, technology and process. Most people will be looking at technology, whilst forgetting people and process.

 It’s not about bringing together a cumbersome process but adjusting processes like agile and smaller value adding processes in the organization to disrupt. Are you going from A to Z or taking a shortcut approach to work towards Z?

 You need to have a context when implementing digital transformation. Just because somebody is engaged in digital transformation, it might not apply to you. For instance, AI may not work for a larger company, because without the data, you might not even start the AI journey. So we need to look at it in that context. It’s a big process.

 All of these three pillars have to come together to make that entire journey successful.

 In the past, tech was supposed to serve enterprises. But today, increasingly, it’s serving the individual and if you really want acceptance from society, whether individually as a customer or employee, it must be meaningful. How do we create this, and make tech and the whole concept of digital serve the individual?

Chinthi: It’s all about customer experience, which is how customers perceive their interactions with your company. There are two elements at play here: how it’s perceived and how that interaction actually is. To break it down even further, it relies on three aspects.

One, how successful was that interaction? Did I get what I wanted to get done? If you don’t do that, your experience immediately falls apart. Second is how much of an effort was it to actually get that interaction done? And thirdly, how did I feel after that interaction?

 To give you an example of that high effort, a bank I am with has been using their web services and wants me to move to their mobile app. However, what they have forgotten is, I have already set up all my transfer accounts and monthly transactions in my web platform. But when I open my mobile, I don’t have a seamless experience. I have to now go back and set up each and every one of those.

So what does that do? That requires more effort to move to a particular platform. I’m sure the platform works well; an interaction will go down really well and be very successful. However, my emotion and the effort that I had to put in to move to that platform completely falls apart.

You can have a brand spanking new application and it can be the snazziest thing on earth. But if you can do those three things – make sure that the transactions are successful, the effort put in is not beyond what’s absolutely needed, and the emotions and perception taken away from that is good – you have a great customer experience.

A successful customer experience takes it a step further. One, truly build that omni channel and self-service applications that are intuitive, don’t take that much of effort from the customer and leave them with a great experience.

Next, how do you engage a customer throughout that journey with you, from awareness to engagement, evaluation, purchase, post-purchase service and advocacy? If you think of that journey, how is it digitally engaging? Is that experience, right throughout this process, valuable or successful and with a great experience?

The third element – and a lot of companies miss this – is the use of the data that you collect. When you have a banking customer, you can get a call from their credit card department that knows nothing about you. Where is the KYC in that? You have to know who the customer is to drive a successful customer experience. Using that data with AI capabilities to narrow down likes and dislikes is going to be really important and relevant in the future. You do that through strong CRM systems etc. AI can offer next best actions and the like.

Last but not least, all of this technology will amount to nothing unless you actually train your staff who serve your customer and are front-end.

All of that put together will drive a phenomenal experience for customers and that’s the number one reason large brands have lost customers in the past few years; they have not been able to tackle this situation well.

Ramesh: The main thing we probably miss out on when moving from physical to digital is that you treat every customer as another number. In digital, you can’t do that but have got to identify each person. Even I as a person might have multiple personas. From a digital context, I have to profile each persona and not just the person, because each person has a need. Being a dad or an employee, or a student, my needs are different. So digital is all about understanding that each human being may have multiple personas, and their needs and wants are different.

You’ve got to give them that experience. How do you ensure that you keep consistency across channels and the choice of the channel is there? That persona, the journey mapping and the entire user experience has to be data driven.

Digital transformation is not about getting up one morning and saying ‘I am digital today.’ It’s a journey, and one that is not easy with a lot of pain to really reap the gain. 

What are your experiences in terms of tech serving the individual, as much as the enterprise?

Thushera: At Axiata group, we serve over 200 million clients and customer experience is a top priority for us. We look at the personas of what people are really looking for. Each individual has different competency levels in terms of digital savviness so how do we make that seamless and intuitive? Laymen should be able to use it simply. For the AI part of it, we need a lot of data. It takes time, so it won’t happen in a day and may take one year or 10 years.

It depends on how much data you accumulate to make some of those decisions. The customer experiences is relative, from region to gender to geographies to age demography. All of this really matters. That’s where you understand who the customer is.  

We use customer 360 with multi channels and multiple angles – from our side, the customer side, the peer side, the social side and global economics. All of these have to come together to serve the client.

Technology also plays a big role in this particular space. It’s not about mimicking a user to a particular experience but leveraging the technology for that to cater to that requirement as well. All of these together – mapping the technology capability – creates a nicer user experience.

