Accenture’s Sudie Sengupta On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level

Digital transformation has become crucial for businesses striving to stay competitive and relevant in today’s rapidly evolving landscape. As technology continues to shape industries and redefine business models, companies must adapt and leverage digital tools and strategies to unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation. In this interview series, we aim to explore various aspects of digital transformation, including best practices, challenges, success stories, and expert insights. We are talking to thought leaders, industry experts, entrepreneurs, technology innovators, and executives with firsthand experience driving digital transformation initiatives within their organizations. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Sudie Sengupta.

Sudie Sengupta, Principal Director of Strategy and Consulting at Accenture, has spent over 22 years building expertise in the evolving interplay between people, real estate, and technology. His work spans Fortune 500 companies and government organizations.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thank you for having me. Real estate is a profession and a passion for me. My fascination with buildings started back in my school days in India. I was intrigued by how people chose where they lived, how they interacted with their homes their physical surroundings, and why some places felt better than others. Gradually, my curiosity extended to my neighborhood. What causes congestion, why are some places pleasant to visit, and how does it impact human relations? I began understanding some of these issues after studying architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Those years in architecture school were forged in the rigor of one of the toughest curriculums in Asia. These were also the early days of the rapid transformation in global real estate. The internet was still in its early days. Still, people were becoming conscious of global issues such as environmental concerns, sustainability challenges, and more importantly, the impact of all these on wellness and the quality of our lives. Around that time, I participated in an international competition on the design of future cities. We were sophomores then, and in a spark of creativity, we proposed the idea of vertical cities enabled by online connectivity and mobility. To our delight and shock, we were adjudged winners based on the freshness of the concept. That incident sparked my interest to learn more about urban level issues and how businesses, communities, and societies are evolving rapidly with the progress in technology and mobility. After my MBA, when I moved to New York as a young consultant advising clients on business strategy, I chose real estate as my domain and technology as my core skill. These were six years after the end of the dot-com era, and the corporate leaders were reshaping the new economic landscape using new IT enabled business models. It was a new phase of economic change, and new ways of thinking were needed — something that appealed to a newly arrived immigrant to the United States.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

An episode from my early years as a project lead for technology transformation remains etched in my memory as a comedy of errors, reminding me that when working with business applications, taking shortcuts can lead to unforeseen errors and that rules apply to everyone. Also, sometimes, the junior person on the team could come up with innovative insights. We were deploying a new business analytics platform for a client and struggling with the performance. After some tests failed, I decided to take control to re-engineer the process and work individually with the senior technical architect over the weekend to redesign the algorithm. I chose not to inform the rest of the team. After all, I was the project leader, working with the most senior technical specialists. What could go wrong?

Over the weekend, we were able to develop what we thought was a successful prototype. We loaded it to production directly without testing so that we could run the report with the most recent and complete data set. As it turned out, our work over the weekend to fix the solution had completely missed the mark. The client commented that the earlier attempt was better and calculated correctly. The fault was never in the algorithm but in the dataset provided by the client team. This error was detected by a junior analyst in my team who had reported to the client via the established communication channel, which I missed in the excitement of hands-on problem-solving. This episode taught me three lessons — always follow the process of checking all communications before attempting a solution and never take shortcuts while testing any new solution, take the collective team in confidence before attempting any change, and most importantly, have faith in the capability of the entire team and not just the senior most ones to be correct.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

In my career journey, many mentors have guided me to become a better professional and leader. However, one who stands out was my practice leader for real estate advisory at Deloitte, Thomas Hanszen. Under his guidance, I developed as a business and people leader, building my team with over 150 professionals. His ability to provide mental support during the most critical periods when things would not work stood out. I remember a time when I was going through a dark phase professionally. I could not move a very large project that had been mired in technical, business, and people complexities. One evening after work, as we returned to our cars, he offered to drive me home, sensing that I was stressed and distracted. I knew that his hotel was in the opposite direction, but he insisted that we needed to talk. Over this 30-minute drive, he did not bring up the project but instead told me about the first time we had worked together. As he dropped me off, he said that if there was one person in his team that he would be glad to recommend to anyone, or if he were to change companies and want to take anyone with him, it would be me. That calmed me down. While leaving, he walked me home, wished my wife well, and added that he was proud of working with me (though I worked for him). He was more than two decades my senior, but especially in those days, he spoke to me as if he was my college mate.

From him, I learned that placing the person first is important. Projects come and go, and successes will follow failures, but true leadership is in watching out for the ones you work with and ensuring they have opportunities to grow. He is, unfortunately, no more, but even now, when I am going through an emotional moment, I go back to his kind words. I remember one of his parting lines from our last meeting: “Some people do not need external motivation; they just need to be told that others see them and believe in them.”

