Business Chief APAC - June 2021

APAC EDITION

June 2021 | businesschief.asia

PRIMED FOR THE FUTURE

Deloitte Consulting Enterprise Performance leader Abdi Goodarzi on why EP matters and lessons from the COVID-19 crisis

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The Business Chief Team EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

SCOTT BIRCH

EDITORAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH CREATIVE TEAM

OSCAR HATHAWAY SOPHIA FORTE SOPHIE-ANN PINNELL HECTOR PENROSE SAM HUBBARD MIMI GUNN JUSTIN SMITH REBEKAH BIRLESON

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ PRODUCTION MANAGERS

OWEN MARTIN PHILLINE VICENTE JENNIFER SMITH PRODUCTION EDITOR

JANET BRICE

VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

KIERAN WAITE DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

SAM KEMP EVELYN HUANG MATTHEW EVANS TYLER LIVINGSTONE MARKETING MANAGERS

ANDREW STUBBINGS SAJANA SAMARASINGHE

PROJECT DIRECTORS

KARL GREEN THOMAS LIVERMORE JAMES RICHARDSON MICHAEL BANYARD JOE PALLISTER JAKE MEGEARY KRIS PALMER MIKE SADR RYAN HALL BEN MALTBY TOM VENTURO STUART IRVING CRAIG KILLINGBACK JAMES BERRY JORDAN HUBBARD

MEDIA SALES DIRECTOR

JAMES WHITE RICHARD TURNER MARK CAWSTON

SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR

JASON WESTGATE MANAGING DIRECTOR

LEWIS VAUGHAN

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

STACY NORMAN PRESIDENT & CEO

GLEN WHITE

EDITOR'S LETTER

BEING SUSTAINABLE If digital transformation was the business buzzword of 2020, fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, then 2021 is fast shaping up to be The Year of Sustainability.

Look around you. Everyone from governments to multinational organisations that previously would have been viewed as enemies of the environment are flashing their sustainability credentials.

“These are exciting times with the promise of opportunity.

And that’s as good a reason as any for Business Chief to undergo its own digital transformation”

Even more are wearing those as badges of honour, but it’s essential to understand that even the term sustainability has undergone its own transformation in the last two years – in no small part instigated by social issues from Black Lives Matter to the Me Too movement.

Diversity & Inclusion are top of the corporate agenda, and how you run your business is now under more scrutiny than ever. That extends far beyond the four walls of the boardroom, putting executives directly responsible for every business in their supply chain.

These are exciting times with the promise of opportunity. And that’s as good a reason as any for Business Chief to undergo its own digital transformation. Following this latest June issue, we will be back in September with a fresh look, new editions, and updated agenda as we better reflect the audiences we serve and represent.

Consider it our own sustainability initiative – making the Business Chief brand stronger for a brighter, exciting, fairer future.

SCOTT BIRCH BUSINESS CHIEF MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

scott.birch@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

businesschief.asia

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CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 10 Big Picture 12 The Brief 14 Global News 16 People Moves 18 Timeline:

INDIA: five days, six unicorns 20 Legend:

Ho Ching 22 Five Mins With:

Loredana Padurean

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LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

Lessons from a crisis

26

Deloitte

Abdi Goodarzi on the Future of Enterprise Performance

58

NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

Unlocking the Potential of 5G

114

Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service

76

Digital Transformation from Board to Ward

CORPORATE FINANCE

Why we need more female CFOs

128

TECHNOLOGY

The biggest cyber security threat

90

Dialog Axiata

Customer-focused digital transformation

138

Cellcard Cambodia The Cambodian telco playing the game

106

DIGITAL STRATEGY

5 business strategies for a successful shift to hybrid working

150

HUMAN CAPITAL

How tech is transforming HR

Top 100 Leaders in FinTech October 2021 To be announced at the FinTech & InsurTech LIVE Event NOMINATE NOW

A BizClik Media Group Brand

Creating Digital Communities

uidelines July 2020

158

210

Delaware Consulting

British Telecom Global Services India

172

222

Top 10 entrepreneurial ecosystems in Asia Pacific

Enabling SMEs and Communities to Thrive

Guiding the digital transformation

Startup cities:

Delivering through disruption

Bukalapak

184

234

Redefining finance for good with technology

Transforming Supply Chain and Procurement

Finastra

SA Health

196

248

Driving Growth in Asia

designing for the future, today

J-Tec Material Handling

SpaceDC

BIG PICTURE

AsiaVision Getty Images - 1263085012

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June 2021

Asia’s move to work/life balance APAC region

It’s a truth universally acknowledged, that Asia has the longest working hours, accounting for 9 out of 10 countries that work the longest in 2019’s International Labour Organisation study. But the pandemic could be changing all that.

