Shub Bhowmick of Tredence On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level
Embrace connected intelligence — When you begin analyzing data from departments of your business that affects choices made in other parts, you get a rough blueprint of how your business functions are connected and interact. This helps you build a truly connected digital enterprise where all the pieces move with each other frictionlessly.
As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shub Bhowmick.
Shub Bhowmick is the CEO and co-founder of Tredence. For more than 25 years, he has been a problem solver, entrepreneur, and technology leader. In 2013, Shub and his partners launched Tredence, a data science and AI engineering company focused on solving the last mile problem in analytics. The ‘last mile’ is defined as the gap between insight creation and value realization. Tredence is 1,000-plus employees strong with offices in Foster City, Chicago, London, Toronto, and Bangalore, serving 30+ Fortune 500 companies in retail, CPG, hi-tech, telecom, travel, and industrials as clients.
Prior to the founding of Tredence, Shub held senior executive positions at Diamond Consultants (now PwC), Mu Sigma, Liberty Advisor Group, and Infosys. Shub holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a Bachelor of Technology with Honors in Chemical Engineering from IIT-BHU, India.
Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
To highlight a couple of significant milestones that sowed the idea of starting a new business in my mind, I’d have to go back to 2002. I was writing essays for business school and answering the question: “What do you want to do in your professional life?” I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And even though that idea and aspiration evolved over time, it was the first time the idea of entrepreneurship truly developed for me.
Living in Silicon Valley influenced the thought because every conversation you have on the work front, even at friendly get-togethers over weekends, revolves around starting a new business. After being away from the Valley for some time, my resolve to start a new business grew even stronger after moving back. It was a time when I was engaged with MuSigma, and that’s where I identified the potential in the space of data analytics. I figured out that customers were not just looking at companies that provide data analytics services but also someone who could do that at scale. The rest is, as they say, is history.
Then I met Sumit and Shashank, who shared the same passion and vision of putting meaningful analytics into the hands of every decision-maker through simple solutions that enable the last-mile adoption of insights. In 2013, Tredence was born in a three-bedroom apartment in Bangalore, and since then, there has been no looking back: We’ve grown to 1,700+ people in just 9 years. It truly has been a magical journey!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
This is an interesting one; Amit Gupta, Sumit, and I all graduated from IIT BHU in 1996, then lost touch for 16 years.
In the fall of 2012, Amit traveled to the Bay Area, set up a dinner with Sumit, and invited me over; that was when I got a chance to meet Sumit again, so technically, Amit brokered the reconnection between the two of us. From that time forward, Sumit and I frequently met as we both shared similar aspirations of starting an analytics company. So, that dinner was an important occurrence.
Another instance where Amit played a key role was in 2013 when we were aggressively looking to add new customers. He introduced us to a contact who eventually started our association with one of the largest global retailers in the U.S. This customer drives a major portion of our revenue, and the relationship is still going strong! So, if I have to mention one particular person I’m thankful to, it must be Amit Gupta.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
My most recent favorite book is “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, and “Forrest Gump” is one of my all-time favorite movies because it exemplifies the power of perseverance. I identify with the protagonist of the film, even though I’m a stoic by nature, don’t get easily rattled, am mostly calm and composed and I’m also a very tenacious person, and some of these qualities are well highlighted and enacted out by Tom Hanks in the movie.
Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?
Our vision is to become the world’s most indispensable analytics partner, and we’re on a timeless mission of taking unstructured, unusable data and connecting it with a use case where it becomes valuable by solving a problem contributing to the top or bottom line. I envision Tredence as directly responsible for contributing to this mission.
We have taken this mission up several notches in the last few years. Our expertise cannot be compared with anyone else globally, especially the enterprise data value we offer for verticals like retail and CPG. Additionally, some of the products and solutions we’ve recently built are intended to leverage and accelerate this mission of putting meaningful analytics into the hands of every decision maker.
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
I’d like to highlight a new healthcare product company that we launched in 2021. The cost of care in the U.S. is exploding and is becoming unmanageable. The concept of value-based care first emerged in the United States about ten years ago. The idea was to focus on overall health versus paying every time they see a doctor and get a certain kind of service from the hospital.
In value-based care, the insurance company and the U.S. healthcare system pay a certain amount per year towards the individual’s health against the payment the individual has to bear towards each doctor’s visit.
We are progressing from fee-from-service to value-based care, which is only 8% of the current market but is rapidly growing. HealthEM.AI, our healthcare product subsidiary, is designed to optimize the cost of care, improve value realization across the healthcare spectrum, and directly align with this shift. We are excited to be part of this transition in the U.S. healthcare ecosystem as we strongly believe this is the right approach, focusing on preventive care, reducing hospital visits, and enabling individuals to stay on top of their critical health metrics.
For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level, what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation for a business like yours?
Digital transformation doesn’t succeed in isolation. When organizations put it in a silo, we have seen them get sucker-punched at the last mile of their transformation journey.
It’s important to understand that cohesive digital strategies and data are key to gluing business functions together during a transformation to create a connected enterprise. And together, they help shape new business models and elevate customer engagement when customer differentiation and centricity are market-defining.
