Posts Tagged "digital"

Searching for the right digital asset management system (DAM) for video can feel like stumbling around in the dark. The time spent gathering requirements, researching applications, and reaching out to platforms can leave you more confused than before you began.

Credits: Published by our strategic partner Tenovos.

If you’re launching a digital asset management system (DAM), you know that technology isn’t your only challenge—sometimes people are. You can have the best DAM in the industry and processes to match, but if your users don’t adhere to naming conventions or don’t categorize assets correctly, the project can devolve into a DAM quagmire. So, how do you get all the users of your DAM—from designers and partners to agencies and entire teams—to come along on your DAM adventure from the start? Your journey will involve mapping out your terrain, building your guild of allies, consulting your DAM wizards, and choosing the path to your DAM legacy.

This article will be your definitive guide to DAM adoption from the beginning. We’ll explain the process of getting users involved in selecting and rolling out your DAM, as well as the strategies you can use to ensure widespread adoption and ongoing equilibrium.

If you already have a DAM, the steps below are perfect for rethinking your adoption strategy. It’s easy for users to fall off the adoption wagon, so your strategies should be evolving to keep up. You’ll determine where to improve your engagement with your users, strengthen your desired norms, and encourage better user behaviors. From mapping out your DAM journey to setting yourself up for a legacy of success—let’s talk about how to achieve optimal DAM adoption.

1. Map out the terrain—user influence and resistance

The (not so secret) secret to DAM adoption is identifying and engaging your stakeholders early in the process. For those without a DAM (or replacing your existing DAM), it means prioritizing the needs of those who will use the DAM inside and outside your organization.

Start with a stakeholder mapping exercise—sit down and brainstorm everyone who will be using your DAM or involved in the success of implementing it. Write each name on a sticky note—from the illustrators uploading new assets, to the IT manager who will deal with support tickets. Then sort those stakeholders into quadrants:

This exercise will help you determine which stakeholders should focus your energy and support on throughout the DAM adoption process.

It’s also important to conduct resistance planning. To manage resistance, you should brainstorm all the potential reasons your stakeholders might resist your new DAM—make a thoughtful, comprehensive list. Executives may lack awareness of why a change is needed. Creative teams may fear the unknown that comes along with this change. IT may resist because they anticipate a lack of support once the DAM is implemented. In this stage, you should consider your users’ concerns carefully, making note of potential blockages will help you gather their feedback and develop a communications plan that effectively addresses their concerns.

For organizations that have already implemented their DAM, it’s never too late to map your stakeholders and consider their needs. Resistance can happen at any point in the journey. Investigate how your DAM is performing with a survey, DAM usage data, or user interviews at regular intervals. You may not be able to implement a new system, but it’s never too late to revisit your users’ needs and consider why they may be resisting your processes.

2. Build your guild—recruit your DAMbassadors

After you’ve determined which users have the most influence and interest in your DAM, you should identify who among them could be your allies. Who is likely to adopt new norms quickly? Who can assist you and offer insight into team morale? Who is most invested in the DAM planning process and its success?

Determine who among your internal (and even external partners) would be willing to offer ongoing feedback and engage with the DAM process. These are your DAMbassadors and they will help you disseminate information, encourage excitement in your engagement campaigns, and uphold the norms and processes you’ll put in place.

Recruiting them could be as easy as taking the ‘high interest/high influence’ users from your stakeholder mapping and asking if they’d be interested in taking on an advisory role. It could be for a limited time as the DAM is selected and implemented, or if your DAM is already in place, you could ask them to give feedback on an ad hoc basis. Consider incentivizing this role—people are more likely to feel appreciated if they gain something from their insights. Bonus points if some of your champions are executive-level leaders—their buy-in will be important to secure budget and support across the organization.

3. Consult your wizards—plan your processes and collect feedback

It’s never too early to start thinking about governance, or how your DAM will be managed. As a part of governance, you must define processes related to users, assets, metadata, and uploads.

