The Significance of Data Analytics in Digital Transformation

Speaker A: Welcome to beyond the Screen, an Ionis podcast where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business's online presence, hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and IT industry, and exploring how the Ionis brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. I'm your host, Joe Nash. Welcome to another episode of beyond the Screen and Ionus podcast. Today we welcome a visionary in the world of technology and digital transformation, Pavi Agraval. With a career spanning over two decades, Pavi's journey has seen him don the hats of a co founder, uh, chief technology officer and IT leader at several influential organizations. Currently steering the ship as the vice president and head of IT at Relativity, he champions enterprise wide solutions that uh, touch everything from enterprise architecture to business intelligence. But his journey has been diverse, from establishing startups and guiding them to successful acquisitions by private equity, to spearheading IT transformations in globally recognized brands like Tupperware and um, Mars. Pavi, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me, Joe.

Speaker A: It's always wonderful to read through these bios, but your one was especially exciting because my house is a big Tupperware house and I have to admit I did get a bit excited when I got to that end bit. I was like, oh, that's new. We don't see that kind of name on this podcast often. So that is awesome. It's great to have, um, diverse experience, all kinds of different sectors here on the show. So I guess I want to kick off digging into your background a bit as we so often do. Um, you know, with that journey I just underscored, you know, from co founding startups to leading IT transformations and global companies. How has your perspective on IT and technology's role in business evolved over the span of those two decades?

Speaker B: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me here. So I'll tell you, I've been in it for almost 25 years and I started off as a developer working in mainframes. ES9000, they don't even exist. All cobalt stuff and RPG. And that time I was totally focused on programming. In fact, back in the days in AS 400, I used to code in RPG, RPG, ILE. So basically I wrote the bulkiest program, only thinking about technology, only thinking about, okay, I have to write this program, not thinking about the business perspective at all. Now over the years, as I have graduated more and understood the business more, what I've realized is that IT is the enabler for business and a lot of companies. In fact I would say 95% plus companies right now. It is a cost center. It is not a profit center yet. Profit center yet. But things are changing now. Because what my perspective right now stands is that every company, whether it's a CPG company or a manufacturing company or a retail company or a software company or, uh, aeronautics company or trains or every company is a technology company. They just don't know it yet. Because nothing will work if technology doesn't work. So it plays a very, very important role now. And it's not just a business enabler, but in a lot of cases, it has a seat on the board and it can do things which nobody else in the organization can do. So that is a perspective change that I've had in last 25 years. Not thinking about business at all and thinking about wholly about business.

Speaker A: And I think that's a journey that I feel like many listeners to our show who have started off as a software engineer and slowly, as they've gained experience, got closer to how the business functions, will recognize that journey in themselves, for sure. So you said something interesting there, that obviously every company is technology company, whether they realize it or not. And I think part of what you described there about technology being pivotal to their success is ultimately the recognition that, know, hey, you know, we're a technology company because we have to have technology, because how do you function in the world without technology versus how do we leverage technology for, uh, success, for competitive advantage? So talking about, you know, the idea of digital transformation, digital success, what do you think it means for a business to truly succeed in digital today? You know, if they're just starting out this journey of recognizing the role that digital plays for their business.

Speaker B: See, digital transformations are not something new. This term was coined more recently, digital transformation. But people were using mainframes. Even at that point. There was some level of transformation where things were manual. Somebody came up with an idea of mainframe. They started using those programs, starting putting their purchase orders through the screens instead of a manual physical paper. So that kind of digital transformation was happening. Nowadays with the onset of cloud, things have taken a completely different direction. Earlier, uh, we had to set up an application. We had to buy a server. The server procurement would take months. Months actually. Right.

