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.