Japan, where the issue is so ingrained there’s a word for it (karoshi, death by overwork) is debating in parliament a proposal that will allow workers to opt for shorter work weeks, with financial support given in the early stages for firms that get on board.

A handful of Japanese companies have already done so, including Microsoft Japan and Mizuho Financial Group, where staff can choose to cut a day off their week, with Microsoft reporting that it’s resulted in better efficiency, happier workers and 40% greater productivity.

The Philippines, which is continuing the four-day working week it rolled out for government offices back in March 2020, has a bill on the legislative table proposing the work week be capped at 35 hours for the private sector, while the Indian government is finalising rules for a new set of labour codes that could provide firms with the flexibility to reduce days to four. businesschief.asia

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THE BRIEF “ADAPTING TO THIS NEW HYBRID MODEL WILL REQUIRE RETHINKING OF LONG-HELD ASSUMPTIONS”  Rosalind Quek General Manager, Modern Workplace, Microsoft Asia

BY THE NUMBERS

Which growth countries in Asia will bounce back strongest in 2021?

CHINA 8% VIETNAM 6.5%

READ MORE

THAILAND 2.8%

“In China… extensive research indicates that the rate for female CEOs remains very low, and CEOs are critical in assessing the performance of CFO candidates”  Maggie Xu Principal, Greater China Financial Services Practice, Oliver Wyman READ MORE

“BEING ABLE TO DEFINE, ARTICULATE AND RENEW PURPOSE WAS A DIFFERENTIATOR THROUGH THE CRISIS AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE CRITICAL IN THE LEADERSHIP TOOLKIT GOING FORWARD”  Satish Shankar Regional Managing Partner Bain & Company READ MORE

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June 2021

PHILIPPINES 4.8%

MALAYSIA 6%

INDONESIA 4.8%

*GDP percentages from ADB Asian Development Outlook

76.5mn $44.8bn 18.3%

The number of The brand smartphones value of Samsung sold China’s leading in Q1 2021, insurance giving it 22% firm Ping An, global market the world’s share and most valuable snatching insurance the title of brand, despite world’s biggest a 26% drop smartphone in brand value producer over the from Apple. last year.

The growth of China’s GDP in the first quarter of 2021, a 6.5% gain from Q4 2020.

READ MORE

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

BX is the new CX Everyone’s talking about Business Experience (BX). What is it? It’s a leadership approach that centres on organising the entire business around the delivery of exceptional experiences, with emphasis on being customer-obsessed.

But isn’t that just Customer Experience (CX)?

Not quite. BX is a more holistic approach. While CX is limited to CMO or COO purview, BX is in the board room as a CEO priority because it ties back to every part of a company’s operations.

Also, the foundation of a BX approach centres on recognising that a brand’s purpose plays a critical role in its growth, so you need a deeply embedded purpose.

Why should firms be embracing BX? Customer expectations have shifted and companies need to catch up with the pace of consumer change. Accenture research shows that organisations embracing practices key to BX have grown profitability YOY at least six times over industry peers.

So, will BX become a mainstream leadership approach? It’s likely. 77% of CEOs say their company will shift to BX, fundamentally changing the way they engage and interact with customers, according to Accenture.

 HONG KONG’S IPO MARKET Hong Kong’s IPO and SPAC market achieves historic high in Q1 2021 with funds raised reaching US$13.9bn, inadvertently leading to Hong Kong being crowned the world’s leading biotech fundraising hub.