Speaker A: Got physical machines being put in actual places by people.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Then somebody would be, will be hosting that machine into our own data center. And then our data center would grow to the size of like 30,000 servers running in the data center. Uh, with physical security and digital security and everything, things have changed now. Now with a click of a button we can have a virtual machine running in Azure, aws, GCP or whatnot. So that is a very important part of digital transformation. Then onset of SaaS subscriptions. We don't write softwares now. We subscribe to a software. I mean there are companies, uh, one of my last employers, very large CPG company, had thousands of subscriptions for different kind of business use cases. Now good and bad thing because I exit out 50% of them when I was rationalizing the, uh, inventory. But still, what the good thing is that you don't have to write the software, you just subscribe to the software. You may tweak it, but you just subscribe to it and use it. So that is another very key aspect of digital transformation. The third aspect I feel is the mindset. People need everything on their tips now, the information needed right now, whether it's through mobile phone or iPad or your computer, M. Of course, anywhere in the world, you don't have to be in US to work. I'm working from India for two weeks and I see no problems in working zero because everything is on zoom. So that is another aspect of digital. Any information available anywhere in the world without any boundaries. And of course the security part. So those are the key aspects of digital transformation. Ultimately every, um, process within a company should be touchless, converted in zeros and ones, basically digitally transferred through wires, not through papers. That would be the ultimate goal of digital transformation. I think that's my take on this digital transformation.

Speaker A: Right now it makes sense. You mentioned something that I want to go to briefly, just being topical. So recently on Twitter, on social media, or I guess Xnow to say it correctly, there's been a lot of discourse about SaaS subscriptions. And particularly the developer sphere has been talking about basically like companies putting down big money on SaaS subscriptions. And it, uh, actually turns out no one's used it and you can cancel it. Basically an approach to dealing with these services where you just cancel them every year and you see which ones people complain about before you reinstate them. So it's really interesting that you mentioned, you know, axing 50% of them. How do you approach, you know, you know, when you've got this proliferation of SaaS at a big company, how do you get to that 50%? How do you shake out the ones that aren't doing anything?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll tell you, I've done it in three companies now and, um, have been hugely successful, saved millions of dollars for the company. In fact, one of the company, we saved around $12 million matter of months seriously. So I have to go back 25 or 30 years back into my, my life, even 40 years because I'm 50 now. So as I was growing up, went through certain tough times and I realized the importance of money very early on and I became very frugal. I would not spend money where it is not required. I would spend money very wisely, I would preserve, I would save. And that became in my DNA. So wherever I went, whether, even if I'm writing the code, make sure that it's most optimal code, it's taking the most optimal resources, it's uh, easy to maintain, easy to change and everything. So that has been my mantra since I was growing up. Now when it came to SaaS I saw that I joined one CPG company. That was my first experience looking at it in a ah, grand scale company was spending around 100 million plus in SaaS subscriptions. For SaaS subscriptions optimization there are a couple of things that you have to look at. One is what is have subscribed basically you have subscribed for thousand users or you have subscribed for compute usage of X number of units or you have subscribed for storage, whatever. So different subscription models. Right? Then we have the contract. What is our contract sale, how long is the contract and then the usage, actual usage, what's happening in the system and these three things you have to look at and find out opportunities. So what we did was we looked at what low hanging fruits first. So we looked at low hanging fruits where we found those softwares which were not used at all, zero usage. So people just bought it because they had funding and we saved like a couple of million dollars right there didn't

Speaker A: find a way to build it into the workflow.

Speaker B: And then there was a lot of budget decentralization that was happening. That company because a large company, China bought their own software, Germany bought their own software and so on. Then we consolidated those applications. Why do we need 12 instances of concur? We don't need 12 instances of karka.

Speaker A: I've definitely been at companies where that has happened. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker B: Exactly. Why do we need 40 different ways to manage master data? We don't need to. Why do we need 60 different applications for managing our invoices? We don't need to. Even though you're a global company, you don't need to. Maybe we have, we need five different instances. So those are the opportunities that we took care very fast. Now the challenge comes is the contract is usually three to five years with these SaaS companies, daily negotiation of the contract within that three years is a very big challenge. But in certain cases, I was able to work out where we got credit and other things for future use, but not in all of the other cases. But overall, the same mantra, uh, same formula we implemented at Tupperware also and my current company also, because it makes sense. Why should we throw the money out when we don't have to?

Speaker A: Basically, yeah, absolutely. I feel especially with a lot of platforms that people are using at work now, like Slack and Zoom and things with plugin and with ecosystems where it's, it's very easy to get into a subscription for a little piece of functionality. Like, you know, you want polls in Slack, you want a, uh, meet, you want like coffee chats in Zoom, and suddenly employees are just adding SaaS subscriptions left and right. And you know, the big things like Concur and Salesforce that the business depends on are part of it. But you also proliferate this like, long tail, small things. Right. Um, fascinating.

