Table Of ContentBUSINESS
INNOVATION
AND ICT
STRATEGIES
SRIRAM BIRUDAVOLU AND BISWAJIT NAG
Business Innovation and ICT Strategies
Sriram Birudavolu • Biswajit Nag
Business Innovation
and ICT Strategies
Sriram Birudavolu Biswajit Nag
Sr. Vice President - Information Indian Institute of Foreign Trade
Sciences New Delhi, India
T-Hub Foundation
Hyderabad, India
ISBN 978-981-13-1674-6 ISBN 978-981-13-1675-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1675-3
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P
reface
Yat Bhavo Tat Bhavati (You Become What You Believe In)
Hence your reality is shaped by your beliefs and understanding.
—Sanskrit Saying
Consider a typical current day scenario.
A mid-sized information technology services company has dozens of
small- and mid-sized enterprises as clients, spanning many sectors—
finance, health, logistics, academia, government departments, non-profit
organizations, media, and so on. The IT company finds itself in the eye of
the proverbial storm of the Information Age.
Each client has unique and changing requirements, owing to new excit-
ing business models launched every month which solve interesting prob-
lems in the industry. Being deep into the Information Age, everything
from entertainment and fun to customer support, consulting, and busi-
ness seem to lean 100% on information and communications technology.
Data pours in 24/7 for every source, from websites, mobile applications,
desktop applications, bank ATMs, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
Putting it mildly, the IT company and its clients are finding it rather dicey
to keep pace with the changes in technology and business.
The design and software changes are taxing them to the hilt. Data secu-
rity is a constant nightmare. There are threats, round the clock, of hack-
ing, malware and exploits, and a few actual incidents as well. The underlying
technologies in the server software and hardware are getting more com-
plex by the day. And the demands for high performance, 24/7 availability,
and instant access to every kind of data seem to be rising incessantly.
v
vi PREFACE
Technical expertise seems to be in constant shortfall. Budgets are very
tight. There just aren’t enough technical people to send to clients’ places
to understand and resolve the network (firewalls, core and secondary
switches, Wi-Fi networks), hardware, and software problems. Regulatory
compliance demands that each client meet architectural standards, main-
tain records, and meet data and transactions security and privacy standards
for its end-customers.
How can an IT company not only crack these problems but also ride
the changes and profit from them?
The IT company strategically attacks the problems with the following
solutions:
• Get the clients to move their data to the cloud, that is, the IT com-
pany’s data centers, thereby managing in one place, security, scalabil-
ity, redundancy, and 24/7 availability.
• Remotely manage the clients’ websites, portals, and mobile apps from
an NOC (network operations center) and the security through an
SOC (security operations center).
• With remote access to the clients’ infrastructure (networks and serv-
ers), manage them remotely over a secure VPN connection, thus cut-
ting 99% of the travel costs.
• The IT company’s data centers reside in several cities, and they’re all
interconnected. So, the experts from any of the centers can connect
to any of the clients all over the country and resolve problems. The
problem of shortage of experts is solved, and their utilization improves.
With these in place, the next innovative steps through which the IT
company can offer superior services are:
• Predicting IT problems intelligently from the trends and typical pat-
terns, automating the model building, and taking preventive steps,
and using data to validate and improve the models.
• Helping clients improve their services with their end-customers, with
big data analytics, machine learning, and AI. For example, if the
transaction traffic peaks in certain months, then add server capacity
or catch fraud when the machine learning catches outliers.
• Mining the web-traffic data or mobile download patterns, AI tools
can detect which type of visitors visit a client’s website, how often,
and from where (as IP addresses can reveal geography). The company
PREFACE vii
can suggest to the clients to serve up different content based on these
variables, thereby improving the accuracy of targeting and reach.
• Build a repository of patterns for each area, from cyber-security to
every client sector, develop a center of expertise, and recommend
best practices and policy to the industry and regulatory bodies.
Develop a high-end consulting practice and move up the value chain.
• Deploy state-of-art IT infra products to manage the bulk of the
operations autonomously, including monitoring, optimizing, trou-
bleshooting, auto-correction, and self-healing but also fault detec-
tion and resolving issues instantaneously.
