Digital Transformation is a foundational change in how a business delivers value to its customers. For successful DT, you should know how to distinguish between ‘Digital’ and ‘Transformation’. It’s a journey of business, personal, and self-transformation. Having a good understanding of digital anthropology is the key to achieve success here.

While there’s an ongoing debate that machines will take up human jobs and many pessimists predict that these machines will rule the world in future, Raktim Singh, a renowned digital thought leader, has a different view.

As per Raktim, there is still a lot of in-efficiencies in various sectors like agriculture, healthcare, education, banking,and manufacturing. The wrong application of technology has, infact, automated those in-efficiencies and created lot of anxiety about the future in the human minds.

We all crave for personalized experience and with proper understanding of digital anthropology, we can harness the power of our beautiful minds& create a better future.

Holistic Digital Transformation
Raktim strongly believes that Digital Anthropology is the key to successful digital transformation. Read on to get clarity on this thought leader’s take on Digital Anthropology and what it takes for holistic digital transformation in any organization.

According to him, scaling a business & providing a personalized experience to each customer was a very costly affair before. Scaling a successful small business always involved creating many overhead roles, whose sole task was to co-ordinate & aggregate. Creating a personalized experience for each customer was just not humanly possible. But, this can be achieved with digital transformation.

Read on to understand how DT has made this possible.

Digital Transformation has four aspects:
• Understanding digital experience, which refers to reading a book or watching movies, at any point in time, on any device, anywhere.
• Solving the WISE (Know your Why, Integration with the external world, Removing Silos, Changing the Environment & Culture). This is the debt accumulated over years and no technology can solve this. Only a determined senior leadership can solve this along with a motivated team.
• Apply the ACID formula (Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Internet of things, Data). You need not run behind every object that glitters – as they rightly say, “All that glitters is not gold”. Technology is just an enabler and always comes as a double-edgedsword. For example, big data is like both microscope & telescope. You will get smaller details as well as a big picture so as to connect the dots, which were earlier difficult to notice. You must use this properly and make sure that you are able to get insights & meaningful action here. But the theft of big data can reveal a lot of personal information about an individual. Also, the machine will know more about you than what you yourself know.

On a similar note, after IoT& CLOUD, the chances of cyber-attacksdisrupting the overall system are very high. Remember, unlike other physical attacks, an entry barrier for cyber-attack is very low. We have moved from COLD war to Code War.
• Developing an Agile Mindset& providing personalized experience at scale, with digital anthropology.
Though a lot has been written about the first 3 points, very few companies have achieved success as they have ignored the points related to digital anthropology.
Understanding Digital Anthropology: From Rakim’s Perspective
Digital anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology.
Human race has evolved from Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0. With the help of various inventions, we have moved from an era, where themajor sources of income were based on agriculture to times when manufacturing sector became the main source to the present age wherein computers are the key contributors.

Our habit & skill levelshave also changed during this journey. Before electricity was invented, there was no concept of nightlife. We couldn’t have imagined a city like Las Vegas.Electricity, cars, telephone & computers have helped us to do more and increased the overall productivity.

Earlier, a ship used to navigate by looking at north star but now GPS helps with navigation.

Rakim’s belief is that post digital transformation, humans will further evolve. For example, as of now, when a driver, doctor or for that matter any professional service person retires, he takes away with him all the knowledge and experience, which he has gained over the years. There are limited ways by which the valuable experience & insights can be passed over to the next generation.

Now, with Big Data & AI, data related to family medical history can be retained & insights can be derived from this data for offering personalized medical treatmentto the other members of a family.

A similar process can be applied in other sectors &businesses will be able to offer a personalized experience to everyone.

It can be anything like personalized medicine for a patient, personalized care for elderly parents, advice related to heath to young members of a family or a personalized education plan.

We, humans, have a conscious & subconscious mind. When you are in love, listen to music or take drugs, you start doing ‘special things’, as your subconscious mind takes over during such times. FAAAN (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Netflix) companies have already started implementing this concept.

Based on your previous movie-watching habits, you can now see a list of movie recommendations, which are totally personalized for you. On similar lines, based on your earlier buying habits, more products are recommended foryou. And, many times, you end up buying those recommendedproducts.
Most of us have the habit of clickingselfies& immediately posting it on social media. Our sub-conscious mind forces us to keep on checking the likes & comments on our social media posts. So, in a way, with digitalization, we are forming new habits.

We don’t memorize various historical events & dates. We just ‘Google’ it. We take the help of smartphones/machines in our day-to-day life. We use taxi-hailing apps, order food on smartphones, wear smartwatch to keep track of our health and a lot more.

This lifestyle is totally different from what it used to be 10 years back. We all have formed new habits and new players & companies are serving those needs.
If you are in the automobile industry then your competition is with bullet trains (which provide reduced travel time) & flying drones (to deliver cargo, till the last mile). Here, the basic need is to move from place A to place B.

In Africa, financial needs were primarily fulfilled by ‘M-Pesa’. M-Pesa is Africa’s most successful mobile money service and the region’s largest fintech platform.Again here, the primary need was to exchangemoney between 2 persons. We need to identify the intrinsic need of each individual and address that.

The young members of your team expect a similar experience atworkplace – an experience that the FAAAN companies provide in their personal life. On a similar note, your customersare also looking for hyper-personalized experience & instant gratification. And his personalized experience needs to be provided, based on real-time data& not a fewmonths’ old data. They are not ready to accept the things the way they were delivered earlier.

The senior management has to unlearn the old practices & remove conventionaldeep-rooted beliefs. You can’t run anorganization by ‘Control & command’ mode. You must create an environment, where team members can come with new ideas & execute. There will be failures, but they shouldn’tget affected by these failures. Create a culture, where the team members can ‘Fail Fast, Learn Fast & Scale Fast’.

Going forward, most of the tasks will be done by machines. But machines don’t have a subconscious mind. So, Raktim visualizes a future, where humans, with their sub-conscious mind & machine, will create a better world.

Customersare looking for RIPE (Real time, Instant, Personalized, Experience). Use Digital Transformation to get ready & provide this.