Tag: digital transformation
The need to automate workflows and integrate data across applications is essential for organizations’ high productivity. Microsoft PowerApps allows businesses to seamlessly build apps and eliminate manual tasks with automation. PowerApps pre-built templates enable build custom apps, importing data into apps from various data sources, and sharing the app across the organization.
How PowerApps transform day-to-day operations?
Sales Appointment Management – enhances workforce collaboration, and access to sales information, and analyzes customer requirements for future engagements.
Product Orders Management – efficient management of product orders, approvals, and rejections.
Leave Management – streamlines day-to-day management of PTO (Paid Time Off) and attendance.
What does PowerApps offer?
Easy to use tool for Business Users to create and connect apps to both cloud and corporate APIs that can be easily shared amongst others within the organization.
Easily build Web and Mobile Apps for your business that integrates Single Sign-On (SSO) to corporate data and services
Complete security access management using any existing corporate API with Azure Active Directory integration.
Rapid creation of Apps using CRUD APIs for many popular, third-party services in the cloud, as well as on-premises services
Full capabilities of Azure App Service – Can host as many Web, Mobile, Logic, and API Apps as your business needs within the fully managed App Service Environment.
PowerApps use cases
1. Event management app that helps end-to-end management of marketing events.
2. Product information repository to help share access to stakeholders.
3. Field service management is a dynamic app that is featured to address specific organizational needs according to service or product.
4. Global contact management and internal communications platform for effective communications.
5. Tracking financial needs through express management, invoice processing, payments tracking, and financial reports.
6. Optimising operational efficiency with customer/employee self-service portals, partner portals, and supply-chain management apps.
Benefits
1. Automates mundane business processes & manages technology debts.
2. High integration of data across 200+ data sources.
3. Boosts productivity, and efficiency, and enables greater flexibility.
4. Ensures security & allows administering data policies, user control options, and permissions.
5. Do more with the budget, time, and resource constraints.
How we can help!
Inovar-Tech works with clients across industries like Manufacturing, Insurance, Healthcare, Telecom, Retail, Education, and State Governments.
We develop solutions for businesses to address their problems with Data Migration, Process optimization, Automation, Analytics, PowerApps, SharePoint portals, etc.
Talk to us to know more about our use cases and the solutions we provide!
Microsoft adds yet another powerful feature to the low-code/no-code PowerApps. An AI-powered Express Design that can convert any uploaded PDF, PPT, Figma files, hand-written sketches, or screenshots into a working app. Industry-leading AI is built into Express Design that allows seamlessly scanning inputs to produce working apps that can connect to various data sources.
How Express Design works?
1. Upload any files like PDF, take a pic of a hand-written note, a UI screenshot from another app, etc.
2. Power Apps’ inbuilt AI engine trained to recognize common application elements will automatically detect the upload and start generating a working app along with data schema in MS Dataverse
3. Edit this AI-generated app to suit your needs and add more elements
4. Next, integrate with databases like SAP, HubSpot, Salesforce, SQL, etc.
5. Customize the app further with your desired colors, user interface, etc.
Industry-wide use cases
1. Legacy data in various electronic formats which are lying in outdated libraries across many organizations
2. Conference room brain-storm sessions to startup ideas
3. Business function-specific requirements that need to be automated
4. Integration with Figma which enables using the same design with PowerApps Figma UI Kit
5. Interactive educational apps that can be used across a university
Benefits of Express Design in PowerApps
Being true low-code tool PowerApps’ addition of Express Design takes the low-code methodology a step further by enhancing the ease of creating business apps.
This flexibility and ease of creation give organizations the ability to democratize app creation for a specific need by a specific function/department without having to entirely depend on IT.
It also drives organizations to create individual and organizational governance policies along with encouraging innovation by design where ideas are converted, preserved, and shared across the organization fueling growth.
How we can help!
Inovar-Tech works with clients across industries like Manufacturing, Insurance, Healthcare, Telecom, Retail, Education, and State Governments.
