The Four Steps to Successful Digital Transformation: Outlined by President and CEO of GlobalLogic

GlobalLogic is a major U.S. digital engineering services company that was acquired by Hitachi in 2021. The company plays an important role in promoting Lumada (a generic name for solutions that utilize Hitachi's advanced digital technologies), which is a pillar of Hitachi's growth strategy.

The company specializes and is a leader in corporate digital transformation (DX) by taking advantage of design-driven digital engineering technologies. In order to expand its business in Japan, the company established GlobalLogic Japan entity in April 2022.

In October of the same year, GlobalLogic President and CEO Nitesh Banga took the stage at Hitachi Social Innovation Forum 2022 JAPAN, the largest event of its kind organized by the Hitachi Group, to discuss the secrets of successful DX in the enterprise.

While the future is uncertain as to what the post-COVID-19 era will look like, we are seeing a wave of change in supply chains, consumer trends, and other areas, along with a shortage of digital talents, threats from cyberattacks, climate change, and other risks that are becoming apparent.

Based on these circumstances, Nitesh explains, "It is precisely because we live in uncertain times that we should leverage digitalization to transform our business."

He points out that the following four points are key to promoting DX:

The first point, software defined everything, refers to the use of software to operate all sorts of products and services today. Including almost all industries automotive, financial services, communications, healthcare, retail, energy and more. It is said that software is now not only supporting products but becoming the product itself. "And COVID-19 has actually caused the big acceleration into software defined everything coming more and more in our lives," says President Banga.

Advancing the software-defined concept is beneficial to the companies that provide the products. Shifting the focus from hardware to software enables product release cycles to be shortened, and maintenance becomes easier. Another major benefit is that new functions can be provided over the network, and new products can be rolled out quickly one after the other without changing the specifications of the equipment.

The second point is leveraging cloud and data. To accomplish DX, it is important to leverage the vast amount of data that exists dispersed across the edge, the cloud, and the data centers. Therefore, the key is to create the software based on the use of the cloud.

"We also must consider how we can extract useful wisdom from unstructured and ever-changing data," says Nitesh.

The third point is innovation through design. This is also essential for advancing DX. Nitesh stated: "It is important to be able to provide optimal design in response to customer feedback." He also went on to say the following:

"Design is not just about the physical appearance; design has three elements: product, experience, and business. And it needs to be from the perspective of ‘who will use it and how it will be used?’ It should not be ‘design for the sake of design’. "

The fourth point is to create new revenue models: not simply just selling products but developing business in a new way. That is the end point of DX, according to Nitesh.

For example, in the product as a service (PaaS) business model, instead of just selling transformers, we can develop a new revenue model through ecosystems with alliances, such as developing a service that encompasses the entire energy supply.

Nitesh in his keynote emphasized that these four points are the key to successful DX. He then proclaimed: "I believe that the era of digital transformation has arrived."

At the end of his speech, President Banga touched on GlobalLogic as a driving force behind such DX. He said: "You might have been exposed to our technology through fast food point of sale terminals and video streaming services without even realizing it." He then concluded his presentation by saying:

"GlobalLogic proposes a digital future that combines design, engineering, and data science, leveraging a wide range of technologies, from IC chips to cloud applications. DX is giving all of us a great canvas to work on. Let's create something amazing together."