KPMG in India is building a tech-enabled workplace which empowers employees, increases productivity and enables them to deliver leading services to its clients
HARNATH BABU
KPMG INDIA
As a professional services firm, we strive to remain on the edge and ensure advanced technology is leveraged at the best. We are preparing the organisation for modern workforce by enabling them to stay connected and work together on common projects through collaborative tools, irrespective of their physical location.
As CIO at KPMG in India, Harnath Babu serves as a catalyst to drive the firm through the current phase of digital revolution and building a robust IT infrastructure. Highlighting the steps taken to foster digital transformation and embrace modernised technology, Babu says, “Over the years, technology has evolved by leaps and bounds. Enhancing the workplace means giving users the access to advanced digital tools that are customised, dynamic and feature-rich. At KPMG in India, we have adapted next-generation technology trends such as Mobility, Cloud Computing, Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence and Collaboration.”
Our IT team is, at present, working on deploying innovative enterprise-grade digital technologies that encompass enterprise productivity and collaboration tools to enhance communication and collaboration within the firm as well as reduce costs / travel footprints.
An early adopter of Cloud in the professional services world, KPMG in India has made rapid strides in embracing a modern approach. “We have modernised our data centre environment and moved to the easily accessible co-located hybrid Cloud model which is designed to scale on demand offering virtually unlimited computing power,” says Harnath.
He adds the organisation has implemented a hyper-converged infrastructure that has resulted in not only reducing the infrastructure footprint by nearly 50 per cent but helped obtain faster response, better network resiliency and cost saving to the tune of a few million dollars. The firm has partnered with leading Cloud service providers to help various business and consulting teams in rapidly building prototypes and services and demonstrating them as proof of the value to the firm's customers. It is rapidly scalable and deployable, based on pay per use model and offers greater agility to the business.
Harnath has introduced cognitive computing technology in the firm with the development of interactive bots – a chat-based virtual assistant for internal employee-related services. The users can easily access chat bot via a chat interface right on their systems. Based on artificial intelligence, it is self-learning and precisely addresses queries in real-time.
As mobile continues to play a significant role in enterprise collaboration from an employee's perspective, the organisation has enabled corporate applications to work seamlessly on hand-held devices and made it easier for the users to meet their self-service requirements while on the move. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy has been implemented in the firm that goes beyond employees who carry their personal smartphones to work to access official emails from home.
Further emphasising on the importance of taking in account the users' feedback to improve IT operations, the launch of a Service Desk Delivery Analytics tool has helped in significantly improving the IT operations landscape. There has been a decrease in resolution time per ticket by 31 per cent and an increase in SLAs by few basis points. Not only this, IT C-SAT has reached 95 per cent for FY 2016-17 after the tool's launch. Harnath highlights that actionable intelligence has led to ready-to-implement solutions which enable users to resolve common issues by self or as pushed through automation. This has benefitted the users with increased day-to-day productivity as well as service desk efficiency.
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