U P

 ASIA’S PASSPORT POWER Emerging from the pandemic, Japan’s passport is the world’s most powerful, with visa-free access to 193 destinations, according to Henley’s Passport Index 2021, with Singapore (192) and South Korea (191) not far behind.

JUN21

 TOYOTA IN CHINA China continues to curb monopolistic behaviour of companies, with SoftBank and Toyota the latest firms under fire. Toyota was fined for failing to inform the government of its joint venture with Didi in 2019.  SOUTH KOREA’S JOB MARKET One of the best economic performers in the developed world in 2020, South Korea’s unemployment rate has surged to a 21-yearhigh (5.4%) in 2021, with COVID-19 and lack of government fiscal stimulus to blame.

W A Y

W A Y D O W N

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GLOBAL NEWS

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Tech gamechanger for Premier League NORTH AMERICA

M&A activity hits record high Global M&A activity hit a record high in the first quarter of 2021, with North America reaching its highest market share in 14 years netting 54.4% of global deal value and accounting for more than twothirds of the US$200.9bn in global IPOs with SPACS playing a large part in US dealmaking.

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UNITED KINGDOM

The Premier League kicks off a new era of football with the adoption of Oracle Cloud to give its fans worldwide a gamechanging experience. Using Oracle’s data and analytics and machine learning technologies, the League will deliver groundbreaking statistics, insight and data-rich stories to fans on TV during matches and across social media channels.

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SINGAPORE

Reimagining global payments Three investment giants, JP Morgan, DBS and Temasek join forces to bring the existing infrastructure of global payments into the digital era. Under new tech company Partior, they are developing a first-of-its-kind industry platform that will utilise blockchain to fast-track value movements for payments, trade and foreign exchange settlement.

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UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

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INDIA

Big business ups the ante on aid to India With India’s death toll from COVID-19 surging, big business is putting its money where so much of its business is. US and Chinese tech titans Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, Xiaomi and Vivo commit millions towards recovery efforts; Amazon partners with Temasek to airlift oxygen concentrators; Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Blackstone together pledge US$58m; and Indian startups LogiNext and Zomato roll out innovative delivery features.

Food Tech Valley to debut Harnessing emerging technologies and modern farming techniques, the UAE government’s newly announced R&D-focused Food Tech Valley is set to not just fast-track selfsufficiency in food production for the country, while ensuring sustainability and waste reduction, but also spearhead groundbreaking food tech innovation globally. businesschief.asia

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PEOPLE MOVES EMILY WOODLAND FROM: AMP CAPITAL TO: BLACKROCK WAS: HEAD OF SUSTAINABLE INVESTMENT NOW: CO-HEAD OF SUSTAINABLE INVESTING APAC Boasting two decades of investment experience, several years spent grounded in ESG analysis, and a firm belief in the potential for sustainability to add long-term value to investment outcomes, it’s little surprise Emily Woodland has been snapped up by the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, to co-head sustainable investing for Asia Pacific. Described by BlackRock as having a “sophisticated command of sustainable strategies”, Woodland has spent the last few years at AMP Capital leading sustainable investment for global public markets and delivering in-depth research and thought leadership on key ESG related considerations. Prior to this, she spent 16 years at UBS, in equity and convertible bond trading, and as a portfolio manager for UBS Asset Management and the firm’s Fundamental Investment Group.

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June 2021

"My long-term aspiration is to contribute to the development of a more sustainable global financial system"

DAN BOGNAR FROM: SALESFORCES TO: DOCUSIGN WAS: CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER APAC NOW: GROUP VP APAC / JAPAN A seasoned techie with 30 years of experience in leadership roles across APAC, Bognar has moved to DocuSign following nearly a decade at Salesforce, where he held various senior leadership roles, most recently as COO handling the company’s largest accounts. He also spent a decade in leadership roles at Oracle APAC and eight years at PwC in the tax tech division.

Thrilled to be joining an organisation that “dedicates itself to improving the lives of customers”, in his new role as Group VP and GM for APAC and Japan, Bognar is tasked with leading DocuSign’s regional growth.