Note that each of these innovative steps doesn’t just solve problems,
but they increase value and brand name, decrease costs and manpower,
and lead to future growth for the IT company and its clients.
What is innovation? Let’s start with a simple notion that you often
know innovation when you see one. You can perceive innovation in
uniqueness, whether manifest or subtle, in an element or in the blend, in
the display or in the force, in the arrangement or in the essence, in the
action or in the effect, in the grandeur or in the simplicity, in brilliance or
in repose, in puissance or in stillness, in isolation or in association.
The myriad examples of outstanding innovation at work show that it is
indeed possible, and this book will share with you the secrets of using ICT
to create innovations. Yet, they are uncommon, and failures are many.
There are great obstacles. The general disquiet that pervades the milieu
stems from the confusing mix of elements, vigorously at play. The effects
of ICT are all-pervading, and while the boons are many and mostly evi-
dent, jeopardy lurks at every corner. The triumphant organizations have
crossed many difficult passes and have undertaken incalculable risks to
achieve remarkable levels of success. It need not be so galling.
Opportunities abound everywhere, and creativity knows no bounds.
ICT can and is being applied in eliminating labor, in communication
(“geography is history”), in entertainment and the arts, in imbuing sys-
tems with intelligence and diligence, in multiplying power and efficiency,
and in fine-grained analysis and synthesis. Why does it seem so difficult to
realize value, then? For each success story, there seem several that have
failed.
ICT has become astoundingly powerful and staggeringly complex at
the same time. Enterprise investments in ICT are a leap of faith, in terms
of the known and unknown risks undertaken. Both enterprise providers
viii PREFACE
and enterprise consumers of ICT are caught in a tsunami of change that
has swept away many businesses, both old and new. It is essential now to
future-proof an organization’s vision, strategy, and implementation for
using ICT as an enabler, catalyst, and differentiator. The symbiotic process
between the development of IT systems and the requirement of a modern-
day organization has motivated us to think through to unfold this rela-
tionship and hence writing this book.
This book is devoted to the real process of unleashing the power of ICT
and harnessing it for all future. It is intended to be a practical guide that is
used on a daily basis. The book will cover all important aspects of ICT in
a nutshell and show the path to the future through innovation.
What is the key to leveraging ICT for success in business for individuals,
leaders, and organizations? Many answers come to mind, particularly
ICT’s amplified ability to serve customers by providing outstanding prod-
ucts and services and creating high value and doing it in ways that are
effective, efficient, profitable, competitive, and valued.
How does one establish a business focus with ICT in mind? This is a
key precursor to establishing an ICT strategy and is covered well in this
book.
This book presents a lean and coherent framework distilled from years
of research and experience in the ICT industry and business strategy
development which captures the essence of some of the best practices used
in the business, founded on a contemporary theoretical basis. What unites
the different elements of the framework is their proven power and potency.
Not only are they insightful and useful, but they have worked, often bril-
liantly and despite great adversity. The framework is built around these
ideas and is based on Sriram’s PhD thesis and key principles laid down in
other industry-proven standards. The framework is enriched with Biswajit’s
long experience in research in the areas of economics of firms and business
strategy development, especially his expertise in analyzing firms’ behav-
ioral change in a dynamic world. Open innovation, the quadruple helix
model of innovation, enterprise architecture, ICT industry standards, reg-
ulatory environment, and the relevant firm theories are the cornerstones
of the book. The process that runs the framework is driven by the themes
of focus, integration, competition, regulation, change, and innovation.
The quadruple helix model involves collaboration with four different
players—partner firms, research institutes, government agencies, and the
users. Open innovation is about using external ideas that originated outside
the boundaries of the firm as well as letting other organizations use some of
PREFACE ix
the firm’s ideas. External and internal economies of scale drive the firm in a
competitive dynamic business environment. For the purposes of this book,
the related concepts of open innovation, co-creation, network innovation,
and collaboration have been clubbed into the term open innovation.