 In executing a successful digital transformation initiative, one of the most important pillars is getting the right people together – the talent equation of this whole thing. You have assembled great talents in the different organizations that you work for and you scale teams very fast as well, having seen how fast your teams have grown. How do you go about assembling a great team of individuals, who can then create this transformation process?

Thushera: This is one of the most challenging areas for any enterprise. There are five things that you need to do in terms of getting the right person, regardless of the size of the organization.

The customer experience is relative, from region to gender to geographies to age demography. All of this really matters

The first is what inspires the person. When you’re hiring a person, you need to look at what inspires them. In this particular space, the intellectual challenge inspires a person, so we need to make sure that if hiring a top person, we offer that intellectual challenge.

Second, we need to make sure that the right person gets involved in the hiring process – i.e. A players hire A players and B players hire C players. We need to be cognizant of that fact and make sure the right persons are involved in hiring the right person for the organization.

Thirdly, every person has their strengths and weaknesses. You need to build a strength-based organization focusing only on the strengths, and not even talk about your weakness. For example, Muttiah Muralitharan was the best bowler in the world and could bowl extremely well; nobody talked about the fact that he was a lousy batsman but that he was a strength to the team.

Fourth, as we are planning to invest in the person, we need to make sure to align our customer requirements and the skills of this person.

Finally, if you don’t have the environment and the right culture for people to perform, it becomes a challenge to retain them; it’s not about just hiring a person but retaining them as well. We have grown from less than 200 to 1,000 in two years – that’s exponential growth. We make sure that the culture and systems are right. People also understand that we’re in an age where we have to inculcate the dynamic nature of skills coming in.

These are some of the ingredients that worked for us. When you have those and word of mouth, it pulls people in and they love to work with the best of the best around them.

One of the bigger tech companies told me they were considering getting rid of the entire recruitment team, because they were full of general HR specialists who did not really understand about hiring A type people, and that echoes what you were saying. But as mentors to many of the next generation talent in the industry, any thoughts on assembling a great team?

Ramesh: Sometimes you may not have the ideal candidate in any situation. In today’s context, your talent could come from anywhere in the world. I truly believe and endorse outsourcing as a strategy for John Keells because today, intellect is a factor of your knowledge and what you invest in terms of keeping it up to date.

We can hire the best of the people but if you don’t give them a challenging environment, you’re not going to be able to retain and nurture them. It’s important for us to understand what we need in terms of our talent pool and whether the talent pool is permanent or transient, which you would need to get some things done.

That view is important in terms of digital transformation. We focus on a digital quotient, not only for the technical talent pool but for every employee at John Keells – i.e. what is the digital quotient we would need for this business? What are the digital skills that they need to be incubated or trained for? What is the digital skill set that an organization needs to incubate and what do we need to do?

That is where we need to infuse the talent and investments have to come from the company to incubate that. That’s the blended strategy we need to adopt because we are not trying to scale from 200,000 since our digital side is different.

Given the multitude of industries, we are trying to see how to ensure tech becomes cost effective for a company that’s making a 2% net profit to a 20% net profit. We’ve got to have that spread and be able to balance it as well.

Chinthi: We hire for attitude and aptitude versus skills. We’ve started this strategy called ‘right skills anywhere’ and have been able to diversify our teams from locations. This pandemic, as painful as it is, is an opportunity for us, and we’ve been able to diversify. 

We now hire people in Jaffna, Galle and Matara who would have not typically joined unless they had to move to where we are and would not have had the opportunity. So looking for the right strengths from anywhere has become an opportunity at this moment.

I completely agree with inspiring a person to join the organization, looking at the core values, and always coming back to the core values and the culture. As you grow and build larger teams, it becomes your number one challenge. It’s always good to engage teams, refresh them and keep that culture alive in everybody’s hearts.

One of the challenges of the tech industry globally has been a lack of diversity. If you look at the general consumer population, 51% of Sri Lankans are women; however, when it comes to tech, only about 25% of leadership positions in the industry are women. There are other issues in terms of the disabled and so on that needs to be addressed, as tech must work for them as well. How do we create more diversity in the tech industry, when talent is at a premium, particularly during COVID?

Ramesh: Especially with gender equality, we’ve done an assessment and across John Keells from a tech point of view, it’s at about 40%. A lot of the time, many opt out when they get married and have a child, in most cases because of other pressures.

But in the last 18 months, work from home and the shift towards flexi time has worked well for working mothers and professionals who want to continue their career beyond marriage and childbirth, which have been the two breaking points where females tend to quit or call it a day with their career, looking at the pressures from running a family as well. With tech enablement getting up to speed, it’ll definitely give them an equal opportunity to continue their careers.

