Living the Live Enterprise

What if?

What if your enterprise could sense, respond, adapt, and learn just like a living body? What if it was able to optimally gather data both from internal processes and from external stimuli to become more informed? What if your enterprise could orchestrate its myriad processes to react to data promptly? What if business decision support systems were enabled with just the right outputs from these processes and insights of the data? What if the systems themselves learnt what and how decisions were made? And what if that next iteration was made even more intelligent?

This is what information technology systems are supposed to do, right? But, in any large enterprise that has lived through generations, silos appear to handle scale and complexity. Data is trapped. Processes get sluggish. Information is lost in translation. Overheads are introduced to govern and extract value. And the cost of these additional processes to gather and manipulate data results in a tremendous loss of productivity and lower agility for timely decision making. In the extreme, the act of measurement causes the very thing that you measure to become unstable and hence inaccurate.

I was recently in a discussion about how getting accurate sales forecasts from the CRM system was sometimes difficult due to the behaviour of sales teams – who would enter a potential sales opportunity into the system only late into the process when there was a reasonable chance of success. The discussion meandered into mandating them to enter relevant data into the system before the workflow could move forward.

But, wait… doesn’t the system already know what activities the sales person is doing on the basis of her scheduled client meetings, travel records and proposal submissions? Can the system make sense of these patterns to automatically suggest or create a record in the CRM system – allowing the sales person to spend her time pursuing the client rather than on an internal administrative process?

That in essence is a Live Enterprise.

To get there, though, implies the CIO shifts his primary objective from transaction support (i.e., enabling the “how”), which is increasingly automated, to intelligent data and decision support for all stakeholders (i.e., enabling the “what”). This imperative for an incumbent enterprise is all the more urgent, given that its digital native competition is already geared to do this from the ground up, giving them the advantage of being more nimble and instinctive.

Being the Change!

At Infosys, we took on this challenge of breaking down nearly two decades of technology debt in an attempt to rewire ourselves as an agile, responsive enterprise that can scale as required. Our journey that began in April 2019 recognized that what was needed was the digital modeling of the enterprise: with deep, architectural networking of systems across silos of data and process stacks. Overlaying this are component capabilities such as observability services AI, poly-cloud management, phygital ecosystems that integrate smart workspaces, computational design, etc.

But above all, this requires “process busting” and a re-imagination of the user experience, placing the human at the center of all redesign.

To be the change we want to drive, we have reimagined the experience we want to give our 230,000+ employees by optimizing 100+ employee applications into three mobile apps. Over 30,000 employees, the world over, have been smoothly onboarded through Launchpad, making the process paperless and saving over 1.2 million sheets of paper a year. More than 170,000 employees are hyper-productive, leveraging InfyMe, with 45% of their day to day operations now doable on mobile. Over 200,000 employees are learning anytime-anywhere on the Lex platform, spending on average at least 35 minutes per day on the app. The shared digital infrastructure has reduced infrastructure setup time for projects by 12X, and the Infosys Live Enterprise Store curates more than 200 platform services to help accelerate our client’s transformation journey.

We have now curated our best practices and the technology platform components that we have built along the way into the Infosys Live Enterprise Suite, so our clients can benefit as well. The suite can be used in any industry for corporate functions, such as human resources, finance, sales, marketing, or legal, and also in industry-specific situations, such as demand-driven supply chains, next-gen grids for utilities, banks of the future, etc. 

The Live Enterprise's ability to sense and respond gets complex processes executed and tasks done efficiently especially the frequent and routine ones. With the routine of business taken care of, the Live Enterprise is free to focus its talent almost entirely on making its value chains responsive to ever-changing market needs. These evolving experiences, in turn, generate new insights to power the enterprise's responses even more precisely, accelerating the pace at which the Live Enterprise Navigates its Next.

Deepak Padaki, Infosys

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