Tag: Digital Innovation

Successfully building a digital transformation strategy and implementing and executing it can get extremely challenging. Especially for organizations that have accumulated generations of technologies, the path to successful business transformation is laden with obstacles that hinder outcomes. If you want to set the right foot forward, you need to identify the right opportunities, develop the right strategies, and invest in the right tools. 

Learn how an implementation partner like InovarTech can build custom plugins for Copilot Teams and Copilot Studio, enabling your business to be more agile, responsive, and competitive.

Unleashing Productivity with Copilot

As advancements in artificial intelligence surge, tools like Copilot Teams and Copilot Studio are unleashing the next level of productivity. Built with large language models and armed with various automation capabilities, Copilot seamlessly works along several everyday tools to make humans more productive, efficient, and creative. 

From senior leaders to marketing professionals, frontline agents to shop floor workers, Copilot offers features that streamline tasks, automate workflows, and enhance collaboration. Employees across the organization can use Copilot to unlock productivity and creativity and adapt to the ever-changing business landscape. 

Here are some ways organizations can exploit the capabilities of Copilot: 

• Customer service agents can use Copilot to automate responses and provide instant and around-the-clock customer support. 
• Team leaders can use Copilot to summarize meeting discussion points and allocate responsibilities accordingly. 
• Sales teams can embrace Copilot to integrate sales insights into their workflow, personalize content, and close more deals. 

• Financial analysts can leverage the power of Copilot to automate data analysis and analyze critical market information in minutes. 
• Copilot can enable HR teams to streamline benefits and compensation or even gather and act on employee feedback and increase engagement
• Marketing teams can use Copilot to understand market sentiment and curate proposals catering to customers’ pulse. 

• Risk management teams can use Copilot to analyze large datasets, predict potential risks, and pivot as necessary. 
• Copilot can deliver much-needed coding assistance to programmers, reducing time spent on routine tasks and focusing on solving bigger problems and driving innovation. 

Tailoring Copilot Experiences with InovarTech

The right team of strategists, designers, and developers can enable organizations to transform business capabilities into consumable services and applications that users love to use. Such a team can help build and execute a digital-first strategy and enable organizations to implement and extend modern tools to accelerate your growth. 

When it comes to making the most of Copilot, the right partner can help customize features or tailor the overall experience using Copilot Studio. Built on the foundations of leading conversational AI technologies and interoperable with Azure AI Studio, the partner can customize Copilot by building custom plugins to tailor responses to common scenarios and enable greater control and efficiency. They can also help create your own Copilots and GPTs incorporating your data and enabling engaging interactions.

Here’s how a partner like InovarTech can enable business transformation with the power of Copilot Teams and Copilot Studio: 

• Automate Common Workflows: Using the power of Copilot Studio, InovarTech teams can help you navigate the intricacies of your day-to-day processes. We can streamline complex business tasks through intelligent automation, such as submitting expenses, onboarding employees, managing leaves, etc. 
• Tailor Conversations: For users who need to send out specific responses, a partner can help design tailored conversations. For instance, they can enable sales teams to send out the right response when they receive customer sales inquiries. 
• Summarize Meetings: The right partner can help unlock high workforce productivity levels with Copilot in Teams and enable teams to engage in effective meetings. Custom plugins can help you summarize key discussion points, suggest action items, and allocate the next steps to appropriate members. 
• Customize Prompts: Several important discussions happen during meetings that must be referred to for future steps. An expert implementation partner can help you get the insight you need from important discussions. From disagreements to follow-up questions, different perspectives, action items, and more. They can customize Teams prompts, allowing you to wrap up meetings with clear next steps. 
• Uncover Answers: Copilot doesn’t just help automate tasks or curate summaries. The right partner can help direct your Copilot to multiple data sources, including external websites and internal knowledge bases, so you can get answers to questions in minutes. For instance, customer service agents can enter questions on SharePoint and have Copilot generate instant answers, help, and guidance from different SharePoint sites. 
• Manage Integrations: A partner can help extend Copilot capabilities to other apps and systems within our business. Using plugins and custom extensions, they can enable your Copilot to access and use third-party data from apps such as Jira, Dynamics 365, Bing Web Search, SAP, ServiceNow, Box, and more. Based on your requirements, the partner can enable, disable, assign, block, or remove plugins for Copilot while ensuring the highest level of data privacy.

