What are some of your career highlights, your day job, and what projects are you currently involved in?

My primary focus is to help large enterprises discover and retain and evolve their innovative spirit, be it pushing the boundaries on Product Ideation, DevSecOps and Cloud practices, or explore new frontiers to make them future ready including redefining their technology operating models. My engagement spans some of the global technology majors and fortune 100 companies. I am also actively researching the new frontiers of business (like Low Code/No Code) and contributing to setting enterprise standards at a global scale. 

Talk to us about your role at Accenture and what did you find most interesting and challenging at Accenture?

At Accenture, I wear three different hats. (1) Helping our clients realize value from their forward-looking technology initiatives and / or guide their innovation; (2) provide thought leadership by identifying emerging whitespaces and discerning market signals to maintain the differentiation Accenture brings to its clients; and (3) volunteer and participate in various Academia and Standards development partnerships.

Most of my clients are path breakers in the market. I get to work with some of the greatest minds in technology innovation, go-to-market strategy development, human centric operating model development – equally spread between Accenture and its clients. Most often, the problems we solve have not been addressed ever before. Yet, operating under the philosophy, if one client faces the challenge, more are likely to follow, we need to plan for scaling models. 

How do you define a work ethic that balances continuous learning that stems from personal motivation and what’s required for client innovation?

In my line of engagement, I need to seek the next big thing for my clients and how to scale those models for other clients. My volunteering work with graduate students and professional engagement with C-Suite helps me see the challenges of today and tomorrow. Accenture has enabled me to work closely with innovators who seek solutions for the chasm between today and tomorrow – when the client’s focus on products and revenue, I must think about growth, culture, and processes. I should say I am fortunate to have an overlapping passion – impact of technology on humans and ecology. Passion and Accenture work feed each other.

I like the way you describe that you ‘drive home the distinction between strategy and plan, purpose and delivery, haste and agility’. Tell me whether organizations and teams should start from strategy, technology, agility, or purpose and how to make sense of it all?

Let me start with a personal experience.

Over the past weekend, my wife and I showed up at a blood donation center. She had an appointment, I decided to join her and see, if I can do a “walk-in” donation. The donation center had a website where we could schedule our appointments, may be create our profile, answer a 42-question survey to generate a pass that simplified the life of the front desk personnel.

When we showed up, the front desk asked for several of the details given via the website all over again, just because the online solutions used by the registration website and the solution used by the front desk did not talk to each other. Next, when our turn came to donate, the medic asked few more questions that were not on the survey. Net result, we wasted 3 hours on the weekend, unable to achieve what we set out to do – donate blood. 

A plan brings strategy to life with resources and timing; purpose motivates the organization to create meaning for themselves and the users from what they deliver; agility without structure is nothing but haste. Break even one of these – structure, meaning, or commitment of resources – the outcome is likely to slip away. This company had a good strategy (which all about making choices) – scheduled dates and windows for donation, making the registration easy, options to reduce the time at the front desk, and the wastage they may have to manage post donation.

However, the plan (investments and specific steps to bring the strategy to life) to bring the strategy to life fell apart – systems were not talking to each other, key elimination criteria not included in online survey, not allowing someone to make same day online appointment (to circumvent the “no-walk-in” policy). They also did not consider the local demography (in the middle of a high immigrant population – which limits when and how often immigrants can donate).

"A plan brings strategy to life with resources and timing; purpose motivates the organization to create meaning for themselves and the users from what they deliver; agility without structure is nothing but haste".

When organizations define their strategy and the resulting choices around “ease of change” (in place of “optimized execution”), the plan aligns to strategy and brings to life the purpose of the initiative, and drives well thought out “agile execution” instead of reacting to changing scenarios. In the case of this blood donation center, had they asked the questions – what to do when there are “no-shows” and “walk-ins”, be geographically contextual, the employees and the donors would have had a great experience and achieved the purpose of establishing the center!

Low-Coe/No-Code has the potential to create multiple solutions and options without well formulated strategy, accelerate delivery without enabling “ease of change or scale”. I have witnessed few such implementations. It is going to take the collective effort of the makers and the users of Low-Code/No-Code solutions to create and amplify value.

Are IT leaders and business executives on the same page about the importance of adopting low-code/no-code, and if not, where is the gap?

A thoughtful question and a great segue to introduce our insights on “Enabling Small and Medium Businesses” wherein we articulate the potential gaps between the Low Code/No Code platform providers and the consumers.

Our research has identified top 5 gaps, that are currently driving even the Low-Code/No-Code enthusiasts to replace their technology choices in less than a year. IT leaders can show up as a true partner to the business with low-code/no-code solutions if they become the sponsors of co-innovation with the business and platform operators instead of solution operators. However, IT leaders and business executives are aligned on the value of low-code/no-code, but from different motivation triggers.

You’ve done a lot of work about enterprise architecture (EA) and the need to develop EA governance. Tell us your perspective about EA and where does Low-Code/No-Code co-exist in EA?

I believe that a well-defined and operated enterprise architecture propels the business to achieve its objectives sooner than its competitors. Good enterprise architects look ahead and develop choices for technologists and business leaders. It defines the boundary conditions as policies and allows the solutions architects, engineers, and tech-savvy business personnel to innovate and meet the needs of its customers. It also identifies and creates early warning options when certain choices could put the business at risk. Low code/No Code is an arrow in the EA toolkit / technology quiver that will be wielded when there is ‘permission to use’. (This is not a co-existence question, but a “permit to use” question).

In the case of low-code/no-code, the enterprise architecture team must examine the conditions that must be true to solve and design with, operate and be secure, comply yet stay nimble with low code/no code solutions.

You understand both the technology and business side of the digital transformation initiatives. So, what is most important for an initiative to succeed, a passionate champion, the right technology or the right timing to undertake such an initiative?

Having the right strategy and a good understanding of the seven levers components of digital transformation. Read the white paper I co-authored. In summary, it is about building the strategy and operationalizing it across the customer journey, business processes, products and / services, technology choices and delivery practices, ecosystem of partners, organizational mindset and incentives, finally, security, environment and social governance. The journey may start with any one of them. However, it will touch all the seven levers – and unless all are addressed, the distance to success will keep multiplying by the day.

Where do digital transformation projects usually fail, especially those that start as Low-Code/No-Code initiatives?

There are several conditions that need to be true for a Low-Code/No-Code initiative to be successful – availability of API endpoint that provides access to data, ease of integrating with “permission” management solutions, and a set of security controls that can assure protections for enterprise data flowing across SaaS and third-party systems.

Second is the platform’s stability and breadth of use cases handled. When enterprises hurry to buy a solution or a platform without understanding the motivations, how to evolve their current infrastructure to blend these solutions, and the desired outcomes, the transformation effort as well as the use of the low-code/no-code platforms fail. Recent research from Gartner finds that most organizations have tried at least 3 solutions before landing on the right choice, and they are likely to use more than one solution to address their existing and emerging use cases.

What are you working on that you’d want to share your excitement about? 

Strategy is about making a set of choices. To develop the options and choices, we need to develop a set of “what if” scenarios. I am driven to develop a variety of choices for my clients and work with them to define the right strategy. Here are some of the pertinent questions I am researching on and developing structured pathways jointly with my clients.



• What-if some of the leading business process management (or automated process management) solutions start to incorporate low-code/no-code features into their existing solutions? 
• What are the white-spaces where a pure-play low-code/no-code platform can continue to demonstrate its uniqueness and sustain market leadership?