We develop solutions for businesses to address their problems with Data Migration, Process optimization, Automation, Analytics, PowerApps, SharePoint portals, etc.
Talk to us to know more about our use cases and the solutions we provide!
Serverless Computing
Serverless computing is a cloud computing architecture model in which the cloud service provider allocates hardware resources on a need basis. The cloud service providers own the physical server installation setup, management, and maintenance. The service provider allocates server resources only during execution and is free during idle time or when the application is not in use. The end-users or the customers pay for what they use to these service providers. The end-users using these server services need not worry about the backend infrastructure capacity or maintenance.
Serverless Computing offerings
There are several reasons to adopt Serverless computing over the conventional cloud-based or server-centric data centers or cloud computing. Serverless computing architecture is flexible and economical. It offers greater scalability and a short turn-around time to release. Organizations save cost and time in planning infrastructure space, purchasing hardware, installation, and maintenance of servers.
Advantages of Serverless Computing
No server management
Since the vendor manages the physical server’s planning, installation, organizations, or developers need not worry about the physical server’s maintenance or DevOps. The labor and logistic costs are saved, and the organizations can re-invest them in opportunities that are productive or areas that give returns.
Scalability
Serverless computing can scale automatically as per demand or usage increases. If a function needs to be run in multiple instances, the service provider’s servers will start, run, and end them as they are needed, using the concept of containers.
Pay-as-you-go
Code only runs when backend functions are needed by the serverless application, and the code automatically scales up as needed. There are server services that can track finer, and smaller details or timings of the server used and provide better and more accurate expenses. This results in heavy savings compared to the conventional server system where organizations must bear operational expenses of servers irrespective of their usage.
Performance for continuously running code
If an application is using code regularly, then the performance will be the same on a serverless environment compared to a traditional server environment, irrespective of the number of instances being run in parallel. If the code is continuously running it might need a short cycle to start called the “warm start”.
Reduced latency
Since the code and application are hosted on an origin server, the code can be run from anywhere and very close to the origin server, thus decreasing the latency.
Faster deployment and easy updates
In a serverless environment, since the code is maintained in the cloud, developers can quickly and easily update their code to develop and release newer versions of the application. Developers can choose to upload the code either one function at a time or all at once because the application is typically a collection of functions provisioned by the service provider.
This helps in applying and releasing the patches or updates with bug fixes or new features quite fast.
Disadvantages of serverless computing
Security concerns
“Multitenancy” – means sharing the same infrastructure with multiple and independent end-users like sharing HW resources in serverless computing. So, in a serverless environment, during the sharing of resources across different end-users, if the multi-tenant servers are not configured properly, it can result in potential security breaches and data theft or misuse. But if configured and maintained correctly, through proper vetting it can reap benefits.
Costly for long-running processes
If the applications are designed to run for long durations, then sometimes the cost using serverless compute, may overwhelm compared to using traditional server services. So, the benefits of serverless computing would be trimmed to applications meant to run for short durations.
Challenges in testing and debugging
It is challenging to simulate a serverless environment to experience how the code will execute once deployed. And with no access to the backend processes or the application is broken into smaller functions, sometimes developers may find it hard to test or debug the issues.
Performance degrades for irregular runs
There may be cases where the serverless code may not be constantly running in which case, to boot up and start the code, might take considerable time, and impact the performance. This is called a “cold start”.
Single vendor dependency
Cloud service provider selection should be depending on the more open and generic APIs that the features and workflows offer, giving us an option for easy switching to other vendors if need be. Sticking to one serverless cloud service provider can often be risky for unforeseen circumstances.
When do you need a serverless architecture?
Serverless architecture is most preferred for developers if:
1. They want to reduce their go-to-market time.
2. Build lightweight and flexible applications.
3. Apps need to be scalable or updated frequently and quickly.
4. Apps have inconsistent usage, peak periods, or traffic.
5. App functions need to be closer to the end-user to reduce latency.
When should you avoid using a serverless architecture?
