5 learnings from business and technology leaders

5 learnings from business and technology leaders

Building the digital business:

As businesses come under increasing pressure to transform, there is frustration with IT’s inability to deliver on basic digital priorities.

Companies are locked into operating methodologies and legacy infrastructures which severely restrict their ability to change.

Yet the disruption of every industry and every company is inevitable.

You need to become super-fast and customer-obsessed with an ability to ruthlessly prioritise to lead your business into digital transformation and execute like a digital company.

That was a key theme at this year’s CIO Summit in Auckland on 8-9 June, which looked at how to lead digital business transformation.

Here’s our take on the top 5 learnings for New Zealand businesses from the cast of international and local leaders speaking at the event.

LEARNING #1

Get to know your customer

We’re now in an experience world, NOT a product world, and digital transformation has to support a customer-centric business strategy.

Sandra Ng says the key question you need to ask yourself is:

How can I engage consumers in a completely different way?

Whether your business is B2B or B2C, at the end of the day you will eventually sell to a consumer. Your understanding of customer centricity from a consumer perspective becomes very important.

Sandra Ng, Group VP, IDC Asia Pacific

Paul Keesing bravely shares an old tweet:

Well done State – you have the least s**t online car insurance experience.

Most insurance policies are pretty much the same. So how do you differentiate? We’re still figuring it out, but working with our customers, suppliers and internal teams to ensure we differentiate ourselves.

Paul Keesing, GM Digital, IAG

Vernon Turner asks the question:

With a connected society, and the ability to ‘talk’ to millions of people very quickly, how do you create personalised customer experiences?

You need to build an infrastructure that understands it’s not about the product, it’s all about the customer. Put the customer at the middle of everything you do.

Vernon Turner, SVP of Enterprise Systems, IDC

Siim Sikkut shares how the Estonian government has delivered a dazzling range of digital services for its customers – the citizens of Estonia.

We’ve received international praise for the ease with which Estonians can access public records online, with President Obama saying: I should have called the Estonians when we were setting up our healthcare website’.

Siim Sikkut, Digital Policy Advisor, Government of Estonia

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LEARNING #2

Culture is critical

One of the priorities for technologists looking to change team culture is moving the focus from technology to business outcomes.

Sandra Ng says that people are the biggest challenge during transformation, so it requires leadership from the top.

People resist change, saying ‘this is something we have been doing for years’ or ‘it is not going to work’. CEOs should lead digital transformation because they set the tone for the entire organisation.


Winners of the ‘Best ICT Team Culture’ Award, Westpac CIO Dawie Oliver says that as soon as he started allowing people to operate in a way that they chose, not their managers, team engagement scores went off the chart.

TBC

There’s no mystique to this. When people are allowed to figure out how they must do that thing that they aspire to do, happiness breaks out.

Dawie Olivier, CIO, Westpac

Paul Keesing speaks about the importance of aligning culture, describing how IAG created a culture of cross-contamination to share resources across the group.

I love the notion of remote working and collaborating over distance in geographically distributed teams, but there’s nothing more powerful than a team that also sits together.


Paul Keesing says attracting and retaining talent has also become an enormous focus for IAG.

You don’t get smart people by giving them dumb stuff to do.


LEARNING #3

Shake up your integration strategy

Just as we all got the hang of 2-speed or bi-modal IT, IDC has introduced a new framework called ‘Leading in 3D’, spanning: Innovate, Incorporate and Integrate.

IDC’s research found that integration is the top desired outcome for over 50% of CIOs in 2016/17.

‘Integrate’ means taking new capabilities and technologies and combining them with your legacy environment to bring digital transformation capabilities across your entire organisation, and potentially across your entire ecosystem.


Stefan Preston explains that there is frustration because, while there is pressure to transform, legacy technologies restrict the ability to change.

There is an ‘us and them’ thing between technology and marketing and there are very few people who have a foot in both camps. That results in an inability to adapt, which sees billion dollar companies going into the bin.

Stefan Preston, Director, Spring Business Accelerator

Paul Keesing shares his CDO view of the CIO’s priorities and how a common ‘language’ was developed at IAG to integrate and align the teams.

If we are going to deliver with urgency, we have to be super-fast and customer obsessed and ruthlessly prioritising.


LEARNING #4

Be ready for the Internet of Things (IoT) and cybersecurity attacks

After all the hype, the IoT is moving away from toys for the consumer and is now a priority for business.

The biggest challenge for IT professionals is to use the IoT to create business value and support business goals.

The speakers shared many examples.

IoT technology is used to monitor 2 million trees around Singapore to determine

how weather impacts tree health.

A connected cow produces 200MB of data per year, helping to increase milk

yields and breeding cycles to create savings of $500 per cow each year.

IAG now has drones in its arsenal to assess fire damage in Australia, taking 60-70

assessors out of harm’s way, providing better data and more accurate pictures of loss.

Alex Bazin says it’s not just about the devices, it’s the connections that matter.

The IoT is less about things, and more about people and processes.

Alex Bazin, VP and Head of IoT, Fujitsu

As the numbers and lifespans of devices exponentially increase, you need to consider how you will support them over 15 or more years, when you’re used to supporting IT for only 3-5 years.

How will companies move their IT to support 10 million users, when they’re only supporting 10,000 users today?

Alex Bazin, VP and Head of IoT, Fujitsu

Vernon Turner says you no longer have a choice of being connected – you will be connected.

While we need to focus on cloud, social, mobile and big data, IoT is the game changer. It is the fuel for all the things we’re going to do.


Sean Duca says don’t use 2006 techniques to protect against 2016 security threats.

Security is like brakes on a car – they make the car go faster as you have the ability to control when to slow down.

Sean Duca, VP and Regional CSO Asia Pacific, Palo Alto Networks

Carl Woerndle provides a frank and personal account of a hacker destroying his 9 year-old business in only 3 weeks.

We didn’t think about the Armageddon option. Decide what to protect, put in place protection and plan your response when you are hit with an incident. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

Carl Woerndle, CEO, My Empire

LEARNING #5

Who will lead the digital way?

There’s a lot of competition within the C-Suite for the digital lead role, so which executive is in the best place to drive digital transformation?

Sandra Ng believes that the CIO is best placed to lead (and she says that’s not just because she was speaking to a room full of CIOs).

The CIO is in the best position because you understand technology and what you do is cross-functional. The rest of the C-Suite only have one function, sometimes two, so aren’t truly multidisciplinary.


Vernon Turner urges us not to miss the next wave of innovation, saying that there is a gap in the CIO qualification.

There’s a danger of CIOs being too focused on running the business and not embracing the innovation coming from the next generation of millennials. That’s a skill we definitely need to have (and we missed it 10 years ago).


Every leader needs to become a digital leader, and every business needs to become a digital business.

The CIOs who digitise today’s business, while also looking for opportunities to innovate for tomorrow’s business, will be the leaders of the future.

For more insights from the leading business and technology executives speaking at the CIO Summit 2016, watch the full-length videos of their presentations here.

For further articles, opinions and industry viewpoints, see www.sparkdigital.co.nz/insights

http://www.sparkdigital.co.nz/insights/events/cio-summit-nz-2016

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5 learnings from business and technology leaders

Technology