Speaker B: Interesting. You brought up Slack because most of the companies have Microsoft, they're Microsoft Shop, they all have teams, subscription free.

Speaker A: Yeah, it just comes with any other Microsoft product. Right.

Speaker B: It comes free right now the premium, um, is additional cost, but the basic teams is free. It's a huge saving, almost like a substantial money.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess the same can be said of, you know, every tech company in the world has Google Suite somewhere, right. Which has, you know, you can, you find probably a tool to fit pretty much everything you need to do in there somewhere, if, you know, you dig for it. But.

Speaker B: And actually I was working for, as a advisory consultant for one company. I'll not make them take the name, but they don't have Microsoft in their house. All Google Gmail they use for official emails.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's very common. That's been the case a lot I've been to.

Speaker B: It's a pretty big company.

Speaker A: Yeah, Well, I think that was, uh, a very timely detour, but to go back to digital transformation. So we spoke about digital transformation, but you shared those three points that you think are key digital transformations. So I want to talk about your approach to digital transformation, which is like, you know, how do you come to digital transformation at a company in a way that's innovative and practical for the organization? And in particular, looking at the issue of, say you've got a company that's really kind of like step one of digital transformation, how do you prioritize which technologies to integrate first into the business and how do you Tackle that mountain.

Speaker B: So see, to have proper digital transformation in organization, especially those companies which are very stable and like legacy companies, right? 100 year old company or 50 year old company, nobody will listen to you if you talk about digital transformation. To be very frank, they don't have time. So first thing that you need to do is listen, listen to their pain points. You need to partner up. And before you start talking about digital transformation, that's a leadership, you need to have that strong partnership with them, them. So my mantra has been be useful, gain the trust, partner up. It's all based off listening. So that's a basic thing. Once you have that strong partnership enabled, you need to look at certain things, okay. We need to look at our existing landscape to look at what technology debt they have. So number one, reduce technology debt as part of this digital transformation. Because none of the digital transformation will succeed if you have a lot of liquidity debt. One of my previous companies There were around 6,500 applications, 4,800 websites. I'm not making up these numbers. These are real numbers. From the transformation perspective, how can we build on something where the foundationally you have so much of technical debt. So as a result we basically X'd out around 3,800 applications.

Speaker A: That still leaves like a stunning amount of applications. It's a huge start. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: More than 50%. And imagine what it can do to the OpEx OpEx for those companies for that CIO. It will reduce substantially not just from resource perspective, but even the compute perspective, the maintenance perspective, change and so on. That's number one. Number two is risk mitigation. And I'm not even talking about digital transformation right now because that is, that will happen. But once we have to take care of these things also. So reducing technology debt risk mitigation is second one, we cannot imagine how many companies they're running vulnerable with security. And none of this digital transformation will succeed if you have thousands of CVEs present in your digital areas already or on prem softwares. So security vulnerabilities, end of life of the uh, applications and hardware and software. They have operating system, they have license and compliance issues. Those things needs to be taken care of. And everything is going in parallel actually. Now let's talk about digital transformation. Digital transformation also you have to consider from the consumer facing point of view as well as core, the uh, core of the business point of view, core tech, when I talk about is those uh, softwares like ERPs, workdays or a procurement solution or supply chain solution, core

Speaker A: tech transformation uh, almost the operational capability, right? The things that are keeping the business running.