Large applications running for longer durations or having consistent and predictable workloads may better be benefitted from a traditional server compared to a serverless architecture both in terms of cost and architecture.
Inovar implements Serverless Cloud Computing
Achieving business goals with a collaborative approach and tailoring the use of apt cloud computing technology infrastructure is very important.
We provided many of our customers with better infrastructure, ensured effortless and uninterrupted operations. We delivered all the features that would help find information for the SMEs and enable them with the right guidance. For many of our clients, we have digitalized the entire process with end-to-end workflow applications. Inovar helped a few clients to deploy a hybrid cloud solution for data security and access control and boosted processes with serverless engines.
We ensured that the client’s services are met and addressed to the business needs with improved user experience and substantial cost savings. If you are looking for services with the best-in-class infrastructure and leaders who ensure strategy lives for ages, reach out to us.
In this era of Digital transformation, industries have enhanced their attempt to optimize business processes excelling through Microsoft Power Automate. Many companies are on a spree to trigger platforms like Microsoft Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Virtual Bot, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and many more. Among which Power Automate is a tech-stack promising platform that boosts productivity and improves business process efficiency by saving time and cost.
The main backbone of any organization is the business processing unit. With the help of business process automation (BPA), companies achieve at the time spent in manual processing, any human errors made, and inefficiency of systems. Statistical analysis proves that with the help of BPA the markets are ballooning at a rapid increase of 10% every year.
What is Microsoft Power Automate?
Microsoft Power Automate formerly known as Microsoft Power Flow is a cloud-based service also known as a low-code or no-code automation tool, built specifically for workflow and process automation. It includes powerful Robotic Process Automation (RPA), called UI Flows, that allows quick and easy automation instead of time-consuming manual processes.
Companies leverage their platform by seamlessly using the Microsoft office 365 services
- To increase their productivity
- Reduce operational costs, and
- Enhance business process efficiency
Ways organizations can use Power Automate
- Create your own workflow
- Automation recurring, frequent, and routine tasks
- Automate legacy of business processes
- Automate cloud applications and databases
- Design logics for Power Apps
- Automate the central business workflow
Benefits of Power Automate in improving Business Process Efficiency
BPA can significantly alleviate many pain points that organizations are facing today. Implementing and installing the right flows can result in achieving key benefits like reduced workload, operational cost, and human errors while increasing compliance and reliability with optimized performance.
1. BPA significantly balloons the productivity of the business process with varied types of workflow automation like Process flow, Desktop flow, Cloud flow according to their need.
2. All the flows can be connected to the process across Microsoft applications like SharePoint, Business Central, Outlook, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These flows well align with the primary aim of Microsoft Teams where the tools make the process more efficient and easily accessible.
3. Power Automate helps create calendars, manage tasks and time, directly from their emails or Teams chats.
4. Process flows are data-centric with many sources applied for numerous purposes. As data collection is time-consuming and missed data may render errors the process automate helps recover this flaw whenever it is triggered.
5. With Power Flow Automate templates, time can be saved by abrogating manual tasks increasing efficiency. While editing these templates or an original process flow, it creates dynamic content options, catches, and identifies errors with the flow checker, and points to the exact need for attention.
Need of Power Automate in different industries
Power Automate has a significant impact on almost every business sector where flows play a vital role. BPA brought revolutionary changes in many sectors like the Healthcare industry, Manufacturing industry, Retail industry, Finance industry, etc. Significantly digital transformation in industries has witnessed adoption to modern technologies including, cloud, AI, IoT, and RPA.
Just like Inovar helped one of the giant US healthcare organizations to manage their COVID 19 registration through an online application. The applied analytics makes the process smooth with Bots and SharePoint, thereby helping staff to access and manage bulk patient information in just one click.
Similarly, the Financial Services and Banking institutions have rapidly adopted business process management automation solutions. With Microsoft Power Automate, the Financial Service sectors can automate loan processing, account opening, customer data management, and details of staff. The manufacturing and retail industry also implements a similar process as the healthcare and finance sectors.