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that significantly impacted you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I would refer to three books. “Good to Great” and “Catch 22” are the first two. But the one I feel had the most significant impact on me was the Indian epic “Mahabharata,” which I am still reading many different versions. “Good to Great” by Jim Collins is all about finding one’s purpose, and it will reproduce one of the quotes: “For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And having a meaningful life without meaningful work is very difficult.” Catch 22 is a favorite because it makes one realize that one needs to accept the absurdities in life and still retain hope for a better future. And finally, the epic “Mahabharata”. I will recommend this to anyone as an accumulation of wisdom over thousands of years. It speaks about how reality and truth change with perspective and how finding purpose and performing one’s duty steadfastly is far more important than pursuing material benefits. At the core, it emphasizes the principle of what people in the West will recognize as stoicism. All these three books are my go-to reads during my pensive moments.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Right now, the most exciting work being done in real estate is in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence. The post-COVID world witnessed fundamental shifts in how people engaged with real estate. Four years back, we witnessed offices emptying due to social distancing and the need to move to remote workstyles. We are now observing a trend for people re-engaging with their communities and seeking social connections in new ways. Shopping malls, restaurants, travel, and vacation spots are busier than ever. However, infrastructure development has not kept pace with these changes and is struggling to cope. This means we must reinvest in improving our public spaces and buildings to address this demand for new experiences, better lifestyles, safety, and sustainability. Information technology will play a big part in driving this change through smart building technology that supports the user’s needs via an omni-experience approach — saving them money, helping them evaluate choices better, and providing unique answers tailored to their requirements. In the past, technology was more in the background, supporting routine tasks and thus often a dollars and cents equation. Today, the intangibles are factoring in much more heavily, such as user experience, market perceptions, branding, etc. The business case to support these new and enhanced technologies is becoming more attractive.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. Digital transformation can mean many things to many people. From your perspective, how do you define digital transformation in your industry?

From my perspective, it is very important to understand what Digital Transformation means as it is often used interchangeably with “Digitization” and “Digitalization”, especially in the real estate industry.

Digitization in a sense, is a much smaller scope. It is about converting a small step or object from a manual or physical form to a digital format that people can use or share online. For instance, one converts engineering drawing blueprints into a scanned image and logically stores them. Another example is taking a physical drawing and redrafting it in CAD software, adding additional details such as furniture, plumbing, and electrical in different layers. It is about moving a physical form into a software form. Digitalization extends this task into an end-to-end process via automation. For example, traditionally, accountants use spreadsheets for lease accounting, with data entered manually into the various fields and calculations done in software such as Excel. Though they use a computer, the process is still a set of manual tasks. Implementing software involves one-time data entry; thereafter, the software automatically generates the payment schedules and provides reports. These include large firm-wide ERP technologies and new-age SaaS platforms that present their value propositions as enterprise-level software for finance and operations that can support real estate capabilities. This worked well when enterprise IT required a common data model but limited business requirements.

However, several organizations decided to focus on more specialized real estate platforms. This led to integrated real estate management systems that presented real estate capabilities within one integrated software. This is where Digital Transformation comes in. This takes both these concepts — digitization and digitalization — into a hyper-automation format and integrates multiple business processes such as transactions, administration, accounting, and asking management, fundamentally changing how business is done. The focus is developing a strong capability around a standardized digital core. By streamlining business processes, IT can reduce data duplicity across the functions. This means we significantly eliminate manual tasks and run algorithms to create instructions humans can follow to perform physical tasks. As software became more sophisticated, software vendors added newer functionalities and capabilities. Over the last two decades, partnerships, acquisitions, and disruptive growth in sophisticated technologies meant that RE Technology continued to be repositioned based on client context, economic cycles, and enterprise initiatives such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and virtualization. We are now observing the move towards “Uberization” — delivering services on demand. This requires a special kind of software, reorienting our thinking and fundamentally pushing the boundaries of how we service our customers by enabling new business models. Real estate technology today is a key tool helping organizations connect their business processes into an integrated IT services model. This has opened the opportunity for building shared services models for the real estate function wherein processes are standardized, automated, and potentially managed by a specialized service provider.

Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?

The short answer is that every organization can benefit from Digital Transformation. Each organization must define its approach to its service model, the nature of the business, and customer engagement. In my discussions with real estate business heads, when asked what they view as the most significant need in their environment resulting from the changes in the new ways of working, the leading answer was the need for improved collaboration tools. Many property managers for retail portfolios such as shopping malls seek superior customer engagement and how to make retailing more profitable for tenants.

Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

It is a challenging process for all organizations because it is about changing processes and human behaviors and managing expectations at multiple levels. As leaders get more comfortable using real estate technology, one of their tasks is delivering strategic value to justify large investments toward Digital Transformation. This will require them to become significantly more client-focused and appreciate who they are serving. Traditional corporations typically have siloed internal organizations to retain legacy command and controls. Initially, organizations focused internally on scalability and profitability by automating internal business processes via enterprise resources planning systems and applications. These were transactions-based processes but lacked the desired customer impact. Managing the customer experience is at the front and center of business growth in this era of on-demand services and social media.

To succeed in Digital Transformation, leaders must determine how their IT strategies will directly influence top-line growth, performance, and customer experience. The key word is omni-experience. The objective is to design digital experiences to help users navigate their journeys. Solution architects should direct these digital experiences by employing marketing or user engagement strategies, assessing demand patterns, monitoring process fulfillment, and determining how these come together. While the fundamental challenge is data readiness (such as redundancy, errors, and misalignment), the duplicity of processes, over-standardization that does not appreciate the nuances, and ineffective processes lacking a proper connection to outcomes can come together to compound the problems. The complexities will also need to take account of the human dimension — the concerns around change management, organizational inertia, and short-term thinking can derail the best of intentions. Addressing all these challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach, multi-talent skill sets, and, most importantly, a determined leadership that takes a long-term view to deal with obstacles.

To indicate one use case, real estate leaders recognize the need to redesign their spaces to accommodate better the workers of today and their hybrid participation patterns. However, only a small fraction of those leaders feel they have sufficient employee sentiment data to support the design process. An even smaller percentage feel that they have the necessary data to right-size the portfolio, drive savings in their portfolio to help pay for the redesign and properly forecast future needs to allow for less reactive measures. Stated succinctly, most leaders know the need for change but struggle with the data to support their decisions. This is where AI can step in by offering data collection from diverse sources, performing predictive modeling and financial analysis, and then providing bespoke recommendations.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

A vision of the end goal or objective is critical to a digital transformation initiative for real estate. This clarity of purpose is essential to set the virtuous loop of improvement and change. I suggest these five steps as central to any such organization-wide program:

1 . Understand your purpose; why do you need transformation? Is there a recognition to fundamentally change the cost structure and engage the stakeholders more impactfully, or is this more of a near-term challenge set by top leadership? It is important to have this clarity before committing.

2 . Is the organization ready for the change? Sometimes, the commitment falters at the first hint of obstacles or operational challenges that temporarily crowd out attention. So, it is important to understand what are the challenges or pain points that need to be addressed and there is some futuristic vision that the leadership can unite toward. If the answer is unclear, it is important to reassess and understand what can help bring direction.

3 . How will you achieve Digital Transformation? How will the organization identify the opportunities and focus on the objectives of the transformation? Is the focus going to be on improving customer experience, increasing adoption of the company’s services to unlock market opportunities, reducing costs and improving efficiencies, or changing how the organization operates by centralizing services and hyper-automation?

4 . What tool sets will be employed? Is the focus going to be on implementing integrated technology systems or best-in-class solutions that will operate independently but be interconnected for data or should you plan on next-generation technology such as AI?

5 . What will the team be to lead the initiative, and what external help is needed? No organization can execute a successful transformation using in-house personnel only. It is critical to get in external ideas, expertise and dedicated to the purpose teams with the mandate to drive the change without distraction.

A well thought out digital transformation can help structure marketing strategies, investigate demand patterns, and generate impossible user experiences from the old legacy systems. In the last few months, I have been involved in helping clients architect their digital transformation programs via artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These include tools such as Generative AI (Gen AI) with subsets such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and large analytical models. With their open-ended approaches and creative applications, these can perform as force multipliers to analytical applications. These systems shift across diverse data sources (both external and internal) to help identify patterns, generate insights about potential outcomes, and then present recommendations for human actors. These new capabilities can then address the fundamentals of business process data and prepare their operating models.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” to create new competitive advantages?

It is all about leadership. The C-Suite must foster a culture of innovation on an ongoing basis by building a talent base forged through challenges and making it a matter of habit. We often hear terms such as “Fail Fast, Fail Often,” or “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast”. All of these could work based on the context and circumstances. The key is to go beyond such slogans and absorb a culture of inquiry, desire for innovation, and obsession with quality as a fundamental basis for evaluating actions, nurturing talent, and setting the leadership agenda. Today the most powerful driver for change is technology and decision-makers should develop systems-oriented thinking to understand strengths and opportunities and how these can come together to develop competitive advantages.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I will quote the lines from Rudyard Kipling’s “ If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same..” After decades of industry experience, one realizes we cannot control everything. One needs to make efforts as a professional with the best intentions, be transparent and objective in one’s conduct, accept the outcomes as they happen, and never give up striving to improve.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Get connected on LinkedIn Sudie Sengupta | LinkedIn, and follow my posts.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

It is a privilege to be offered this platform. Thank you and I look forward to collaborating.

About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.