Speaker B: I mean things like SAP and other integrated solution. So that part. And then we talk about the UX also. So UX should be based off the design thinking, where we conduct design thinking sessions with the end users. Everything should be mobile first. It should be mobile ready, given everything. And of course data and analytics, I mean leveraging big data and going cloud first approach with everything cloud. Nothing should be on prem unless it is really required. When certain things, like, you know, in office displays, there are certain things that you might need a server or two in house, that's a different thing. Or for manufacturing you might need on prem servers, but other than everything should be on cloud, then data and analytics, leveraging big data, leveraging cloud analytics, leveraging generative AI nowadays, all those things. So this complete spectrum of things is what I call digital transformation. Now there is one more aspect of transformation which is extremely important, is human. So we talked about, we have three pillars mainly, right? The people, process and technology. I also talk about enablement because if you don't enable the people, our digital transformation will fail. Now what does enablement means? Enablements means how we do the demand, how we manage the supply chain of the software or the data, how we produce the software, how we manage the complete DevOps. Or rather I would say DevSecOps. In fact, I have added one more word of requirements to this because without requirement nothing works. So rec DevSecOps. So there are multiple aspects to it. So basically agile rec def secops process is what I believe in and that enablement has to happen. And that enablement is very critical because I have seen companies which will have brilliant idea but they cannot execute well and they end up spending millions of dollars to create a big idea. There is no ROI because you already spent so much because of your broken processes. So people, process, technology and enablement is all should be part of the digital transformation.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. I like the emphasis on people and partnering with people in your organization to find the problems. First of all, the first thing that struck me as you were talking about that was it's very reminiscent of what we have heard on this show, uh, from experienced product managers who are talking about, you know, managing the product and making sure it's addressing user needs. And it very much is similar if you're thinking of the organization as a whole, as a product and its users are the employees. A very similar approach, which is very interesting. But then also it's great to hear those three pillars because I feel like, at least in. I've never worked with digital transformation, but I've been adjacent to a lot of it happening. My perception has often been that digital transformation is something that happens to a business rather than cooperatively done within the business that, you know, often someone has decided, hey, let's bring in some consultants who are going to do additional transformation. Right. And so hearing your envision of those three pillars and it being so people centered, I think is really important. And yeah, a very interesting approach.

Speaker B: The reason we have to introduce people and enablement part is what's our ultimate goal of digital transformation. Our ultimate goal of digital transformation is to reduce time to market for the business, period. Business can move faster, whether it's launching on new products, whether it is for delivering of our product to a customer or anything. So if you don't consider people and the enablement part, then we will not reduce the human errors. We'll take more time to produce the product that the business wants to use. It will increase the cost of ownership of anything that we do. And then it will also increase if you don't take care of people and enablement part, it will also increase the severity and frequency of those incidents which business disruption will happen and business will not be able to move faster so that digital transformation will not work. So all of these vertical pillars and the bottom horizontal of enablement is extremely critical and a lot of people miss that part where they don't enable the processes around it. Um, and then people say, oh man, my digital transformation is not working. I implemented this workday, but it's not working because when you have not enabled the processes around it.

Speaker A: Fascinating. Then that I think leads me very nicely into another question here, which is you mentioned a couple of, I guess, newer technologies there. You mentioned DevSecOps, which is a somewhat newer rebranding of the term. I like your spin a little with additive requirements as well, but also generative AI, a very hit thing at the moment. When you think about introducing these new technologies and strategies into an established business or a legacy business, this sounds a bit adversarial. But how do you overcome internal reluctance or pushback or skepticism? How do you use that enablement picture to convince people that this is a positive change?

Speaker B: I'll tell you two things that I truly believe and I use it now and then. I have gone through seven transformations and it really works. So first thing is always think big, execute small and iterate. So take smaller chunks, breed success, gain the trust and become influential. If you become influential, create another iteration and this Is like, you know, human psychology actually, because with change management you have to play with human psychology. So I have a big thing in my mind that I want to digitize everything. I want to cut down 3,000 applications, but then I have to execute small and I have to iterate through it, repeat the formula. So if we do that, then we are slowly gaining the trust in a new organization. When a person goes, instead of getting in and saying, oh, we are going to change the world, it's not going to happen. People will resist like anything because ultimately what's your goal is to implement those incremental changes. So small, small chunks, break it down. You take one process, modify it, create a success. Success breeds success. So think big, execute small, iterate, because success breeds success. Your first iteration, if it fails, doesn't matter, it's a small impact. But if it is successful, then you gain the trust of the business.

Speaker A: It's very similar to what's the famous, like uh, under promise, over deliver, kind of a similar vibe.

