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The Road to SMI

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Shrikanth
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The Do Big Symposium by Tata DoCoMo in partnership with Dataquest delved on the impact of SMI on businesses and how service providers like Tata DoCoMo can act as a business catalyst

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A nexus of disruptive forces – SMI- Social Media, Mobility, Internet of Things (IoT) and host of other forces is altering IT organizations across the world. CIOs across enterprises are looking at transitioning to the next orbit in terms of technology and as businesses and the world becomes increasingly interconnected. Clearly the key success denominator is ‘access to always on reliable 24/7 connectivity access’.

With this backdrop in mind, The Do Big Symposium by Tata DoCoMo in partnership with Dataquest delved on the impact of SMI on businesses and how service providers like Tata DoCoMo can act as a business catalyst by providing mission critical connectivity and DC infrastructure. The Chennai edition of the symposium on the theme ‘Harnessing the power of Social, Mobile and IOT (SMI) for Business Transformation unraveled the complexities of SMI and attempted to find relevant answers to the multipronged issues facing enterprises. The keynote sessions and panel discussions threw light on the many possibilities that SMI is opening up and also on the best practices and solutions for organizations taking the plunge.

The Power of the IT Department



In his keynote address Chand Das, CEO, Education & Stationery Products Business, ITC Limited said, “Each one of the businesses has undergone transformations in their own right. As IT managers you have to be eyes and ears of the business. For instance in our organization we do a divisional IT steering committee and deliberate and discuss on what IT is doing and what is expected out of the IT department.”

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“Technology disruptions happen all the time but IT departments need to look at opportunities out of disruptions and make the best use of it and SMI is one such disruption that offers immense potential”, added Chand Das.

Chand Das also cited instances from his own business domain of Education and Stationary – like the Classmate Notebooks the company makes and how it effectively leverages Social Media and IoT. For instance the cover design of the Classmate Notebooks are aggregated via a contest through its Facebook page and the best design was taken out from user submissions. Similarly on the manufacturing side, the key machinery are equipped with sensors so that we can monitor the health of machines form a remote site and also we gather key performance parameters of the machines that help us utilize it in an optimized fashion. Moreover we can preempt and fix up faults as well.”

The panel discussion moderated by Ibrahim Ahmad, Group Editor, Cybermedia deliberated the multi-pronged issues on the road to SMI.

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Ramu Annamalai Ramasamy ,CEO, Hermes i said, “ SMI has a defined impact on business and for instance the iCashCenter is the flag ship brand of Hermes has been conceived and designed to provide comprehensive end-to-end solutions to the common man and hence we deal with the bottom of the pyramid as well and hence technologies like SMI gives us ample leverage and we mesh it effectively and appropriately in our operations.”

Quips Boby Mohan, CEO, Distil Information, “ I think technologies like IoT has major ramifications and we have seen some of the enterprises in ANZ region leverage IoT on the field and procuring some spectacular results in terms of operational and IT efficiency.”

Agrees Kumar KV, Managing Consultant, PwC, “ I agree that SMI is a disruptive force. We have some amazing use cases emerging across the world on how trends and technologies like IoT are re-imagining the traditional business processes. But at the same while it’s a challenge in creating a conducive tech infrastructure for SMI at the same time I see domain expertise also as a challenge on the road to SMI.”

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Meanwhile Chandrasekhar R ,CTOIO, Matrimony.com, talked about how mobility and social media is disrupting his company’s operation, “ If we look at our business for instance, we are seeing massive shift to mobility. For instance 60% of our users log in from the mobile device. We have more than a million likes on our Facebook page and on these platforms we talk about our range of services. We are leveraging mobility and Social media to the hilt.”

Hiimanshu Khanna, Head, Enterprise Marketing, Tata Teleservices shared insights on the successful examples of SMI and said enterprises need to take that critical call and realize that they need SMI and adopt it aggressively.”

Meanwhile Sai Pratyush, Head Product Lifecycle, Managed Services, Tata Docomo Business Services, gave a ring side view on how SMI is impacting businesses and how Tata DoCoMo is playing an enabling role in making enterprises manifest this trend and profit from it.

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