Copilot Use Cases

Copilot can be used by different teams to meet different requirements; here are some popular use cases: 

• Use copilot as your personal assistant to create emails, summarize meetings, and generate a list of action items.  
• Have Copilot analyze a particular data set and build intuitive visualizations from the data via a simple prompt. 
• Leverage Copilot to find information from existing documents or the web and prepare a synopsis for quicker understanding. 
• Make Copilot your hub for all work by integrating it with existing tools and act on real-time data. 

As businesses look to better compete in a volatile and highly competitive world, Copilot paves the way for high levels of productivity and efficiency. Reimagine your current digital technology landscape with Copilot-enabled solutions that will take your business to the next level. Whether you’re looking for end-to-end Copilot implementation or a custom agile solution for a particular use case, our team of experts and long-standing experience in transforming businesses from legacy to modern can make you stay relevant for generations to come. 

Partner with us to: 

• Solve complex problems using the power of Copilot
• Integrate Copilot with the apps you use to run your business 
• Get a comprehensive view of data across the enterprise 
• Create a unified user experience and enable a single source of truth

Last year, Google officially bid goodbye to the futuristic Google Glasses launched in 2013. 

It failed because of its clunky design, high cost, and customers’ concerns about data breaches and hacking. 

Amazon’s Fire Phone met a similar fate. The company launched the smartphone in 2014. However, it never gained popularity because of its bulky design, limited apps compared to Android and Apple, and unaffordable prices.

Both products failed because the companies did not fully understand the market and customer needs. Amazon, for example, underestimated the popularity of Google Play Store, Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail. Customers could not access these popular apps, which became one of the main reasons for Fire Phone’s downfall.

Like Amazon and Google, many companies fail to see their innovations succeed. According to Harvard Business School, that number could be between 70% to 90%.

Failure in innovation could happen due to various reasons:

• Lack of practicality in ideas: The products were not designed properly, as in the case of Google Glass or Amazon Fire Phone. Google Glass was poorly designed, while Amazon Fire Phones were heavier than other smartphones. The product must address real-world needs and concerns for the idea to succeed. 

• Not understanding customer needs: A lack of research and understanding of customer needs could lead to building products that are not useful to customers.

• Lack of alignment with business objectives: Innovation cannot always happen in silos. After all, it involves the company’s resources, time, and money. It must align with the company’s overall objectives to deliver the desired outcomes.

• Not accounting risks: Most companies do not consider risks or unforeseen challenges while developing an innovative product. This could derail the plan and lead to early failures.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to always be this way. 

Innovation is not an impossible goal to achieve. At Inovar Tech, we call it the Art of Possible. It opens up a world of new possibilities for experimentation and growth.

To succeed, companies need a practical approach to building innovative products. 

Let me explain how it works.

Art of Possible – Bringing Practicality in Innovation

To build innovative products, companies must focus on solving real-world problems rather than building to demonstrate an innovative mindset.

This approach is called practical innovation.

Practical innovation is not just about developing new ideas. It is about turning those ideas into products that deliver tangible results. Innovation and practicality cannot function in silos. 

Practicality has to be baked into every step of innovation. 

Here are some ways to do it.

• Solve real-world problems

Do thorough research to understand the pain points of the customers. This will help you find solutions that will alleviate the customer’s problems. 

• Use multi-pronged approach

Don’t rely on a single approach to solve problems. For example, companies use a single tech stack to build products. A single tech stack could hinder innovation if it has limited features and does not evolve with time. 

Use a multi-pronged approach to consider multiple approaches to a problem. For example, multiple tech stacks provide more features and flexibility, making innovation easy.

There may not always be a correct answer, but a multi-pronged approach eliminates the assumption that there’s only one way to solve a problem. It encourages companies to find more solutions to solve problems and innovate. 

• Find the balance

Too much focus on creativity and innovation can pose several challenges. For example, complex interfaces and confusing navigation can lead to customer churn. Impractical products with no real-world use case can lead to wasted company resources and reputation damage. 

Find a balance between practicality and creativity to overcome these challenges. Define a clear goal, find multiple ways to achieve it, and choose the best solution after a thorough feasibility evaluation. 