Speaker B: You know what? Monolithic transformations is not going to happen. Those big bang approach things are gone. Those are gone things. I mean, uh, my current role, I have implemented 27 different changes in the organization of DevOps and Agile and how we do things, everything. Because our uh, digital transformation journey requires all those, those things to be done. But we have to do it iteratively because every iteration we do has to be a success.

Speaker A: Okay, so to flip that over so you know, that's talking about, you know, you've got a new thing you want to implement into a business, you're trying to convince people for you, you know, especially with your experience, having co founded, you know, startups, how do you assess the potential of new technologies to be disruptive in the market? Like how do you convince yourself that this is something that you want to bring, you know, even to the company or to the market? In the case of your startups, I

Speaker B: don't go emotional with technology the moment I have realized that technology is there to either improve the customer experience or either improve the employee experience. Either it's digitizing the processes or uh, either it is helping us achieve the operational excellence, one thing or the other. So any technology that comes in, I always think about which part it is going to help me or help the business, whether it is going to make me money or save me money. Because any dollar saved is also equal to almost like if I consider EBITDA of 20%, every dollar I save is equal to $5 in revenue because $5, 20% of it is EBITDA is $1. So if I'm saving $1 with a technology introduction, then I'm actually generating $5 revenue for the company. And that's how the mindset has to change to make it the profit center because it's not there yet. So what I'm saying is so when we look at the new technology, whether it is generative AI or AI or data analytics or any other SaaS subscription that we're talking about or automation of, we have to think about from that perspective. Customer experience, employee experience, digitization of the processes. Either it is helping us operational excellence, achieving operational excellence, whatever you want to do, or optimizing the cost or adding helping us with a new business model. So one of the things has to be there. If it is not there, I'm not interested in the technology or it is eliminating the risk for the business because there might be certain things where it may not fit into any other bill, but it has to be done because of it's a risk.

Speaker A: I'm still sitting with uh, what you were speaking uh, about in terms of uh, the revenue spend relationship and it come around that direction. You know exactly what you said at the beginning about flipping being a cost center, being a revenue generator, where I thought about it in that direction, always thought about you know, in terms of hey, this thing I do now will make this much money but not how much revenue has been generated to enable the spend I'm doing now is really interesting.

Speaker B: I mean imagine this company to make $10 billion in profit or EBITDA margins at AH, a 20% EBITDA margin, you have to generate $50 million in revenue. But if you save $10 million in certain costs, you're basically adding to the bottom line. It's a big number.

Speaker A: So earlier on we were talking about um, you talking about the importance of data analytics and taking advantage of the new forms of data analytics we have available to us now with that in mind, with the importance of data and decision making improving, with data driven decisions being very key in all kinds of businesses, how would you recommend that legacy businesses reframe their data strategies to leverage these new technologies?

Speaker B: See from the data analytics perspective we have to consider all sorts of data within an organization. I mean legacy technologies, both structured and unstructured and semi structured data. Because the amount of information that is present in the structured data in legacy applications is only a fraction of it. But unstructured data is in documents, in PDFs that is substantial information which is not even tapped.

Speaker A: The amount of information locked in PDFs gives me nightmares, honestly.

Speaker B: And I think organizations should consider a holistic approach when they talk about data. Structured, unstructured, semi structured, even audio, small messages, uh, what we call text messages and slacks and themes.

Speaker A: The voice messages that people send, like the quick voice messages they fire over

Speaker B: in certain cases, yes, short messages. So short messages is a big deal because the amount of messaging that is happening through short messaging is much higher, much more than emails, for instance. So the an organization has to consider when they talk about data analytics from multiple different aspects, considering all the different elements, the structured data, the unstructured data and the semi structured data, emails and other things. Right now, depending upon the different use case, you can have the analytics sitting on top of it. You can use certain companies, they use modern softwares like Snowflake and Tableau and Microsoft and so many other things. Azure Data Lake, again that could be case by case basis, but from a strategy point of view, all the different types of data should be considered. So that would be my take on this on uh, a high level right

Speaker A: now that makes sense. The various unstructured media available for employee communication now is a really interesting one from so many angles. Like you mentioned, traditionally, I guess email has been the strata of business communications. But then when you start to get into even just topics like how much do we as the business understand what decisions are being made with what technology? Like from a compliance perspective, you know, you can tell what's happened in emails, you can see what data's been exchanged in your company's emails. But like how do you deal with an audio message sent over Slack, like completely inaccessible in so many ways? Yeah, it's very interesting actually my company

Speaker B: is working on it, so we are actually working on the same use case where we can understand what's in the audio or even the video and create intelligence out of it. So. And all structured information can be using the artificial intelligence. We can generate intelligence out of it based on certain rules.

