Technology has advanced rapidly over the last few decades. In addition, the use of technology is increasing significantly. It impacts people’s lives and changes how they learn, think and communicate. It also plays a significant role in society, and it is difficult to imagine life without it.
Technology and society are inextricably linked and interdependent and influence each other. Technology impacts society, including the potential for humanity to advance or decline in both positive and negative ways.
Modern technology is simply an advancement of old technology; the impact of technology on modern life is immeasurable. Modern technology refers to products, services, and infrastructure that are designed and built with the help of scientific knowledge and engineering.
In the fast-paced environment walking in the footsteps of technology, Vimi Rao is now the Chief Executive Officer of Sapta Inc. Being a woman, administering with new technologies and staying updated seems to be a task. Yet she was able to achieve it with keen attention to detail.
In Sapta Inc, Vimi designs business solutions to find out the gaps that exist in the organization. She always had a vision for herself, and therefore she was able to prove herself in the most challenging environment.
Let’s get into details to understand how Vimi was able to stand on par in the challenging environment and lead the company:
Professional Background
Born in Fiji Islands, Vimi is deeply ingrained in Pacific Culture, which influences her work ethos of building cohesive teams. Vimi says as the third generation with Indian Heritage; education plays a vital role in her family to ensure a secure future. With limited resources yet strong faith, her late father made facilities for them to complete their higher education to lead an independent life as females and build their futures with bigger dreams. She left Fiji after the political coup in 1987 for further education in Australia.
Vimi has a Master’s degree in Business & Technology from the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Statistics from the Australian National University.
Her professional career began with Management Consulting firms that instilled the importance of methodologies and governance frameworks in assisting businesses in successfully executing strategies. She has extensive experience working across the globe to successfully negotiate and execute strategic initiatives. Her introduction to M&A was through the merger of Price Waterhouse Coopers, which paved the way for her to the United States as an expatriate in the late 1990s as part of ABN AMRO Inc’s M&A Technology team. When 9/11 occurred, Vimi was working with United Loyalty Ventures, which was later integrated with the parent company United Airlines. She was part of the management team that led to a $200 million cost savings that saved the airline from bankruptcy by leveraging digital transformation initiatives and revamping loyalty programs.
What inspired Vimi?
There are many complexities and challenges for management teams to be in sync and lead ahead when working in technology and business. Coordination and getting the right information at the appropriate time are not only important for business, but they are also difficult to achieve across the organization. Executives are pulled in many directions and must make decisions that affect the organization with or without data. She has experienced how a rigid governance framework not only stifles innovation but also leads to a lack of synergies and conflicts across the organization.
Citing an example, Vimi says that during the 2000 economic downturn, to reduce cost centers, strategic pathways were impacted. R&D, PMOs, and COE were the first to be hit because they were non-revenue-generating business functions. Business proritites shift with market conditions. Furthermore, executives are still heavily reliant on their management teams to manually collect data via spreadsheets, documents, and presentations.
Describing her inspiration, Vimi said that Leaders like Therese Tucker of Blackline and Mark Benioff of Salesforce had paved the way for entrepreneurs like me. Like the CRM, Strategic business can be simplified and made available on the cloud as a powerful and costeffective solution. Having a career built on organizational transformation activities, Vimi wanted to simplify and create a nimble governance framework that promotes organizational sustainability for businesses by providing better transparency, accountability, visibility, and sustainable growth.
Understanding Sapta Inc.
At Sapta Inc., Vimi designs a business solution to address the gaps that exist in organizations. She says that her outreach has been to consulting firms that deal with these issues daily, as well as startups and SMEs looking to adopt practices as they grow. As a Team, they are constantly forming strategic partnerships with businesses to cross-sell.
Sapta is a startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. Sapta is a strategic platform that uses a balanced scorecard approach to help C-suite executives accelerate strategic orchestration and decision-making through collaboration while fostering organic innovation across the organization. It enables businesses to promote management efficiencies by reducing discrepancies in manual data points with digital data sources and automated workflows.
In addition to allowing businesses to focus on strategic planning and proritization, Sapta’s governance framework can create better accountability, visibility, and transparency across the organization. The platform enables ESG practices and fosters a work ethos of innovaton, inclusion, and excellence.
Competitive World
Vimi remarks that the work they are doing is revolutionary. Based on the current professional world, businesses hire exclusive investment advising firms to come in and assess their current state of affairs and provide a roadmap for how to proceed. Whereas Sapta Inc is a ready-made blueprint for businesses to inherit critical business processes and KPIs. It enables companies to consolidate technologies and automate management workflows. This is where consulting firms can still come in to help businesses integrate a ready made blueprint. Sapta streamlines and automates these business processes and can feed decision-making data into any business big data as a single pane of glass for executives.
