Integration and focus creates competitive advantage: Rui Bastos, CIO, Reliance Industries

At the Cloudera event held today in Mumbai, Rui Bastos, CIO, Reliance Industries Ltd talked about the oil to chemicals transformation at Reliance Industries Ltd.

He said: "We have undergone from oil to chemicals transformation. In oil, we have huge amounts of data, which leads to huge amounts of complexities. We have extremely complex pieces of machinery to handle all data. We have a business case for digital transformation. The core strategic focus is on the efficiency, and what drives the execution and agility model."

The emergence of digital platform-based business models are key to transition the industry from oil to chemicals. How you use the technologies available to leverage your business is very important. Data is very key to determine your business model and strategy. Integration and focus creates competitive advantage.

The oil industry has always been overproducing. That is now shifting. Historically successful corporate cultures are proving to be 'killers' in the digital age. There is a shift to knowledge of themes and teams. You are now faced with new technologies and markets. You need to collaborate. Governance is now involving collaboration. Transparency drives the performance. From 'know it all', you are now becoming 'learn it all'.

There needs to be business agility in the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world. There must be an integrated O2C (oil to chemicals) value chain optimization. There also needs to be continuous learning and improvement. There is predictive- and insights-driven execution. We also need to leverage disruptive technologies. Data is the key. Platforms have to leverage data to provide proactive business insights, improve performance, and enable continuous improvements to our ways of thinking. There are hundreds of use cases across the O&C (operations and control) value chain that drive the business case.

IoT-enabled platforms can enable an increased safety, detect hazard, and notify the employees and supervisors. Wearable technologies present a new opportunity for reducing workplace safety incidents.

Everything today is going mobile. Business partner integration is driving the API economy. APIs and data monetization are becoming common. There is a need to capture and leverage data in every interaction. There is also a need to integrate data flows across interactions. We are coming from a legacy of data silos. You have to manage an entire IT cloud infrastructure.