Season 3, Episode 7 - "How does platform thinking fit into digital transformation?" with Maya Agaskar, Managing Director, Accenture

Hey, it's Andrew, and welcome back to Season 3 of Network Disrupted, where I, along with some very smart guests, help fellow technology leaders trade notes on navigating disruption in our space. This season, I've set a goal of exploring the issue of enterprise cloud adoption from as many angles as I can. Today, I'm joined by Maya Agaskar, who is a managing director at Accenture, working with tons of Fortune 100s on all angles of their digital transformation strategies. In this episode, Maya and I talk about the digital transformation journeys that we see many of our customers taking on, and what it will take to support those from a talent and a technology perspective. We dig into the concept of building platforms all over the business, and how that can support innovation that impacts end customers. As a fun addition, we talk about where we think the businesses we've grown up knowing are headed. So let's go. And if you have a moment, please don't forget to leave a review on Spotify, Apple, podcasts, or wherever you listen to these. The feedback is always so helpful, and you'll be helping more people like you discover the show. Maybe you can give me a sense of the complexity. We love the pilot-proofing concept approach. Influences, everything influences the human experience. There were several failures along the way. We want to be early adopter customers. You are handling sensitive information. That's where it's loved. Maya, thank you again for joining. Thrilled to have you today. And why don't you start by just telling us a bit about what you do at Accenture. Great, Andrew, and thanks for having me. So I am a member of our interactive practice, which works with our customers to focus on driving out what we call the business of experience. So historically, we used to talk about customer experience. We now are looking at every business being a digital business. And specifically, as those customers rotate to digital, how they can focus more on employee experience, how they can focus on partner experience, and how they can focus on in-customer experience. So every touch point a customer, partner, or internal employee has is thought about in a meaningful and delightful way. And those touch points are connected and informed by deep data analytics and predictive experiences. And so I am fortunate enough to be a member in that space of a team called Bloom. We work on driving growth strategy and innovation with some of our largest customers. So customers who want to innovate in the experience space, haven't quite done it before, are thinking about white space disruption or establishing new products and services or taking their existing products sweet and adding digital services to it. I am fortunate enough to get to both work with our internal teams and those customers to help identify what those experience-led services can be and then ultimately get to build them with our customers. Yeah, that's fantastic. And I love how you take it sort of from the expansion of customer experience or where a lot of that started. I used to always say, "Well, going back ten or twelve or fourteen years, if a company doesn't know who its customers are and how they're using its products, then they're eventually going to fail or they're not going to be able to grow at least." That was critical and was working with customers that launched amazing strategies like Nike around connected fitness in an industry where they were completely disintermediated from their customers initially, right? Like the retailers knew their customers or John Deere, something we talked about before on connected tractors or agricultural farming solutions, really, what they're trying to build. But I realize now it's well beyond that, as you just said. Yeah, for sure, you need to understand your customers. You need to understand how they're using your products. You need that data to inform strategies, but there's employees. I mean, every single touch point has got to be digitized. So, when you're working with your customers, I guess they're probably all over the place, but are they just starting this journey? Are they trying? They've failed. Where are they along that life cycle and how much transformation has occurred already and how do you sort of measure where they are, assuming some sort of model in terms of how you interact with them, sort of understand what their goals are, where they're going, where they are today and what they need to do. This is a great question. And we have customers that are on all sorts of different stages of maturity of their digital journey. We have ones that are very sophisticated. They have platforms in place. They've centralized their data. They have what we call digital factory models stood up, where they have an innovation pipeline that is running in parallel with multiple application development pipelines. They've reorganized their workforce into, you know, services-oriented guilds. They have very specialized talent that they're able to bring together for short periods of time to drive out innovation or to drive out development depending on whether or not they sit on that innovation segment or the development segment. We have other customers. I worked with one last year that, for example, aren't yet on cloud. And what they're finding is there's pressure for them to move more of their data information the way they work to the cloud because they're finding that some of the things, all the shifts that we've already talked about, you know, shifting to digital products, shifting to value-added services, they're not able to make when they're still in a very traditional infrastructure environment. They don't have the skills, but beyond that, they don't even have the technology capabilities to be able to support some of the work they want to do. If you're a utility company and you are still on a physical back-end server in a data center, it makes it awfully hard to have a customer-facing portal where a customer can come in and see their bill and pay it online. Again, it sounds like something that is so simple that due to the liquid customer expectations that we talked about at the beginning of this call, customers are expecting. Yet the company has so many barriers that they have to make from a raw technology standpoint to a talent standpoint to an organizational standpoint before they're able to do what should seemingly be fairly simplistic because a portal requires the integration of all of that customer data and all of that internal data and all of that financial and billing data, much of which oftentimes is in back-end systems, which in many companies, historically, it's been siloed. On the other end of the spectrum, again, we work with customers that have actually gotten to the point where they are able to rapidly evolve potential value-added services and test them in the market. You had mentioned the Porsche example where you can do Porsche for a day. Companies oftentimes don't know whether or not they want to stand that up as a full separate business line. They want the opportunity to innovate around an idea, be able to almost beta test the business or product idea in the same way we might beta test software and then see if customers are going to buy it. If customers are going to buy it, what is the uptick in it? What is the right price point? How do you maximize the value of bringing that new product or service to the market before you actually launch it? Something that goes back to lean principles and other principles that are the larger the company, the more difficult they are to embrace normally because you're used to the software development terminology, used to more of a waterfall-type business plan versus a, "We're going to experiment here. We're going to launch this. We're going to learn." Based on that, we're going to do something else, but we're not quite sure what that something else is yet. It's a different way of thinking altogether. We talked a bit about this idea of platform thinking. Can