You will need to answer questions like:

• Will assets be uploaded manually through the DAM, via an integration, or both?
• Are you managing web assets? Video assets? Something else? How does that change your DAM needs?
• What are your file naming conventions? And where are these documented, and how are they communicated and enforced?
• Which users/groups will be permitted to edit metadata?
• Who will be responsible for archiving and expiring files?
• Who will provide DAM access to external users? Who will be responsible for training them?
• What are the different levels of access/permissions for different users and groups? How will access change if the users are external agencies, vendors, or retail partners?

Building and documenting these norms early on allows you to run them by your DAMbassadors and important stakeholders to ensure you’re considering complex user or asset challenges that may come up when choosing, implementing, or managing your DAM.

And remember that feedback shouldn’t stop at the planning stage or after you’ve implemented your DAM—continue seeking ongoing feedback from your internal stakeholders and external DAM users. Nothing halts adoption more than users feeling like their feedback and suggestions don’t matter. Consider how you can collect feedback throughout the DAM process and follow up if user feedback influenced a decision—this builds their trust.

4. Pick your path—select the best DAM for your needs

Once you’ve determined your DAMbassadors, your unique governance idiosyncrasies, and sought the feedback of your internal and external users, you’ll be ready to select your DAM.

Picking the right DAM can often feel endlessly complicated—the time spent gathering requirements, researching applications, and reaching out to platforms can leave you feeling exhausted by the options. Narrow your focus on the top features that your organization cannot function without—based on your stakeholder feedback, of course. If you’ve done Steps 1-3 thoroughly, your organization’s ideal DAM should check off all your most important boxes.

If you’ve made your case to your executive-level leadership, done your research, and considered user feedback, your choice of DAM should set you up for the ideal user adoption scenario.

5. The rallying cry—develop and execute a communications plan

Communication plans can make or break DAM implementation. A clear comms plan will ensure everyone knows how the DAM will help them achieve their goals (i.e. what they can expect from the DAM) and how they’re involved in the implementation and management of the DAM (i.e. what’s expected of users). Use face-to-face meetings, town halls, forums, and Q&A sessions to communicate with stakeholders.

The key message is simple: If the DAM works as intended and users adopt it as directed, everyone’s lives become easier. This plan defines the philosophy of the DAM, how it will be used, and how success will be measured for all users. It should include a timeline for implementation and onboarding and where users can go for ongoing DAM best practices, support, and training. You may choose to include how your organization plans to work with the DAM vendor and how the transition from the current asset system to the DAM will take place. The more clear and thoughtful your comms plan is, the more likely you’ll be to reduce friction post-launch and improve adoption.

6. Create a legacy—make onboarding and ongoing training impossible to ignore

Your DAM adventure has begun. It’s filled to the brim with users accessing your DAM for many reasons—approval workflows, sharing assets, archiving past campaigns. How do you manage to keep all those users following your carefully curated governance rules and norms? You create onboarding and training tools that are tailored-made to teach. Here are 3 DAM onboarding and training ideas to keep your journey of asset management smooth:

• Launch a frequently asked questions (FAQ) video series in your DAM
  Take a page out of Webflow University’s book and make a library of quick videos to onboard users, answer common questions, and reiterate helpful governance norms. Host your FAQ library in your DAM and link its location to the dashboard of every user. Each video can be casual and even funny—the point is to make learning and relearning DAM conventions accessible and impossible to ignore.
• Create a DAM help desk
  Sometimes users don’t know where to get their questions answered. Creating a DAM help desk, either in person or virtually, gives them a predetermined window to come to you with questions and feedback on the DAM. Have your DAM managers, IT staff, or DAMbassadors cycle through ‘office hours’—they can be on standby until a user reaches out with a question. This also works great asynchronously as a Slack or Teams channel.
• Build a governance document
  Remember the governance planning you did in Step 3? Consider creating a governance resource that users can refer back to. Create an artfully designed landing page—an internal search engine that points people to common solutions to their problems. Give clear guidance on how to use common metadata terms, manage metadata, and upload assets. Include anything else that users may forget or make mistakes from time to time.