Modern Technology – Face of the World
Modern technology is changing the face of the world by allowing for greater global reach and connectivity. It’s all about simplifying and bringing efficiency to the workforce. Today’s technology is all about how to do things faster and better while delivering better business results. Living in the post-pandemic world of Covid has also opened a new paradigm with hybrid workplaces all over the world. The Sapta platform is all about providing a consistent approach across businesses that promotes better synergy across hybrid teams. Sapta not only empowers employees but also allows businesses to have a digital footprint of their corporate planning on the cloud. Not only do they plan, but they also enable businesses to innovate with hybrid workplaces, giving them the ability to innovate organically in their current business.
Sapta Inc’s Challenges to Overcome
Sapta’s biggest challenge right now is preparing to raise funds while closing enterprise deals that can take months to complete. Being Cosell-ready with Hyperscalers has become critical. The most exciting part is not only becoming partners with Microsoft and IBM but also selling on Azure Marketplace with Microsoft. Microsoft has been fantastic in providing not only mentorship and tools but also capital to continue the progress. As a cloud-agnostic startup, the future is multi-cloud, so the next goal is to list offers on AWS Marketplace for AWS customers. One of the key strategies is to build a partner ecosystem that can help them sell and Cosell.
Success Story
The ladder of success is not easy when there is a female from a DEI background. When one of the executive wellwishers built-in Vimi’s confidence and gave her a hint to move on by telling her that she is made for bigger and better things, this was the time when Vimi opted for the change. She left the corporate world and her stable income and pursued her Master’s Degree in Business and Technology, and worked with start-ups. Based on her experience, today, she can create the blueprint for Sapta.
Words of Expert
On asking Vimi, her advice as an experienced budding leader, she quoted Benjamin Franklin’s “failure to plan is planning to fail.” Being experienced, Vimi classified her tips into three points for easy understanding.
- Understand the problem that you are trying to solve and become a Subject Matter Expert.
- Find people who believe in your vision and bring skills to the table that you don’t have.
- Remember that this is a journey; you build your network of believers as you build your solution.
She also added that she loved Taylor Perry’s inspiration video because it sums it up so well: keep on digging, and you are bound to hit the water sooner or later.
Sapta Inc’s Future Offerings
Vimi addresses this and answers that they aim to be the most robust corporate planning platform, providing executives with a single pane of glass for all businesses. They are working on seamless integrations that will allow businesses to enrich their big data with more meaningful data. Having access to data points on why decisions were made and using the learnings from these will enable executives to be bold in moving forward.
Sapta Inc’s mission is to make Sapta the secret weapon for executives who want to steer their business in market conditions and evolve naturally over time. Rapid Hiring and Firing are being seen these days. Deliberate hiring and investing in talents will not only benefit businesses but will also foster greater loyalty and synergy when the entire organization is focused on a shared vision. The change in demographics, not just due to DEI but due to different generations entering the workforce, their platform will be focused on building more independence for better productivity and cohesiveness in hybrid workplaces.
Strategy Planning
Murali Kashaboina, Chief Data Officer at New England Health, and an executive advisor of Sapta, has drafted his thoughts on highlighting the success of the company. According to A.G. Lafley, author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, strategy is “an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions an organization to create a sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.” Successful organizations are constantly monitoring the new business dimensions introduced by ever-changing market conditions. They are constantly developing new strategies to proactively steer and adapt their business case for continuous value creation. As an executive advisor, Murali always emphasizes the importance of maintaining a constant focus on strategy re-definition and business case revisions based on market demands. A well-oiled framework and an automated workflow are required for cataloging strategic decisions, goals, objectives, and initiatives in such a disciplined practice. Corporate strategic planning and governance, much to my frustration, are mostly manual processes. PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents are used to record ideas, proposals, and decisions. Without a managed framework or tool, various versions of such artifacts float around. There aren’t many dedicated digital tools or products for streamlining such an important function. Sapta piqued interest as Murali was constantly exploring such tools.
Sapta’s platform is revolutionary, with the potential to completely transform the landscape of enterprise strategy governance. He joined their advisory team as soon as he could. Sapta’s platform would allow for open collaboration, highlighting how different strategies are prioritized and laying the groundwork for thought capital and idea incubation. Their platform’s built-in capabilities allow for the cataloging and exploration of both prospective and retrospective perspectives as an organization defines its integrated set of strategic choices, road maps, and missioncritical initiatives. He can easily view the balanced scorecards for the entire organization, division, or specific department using Sapta’s platform. He can quickly grasp the various forces and rationales influencing specific strategic decisions.
Simply put, Sapta’s platform is a one-stop shop for managing, collaborating, and streamlining corporate strategic decision-making. As an executive leader who promotes business growth and transformation, he strongly advises organizations to use a platform like Sapta’s to plan, build, and execute their strategies for maximizing value creation, profitability, and business sustenance.
