IIM Rohtak Hosts Summit on Harnessing Digital Transformation

Rohtak : The Indian Institute of Management Rohtak (IIM, Rohtak) hosted its annual management summit on 14^th September 2024. The summit titled “Leveraging Digital Innovation: Enhancing Business Agility and Performance,” aimed to enable students to thrive in the digital era. It brought together over 20 distinguished industry leaders from prominent companies such as IIFL Finance, Maruti Suzuki, TATA AIA Life Insurance, DLF Ltd., and Havells. Notable guests included Kapish Jain, President and Group CFO; Abhishek Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer; Satish Mahopatra, Executive VP- Head of Business & Corporate HR; Gaurav Singh, Assistant VP- Marketing; and Partha Karmakar, Business Head- Professional Lighting. The event was attended by more than 350 students.

Prof. Dheeraj Sharma, Director, IIM Rohtak inaugurated the summit with a welcome address. In his address, Prof. Sharma warmly welcomed the students and conveyed his appreciation to the guests for their invaluable presence and contributions. He highlighted the transformative power of digital initiatives with multiple examples like AI, AR, and VR and their role in reshaping the family dynamics, education system, and development of self-perception of individuals. Besides emphasizing the vast expansion in productive capacity brought by digitalization, he also mentioned its negative effects such as standardization and loss of individuality. He quoted Peter Senge’s famous line, “People don’t resist change; people resist being changed.” These words set up the agenda of the summit.

The first panel, “Finance 4.0: Steering Through Technological Disruptions,” explored the digitalization of financial services and its impact on the overall economy. The panelists noted how big data, real-time analytics, and proactive decision-making enabled the financial service-providing companies to move from a traditional support function to a strategic enabler. They identified two major hurdles in the digital transformation of financial services: a lingering risk-averse mentality and the difficulty of choosing the right digital tools. The second panel, “HR’s Role in Digital Transformation: Guiding Organizational Change,” identified the key challenges that digitalization had brought to HR services and suggested three means to deal with them: reasoning from first principles; constant communication, and internalization of the need to learn, unlearn and relearn.

The third panel, “Tech-Driven Recruitment: New Strategies for a Changing Workforce,” builds on the second panel and discusses the large-scale unlearning and relearning forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The panelists remarked that COVID-19 enabled firms to understand that work is an activity rather than a location and emphasized the role of new-age recruitment technologies such as ATS, psychometric tests, gamification, and AI in reducing bias and enhancing diversity. The fourth panel, titled “Omni-Channel Marketing: Creating Seamless Customer Experiences in the Digital Age,” highlighted the need for dealers to unlearn their assumptions about customer behavior and use data to better understand customer preferences. The panelists harped on the importance of better segmentation through psychographics, thereby aligning the availability of innovative products with internal needs. Overall, the panelists concluded that embracing digital innovation requires skill-building, clear communication, ongoing learning, and the development of a learning attitude to make change feel natural.

IIM Rohtak, a premier institute of national importance with over 1500 students enrolled in various programs, recently received the AMBA accreditation, making it to the top 2% of management institutes worldwide. With over 75% female representation over the last three years, the institute hosts students from over 30 Indian states and UTs. The Institute offers eight one-of-a-kind programs imparting knowledge with multi-disciplinary outlooks to prepare future business leaders.