• Take a customer-centric approach

Create detailed customer personas to understand the customers’ needs, behaviors, and pain points. Build products and features keeping these insights in mind. Once the product is ready, launch it to the most avid users for feedback. Conduct usability tests and customer surveys and seek reviews to identify areas of improvement. Implement their inputs to improve the product.

• Don’t forget the MVP

Don’t get distracted from the objective of building a practical product by including all shiny features. Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with critical features and functionalities that solve real-world problems. Release it to the users to gather feedback and improve the product. This approach will accelerate the development cycle and save time on building products nobody wants. 

• Iterate always

Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and measure the metrics regularly. This will help you identify areas for improvement and iterate the product to achieve the business goals. Regular iterations will help keep pace with customer demands and stay innovative.

You must also collect feedback from customers and other stakeholders about the product, analyze it, and integrate the key takeaways to improve it. 

How To Decode The ‘Art of Possible’?

In a fast-paced business environment, balancing innovation and practicality can become challenging.

At Inovar, we understand this challenge well. That’s why we conduct workshops called the ‘Art of Possible’ to accelerate a company’s journey toward becoming a digital business.

In this workshop, we will walk you through our 4I framework: Inspire, Ideate, Innovate, and Integrate. 

In other words, through this workshop, we help you:

• Find inspiration for your digital innovation journey.
• Identify multiple opportunities to generate business ideas and capitalize on them.
• Build a roadmap and guide you through the innovation process.
• Brainstorm multiple strategies and implement the most viable to make the vision a reality.

From discovery to understanding challenges and conceptualizing innovative solutions, we will be with you throughout the process so that you can learn the impossible art of achieving practical innovation. 

To know more about our Art of Possible, contact us. 

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how one operates and delivers value to customers. With all the service options a customer has nowadays, the relationship a service-provider has with its customers has never been more critical. Businesses must be agile and flexible to meet their evolving demands, and the onus is on these businesses to support those needs and streamline efficiency.

Additionally, a digital transformation strategy helps employees being more engaged. With updated systems, applications, and solutions, it’s easier to communicate with customers, partners, and co-workers, and it leads to better collaboration as well, helping them succeed in driving important business initiatives.

There are many ways that a company can gain benefit by instituting a digital transformation plan, some of which are short-term wins, while others become more obvious down the line. Here are the 6 critical factors that lead to success in Digital Transformation.

1. Setting a strategy that covers what, why, and how and defines specific business outcomes
2. Winning leadership commitment from CEO through middle management
3. Finding the most capable people to drive the program
4. Developing an agile governance mindset that is flexible and adaptable.
5. Establishing clear metrics for processes and outcomes
6. Building modular tech and data platforms driven by business needs

The key to addressing all six factors is planning, preparation, and execution of digital transformation strategy. Once the plan is fixed, then one can determine what it is that one wants to gain from upgrading the digital foothold. Digital Leaders have accomplished an earnings growth 1.8 times^* higher than companies that resist Digital Transformation. Organizations that get these 6 elements right have an 80%^* chance of success.

Out of the six factors mentioned, two of them are the most critical:

Agility is the key – Organizations need to ensure that all operations adopt an agile approach to work. This means learning continuously, acting as one team, being outcome-oriented, and being committed to action. While making this shift, having an agile mindset is of utmost importance. This requires an authentic belief in the behavioural changes required, as well as supporting tools such as playbooks, processes, and support to work in a cross-functional, mission-oriented way.

Soft skills are as important as tech skills – Another key factor is spending enough time to get the right people in place and then supporting those people. Leaders need to find the best people with the highest potential to lead a successful transformation. A few things to assess when finding a transformation team are:

1. Have you taken extra care to fill pivotal roles such as program manager?
2. Are there enough digitally literate people to drive new thinking?
3. Have you sourced team members tactically from business units so that they can become champions in critical areas?
4. Do you have a detailed assessment of the skills required and gaps to be filled?

In addition to tracking progress toward goals, company leaders should track the momentum of the project. Digital Transformation leaders should ask these questions to measure momentum:

• How strong is the business pull for digital solutions versus the program push?
• How do the most talented people in the company feel about joining the program, wary or excited?
• Are executives diverting funding to other initiatives or defending the transformation project?
• Are people trying to lower expectations about the work or talking up the advancements?

These “threshold behaviours” are a good indicator of whether the work is headed in the right direction or stalled out. Success is measured by the percentage of targets met and value created, the percentage of goals met on time, success relative to other transformations, and success relative to management’s aspirations for sustainable change. 