Chinthi: I’m extremely passionate about this not just because I’m a female. This has been a passion for me, and why I’m one of the founding members of Diversity Collective. We even spoke at a John Keells event, which has done a great job in getting everybody to listen to the importance of diversity.

All of us would probably believe that the pandemic had a neutralizing effect, because we have worked from home and hybrid. But it is not just for mothers but also for fathers, where the concept of a double shift has happened.

I feel positive not only about working from home, but that this is going to open everybody’s eyes to how difficult it is for a female to handle that double shift of being a mom and having a great career.

We can hire the best of the people but if you don’t give them a challenging environment, you’re not going to be able to retain and nurture them

Through COVID and the pandemic policies that come out from it, we are now looking at mental wellbeing as a big proponent in making sure our teams are engaged. We’re looking at work-life balance in a new way, almost forcing it on our team members.

So I have great hope, because this is an equalizer, an eye-opener for everybody. Now it’s not just the females having to do the double shift, and the dads at home are also looking at it.

I hope we learn from the situation, and build it into policies, where we realize that it’s not about being equal. It’s really about equity. How does somebody handle that double shift? What do you have to do? What kind of flexibility do you need to have in your policies for somebody to be able to handle a great career whilst being a mom and having a family? It goes for both dads as well as moms.

Thushera: First, we need to accept that females have equal or better intellectual core competencies compared to males. The problem is the opportunity and the constraints that they have. At ADL, females account for a little over 30%. Now with new hires and transactions, it’s above 50%, which means that strength in the environment is such that there are no other constraints. Some constraints have been imposed, while some are taken away.

Second, do we have the right enablers and policies, and even the acceptance? We need to accept that they have equal or better IQ.

From there onwards, we need to realise that females bring super diversity into teams, and different viewpoints and different challenges; they sometimes challenge the status quo. So we need to accept and enhance that.

We enable females. Some pursue higher studies and we offer them part-time work – while they study, they work for us. Should they migrate, we now offer remote working for those females, so that’s an opportunity.

What type of jobs do we create? Separate jobs? No, don’t differentiate. It should be equal. We need to create a level playing field for everybody. When you create that environment and the culture, there shouldn’t be any problem. Females can have better ways of delivering things than men. From the outset, we should accept that and create the environment, opportunities and enablers for females to contribute, as it could result in serious gains for any organization.

I’m proud that some of our females are delivering much better, stronger and with more consistency. It adds value to any organization. How do we encourage that? Create that environment, culture, and also a system and policies to facilitate that

We’ve set ourselves up for digitizing for growth, and today, many organizations have got this momentum, and they’re moving forward. But there is a danger of not getting the right mix between growth and stability. You can easily get side-tracked in terms of moving away from core values, beliefs and principles that you have been following up to that point. A company that has grown so fast as Axiata Digital Labs has found this way of sticking to the core arbitrage, the core set of values that the company has. How can other organizations learn from your success?

Thushera: This recipe might not work for everybody and I’m not advising but rather relating my experience. Culture is not the arbitrage. Scale can also be stale. The arbitrage is the soul of the organization – why we are here, why we are in existence; what we do and why we do things.

Culture is a subset of that entire soul. If you stick to that, you have to align. When most companies grow, they lose out on culture and soul. You might feel like what was done earlier may not work, and completely change things that are working well. That creates a lot of instability. The people and process add a burden to your systems. While maintaining that, keep the soul by creating a culture that everybody aligns with and connects to the soul.

We understand our clients, and who our clients and people are in the organization. They want to learn, contribute, be recognized and grow their careers. All of this has to be provided in an organization.

If you’re not connected to the client, what you do is not going to be relevant and you start losing clients. You may have a nice growth trajectory and enjoy that, but as you start losing clients, you have to rely on an engine to find a new set of clients, which is a serious burden on any organization, and when you find new clients, you can lose them as well. So the engine comes under a lot of stress.

Scale can be stale. You can replicate start-up culture, where you have the soul connected to everybody. Larger organizations need to think how to get back that soul.

It’s about reminding ourselves why we exist, what our client wants, and what capabilities we have to serve our clients and keep innovating around that. Clients are not looking at the same thing that we have been doing for the last five years; they are looking at something completely new. So the soul and intent really matters. Really understand the intent, and how and what we do.

Make sure that you take care of your people. It’s not about having a foosball table or table tennis or a pool table in your organization – those things won’t go a long way. Initially, you love it, but what next? It’s about how you’re challenging your people to grow their potential, and creating an environment for them to perform. If you don’t have an environment for them to perform and grow, they won’t stick with you; there are other opportunities and places to go.

