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Thursday, April 14, 2016

How Information Technology Makes the World Flat? Insights from Top MBA Colleges in Delhi NCR

Top MBA Colleges in Delhi NCR like Ishan Institute of Management & Technology are engaging in some very academically and worldly wise business research on globalization and emerging trends. The academic community along with the students have collaborated on some exciting academic projects using exploratory research to uncover some amazing insights on the way information technology is playing the role of an enabler of a flat world to perfection. Based on the inputs of the two opposing schools of thought on globalization we bring you the inside story of information technology and its application in different walks of business life along with the visible impact that it is making on lives of people.

At the top MBA College in Greater Noida, we have done extensive studies on the two opposing camps. The first camp of business management thinkers consists of those who have voiced their evidences in favour of the hypothesis of the connected world. This track is called by different names such as the borderless, flat or small world. The top thinkers are Thomas L. Friedman, Kenichi Ohmae, Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati, Prof. Arvind Panagariya and Prof. Avinash Dixit. On the other hand there is a school of thought that opposes the notion of the flat world and looks upon globalization as a work in progress.  Comparing and contrasting the two schools would not have been enough in the absence of empirical evidence on information technology and cloud computing based applications in business and governance. The findings of the research are summarized here as follows:

Rising Proportion of Ecommerce in International Trade
There is evidence on the rising proportion of ecommerce as a part of international trade in goods. A report published by the American business research firm McKinsey asserts that ecommerce accounts for 12% of the volume of international trade in goods. Ecommerce companies like Alibaba, Amazon, EBay, Flipkart and Rakuten have taken ecommerce beyond boundaries. Some of 50% of world’s traded services are digitized.

MSME are the New Micro-Multinational Companies of Today
The MSME sector is engaging in digitization like never before and is coming up as a new sector that is ready to transcend boundaries. It has been reported that Amazon hosts more than 2 million third party vendors on its platform, all of them are MSMEs. EBay accounts for more than 2/3rd of its procurement from MSMEs that are highly active in the field of digitization and are connecting to customers through online, pocket internet and mobile apps development. The MSME sectors of emerging economies accounts for 68% of the payment transactions that PayPal does in a financial year.

Competing with Big Data and Advanced Analytics
The volume of global data gets doubled every 20 months. This is a finding published in a report published by PwC. If anything it shows the growth of big data at a breakneck speed. The production of big data is increasing while the costs of usage of data are falling continuously indicating that business firms stand to gain from falling long run average costs of production of data. Data visualization, cloud computing, cloud hosted software, wireless communications, internet of things, machine learning and advanced analytics are extending the power and reach of information. For example, Acxiom is a U.S.A based company that offers profiles of 50o million customers with each profile being enriched by more than 1500 data points that is streamlined from a data set of up to 50 trillion transactions. Advanced analytics in the form of machine learning and artificial intelligence allows firms to scale up the process of customer centric learning massively at a very low cost and thus produce customized offerings of goods and services. This massive automation of customer centric business functions is a direct outcome of the usage of advanced analytics.

Automating Knowledge Work
Take the case of IBM Watson, which is a one of its kind platform for artificial intelligence based computing system. IBM Watson was trained and coded to read the medical reports of 600,000 people, 1.5 million patient records and 2.0 million pages of reports of clinical trials on cancer. Today IBM Watson is the backbone of the decision support system meant for oncologists at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Clearwell Systems is a Silicon Valley based company that offers legal document processing services for its clients. Recently the company employed knowledge work automation software that scanned more than 0.5 million documents to conclude that less than 0.5% of the documents were relevant for pre-trial case study references. While many may argue that the results had nothing encouraging for the company, it must be noted that had the company got the work done manually it would have taken more than 50 people and over three months. The work was completed in sharp 3 days thereby saving costs, time and effort for the company.

Offering Fresh User Experience to Customers
The rising income levels and employment generation in emerging economies is leading to faster internet adoption and higher rates of mobile internet penetration. While the scenario augurs well for emerging economies there are extended opportunities for improvement in countries like India, China and Bangladesh. India’s digital penetration is only 10% and that of China stands at 40%. The business value that can be created in these countries based on digitization is truly enormous.

For example Dutch-Bangla Bank Limited (DBBL) in Bangladesh for example has achieved a customer headcount of 1million mobile payment subscribers in the first 10 months. Standard Bank of South Africa has reduced new client acquisition costs by 80% for smart phone subscribers. Kenya’s Google sponsored iHub Project offers financing options to entrepreneurs and start ups on the basis of mobile apps development services. In India, Hindustan Unilever offers smart phones to distributors and even local shop keepers operating mom and pop stores to coordinate on issues of inventory management, marketing strategy and demand forecasts to streamline the supply chain.

Improving Governance, Education and Health Care
Governments of different countries are proactively engaging in consolidating their interface and outreach to citizens using web technologies. India has enrolled 400 million citizens into the Aadhar Program which is the world’s largest biometric information bank. The Aadhar Program aims to disburse $ 50 million worth of subsidies to the poor by means of direct cash transfers and saving $6billion annually in fraudulent payments. In Bangladesh, more than 90% of child births occur beyond hospitals. A mobile –notification system issues alerts to teams of mid-wife techies, nurses and child care experts to the required places. The system has an efficiency of 89%. The government in South Korea has initiated the e-People project which enables citizens to file online petitions for reporting issues of corruption. A PPP( public-private partnership) in China offers a cardiovascular monitoring system by transmitting data from the bodies of the patients directly to the doctors in Beijing, who then suggest treatment over the phone.

At the top MBA College in Greater Noida we have and are still engaging in high quality business research on the adoption of digitization and its impact on the global economy. The above piece of literature is based on inputs from business research projects done by students of the PGDM and MBA courses and mentored by the academicians of the business school. Ishan Institute of Management & Technology is the first business school of Greater Noida.