You may notice that this resource and your video FAQ library will have some overlap—it’s important to have resources available in multiple formats and places. The more accessible, interesting, and valuable this information is, the more likely your users are to adopt it.

Your DAM adoption journey begins with a single step

User adoption is the single defining characteristic of a successful DAM implementation. Are your users accessing the DAM as intended? Is it working for them as intended? In your DAM adventure, user adoption is an ongoing process—a never-ending story. But, if you can map out your desired digital asset system, bring along the right users to see it through, plan and communicate your processes, and keep people engaged—widespread adoption is possible.

For organizations with entrenched DAMs (and tired DAM managers), it’s never too late to address user adoption. There’s always the opportunity to seek feedback on how to improve your DAM processes, make training easier to access, or develop a comms plan that revitalizes users’ desire to make the DAM better.

After all, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Your adventure awaits.

Want to know what types of data your DAM should be providing? Reach us at marketing@sifycorp.com

Written by Michael Waldron, CMO, Tenovos

 

Credits: Published by our strategic partner Tenovos.

In an era of increasing personalization, the key to successful marketing campaigns is effective storytelling that reaches the right audience with the right message at the right moment. If this chemistry between audience, content, and timing is the key to success, creative and marketing professionals have to rely on next-generation asset management technology that can guide them toward the right combinations by replacing guesswork with data, and surrounding content with context.

Traditionally, Digital Asset Management platforms (DAMs) have focused on assisting teams to manage their digital assets and move them from inside the organization to external partners and platforms. The premise is simple: a central repository where brands can store their assets alongside relevant metadata to make everything easy to find — photos and videos, logos and tear sheets, and any other brand collateral that needs to be used and reused.

At its most basic level, a good DAM solution enables marketers to do their jobs more efficiently. More modern DAMs employ AI and machine learning to automatically add relevant tags to assets, so teams can spend less time on tedious tasks like tagging or finding assets and more time on the creative and analytical areas of their jobs. The most advanced DAM platforms, however, go beyond managing and moving assets, to actually measuring their performance in their context of use.

Building a DAM for the Modern Enterprise

Over the past 20 years, the pace of change in technology has exploded, while the DAM category has lagged behind in innovation. Brands have come to expect an exceptional, personalized user experience complete with smart insights from their marketing platforms, and DAM should be no exception. As marketing becomes increasingly fast-paced and data-driven, it’s time for a completely new and different DAM experience — one that can meet the demands of an increasingly tech-savvy industry and understands its pain points.

The first and most important question that a DAM provider should ask is, ‘how does my solution help marketers do their jobs more effectively?’ That is, after all, the central goal of a DAM system: to make it easier and more efficient for creators and marketers to collaborate to design and execute successful campaigns. In other words, if finding an asset within the DAM system and searching through emails to find it take approximately the same amount of time, the system is not making teams more efficient — it’s simply adding a layer of complexity to their martech stack.

Creating a Seamless User Experience

Not all DAM platforms are created equal. One common issue that many enterprises face is the inability to seamlessly integrate their DAM platform with the rest of their marketing ecosystem, which can essentially negate the efficiencies gained by using an asset management solution in the first place. Considering that the code base of many solutions currently on the market is over a decade old (older, in some cases), this is a problem that will only get worse over time as marketers look to incorporate new tools and technologies into their workflows. Consequently, it’s important to find and implement a solution that leverages the use of modern technologies — such as AI/ML, micro-services, graph databases, and serverless environments — that will be able to maintain its speed and flexibility in the years to come.

An organization’s ability to collaborate seamlessly with team members across — and outside of — the organization is also a key indicator of the success of a DAM implementation. Marketing doesn’t happen in a single silo; from research to ideation, to creation to deployment, marketing is interconnected and interdisciplinary. A modern DAM platform should connect the enterprise in such a way that it simplifies the creative life cycle and enables marketers to reduce the friction and time required to launch each new campaign.

Data-Driven Marketers Need Data-Driven Technology

The reality is that many of the DAM solutions available on the market currently have not kept pace with the evolving needs of the increasingly data-driven marketing operation; they’re often expensive, difficult to implement, and don’t deliver the user experience marketers and creative professionals have come to expect from their technology. Seen from this angle, it’s not surprising that many organizations are hesitant to invest heavily in a new system that is not capable of demonstrating a return on investment.

Brands need modern DAM platforms that not only enable them to meet the demands of marketing in the digital age, but also help them to demonstrate — and improve — their ROI. Marketers should expect their DAM platform to provide:

• A data-first approach to asset management that allows brands to measure and optimize their processes and their content to provide increasingly personalized experiences
• A seamless user experience that drives adoption and enables teams across the world to collaborate easily
• Performance and optimization capabilities underpinned by artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Continuous improvement and delivery to support the demands of a global omnichannel enterprise

At the end of the day, companies implement a DAM solution in order to optimize their processes and improve their ability to tell the compelling stories that are central to a successful marketing operation. This optimization should come not only in the form of improving the speed of creation, but also the strategy behind a given campaign. A system that has access to all of the contextual data that surrounds your every asset should be able to distill those data into insights that inform the creation of future content.

A modern, data-first DAM should act not only as a content database but also as a source of insight to enable marketers to make smarter creative decisions, which in turn allows them to tell stories that matter to their audience.

Want to know what types of data your DAM should be providing? Reach us at marketing@sifycorp.com

Written by Michael Waldron, CMO, Tenovos

 

Ramji writes on the ‘Unreal Unity’ of technology and art…

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The highly acclaimed Unreal and Unity3D engines are among the most popular tools with employed by the augmented Reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and gaming professionals. But what in fact are these ‘engines’ and how is this new technology revolutionising cinema? In this article let us see what powers these new age solutions and how these technologies are changing filmmaking.

Imagine you are playing a computer game which is usually a set of sequences that appear at random, and you, the player, react or engage with them. All these happen in something called as ‘real-time’. In the computer graphics terminology, something happening in real-time means it happens instantaneously. When you are moving in the game or a VR environment, there is no way to predict what direction you would turn towards. And wherever you look within the game, there should be some visuals or environment with respective to your position. This is done by real-time rendering. Images or visuals that are produced instantly depending on the point of view. There are a lot of mathematical calculations that happen in milli or microseconds and the resultant images are shown to the user. These calculations and all other game dynamics are handled by the game engines.

Some of the popular engines right now are Unity3D and Unreal. It is interesting to see how these engines are evolving beyond the gaming industry. With realistic lighting, and almost realistic human character generators, these engines are blurring the lines between gaming and moviemaking.

For example, in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, a novel idea called virtual production was used.

What is virtual production? This is a stage surrounded by a semi-circular LED screen on which the background or the environment is shown. The actors stand in front of the screen and enact their roles. All this while the camera records the scene with the background. This is very much like the background projections used in older movies. But the novel idea is that the backgrounds that are projected are dynamic, and the perspective will change as the camera moves. This makes the scene look realistic. And it also captures the ambient light from the background fall on the characters and the actors also know where they are located. This greatly helps in removing the usage of blue/green screen and reducing long postproduction hours.

This is how the real set and virtual set (LED Wall) is placed in the production floor. The part that is separated by the white outline is the real set with real people while the background is on the LED wall. They blend seamlessly thereby creating a continuous set.

The production team for The Mandalorian used Unreal engine to create the hyper-realistic backgrounds and these backgrounds can be changed dynamically during the filming. Using a virtual reality headset, the production team can alter the backgrounds as per the director’s vision. The real filming camera is linked to a virtual camera in Unreal engine and as the real camera moves or pans, the linked virtual camera mimics the movement thereby shifting the perspective of the (virtual) background. All these are done instantly and in “real-time”. This provides a very realistic shot, and the virtual sets can be quickly changed or altered in a jiffy!

Not only this, but there are also other dynamics like the time of the day that are made available to the filming team. They are provided by web-based controls on an iPad using REST APIs. This enables the production team to change the lighting, sky colour and time of the day all instantly. This saves a lot of time for the team and helps in improvising the shot or scene on the go.

Not the one to be left behind, Unity3D, is another popular engine that is in the fray of creating hyper-realistic movie-quality renders. They recently released a teaser called Enemies which involves completely computer-generated imagery complete with high-definition render pipeline (HDRP) for lighting, real-time hair dynamics, raytraced reflections, ambient occlusions, and global illumination. Well, these terms themselves will warrant a separate article. That’s for another day and time. Here, take a look at the teaser:

In this case, the entire shot is computer generated including the lady character. Unity3D has its own set of digital human models and Unreal has its Metahuman package that offer hyper-realistic digital characters which can be used in real-time.

This is just the tip of an iceberg. The possibilities are endless, and it is a perfect amalgamation of two fields, and this opens a lot of doors for improving filmmaking with real-time rendering technology and the line between gaming and filming are blurred by game changing technology revolutions driven by Unreal and Unity3D!

 

In case you missed:

• VFX – Dawn of the digital era
• VFX – The evolution
• VFX: The beginning
• Is Augmented Reality the future of retail?
• The future of training is ‘virtual’
• Putting the ‘Art’ in Artificial Intelligence!
• Into the Metaverse

 

 

The Hiring Bias

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In study after study, the hiring process has been proven biased and unfair, with sexism, racism, ageism, and other inherently extraneous factors playing a malevolent role. Instead of skills or experience-based recruiting, it is often the case that interviewees get the nod for reasons that have little to do with the attributes they bring to an employer.

“This causes us to make decisions in favor of one person or group to the detriment of others,” says Francesca Gino, Harvard School of Business professor describing the consequences in the workplace. “This can stymie diversity, recruiting, promotion, and retention efforts.”

Companies that adhere to principles of impartial and non-biased behavior and that want to increase workforce diversity are already hard-pressed to hire the best talent in the nation’s current environment of full-employment and staff scarcity.

Five Main Grounds for Hiring Bias

Researchers have identified a dozen or so hiring biases, starting with a recruiting ad’s phrasing that emphasizes attributes such as “competitive” and “determined” that are associated with the male gender. In fact, study findings have reiterated that even seasoned HR recruiters often fall prey to faulty associations.

Here are five of the most frequently cited reasons for the unintended bias in the hiring process:

• Confirmation Bias: Instead of proceeding with all the traditional aspects of an interview, interviewers often make up their minds in the first few minutes of talking with a candidate. The rest of the interview is then conducted in a manner to simply confirm their initial impressions.
• Expectation Anchor: In this case, interviewers get fixated on one attribute that the interviewee possess at the expense of what backgrounds and skills other applicants can bring to the interview process.
• Availability Heuristic: Although this may sound somewhat technical, all it means is that the interviewer’s judgmental attitude takes over. Examples might be the applicant’s height or weight, or something as mundane as his or her name, reminding the interviewer of someone else.
• Intuition-Based Bias: This applies to interviewers who pass judgment based on their “gut feeling” or “sixth sense”. Instead of evaluating the candidate’s achievements, this depends solely on the interviewer’s frame of mind and his or her own prejudices.
• Confirmation Bias: When the interviewer has preconceptions on significant aspects of what an applicant ought to offer, everything else gets blotted out. This often occurs when, within the first few minutes of talking with an applicant, the interviewer decides in his or her favor at the expense of everything else that other candidates may have to offer.

Why Bias Is a Problem

In a book titled The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, Scot E. Page, professor of Complex Systems, Political Science and Economies at the University of Michigan, employs scientific models and corporate backgrounds to demonstrate how diversity in staffing leads to organizational advantages.

Despite the mountain of evidence, the fact remains that many fast-growing companies are still not deliberate enough in their recruiting practices, often times ending up allowing unconscious biases to permeate in their methods.

Diversity in hiring, an oft-used term, is essentially a reflection on different ways of thinking rather than on other biases. For example, a group of think-alike employees might have gotten stuck on a problem that a more diverse team might have tackled successfully using diverse thinking angles.

 

Automated Solutions

Although hiring bias is normally shunned, this in no way implies that it doesn’t proliferate amidst large and small organizations alike. The tech industry—and Silicon Valley in particular—was shaken recently by accusations of bias in the workplace, driving many HR managers and C-Suite executives to look for “blind” hiring solutions.

To pave the way for a more diverse workforce—one that is built purely on merit—there is recruiting software built to systematize vetting and maintain each candidate’s anonymity. These packages enable companies to select candidates through a blind process. Instead of looking at an applicant’s resumé through the usual prism of schools, diplomas and past company employers, the first wave of screening can be done based purely on abilities and achievements.

Other packages also enable the employer to write blind recruiting ads, depicting job descriptions that do away with key phrases and words that are associated with a particular demographic—masculine-implied words such as “driven”, “adventurous”, or “independent”, and those that are feminine-coded such as “honest”, “loyal”, and “interpersonal”.

eLearning Case Studies

Companies are now attempting to make diversity and inclusion—from entry-level employees to the executive suite—hallmarks of their corporate culture. With an objective to identify and address unconscious bias in all processes and behaviors, companies can introduce unconscious bias training curriculum for first-line managers, by calling on eLearning companies for their eLearning courseware and content.

 

 

 

Confronting Hiring Bias in a Virtual Reality Environment

Virtual Reality (VR) technology can further boost unintended hiring bias. In a  simulated setting, the user manipulates an avatar that was able to assume any number of demographics for applicants in the hiring process. Based on the gender or ethnicity of the avatar, the user experiences bias during question and answer sessions. The solution would use an immersive VR environment, a diverse collection of avatars, and sample scenarios to pinpoint to participants where bias is demonstrated and understood.

 

What sounds like the cutting edge of science fiction is no fantasy; it is happening right now as you read this article

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Imagine getting trained in a piece of equipment that is part of a critical production pipeline. What if you can get trained while you are in your living room? Sounds fantastic, eh. Well, I am not talking about e-learning or video-based training. Rather what if the machine is virtually in your living room while you walk around it and get familiar with its features? What if you can interact with it and operate it while being immersed in a virtual replica of the entire production facility? Yes, what sounds like the cutting edge of science fiction is no fantasy; it is happening right now as you read this article.

Ever heard of the terms ‘Augmented Reality’ or ‘Virtual Reality’? Welcome to the world of ‘Extended Reality’. What may seem like science fiction is in reality a science fact. Here we will try to explain how these technologies help in transforming the learning experience for you.

Let’s get to the aforementioned example. There was this requirement from a major pharmaceutical company where they wanted to train some of their employees on a machine. Simple, isn’t it? But here’s the catch. That machine was only one of its kind custom-built and that too at a faraway facility. The logistics involved were difficult. What if the operators can be trained remotely? That is when Sify proposed an Augmented Reality (AR) solution. The operators can learn all about the machine including operating it wherever they are. All they needed was an iPad which was a standard device in the company. The machine simply augments on to their real-world environment and the user can walk around it as if the machine were present in the room. They could virtually operate the machine and even make mistakes that do not affect anything in the real world.

What is the point of learning if the company cannot measure the outcome? But with this technology several metrics can be tracked and analysed to provide feedback at the end of the training. So, what was the outcome of the training at the pharma company? The previous hands-on method took close to one year for the new operators to come up to speed of experienced operators. But even then, new operators took 12 minutes to perform the task that experienced operators do in 5 minutes. The gap was a staggering 7 minutes. But using the augmented reality training protocols, all they needed was one afternoon. New operators came to up speed of experienced operators within no time. This means not only can more products reach deserving patients but also significantly reduces a lot of expenditure for the company. And for the user, all they need is a smartphone or a tablet that they already have. This is an amazingly effective training solution. Users can also be trained to dismantle and reassemble complex machines without risking their physical safety.

