Last of two parts
The Manila Times (TMT): How do you see the changes from this year impacting businesses in the coming year, and beyond?
Melarkode: Let’s talk about the flip side of digitalization. There is a heightened awareness of aspects of digital dystopia, too. Various lockdowns have shown us that, ultimately, humans are more important than ever in the adoption of technology. One-hundred-percent digital is neither desirable nor practical. At the end of this crisis, no one is going to see being restricted to a room or a couple of rooms for everything from entertainment to work and family life, and seeing everyone above the shoulder on a small screen is the ideal and only way to do things.
Businesses would have to weigh up a balanced return to normalcy, from allowing hybrid working from home and from an office to balancing travel with doing things online.
Ultimately, technologies that augment human capacity and capabilities will be the most successful, not those that replace them. Enabling connectivity across the hybrid working environments, including cyber and physical security. will once again be made easier with iPaaS.
TMT: Do you see faster adoption of digital transformation across industries?
Melarkode: Yes, absolutely. Especially with the advent of iPaaS that makes it easy and business case-friendly in times of constrained resources. Pre-Covid, there was an IDC report showing that 51 percent of CIOs had reported stalled digital transformation projects and that 64 percent had listed legacy IT systems as the No. 1 barrier. Now, as David Chow, CIO of Newgate Medical Group and advisor to Fortune 500 companies said at one of our CIO Chats: “A lot of CIOs will be exposed by this crisis. So, if your house is not in order, there’s nowhere to hide.”
With the widespread availability of cloud technologies and platforms such as iPaaS that make many steps of the digital transformation process possible on premises. as well as on the cloud at pace, there are few excuses now to stick to old ways of lots of coding effort, big teams running sequential IT management processes (versus Agile methodologies), using expensive and outdated old-school “middleware,” as it’s called, to connect different parts of the enterprise and have untenable excuses for the slow pace of digital transformation, whichever industry you’re in. Lack of talent is an often-quoted reason, as well, another issue that iPaaS solves for with what I’d like to term “economies of skills.” You don’t need a Ph.D. or advanced technical knowledge like some IT platforms do to implement a platform such as Boomi’s; in fact, at one stage, the community of users were calling what we do, “citizen integration”, i.e., even non-IT users could run it.
TMT: What are some of the biggest challenges businesses face in adjusting to the new landscape, and does your company intend to address them in 2021?
Melarkode: In addition to the points already covered, data in general would continue to proliferate with increased digitalization. If businesses haven’t started figuring out how to store, connect, mine and use it in the best and fastest way, they would be outcompeted.
Data and how you use it is increasingly a core source of competitive advantage, especially between competitors who have access to the same base data. One may just end up better able to connect the dots reliably and use it far better in terms of taking business decisions and acting fast on them. iPaaS is all about connecting data and applications across teams, business units and regions. Boomi is a world leader in that space and would continue to grow in the space.
TMT: What are some opportunities businesses should consider to continuously adapt to changes in the industry?
Melarkode: My personal take is to game scenarios well into the future and work backward from there in practical, phased chunks in tackling the future as it happens. For example, when my parents were growing up, they were probably told that jobs in government were the future and not the multinational jobs that actually proliferated. When I was growing up, the frames of that time were used to project that MNC (multinational company) jobs would be the future; few predicted an IT and business process outsourcing and coding-based world that’s been very prominent in the Philippines, for example.
Similarly, a lot of focus currently is on coding skills for the future — the future in reality is more likely to be one of machine learning and low code and with global warming, increased emphasis on clean energy technology, clean water technology, fresh land and construction technology required with coastal flooding and food technology to feeding a growing population sustainably. IT would be fundamental to all these through the application of artificial intelligence to improving farming practices to connecting data across IoT devices and sensors.
I’d advocate for business leaders to spend time with their peers outside their own industries or areas of comfort. The connections and insights generated could be surprisingly good and helpful for continuous anticipation of change and being able to adapt.
Our parent company, Dell Technologies, recently published a neurological study on the human to technology relationship. which showed that good technology could enable achieving 40 percent more in a workday and decreases work-related stress. The time has never been better to adopt “good technologies” such as iPaaS.
