‘Poor broadband infra biggest barrier to digital transformation’

Indian enterprises are on par with their global peers in terms of digital capabilities and are catching up in areas of infrastructure and processes that will enable their digital transformation, according to a report by Frost&Sullivan.

The immediate challenges for digital initiatives in India is non-uniform connectivity, speed, and broadband infrastructure along with a scarcity of suitably-skilled personnel in the market despite an abundance of engineers, the study said. To address these obstacles, the government and telecom providers are laying out optical fibre cables to improve the overall speed, while enterprises are allocating budgets to train existing and new employees.

While there is awareness on the need for digital roadmap in these enterprises, more has to be done to bring this awareness into action, the report said.

Frost & Sullivan recently collaborated with Nasscom to release a study ‘Enterprise Digital Transformation: Evaluating Indian Enterprises’. Based on an indepth study of 250 firms, suppliers, and users across verticals such as healthcare, retail, telecom, manufacturing, and banking/financial services/insurance (BFSI), the study analyses digital transformation strategies of Indian enterprises and assesses value propositions. “Government-backed Digital India initiatives, such as Digilocker, eSampark, eLearning, AADHAR linking, and direct distribution system, will catalyse this transformation and improve infrastructure and solution platforms. Simultaneously, an increasing number of enterprises across the country are moving to the cloud, implementing Internet of Things solutions, and trying to understand customers better through analytics and social media platforms. As a result, tremendous opportunities are emerging for information technology and IT-enabled services (ITeS) providers,” the study noted.

The study pointed out that banks invest 30 per cent more in application for customer services over insurance companies, and the intra-company digital attitude in banking is higher than that of insurance companies. Retail banking can lose up to 55 per cent of their business to fintech firms if they don't up the ante in terms of investment in digital transformation, according to the study.

“From small/medium to large-scale and government ones, Indian enterprises are revamping their infrastructure to set a path for digital transformation,” said Haritha Ramachandran, Associate Director, Digital Transformation (ICT) Practice, Frost & Sullivan.

“Digital transformation will, however, require timely policy intervention and infrastructure for IT-BPM sectors to support cloud implementations and improve security. Furthermore, verticals such as BFSI are seizing this as an opportunity so their fintech peers do not disrupt them. At the same time, the manufacturing industry is also looking to take production lines to the next level with Industry 4.0.”

R Chandrashekhar, President, Nasscom, said, “With the rapid evolution of technology, digital solutions are becoming an integral component of business operations for enterprises across sectors. This is further fuelled by an increase in digital-savvy customers along with the necessity to stay ahead in the market. This study helps analyse and forecast digital transformation strategies of Indian enterprises, helping them transform their business processes.”

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