Ashish Tiwari:

What are the risks to be kept in mind while going digital? Especially if we look at it from the lens of SMBs. A lot of SMBs will have their question in their mind.

 

Vivek Puthucode:

The biggest risk is reputation, Security and privacy. When you embrace digital, you're collecting data and you're collecting and storing it. Where you collect what data you collect, where you store it. It's extremely important because you don't want to collect sensitive customer data and leave it somewhere that gets exposed on the wide web. That reputation is very difficult to recover. No customer will trust you ever again, to be able to handle their data. So it's extremely important to make security privacy, right in the centre of all the decisions you make. That's where you work with a reputable provider of technology. You don't work with anybody who would expose yourself to risks.

Not everything is cheap. What appears cheap might be very cheap for the business. So doing a research and making sure that, you don't put your reputation at risk and you can trust the technology. It's got the reputation of trust. That's extremely important. Number one, risk number two risk is you can start something too big and the advice we give is start small. Start with something simple, learn from it. Iterate. Don't make it a very big project for failure. That's a scope risk, reduce it small. And experience it, even if you fail, it's okay. Learn from it and have a go better next time. The third risk is really around People change. Now you can bring smart technology in it. If you have not spent time convincing your business owners, your partners, your employees, your teammates if you haven't done that cultural change of why we are doing it. Go back to the checklist. Why are we doing this in first place? If everybody's not bought into it, they can sabotage the chain that you're trying to make. There are many other risks, but there are risks that you need to manage and, start with self-awareness. You start educating yourself on the places you're going to for technology choices that start with that.

But I would say suffice to say that focus on privacy and security first. Everybody as a business owner whether you're using technology or not, today, have the responsibility or the custodians of Verizon of data that people are trusting you with.

 

Mani G:

that's a great answer. so the other last piece in that would be - be yourself. If something is unique to you, stick to it, don't become a commoditized entity because technology is available. So you have to maintain your quality, your identity. Technology will only help you to scale if you lose that identity. I don't think you will get any help from anywhere.