Lastly, your business needs to think about optimization. Your engine has to be super solid, the systems have to be in place and the processes have to be there for everybody to work, so transparency really matters. When you have that, your engine runs smoothly, and people will work for a particular purpose and intent. Your clients will be happy so you won’t have a lot of churn. When you have all these ingredients, scale won’t be stale.

John Keells X is a good example of an established organization, investing in but also co-inventing with start-ups. It’s been a very successful model for other large corporates to follow. What are your key learnings that others can adopt?

Ramesh: When we started John Keells X in 2015, our aspiration was to get the current leadership as well as employees exposed to the opportunity and potential of open innovation. Initially we offered prize money, for JKX 1.0. We funded the first patent in the US and are happy to have been a part of it.

For us, it was not about the quantum of money but that we were betting on youngsters, and we wanted the organization to understand that ideas are what we need to invest in. Sometimes it’s not about the person; it is about the idea and conviction. Whatever’s happened over the last decade is about ideas coming to fruition, people believing in people, not taught in terms of fixed assets on the balance sheet.

We then pivoted in terms of becoming an accelerator. We would encourage ideas and help them to accelerate from zero to whatever in nine months, and we took a 6% stake for a small sum of something like 2 million.

JKX 3.0 went further and was opened out to employees. One of the employees who got picked was given paid leave for six months and now he’s running his own peer-to-peer lending scheme. Of the 50-odd start-ups we have touched in the last five years, we have invested in nine and close to five are doing pretty well, and we have gone into long-term investments in two of those.

Scale can be stale. You can replicate startup culture, where you have the soul connected to everybody

JKX 4.0 is going to be announced pretty soon. We are making a very significant and pivotal shift, with plans to launch our own CVC. We are also planning to invest in late stage start-ups. And we are going to align it to big businesses. So we wanted businesses to come up with use cases this time around.

We are framing it around a hackathon, where we would have two streams, accelerator plus venture fund, where we might even go up to a 20% stake with a big-ticket investment, provided there is alignment. We feel that is what will fuel the kind of innovation DNA that we are looking for. We don’t necessarily want it to come from the confines of John Keells.

The process of going through a digital transformation also looks at the core business itself – examining what you do. Something that Mitra Digital is quite vociferous about is how to engage with clients – creating simplicity through innovation, and looking at the businesses as well. How should a business go about re-examining its business model, while implementing a transformation?

Chinthi: I use words like overhaul, and digital transformation is a big disrupter. If you go back to the basics of it, think of Uber and how it disrupted taxi services, etc. The question any business should be asking is why wouldn’t we take another look at our business models and whether they need to be changing?

Let’s go back to the bank, the most traditional known entity for all of us. It is a very traditional institute, where you can deposit money and gives out loans, while providing services like wealth management. But there is an $18 billion market growing at about 46 to 47% a year of neo banks, which are 100% digital banks that are not about savings accounts, current accounts and interest loans.

We work with a client in Australia, with the slogan ‘money automated.’ There is no concept of accounts, interest and loans. They want to be part and parcel of your life, and to almost disappear into the background. I work with CIOs of large banks who say ‘the bank does not need to be front and centre; it needs to be there to support. That’s our vision.’

You have to think about these banks, these organizations, as helping you pay, earn something, plan your life and have fun. The best of these banks say ‘let me plan my vacation.’ They help you plan your budget. They are very much an integral part of your life and disrupt the traditional banks.

The question is not about whether they should or not, but why not? And how quickly can you do it before you get completely disrupted? There’s regulation that could prevent certain things, but it’s just a matter of time until you reach that tipping point and things completely change.

One thing that businesses in Sri Lanka and around the world have not addressed enough is that the more we digitize our life, the more important the issue of cybersecurity becomes. In the rush to get this process underway, this is one area that we really have not looked at enough. Is there advice you can offer SMEs and businesses on being smart about cybersecurity and doing it very quickly, because it’s a critical issue now?

Chinthi: It’s a massive issue. Cybercrime is estimated to reach about $10 trillion across the globe by 2025, in comparison to 3 trillion in 2015. That’s a growth rate of about 15% year on year, and cybercrime represents one of the greatest transfers of economic wealth in history.

It’s very prevalent in small to medium sized businesses, and they are the ones being frequently targeted. About 43% of cyber-attacks are targeted at small business, and only about 14% can defend themselves. If you think about the most common types of attacks – phishing and social engineering, stolen devices – these are pretty common for small businesses, along with credential theft.