As service consultants, we understand that the automation of industries varies, and every business has its own business goals and capabilities. Hence, keeping them in mind we build solutions that help improve businesses efficiency with Microsoft Power Platform. Discover more about Power Automate with Inovar.
Robotic process automation or RPA has the power and capability to help organizations increase their output and accelerate their digital transformation agenda. The true benefit of RPA rests on the technology’s ability to increase efficiency while reducing costs. There is no surprise that RPA is gaining traction in the market by taking away repetitive manual tasks from the human workforce and freeing them to focus on more critical strategic functions.
6 steps to use RPA in an effective way
1. Identify the process
The first thing is to carry out a thorough assessment of all the operations, within and across various departments, so that you can determine which processes can prove to be good candidates for automation.
2. Manage expectations:
Implementation of RPA is all about managing the people and their expectations. Employees must be informed about the need for automation, its essentiality, and how it is likely to influence the return on investment (ROI). The most important areas in which you need to manage expectations are:
- Implementation time
- Implementation cost
- Cost savings
- Benefits of analytics
3. Choose the right tool
Another vital task is to have a crystal-clear set of objectives that your company aims towards. There you can follow two criteria. First, you can consider vendor-related criteria, such as their experience or their orientation to future-proof automation solutions.
Another way, you can try to match the RPA software features, like security and screen scraping capabilities, ease of implementation, the total cost of ownership, etc., to your company’s hierarchy of goals and needs.
4. Assessment of ROI
A fine-grained analysis is required for analysis of the feasibility required before successful RPA implementation. It is important for every organization to compare investment against return, and to decide based on this to what extent it is profitable to invest in RPA.
5. Involve your IT team
The members of your IT team can provide critical insight as you choose an RPA tool that meets your business objectives. Their expertise will also be valuable whenever unexpected issues or malfunctions occur. Training for other employees will be also easy with their support.
6. Measuring the performance
Finally, formulate key performance indicators (KPIs) based on which you can find out the success rate of your RPA implementation.
Inovar blends diligence with skill
Inovar delivers state-of-the-art smart solutions by blending diligence with skills. We adhere to the aforementioned steps and identify what processes/functions need to be automated.
Considering the massive importance and benefits of RPA solutions in reducing efforts, improving customer service, and increasing profits, proper implementation becomes pivotal to ensure that every step is duly scrutinized, vetted, and backed.
The pandemic has changed how people around the world live, work, and engage with each other. In late 2019 when covid-19 struck the world, affecting millions of people all over the planet — the healthcare industry was hit the most. The pressing need for resources, information, cost optimization, and supply chain inefficiencies in the sector calls for a major technology overhaul. Therefore, embracing new-age digital technologies is key for healthcare providers in addressing the immediate concerns and driving long-term goals.
Automation makes a revolutionary process change in most of the industries, that has the same or even more potential for the healthcare sector. Introduction of Business Process automation can streamline the healthcare system for simplicity, increase service quality, and manage pen and paper-based manual tasks, saving time and cost without the slightest glitch.
Challenges in Healthcare
Application Disparity: Modern healthcare is a complex environment where many disparate applications work. The complexities also grow with the business. With mergers and acquisitions, modern technologies are adopted to meet new challenges. In this situation managing all technology becomes quite difficult for the healthcare IT departments and business users.
For example, in most healthcare sectors, patient data transfer is still carried out manually in the form of files and documents from one department to another. As the volumes of data are generally high, compiling them in one single process is a tedious and lengthy process. Not to forget, since they are done manually, there is always scope for multiple human errors and miscalculations. The greater the rate of error, the more the cost will be for rectification.
Lack of efficiency in patient service is another challenge that can be a barrier to your organization’s growth and reputation. In most scenarios, customer care executives are busy with paper works and other files and documents compilation that they lack prompt and timely delivery of services to the customers.
I hope you can relate to the problems I discussed above. So now I am going to share how automation becomes an integral part to solve some of healthcare challenges.