Speaker A: Nice to bring your company into it right near the end. We're coming up in time here. Okay, I've got a couple more questions I want to try and squeeze in. Be mindful of your time. So you know, we've spoken about emerging technologies a couple of times here. What emerging technologies do you foresee having the most substantial impact on online business operations in the next five years? Obviously I can imagine where it's going to go given the current moment and AI and stuff. But yeah, that's the question as is,

Speaker B: I think hands down it would be generative AI. It's going to Be a ah, game changer for a lot of business processes, a lot of industries, how we do things. Of course it will have certain impact on the employment also because you don't need to hire and if I just consider it perspective, right? I mean not even considering outside we may not need to hire 20 developers if you can generate the code at the first pass metro minutes. So just that's only in transition. So generative AI, hands down it'll be the number one thing that is the game changer. And it is just the beginning.

Speaker A: I had a moment this morning. So speaking about PDFs and unstructured data, I've been trying to deal with a really difficult PDF data extraction problem. And I've also been a bit of an outspoken generative AI skeptic, I will say that. But this morning I was like, I'm fed up and banging my head against this PDF problem. I'm just going to give the PDF to a generative AI and ask it to get what I want out of it and see what happens. And it did it. And I was just like, I've really been, this is what I get for being a non believer. I've just been absolutely had like hours of work that I've spent on this just instantly gone. I'm just like, okay, fine.

Speaker B: I mean there are so many case studies. My company does deals with unstructured data a lot. I mean we are in that uh, legal industry space where the legal cases are millions of documents. We have petabytes of stores of data, all unstructured information. But how we create intelligence and it saves the legal lawyers and everything time. I mean it is substantial.

Speaker A: All right, so final question here to squeeze, last one in. You know, we've spoken, you know about uh, all different industries you've covered the length of your career, you know, the different roles you've had from developer, uh, to digital transformations to you know, founder and cto. As you look back on all of that, what, what is one piece of advice that you would give to folks entering the technology industry today?

Speaker B: So one piece of advice I would give is always broaden your horizon. Don't stay in your comfort zone. If you are uh, comfortable, then punch out of the comfort zone, look beyond. I mean if you are developing Java programs, understand how the interfaces work, understand how the data works, understand how the APIs work, and if you are doing the database programming, understand the reverse side of it, what happens in the application level. If you understand the application and data, look at what's happening in security. If you understand security Also understand, I mean, you have to broaden your horizon because what happens is people get into their cocoon, just stay in that cocoon because of their comfort zone, which is okay. A lot of people, it is good for them. But people who want to grow both in their career as well as professionally, as well as from the knowledge point of view, you have to understand what is the engagement tier, what is the digital services tier, uh, what is the mass data integration tier, what is the, uh, enterprise services tier and everything around that. So staying in your comfort zone is only going to help you to be in your cocoon, which is okay for some people, but for most, you need to expand. So learn upskill. Wherever you get an opportunity, content is freely available. So that would be my number one advice.

Speaker A: I love that advice a lot. I think it's, uh, you know, I say it's very easy to get a hone in on a single track and to spend time in there. But the example you gave of being a Java application developer and understanding more about, you know, what happens at either end and at the peripheries of your application, even if you do want to stay on that single, you know, if you want to be the world's best Java developer, it will really help you do that. So I think that's, that's great advice. Well, Pavi, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been fantastic and yeah, thank you for joining us on the show.

Speaker B: Thank you, Joe, and it was wonderful talking to you and thank you for all the questions.

Speaker A: Beyond the screen, an Ionis podcast. To find out more about Ionos and how we're the go to source for cutting edge solutions and web development. Visit ionos.com and then make sure to search for Ionos in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Don't forget to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On, um, behalf of the team here at Ionos, thanks for listening.