The first chapter, the Introduction: Unfolding ICT, lays the ground-
work for the book. It also dispels any illusions that ICT is just another
sector and the recent advances, a temporary development. ICT is the zeit-
geist. The increasing bond between ICT and innovation has practically led
to their fusion in many forms.
The second chapter, The ICT Tsunami and Your Future, while being
cautionary, brings out the essence of the sweeping waves of changes pre-
cipitated by ICT and the innovations in its wake, some of them transform-
ing ICT itself. The third chapter, Every Organization Is a Complex ICT
System, is a continuation of the second and shows how every organization
is ICT driven and why we need an “ICT lens” for looking at the modern
and future landscapes of industry and society.
The fourth chapter, The Enterprise Technology Landscape, delves a little
deeper into ICT itself, to get a clear understanding of the components and
forces, and of how organizations and people are using it. Taming the wild
forces of ICT needs strong governance, and this is also discussed.
It is easy to lose oneself in the immense complexity and the ever- shifting
mess. The fifth chapter, Finding Business Focus with ICT, emphasizes the
value of Focus for survival and growth, in this unbelievably turbulent eco-
system. It also shows a clear path to achieving and sustaining focus.
The sixth chapter, The Innovation Strategy, prescribes the essential
ingredients required for formulating an effective ICT-based innovation
strategy. This is based on vast research, industry experience, and evalua-
tion of business trends.
Without the right people and culture in an organization, strategy is
practically useless. The seventh chapter, Social Capital: The Innovation
Culture, deals with the very important subject of developing the right
culture in an organization to foster and turbocharge innovation.
Strategies and culture differ from region to region. The eighth chapter,
Regional Factors Influencing Innovation, describes how an organization
should factor in regional issues for developing a strategy for a region.
The ninth and tenth chapters focus on India. The ninth chapter talks
about the current state of the ICT sector in India, a bit of regulatory envi-
ronment, and some of the emerging issues India is facing internationally.
The tenth one describes the evolving regulatory scene.
x PREFACE
The eleventh chapter comprehensively sums up the ways in which to
Win the Competition with Innovation.
The book drives home the concepts through apt mini-stories and anec-
dotes from the industry and attempts to develop an action plan on how to
apply the relevant part of the framework. The framework and process
emphasize Peter Drucker’s point that great ideas and decisions are a blend
of intuition and rigorous analysis.
The genesis of the book goes back to the days when both the authors
had animated discussions regarding the ultimate use of a doctoral thesis for
the people at large who wanted to know the dynamics of ICT and how it
was useful for strategizing the business. The intense discussion on the
brewing idea finally moved us to take the plunge in writing this book. The
head of ICRIER, Rajat Kathuria, prompted Sriram also to convert the
content of the PhD thesis into a book. Finally, it has become a joint prod-
uct bringing the wisdom of two authors: experience of the ICT industry
and research on business dynamics and strategy. The discussions with vari-
ous experts and colleagues in India and abroad were extremely useful. It is
difficult to thank all of them for their valuable insights on the topic.
Nonetheless, the rich contribution is acknowledged with profound thanks.
We would like to especially thank the faculty at the Indian Institute of
Foreign Trade. Their support and inspiration have pushed us towards the
early completion of this book. Professor O. P. Wali has been of tremendous
help in being both a source and a sounding board for several ideas. Sriram
would like to thank the management and colleagues (too many to name
here) at Oracle Corporation and its customers and partners, for their valu-
able expertise and help during the time he was working with Oracle
(2008–2017) in the Global Communications Business Unit. He gained
much experience and many insights into the ICT and innovation during
this period. Sriram is grateful to the colleagues and the management team
at T-Hub foundation and the Director General of RICH, Ajit Rangnekar,
for the valuable knowledge that they shared about startups, accelerators,
startup ecosystems, and research forums and for the permission to use
materials from T-Hub and RICH in this book. The market research ana-
lysts at T-Hub, Sandhya Kanukollu and Abhineeta Raghunath, have con-
tributed significantly to the chapter on T-Hub, and Dr. Maneesh Kunte
provided material on RICH. Sriram is also indebted to his family, particularly
his wife Sivani, for putting up with his research and book writing for hours
and days on end. Biswajit is also appreciative of his executive students who