The business automation software works on all programs whether, new applications, legacy programs, cloud-based solutions, or on-prem.
BPA makes human-oriented processes much smoother with greater results like increased speed, productivity, and efficiency. Suppose for a patient, scheduling an appointment with a doctor usually happens online in a matter of minutes, but what happens behind the scenes is a bit more complicated. Healthcare institutions have to collect personal information, diagnosis, insurance details, and confirm the doctor’s availability. If the right information cannot be accessed during the registration process, or if the doctor is not available, it is up to the staff to inform the patient beforehand.

Implementing automation can resolve some of the bottlenecks related to scheduling patient appointments. Bots can automate patient data collection and processing, so patients can be optimally scheduled according to diagnosis, location, doctor availability, and other criteria. By simplifying appointment scheduling, healthcare institutions can focus their efforts on providing exceptional service and other tasks that cannot be automated. Automation tools also enable customer care executives to take the assistance of such tools with automated call and email options.
Inovar proposed Automation Solutions with better ROI
Something similar also happened with one of our US healthcare clients. They were also facing customer support challenges during the pandemic. They were primarily using a pen and paper-based system for information collection and symptom analysis. After the outbreak of the virus, a lot of patients started asking for support in their chatbot regarding diagnosis, vaccination, and other medical support.
With a lot of restrictions, it becomes necessary to give patients the capability to run the assessments on their own from the comfort of their homes. Remote work capability also became especially important, and they needed an infrastructure through which they can achieve that.

To manage the entire scenario, they required VPN, which was not designed for such large-scale use resulting in low bandwidth and frequent outages. Additionally, a lot of the content and manual workflows required the physical presence of the employees on the hospital premises that was quite impossible at that moment.
In this critical situation, the first hurdle to cross was to get them to a cloud-based solution to ride care facilities across all their nation-level operations and provide the best health support to patients. This would make remote work possible for the hospital staff in case they were showing symptoms and had to quarantine at home.
In this situation, Inovar helped a leading US healthcare organization to automate their Covid-19 Helpdesk and Registration process from a pen and paper-based manual system to a cloud-based automated solution.
SharePoint Online became the choice of the platform along with Power Platform as their primary productivity technologies allowed them to create a technology framework with a built-in rapid growth mechanism and assist hospital staff to manage the entire remote work process.
With the implementation of the initial solution, the healthcare organization was also facing challenges to roll out the solution in all other locations of the US that becomes much fair with SharePoint and the power platform.

A simple but practical experience gained a high adoption rate within the healthcare organization. The organization’s IT team also considered it as the best rollout experience with almost a zero-touch provisioning and deployment strategy. Ultimately, with all these solutions 90% of their remote and quarantined caregivers were able to serve the patients over remote calls and Online consultation.
The digitization of call centers was a major bonus as it consisted of Automated Diagnosis for Covid, automatic decision-making capabilities, and other similar tools that ensured self-help services that were non-existent before. This resulted in a reduction of 70% in phone calls.
Businesses transitioning from manual processes to comprehensive workload automation tend to go through several phases on their automation journey. If you are also facing the same difficulties within your organization, then Inovar is the best partner to collaborate with and make your automation journey smoother. Feel free to reach out to us we would love to collaborate!
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.
- Setting a strategy that covers what, why, and how and defines specific business outcomes
- Winning leadership commitment from CEO through middle management
- Finding the most capable people to drive the program
- Developing an agile governance mindset that is flexible and adaptable.
- Establishing clear metrics for processes and outcomes
- 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:
- Have you taken extra care to fill pivotal roles such as program manager?
- Are there enough digitally literate people to drive new thinking?
- Have you sourced team members tactically from business units so that they can become champions in critical areas?
- 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
‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ the old proverb becomes the ultimate truth for global healthcare organizations in the current situation. The front-line healthcare staff has been fighting a war against the dreadful human tragedy due to COVID-19. In these turbulent times, digital technology is reshaping the care delivery system globally.