In an ideal connected digital business, every interaction generates data. This data has immense potential to drive intelligent, high-impact decisions, spark new revenue streams, and set you up for first-mover advantages and growth at both the bottom line and top line. Almost all organizations face the problem of extracting meaningful insights from this data — combining data points from across the business functions — for all business functions and delivering them at a velocity that makes a difference. On a practical level, this involves:
Wading through high volumes of data
Homogenizing data from across formats, types, sources, and functions
Generating insights considering exhaustive data points
Delivering these insights in a manner that makes an impact
Add to this layers of
A.I. engineering for automation
And design thinking for last-mile adoption
Digital transformation can enable this to make organizations ‘smart.’ What data power centers do is make them ‘intelligent.’ For example, a digital machine can run with a basic data engine. But with a mature data and A.I. engine, an organization can go beyond predictions/forecasting and help businesses deliver value at scale.
So, today, with our customers, we focus on taking organizations beyond digital piecewise. Instead, we focus on upgrading their overall ability to achieve more with A.I. and data science.
What kinds of companies can most benefit from Digital Transformation?
In a sense, every company. At least this decision is easy in an age where we are spoilt for choice and struggling to choose. A straightforward answer to the question, “Do you need to go digital?” is “absolutely, yes!”
The relevant question right now is how. How should you approach digital? Which aspects of your digital-native inheritance should you keep, and which ones should you disrupt? Who should you model after? Should you write your own digital strategy? Is there one perfect strategy?
Most importantly, how do you inform these decisions? How do we decide?
We look at the data and look for patterns. Data and analytics are key to succeeding in your digital transformation on many levels.
We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how does Digital Transformation improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
In many organizations, digital transformation becomes an exercise in upgrading technology platforms and IT infrastructure. Connecting it to a baseball analogy is a bit like going to the major leagues and showing off minor league moves. They have a bigger stage and higher potential to do more, but they stick to low-ROI minor league tactics, barely justifying their transformation CapEx.
So, how do we make the most of the potential of the new tech? By driving process innovation. Data informs these decisions neatly. A well-thought analytics engine helps organizations continuously and automatically measure the efficacy of the transformation. A.I. engineering can now have these measurements trigger an auto-course correction, ensuring last mile adoption of insights at critical junctures and resulting in real, tangible impact.
By character, a successful digital transformation is a series of right decisions at the most critical points. And data has enormous scope and analytics, the immense capability to deliver these decisions at the required velocity.
Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?
Interesting question. The biggest overarching challenge with digital transformation is organizations’ inability to keep the bigger picture in focus in the long term. Digital transformation has so many moving parts that it’s easy to get distracted by those and short-term gains, pulling focus away from the long-term goals that require consistent and unified efforts. In a way, it’s akin to movie direction. While there’s a specialist for every aspect (e.g., actor, cinematographer, screenplay, choreography), a director keeps track of the whole story and its direction, dynamically aligning all the moving parts toward a common vision. Ultimately the success of the massive digital transformation efforts pivots on a few hundred (possibly thousand) decisions that help the moving parts stay true to the larger business outcomes.
Another challenge worth highlighting is companies must do everything to ensure they aren’t ignoring at least one out of these three during transformation — people, processes, and platforms. It often happens, but a digital transformation requires all these three elements to transform in tandem — in one well-executed macro-move. If platforms evolve and processes don’t, then the potential of platforms is lost. If platforms evolve and people don’t, then ROI is lost.
It’s important to pivot the mindset shift from “how to transform” to “how to transform with impact.”
Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
Here are a few that I’d like to highlight
1. Embrace connected intelligence — When you begin analyzing data from departments of your business that affects choices made in other parts, you get a rough blueprint of how your business functions are connected and interact. This helps you build a truly connected digital enterprise where all the pieces move with each other frictionlessly.
2. Don’t just change, optimize — A digital transformation touches more than technology. It’s an opportunity to discover new efficiencies and improve your organizational culture. Let data guide you and lead you to these improvements at the last mile.
3. Solve small, make a big impact — Replace infrequent, extensively planned changes with rapid experimentation and incremental changes and elevate your digital transformation ROI. This is a game of scale AND speed. Fortunately, with automation and connected intelligence, rapid experimentation is not just an option but imperative for any organization looking to succeed with its digital transformation.
4. Transform mindsets and find opportunities — Digital transformation is as much an opportunity as it’s a challenge. It outfits you with brand-new tools. With an innovation mindset, these tools can be used to create a dramatic impact. Partners like us grow innovation CoEs within our ecosystems to help organizations institutionalize this innovation mindset in their post-transformation state.
5. Data-driven decisions — Make data-driven decisions a core aspect of your digital transformation journey. Data allows you to make unbiased insights into existing processes, providing an opportunity for improving something that already exists. The world is moving towards intelligent automation, and data will be critical in driving more decisions.
How can our readers further follow your work?
All of our corporate updates can be accessed from our website www.Tredence.com. Our LinkedIn handle is a good source to learn more about all of our latest news and events, and this is my personal profile on LinkedIn.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!