you give me some color on what you mean by that? We think about the next evolution. I know you and I talked a bit about digital products and digital services. If we think about some of who the most effective players are today in high tech, we tend to think of Microsoft, we tend to think of Amazon, we tend to think of Google. One of the things that has made them as large as they are is their ability to have a platform model where they almost serve as a connector. A good way to think about it is they serve as the glue between potential customers and between companies who are leveraging their technology to be able to expand their own products and services. You have this almost circular economy where you have customers coming to Google to consume something that they like and you are providing a ready market for other companies who are developing other innovations to be able to develop their products and services on that platform. That's probably not the best way to articulate it, but you're essentially serving as the glue in between extremely large audiences. It allows these companies to grow extremely fast, essentially think about it as your product scaling itself. You are allowing other people to build on top of the foundation that you have created. That allows you to almost, again, be the glue, but also create a much larger market because you're reselling products and services that you're not having to create or invest in. When I think of it from a technology standpoint, I look at the transformation of IT over years where things used to be project-based. We need this value, and so we're going to submit our requirements to IT, and IT is going to go build this value. They're on the hook for selecting it, purchasing it, deploying it, and the SLA is around there providing the value that I asked for versus today where companies, our business units need to build that value on their own. They're on the hook for that on the digital side and the technology side. Therefore, the IT team needs to think about building a platform for them to innovate on so that we can expand rapidly, so that we can still control for cost, reliability, security, all of these core things that are our jobs, but we have to hand the reins over to somebody else. Basically, IT is a service to connect to what we're talking about before. It's the servitization of IT from a more project product focus to a platform focus where success is people madly using this platform to build and build and build because now they're connected to revenue versus contractual value for delivering a new purchasing system. 100%. We've talked on this call about a platform that really is externally facing. One of the other things that we're seeing are platforms, as you mentioned, that are internally facing within an organization. One of the things I've talked a lot about is that I work with our customers to help them achieve what we call the business of experience. If we think about really building an experience layer within an organization, you're going to need access to all sorts of back-end systems. You're going to need access to data stores and companies that can shift some of their internal IT onto a platform that can have these different layers that are served, that has a standard DevSecOps layer, that has a standard data processing layer and then can have an experience layer on top of it, can actually help enable some of these experiences for the end customers and for the employees and for partners who might be coming in to create B2B transactions or so forth with that company. It's one way for companies to better serve their customers, to better serve their employees, and to better serve their partners. You don't always have to be in the business of platforms to be using a platform. Right. Absolutely. I think that thinking, and reminded of a podcast we did a couple of years ago, somebody was working in the federal government and just trying to build that platform out of data. Part of it was around customer experience. This was part of the Department of Agriculture, I think, and the number of times that their customers, so commercial farmers, had to add the same data into different forms was ridiculous. They were creating customer experience issues and therefore they weren't getting the data they needed, but also internally they weren't able to leverage that data to drive out better decisions, better solutions, and everything else. It's just another agricultural example of the same point. I think it's a critical point. When you start working with a new client, is that idea new to them, or they're thinking along those lines and that's why they're speaking to Accenture? It depends on the client. Some of our clients know that they want to head that direction, and they say, "We want to become an experience-led company. We want to revamp our entire customer experience, or we want to revamp our entire employee experience, or we want to create a digital B2B sales channel that can drive a billion dollars in sales for us next year." As it comes with that amount of specificity, other times it comes as a need. I had a customer probably five years back and they wanted to deliver a single-page web application so that customers could pay their bills. If a customer was in default in their bill and they hadn't paid their bill, they could resolve that default online. This was a utility company. The nuance here is that if your bill goes in default, they have to give you, I think, three times to contest it before they shut off your electricity. Certainly in Canada, but also in Northern States, shutting off your electricity in the middle of winter becomes a human issue. Setting up these systems so that customers can interact in a way that's familiar to them on their mobile device or on their laptop is a big deal. With this customer, they knew that they wanted to be able to serve this single-page application, but one of the limitations that they found was that most of their customer data rested historically in SAP back-ends. You couldn't build your experience directly on the SAP back-end or you could, but it would be extremely expensive. It would be extremely brittle. The testing of it added huge overhead. One of the things we've seen with many of our customers, and they started this journey, many of them started maybe five or six years ago. We still have some customers who haven't trudged this direction yet, but they're looking at decoupling those monolithic back-end systems from this lighter experience layer, this lighter analytics layer, so that you have this flexible layer on top that can interface via APIs into your SAP or your Oracle back-end and you can customize your experience with much greater frequency than you touch the back-end. If we think about our conversation earlier in this podcast about the car companies and how you have this physical product and you have this series of software products and the software products are moving in a much faster pace, we are seeing the same with customers as they digitally decouple these systems. You have this massive ERP system, which is your slow pace and then you have an experience layer, analytics layer on top of it that can be much more nimble and flexible and you can change with much greater regularity to evolve or flex to your customer's changing needs. They're doing it again through this layer of almost open APIs and microservices, which serves as the plumbing between the different platform layers. No, for sure. It's also been amazing to see this whole idea of a system of record versus system of engagement and the number of companies SAP has bought over the years whose business model was to create a better system of engagement on top of that incredibly important system of record. It's a huge part of that strategy. It lowers entries to barriers, which I think is fantastic. Well, super. It's been great talking to you. I learned a lot and we'll catch up again soon and just thank you for your hour. Yeah, thanks for having me, Andrew. Great chance to talk about a lot of key ideas that I think are top of mind for us every day. [Music]