As for advice, make yourself aware. There’s a lot of literature that talks about these things. As an IT organization, I have an RFP to strengthen my risk assessment. Being an IT organization, we are pretty tightly measured, but I want a third party to come in and provide some awareness and risk mitigation.

Put security measures and policies in place, don’t make them paper-based only, test them regularly and monitor them as well. For a small to medium sized business, that would be what I advise.

Ramesh: When we speak of digital transformation, security is an integral part of that agenda. At John Keells, we furthered the progress in terms of looking at zero trust.

Work from home has us happy building a China wall and saying everything within the China wall is protected. Outside is not, and you have this fancy thing called VPN. That’s now history. Today, it’s about profiling information assets as much as the user.

John Keells is moving away from private networks into public networks, which are built on the internet; every user is on a public domain, authenticated and gains access to information assets, which are classified based on a zero trust framework. It is easy for an SMB to adopt, because a lot of the technologies are cloud based and you could easily go on a subscription.

Cybercrime is estimated to reach about $10 trillion across the globe by 2025, in comparison to 3 trillion in 2015. That’s a growth rate of about 15% year on year, and cybercrime represents one of the greatest transfers of economic wealth in history

 That’s the benefit for greenfield operations and SMBs, to embrace the cloud. You can build the infrastructure on an op-ex model and secure your information assets easily. It’s a progressive step that organizations need to make.

You cannot talk about digital transformation without discussing security. It’s an integral part. Especially when privacy is being legislated in Sri Lanka, we are going to face phenomenal challenges in using data in terms of what we are professing to do with personalization and so on. The privacy of data, how we use data, how we store and manage it, especially in complying with GDPR etc. is going to be a challenge that we have to conquer.

Thushera: We need to understand how hackers have moved from end user type systems to the left side, which is the developer. They will easily hack into your depository or maybe a source code; they tend to put backdoors in the code. That’s why Gartner predicts privacy is one of the critical aspects that we need to look at in 2021 and beyond.

What are the available technologies? We do have privacy aware machine learning so that’s one area that we need to really look into. Your DevOps process needs to have automation, and security has to be integrated.

 It’s moved from DevOps to DevSecOps. We are now practicing DevSecOps, and making sure all security parameters and aspects are being monitored.

The perimeter security is secondary. There are enough technologies to support the perimeter security. Third is how we protect sensitive data to have super solid systems and the capabilities, and leverage on technology.

We do have anonymization software but it comes at a price. It’s encryption decryption where the storage becomes seriously large. When talking about machine learning, you’re dealing with a massive amount of data. All of this data has to have a masking, which comes with anonymization.

You need to think about your anonymization solution. Your latency has to be very low. At the same time, your cost of storage has to be very low. So where do you store – in-house, on premises or the cloud? You need to decide on strategies like defining, deciding the strategy, having an enterprise blueprint, having security as a primary component. It’s a must; there’s no choice.

Alarmingly, none of the enterprises have security as a major component of the enterprise blueprint. When you have it, you’re securing your enterprise systems. Your DevSec process has to be strong, along with the information classification plus how you deal with sensitive data. You have to think about all of this in in a holistic manner.

Machine learning can be leveraged. Reverse proxies and phishing sites are out there, so you can easily capture them. Machine learning is capable of catching some of these in a very advanced manner. We are leveraging all of them at the moment. It has to be in your core strategy, as a CIO in your organization. Any enterprise should have a strategy where privacy and security is top priority, equal to the functional/non-functional and business value that it delivers.

One single attack can completely bust your entire organization. A few weeks back, T-Mobile was attacked and 100 million customers’ information was out in public. So an entire business can go down in no time.

If we address the problem, digital trust comes in. Enterprises can leverage that, and your enterprise becomes trustable. That’s where Explainable AI comes in. You need to look at Explainable AI as a vehicle. There’s a reason behind each of these decisions or maybe a recommendation that AI is giving you. There’s no choice. This has to be the primary focus. There are enough technologies, capabilities and competencies available to handle those scenarios.

What is one thing that organizations need to focus on, in terms of succeeding post-COVID?

 Chinthi: I love this quote from William Pollard that says “the arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” Today, you have to rethink whatever you were doing before. Digital transformation gives you the perfect opportunity to do just that.

 Thushera: Stay close to the soul of the organization that makes everything around it possible, relevant and connected. When you’re close to your soul, you’re not letting go of the great stuff that you do. If you’re not connected to your soul, you won’t understand the intent for existing as a business. Digital transformation is a must where you take that intent to a client and make it a reality.

 Ramesh: Always understand your context, especially when trying to transform or drive a digital transformation program. Don’t try to copy. Understand your context, personalize it, write your own playbook, and fail safe fail fast.