InovarTech eliminates the complexity of end-to-end integration with a modern cloud integration platform that connects B2B Data flows, applications, and data across the entire ecosystem and drives complex digital transformation efforts.

References:

^*6 ways to win at Digital Transformation from TechRepublic

CEO Satya Nadella said,” We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”

In this pandemic, there is no choice for anyone but to be tech-savvy. Most businesses that were not dependent on technology, have now been forced into adopting technology. This has forced a shift in remote-work policies and workplace hygiene as well as evolved in business-continuity strategies. The one silver lining to this situation is that industries will now understand how smart-technology platforms and digital-transformation tools can help make fool proof business models in the face of such a global crisis.

The impact that technology is having on the society will persist for years to come. The top digital revolutions are work from home, distance education, telehealth, online entertainment leading to reduced bandwidth and retail industry. Here is our perspective on how some of the industries have changed recently.

RETAIL INDUSTRY:

Retailers are now focusing on launching online stores and developing a well-mapped customer journey across various e-commerce websites. Survival of the retail industry calls for its ability to sell, which involves checking the existing business process to find problems and creating a more robust framework. This will improve efficiency and help converge evolving technologies. Thus, improving customer experience.

HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY:

In the health care sector, non-urgent cases are being dealt with using telemedicine as most governments are now insisting on being technology-enabled. Nowadays, patients get better treatment with virtual reality tools, wearable medical devices and mobile technology. Hospitals are using big data to create a customer persona which compiles statistical information on what the prospective patients want and need, and the platforms where one can reach them. Even doctors can now streamline their workflows using artificial intelligence-powered systems.

FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS:

Most banks still have not adopted cloud-based infrastructure due to security concerns, but this pandemic has driven them to make this their top priority to become resilient. Banks being digitized can see reduced costs and streamlined processes and this end-to-end integration provides a seamless, engaging customer experience. This makes room for further business transformation with new digital technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Being primarily powered by AI and its related technologies of machine learning and predictive analytics, insurance operations have become faster. Digital transformation is also speeding up customer service, where live chat and digital assistants are helping customers in their most important times of need.

EDUCATION INDUSTRY:

Digital transformation has impacted the education industry and educators are now realising the benefits of technology in classrooms. Education is an industry with antiquated methods and practices, but with the help of digital transformation, teachers have begun making drastic changes to their instructions and assessments at a much faster and smoother rate than expected. New educational technology is helping students learn in a collaborative and interactive manner. Virtual and augmented reality plays a major role in enhancing teachers’ instructions while simultaneously creating lessons that are fun and engaging for students. Thus, teachers are being able to bring the outside world into the classroom.

Today’s pervasive online environment allows exciting possibilities that can educate students on cyber safety as well as individual responsibility. Colleges and universities are starting to create informal campus learning spaces for the students to understand the importance of collaborating and creating whenever possible and not just within classrooms. Artificial intelligence has also become a major tool in higher education. Australia’s Deaken University used IBM Watson to create a virtual student advisory service available every day of the year. In the very first trimester, over 30,000 questions were recorded. Thus, giving actual advisors time to spend on much advanced problems.

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES:

Infrastructure modernisation has become a priority for governments looking to serve citizens in the digital era. Local, state as well as federal government agencies are undergoing digital transformation to help them use the power of the cloud. While, technology can help governments become more effective, the change does not happen overnight. Due to various factors, different government agencies are at various stages of digital transformation and are looking at how they can scale their efforts to fulfil the commitments made to their constituencies.

Executives of various industries are now inspired to use digital advances such as analytics, mobility, and social media to transform businesses. Customer interactions and internal business processes are changing to take over new technological capabilities. Governance is a key determinant in managing digital transformation as it often goes beyond organisational structures to include specific leaders. These new roles include ‘digital czars’ who lead digital transformation at the firm or business level as well as senior liaison roles.

To conclude, in each of the above-mentioned scenarios, the thing in common is to transform organisations into smarter, more proactive, and more energetic entities that are able to cope up with the changes in our behaviour and technology demands. Taking the right steps can help them evaluate what they need to do to harmonize their back-end systems with new digitized capabilities for clients, partners and staff.

” When digital transformation is done right, it is like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar,” rightly said by George Westerman, MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy.