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Hello, everybody. My name is Rick McCutcheon. I'm a Dynamics Business Applications
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MVP, and today there's over 300,000 business professionals on LinkedIn that
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have a job title related to digital adoption. That's why we do this podcast.
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My normal guest host, Joachim Schermacher, is unavailable, so we brought in
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his standby, Daniel Garcia. Daniel, Daniel, say hello to the audience and introduce yourself.
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Thanks, Rick. Happy to be here. Happy to be the designated hitter for today's session.
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And very pleased to meet you, Rafi. Looking forward to being here.
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Daniel Garcia, head of strategic alliances at ClickLearn. I work with ISVs and
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partners in helping the end clients undergo digital transformation.
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Okay, so let's meet our guest. I'm just going to give her an introduction.
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So we interview digital adoption experts in the Microsoft ecosystem, and we have one today.
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Our guest is Rathi Rao, Senior Manager at Sonata Software.
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Let's welcome Rathi to Digital Adoption Talks. Rathi, introduce yourself to the people.
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Thank you so much. Go ahead. Thank you, Daniel, for having me.
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So Sonata Software Limited is an IT services company. It's 38 years old,
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and it's focused on modernization engineering powered by a unique framework.
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So my role is to offer this modernization to customers, which essentially means
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how to migrate, move customers from on-premise older technologies to cloud,
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SaaS, adopt SaaS technologies such as Dynamics 365.
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365, look at redesigning the IT platform so that the customer can have a modern
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IT digital platform where they can stay agile, reimagine their business process,
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and continuously modernize.
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So that is my main role. I manage the go-to-market for these migration modernization.
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I am very thrilled here because this is my pet topic, and digital adoption is
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a front front and center of a successful modernization program that we'd like to see.
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So I'm very happy to be here and happy to have the discussion.
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Great. Rathi, tell us a little bit about your history with business applications.
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Like I said, Sonata Software is all about modernization engineering.
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So we have a framework where we bring together industry expertise,
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technology platforms such as Dynamics 365, which is a business app where you
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can do so much of transformation.
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It is on cloud and the customer enterprise has an option to design,
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innovate, build those strategic engagement models models where they can deliver
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sustained values to customers.
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So using this platform, using an approach that we have coined,
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platformation, we try to work with BizApps customers to see when they move to
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cloud and this new Dynamics 365,
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how can they adopt this technology for transforming their enterprises and not
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only doing that in the current,
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but create that future digital roadmap so that their IT will be evergreen,
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as well as be able to see how can you constantly upgrade.
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You know, you can't just move to cloud and say, hey, I'm done with my transformation.
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You need to constantly keep adopting these new technologies.
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And that's how the digital adoption becomes front and center of how do you successfully
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modernize a customer from old legacy technologies to the new.
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Okay, so what is your personal background with business applications and dynamics?
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What have you worked with?
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So I have close to about now 25 years of experience in the industry.
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I started as a geek with coding skills.
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My pet passion was writing software.
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So what started that, and I worked on the web technology.
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So inherently, I started with building websites and portals and came up to a
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point where I am building out IT platforms for customers.
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And now more than ever, it is a question of integrating products together to
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make them work for an enterprise, right?
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So that is what I advocate and that is what I take to market.
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And I work jointly with the customers to see how we can build out that future
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platform and technology.
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So I'm from a hardcore IT playground, but now Now selling the products and the
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technologies have become my passion.
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So you started out coding. So that gives you a great background to understand,
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you know, how complicated these things are and how we need real professionals working on them.
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Daniel, would you like to add anything? thing? Yeah, I think it's really interesting
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how Prati's been on the actual side of working on the projects and understanding
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what is necessary and being through the journey of migrating somebody into a newer technology.
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But now you're on the, let's say, sales side and you have to convince clients
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that it's in their best interest to do certain steps.
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So I wonder, I'm looking forward to hear about some of those challenges,
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getting people to do stuff that you know it's in their best interest and maybe
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it's not one of their priorities.
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So, Rathi, this kind of leads to our next question. When you're working with
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enterprise customers and you're having these in-depth conversations around change
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management, around digital adoption, what are some of the common mistakes that
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you see organizations making?
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Yeah, I think the single most common mistake that I have seen is a very narrow
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vision towards technology adoption.
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Like Daniel was saying, you know, it is all about, okay, I bought this product now, how do I use it?
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That is not how it really works. The true modernization initiative would be
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to have a vision of where your business needs to head. What are the outcomes that you want to define?
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What are those areas that you want to improve in terms of either automation
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or digitization or even a business process?
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How do you standardize it across all of these areas?
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It could have multiple business units, multiple geos. So having that technology,
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I mean, digital vision, and how do you want a modern organization to look and
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then mapping it to technology would be the right way to do it.
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So that is, in my opinion, the key common most mistake, which is having a very
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narrow vision to digital adoption.
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And the second or an outcome of the same is not being able to percolate that
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digital vision to all of its customers.
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So, everybody in the organization needs to see what is the vision of this whole,
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even if it's a single product that's been implemented,
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what is the outcome of that product, what should be the real use of that product,
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what should be the business outcome of leveraging that piece of technology and all of that.
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So in terms of that helps leveraging the actual advantages of the technology or the product.
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See, while most organizations can do a training on a particular product or a
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technology, it's important to train how to leverage that particular product
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and technology to create value in that competitive edge.
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And so everybody is looking towards building out a competitive edge,
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building out use cases and scenarios which helps organizations do better,
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do much more advantageous use of the technology that the company is trying to
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invest in and get a return of investment on.
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And so talk a little bit about the process you go through with companies and
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how do you get them to see the vision, the big picture?
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So we actually work, we start with an envisioning session or initial sort of
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an open design thinking based session where we try and get the,
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you know, the top level execs to talk about under each process area,
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what are their main concerns?
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You know, we start with the growth of the strategies the company has adopted
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and against those companies, we try and drill down.
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We get everybody's view into what are those areas they have in terms of a process
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pain area or I'm unable to do this and I'm unable to do that.
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And that kind of sort of trickles down to even a process area.
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And we get a clear view of these are the most important strategies the customer
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may have in the next three or five or 10 years.
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For example, a customer would say, I want to explore these markets or I want
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to open these channels in terms of strategy or I'm unable to do business as usual.
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I want to tighten my supply chain or it could be I have a lot of leakage in
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my revenue. So I want to tighten all of those areas.
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So once we identify the problem areas, once we identify the key goals that the
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customer wants to achieve, that is when we build out vision saying,
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OK, these are the parameters.
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Meters anything we do in terms of a modernization or
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digitization must have these outcomes they should
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be able to improve my my channels or
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my customer experience itself or be
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able to deliver some kind of outcome in terms of
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say i close all these revenue leakages or
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maximize my channel usages or anything of that
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the kpi that we capture and then we take
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each of these and say okay in in in case you want
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to this is your kpi you will cut towards that these are
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the areas you have to look to modernize and adopt technology leveraging
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abc so that is how we start off we
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start off with an envisioning workshop and boil
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down the outcomes then based on the outcomes define a
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strategic roadmap for the customer saying these are the areas that we need to
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work towards and look at platform technology to adopt or they've already invested
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in and see how we can build out a a platform for that customer using the technology
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they've already invested in,
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plus any new technologies that we'd like to bring into the scale.
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Okay, great. Daniel, would you like to add anything? Yeah, I think,
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you know, the role that Hatties is doing is extremely important, right?
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I think organizations are very eager to achieve transformation without doing
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the proper vision and getting everybody on board, invested.
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And then that gets you to have a good first step. And I think one of the things
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that she mentioned earlier, this notion of evergreen IT programs,
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right, speaks to the fact that learning is not an event.
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It's an ongoing process that happens all the time.
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And it has a real impact on the success of the transformation for the organization.
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And now I'm going to maybe pull some quotes. I was listening to your CEO, Samir.
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He was doing a podcast. And one of the statistics that they were citing in that
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podcast was they did a survey of 500 executives and 68% of the respondents said
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that ineffective data capture and human error were one of the top reasons for poor quality of data.
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So when you combine the fact that it's still human beings using these systems
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and the importance of training for them to the success of the transformation,
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that's why we're very passionate about digital adoptions.
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And I'm glad to hear you use words like evergreen IT programs.
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And Rathi, we talk about business process and I've got a lot of experience with business process. us.
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But it's funny how we'll go into an organization and they've got an idea of
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what they want built, but they really don't pay attention to change management.
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They really don't pay attention to this whole digital adoption, user adoption thing.
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So how do we get them to pay more attention to this piece?
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Yes. I think it is like change management, very much like change management,
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it has to be top-down driven because it is not about leveraging or using the technology more.
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It is about how do you improve or enhance the company's capacity to innovate.
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So that boils down to every individual understanding the end goal saying,
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I need to do improve customer experience by X.
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And so this process is in my hands.
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I need to see what What technology I can leverage to either increase productivity?
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Is there an option to leverage maybe, say, power platform where I can do some
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low-code, no-code statistics, get some information?
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Can I leverage intelligence somehow? Can I streamline some process where I can
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increase the automation?
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Is that possible? And which technology do I have in my organization to leverage this?
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So that ideation, that constant thinking about automation.
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How to leverage these new features, new functionality comes only when you have
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that approach to your employees saying that, you know, you tell me what you
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want to do, what do you need,
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how do you need me to help you improve that capacity to innovate, improve productivity,
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improve operations efficiencies, and all of those goals, which I set for you.
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And then I will back it up with technology, come down and say,
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okay, these are, you leverage this and you do these, and this is how digital adoption will happen.
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So today, if you see, digital adoption is about buying a new technology and implementing it.
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But there should be a constant cycle of reviewing the technology portfolio that a customer has.
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Is it good enough to actually do those increase of productivity and increase
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of operation efficiency that
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you're claiming or you want to achieve in the end of the business year?
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That cycle of reviewing their portfolio, reviewing the technology,
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tracking the metrics, seeing that you've reached those goals that you've stated,
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that is something that we need to look at as a continuous modernization cycle.
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So this evergreen IT is not something that you get in one shot by adopting any
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technology and then forgetting about it.
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It is something that you achieve only when constantly monitoring the advantage
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or the outcomes that you have defined, seeing whether that is really being achieved,
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then leveraging or changing the technology landscape whenever there is an option
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available to you to make sure that the outcomes are done and you can achieve
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that evergreen IT with a continuous modernization concept.
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So that is why most of our managed services offering today has that element
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where we come in and proactively look at that, re-look at, you know, organizations',
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digital adoption and see whether we are actually leveraging technology to deliver an outcome.
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Okay, great. Daniel, would you like to add anything? think? Yeah, I think very well said.
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Absolutely. I agree. I think nowadays,
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one of the things that we must not forget is the end users, right?
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Delivering all of this technology to them and getting them involved on the front end, as you said, right?
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Asking them what they need and building what they need.
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And then also allowing them to continue participating in the communication while
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it's being utilized, providing that feedback.
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And that certainly is one of the aspects that we make sure that is integrated
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into digital adoption solutions with ClickLearn is that aspect that you have
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a feedback loop from the users as a crucial component to the success of implementation.
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Okay. All right. Well, Rathi, thank you for spending time with us today on Digital
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Adoption Talks. Do you have any sort of closing reflections or insights you'd
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like to leave us with around digital adoption?
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Yes. The game is to charter a smooth roadmap for a value-driven continuous modernization
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digital adoption strategy where it doesn't stop.
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You're ever evolving towards towards program unlocking potential every now and then.
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And that way, it not only ensures success, but like Daniel was saying,
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it ensures that everybody's involved in driving towards an outcome,
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towards a goal, and helping the whole organization innovate, right?
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Technology is just something that helps in all of these areas,
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but this needs to be a business-led transformation, digital adoption program,
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and that will unlock potential for a lot of organization goals that,
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you know, any company can be resilient through any kind of change,
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either market or technology or anything else.
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Okay. Thank you, Rathi. Thank you, Daniel. And have a great day.
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And I hope you, I'm going to say this again. Sorry, Laura. Laura.
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Okay, Rathi, thank you very much for an outstanding interview.
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Daniel, thank you for your insights.
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And I'm sure we'll be talking to you both soon about what's going on in the
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world of Microsoft and digital adoption.
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Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye for now.