Not only corporates but even schools can also utilise this technology for effective teaching. Imagine if the student points her tablet on the textbook and voila, the books come alive with 3D models of a volcano erupting, or even make history interesting through visual storytelling.

Now imagine another scenario. A company needs their employees to work at over 100 feet high like on a tower in an oil rig or on a high-tension electricity transmission tower. After months of training and when employees go to the actual work site, some of them realize that they cannot work at the height.

They suffer from acrophobia or a fear of heights. They would not know of this unless they really climb to that height. What if the company could test in advance if the person can work in such a setting?

Enter Virtual Reality (VR). Using a virtual reality headset that the user can strap on to their head, they are immersed in a realistic environment. They look around and all they see is an abyss. They are instructed to perform some of the tasks that they will be doing at the work site. This is a safe way to gauge if the user suffers from acrophobia. Since VR is totally immersive, users will forget that they are safely standing on the floor and might get nervous or fail to do the tasks. This enables the company to identify people who fear heights earlier and assign them to a different task.

Any risky work environment can be virtually re-created for the training. This helps the employees get trained without any harm and it gives them confidence when they go to the actual work location.

VR requires a special headset and controllers for the user to experience it. A lot of different headsets with varying capabilities are already available for the common user. Some of these are not expensive too.

A multitude of metrics can be tracked and stored on xAPI based learning management systems (LMS). Analytics data can be used by the admin or the supervisor to gauge how the employee has fared in the training. That helps them determine the learning outcome and ROI (return on investment) on the training.

Training is changing fast and more effective using these new age technologies. A lot of collaborative learning can happen in the virtual reality space when multiple users can log on to the same training at the same time to learn a task. These immersive methods help the learner retain most of what they learnt when compared to other methods of training.

Well, the future is already here!

The IT industry is no stranger to digital disruption, over the last 3 decades, new trends and technological leaps have time and again changed the direction of the industry. The first wave in 1990s permanently transformed industries such as music, photography and video rental and the 2000s saw major disruption in industries like television, travel and recruitment. We now face the third wave of digital disruption, brought on by the huge amounts of rich data produced by social media and mobile technologies.

How quickly and efficiently businesses respond to this challenge, will determine whether they will be competitive and profitable in the coming decades.

Challenges of Digital Transformation

State of existing IT

Business need to know where they stand in terms of their IT readiness.For digitally mature organizations the change is manageable, but some businesses might have to restructure and invest more deeply to embrace the digital environment.

Change Management

The digital way of working is based on openness and creativity; it promotes a flatter and less controlled organization. Enterprises need to embrace and incorporate this into their work culture and existing workforce must be motivated to join this new work culture with an open mind.

Digital Employees

For a business to succeed in a digital world, it needs to be staffed with people who live digital and breathe data. To fully understand the digital experience offered to customers, managers have to be comfortable with the technology themselves.

Customer is the king

Customer experience must remain the primary focus while designing and implementing digital systems. How you want to engage and service your customer? What are the business models that you offer? These are some of the questions that will drive your ultimate digital goal.

Leadership

Clear vision and strong leadership are two vital factors for long term Digital Success. Digital transformation is a top down process and a focused leader with a clear, detailed roadmap will successfully lead the organization through its digital journey.

Transformation, digital or otherwise, is crafted and enacted by people. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the success of digital transformation lies more with employees, managers and other stakeholders rather than implementing technologies. The right people will enable organizations to deal with, not just this wave of digital disruption, but all future changes that come their way.

We are Sify and we transform businesses for a digital world like no other. With our SMAC network, global inter-cloud connectivity, agile IT and seamless access across platforms, we transform the way enterprises do businesses providing a unified customer experience.