The healthcare industry was pretty slow in embracing the digital age. But, after the Corona pandemic, healthcare organizations have picked up at an unprecedented pace in the digital transformation journey. Also, more than 50%*** of patients are now ready to adopt digital tools as a way of quick cure solutions. Within six months, some significant variations were observed in medical management, like:
- Doctors and care staffs became more digitally matured in different hospitals
- More confidence & willingness among staff and patients to use technology
- Funding to invest in the medical IT infrastructure
Healthcare leaders have been spellbound by noticing how technology has stepped up to help the affected people in this pandemic. A report reveals a 500%* increase in telehealth visits and remote worker’s number almost double-ups.

Providence Health of Washington State has reconfigured their chatbot ‘Grace’ with FAQ’s and COVID-19 symptoms related assessment. Providence Digital Innovation Group has noticed that 70,000 * patients log into the chatbot and received over one million emails enquiring about the disease symptoms and doctor consultations. The number of virtual visits has gone up by 10 to 15 times compared to the pre-pandemic situation.

Millions of people are now welcoming digital care therapies and open to adopting the virtual health visit. Now, most on-demand digital care services are:
- On-demand medical appointments, home therapies, and care suggestion through telehealth
- Physicians and hospitals are using big-data insights and cloud storage to track and manage patient data
- Medical wearable devices to control health 24/7 and improve preventive measurements
- The virtual collaboration that helps doctors and caregivers to get trained in a better way
- Artificial intelligence that makes personalized treatment possible
- COVID-19 Self-assessment survey designed by healthcare marketers to check the valuable data among the population and initiate quick actions

Considering the present situation, the Government is relaxing healthcare regulations. Since the onset of the pandemic, social distancing has become mandatory for everyone, and that has started an experiment on remote care. The remote treatment makes patients more digitally empowered than ever.

According to the Google database report, from the starting of January to now, the most searched term is “Vaccine,” including the phrase “COVID-19 Vaccine trial and update.” Moreover, the below statistics have revealed a substantial increase in searches of preventive measures in South Asian countries.

Based on these above facts, we have found some astounding impacts on the global healthcare business due to this rapid transformation. An American market research company has already observed a hockey stick curve of the virtual care adoption system in the United States. Besides, US health insurers have admitted covering coronavirus related telemedicine. A French firm Doctolib SAS has experienced an 18-fold jump** on the medical video consultation within March 2020. Over one million people have used NHS 111online support for assessing nCov symptoms within the first week of site launching.

Besides all these benefits, there are some challenges in a digital transformation like:
- Equal opportunity access
- Clinical support to the patient for optimizing technology
- Training to handle new expertise and others
However, healthcare organizations can get rid of these challenges and improve their adoption scale by following the below characteristics.
Characteristics | Usefulness |
Easy to use techniques | Patients able to connect through mobile device sensors, useful for video/phone consultation |
Measurable improvement in patient care quality | Facilitate clinical decision and increase learning on augmented reality |
Affordable agile solutions and easy to replace the facility | Maintenance cost is low |
Better working collaboration with industry innovator | Improve communication between end-users and makes clinical training easy |
Ready to deliver a dynamic solution as per the need of end-users | Quick analysis and better advice to patients |
References:
* Padmanabhan, P (contributor of CIO) ‘How the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping healthcare with technology’, CIO, India Retrieved from: https://www.cio.com/article/3534499/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-is-reshaping-healthcare-with-technology.html
** Rethinking Digital Transformation of Healthcare Amid COVID-19: How Marketers Can Adapt to Changing Dynamics Retrieved from: https://useinsider.com/healthcare-amid-covid-19/
*** Vikram Kapur and Alex Boulton Covid-19 Accelerates the Adoption of Telemedicine in Asia-Pacific Countries, BAIN & COMPANY, Retrieved from: https://www.bain.com/insights/covid-19-accelerates-the-adoption-of-telemedicine-in-asia-pacific-countries/
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.