JEREMEY CHOY FROM: HSBC TO: MIDEA WAS: HEAD OF ASIA TECH M&A NOW: CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER With nearly two decades of Asia-based experience under his M&A belt, Jeremey Choy has left HSBC Hong Kong where he led technology M&A for the last two years for the Chinese city of Foshan to be CFO of Chinese Fortune 500 firm Midea. This move comes as the home appliances giant taps into tech-driven appliances like smart living and IoT. As a veteran dealmaker, Choy previously spent four years as head of M&A at boutique investment bank China Renaissance, four years in JP Morgan’s North Asia M&A team, and five years in deal-making at Goldman Sachs.

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TIMELINE

INDIA:

FIVE DAYS

SIX UNICORNS

We chart an historic week in India’s tech industry, where in just five days, between 5-9 April 2021, the country achieved six new unicorns, bringing India’s total to 10 in 2021 to date, an immense unicorn leap from just seven in 2020 and six in 2019.

APR

APR

Meesho

CRED

India’s first social commerce unicorn, Meesho raised US$300m from SoftBank, Facebook and Shunwei Capital, giving the Bangalore-based startup a US$2.1bn valuation, a threefold jump from its previous funding round in 2019. Founded in 2015 by two IIT-Delhi graduates, Meesho connects producers and resellers, helping small businesses sell through social media. It has 45m customers and has enabled 13m entrepreneurs to start their online businesses with no investment.

Founded just over two years ago, Bangalorebased credit card repayment app CRED raised US$215m from Falcon Edge Capital and Coatue, nearly trebling its valuation to US$2.2bn from its January US$80m round. Allowing customers to pay off their credit card debt while earning CRED coins which they cash in for rewards, CRED has grown rapidly during COVID19, doubling its customer base to nearly 6 million in a year.

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APR

APR

APR

API Holdings / Groww

ShareChat

Gupshup

The first epharmacy startup to gain unicorn status, PharmEasy (API Holdings), which has digitised 60,000 brick and mortar pharmacies and 400 doctors across India, raised US$350m in a round led by Prosus Ventures.

Founded by four former Flipkart employees as a way of making investing simple, investment platform Groww became India’s secondyoungest fintech unicorn, raising US$83m in Series D funding led by Tiger Global, quadrupling its previous round in September.

New Delhi-grown social media startup ShareChat, founded in 2016 by Mohalla Tech raised US$502m from Lightspeed Ventures, Tiger Global, Twitter and Snap taking its raised total over six rounds to US$766m and pushing its valuation to US$2.1bn.

The funding will be used to grow its user base and short video platform Moj, which launched in 2020 following TikTok’s ban in India. The regional language startup claims 280m users.

AI-led conversational message startup joined the unicorn club after raising US$100m from Tiger Global giving it a ten-fold valuation of US$1.4bn. The smart messaging platform, which has seen accelerated growth during the pandemic, was founded in Bangalore in 2005 by serial entrepreneur Beerud Sheth, whose online freelancing platform Elance is now listed. Gupshup’s API enables 100,000+ businesses to build messaging and conversation experiences across 30+ communication channels.

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LEGEND

HO CHING

She created the largest listed defence engineering company in Asia, before leading Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund to international success. Oh, and she’s married to Singapore’s Prime Minister

A

sk Singaporeans who Ho Ching is, and the majority will answer the ‘wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’.

And that’s certainly true. However, she’s also the CEO of Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and one of the world’s largest investment companies.

Well, she is until October 1, 2021, as she recently announced she would be retiring following 16 years as CEO of the investment giant.

Since taking the reins in 2004, two years after joining Temasek as Executive Director, Ho has gradually transformed what was an investment firm wholly owned by Singapore’s Government into an active investor worldwide, splashing out on sectors like life sciences and tech, expanding its physical footprint with 11 offices worldwide (from London to Mumbai to San Francisco) and delivering growth of US$120 billion between 2010-2020.

Described by Temasek chairman Lim Boon Heng as having taken “bold

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June 2021

steps to open new pathways in finding the character of the organisations”, Ho is credited with building Temasek’s international portfolio, with China recently surpassing Singapore for the first time.

As global a footprint as Ho may have however, she has her feet firmly planted on Singapore soil and is committed to this tiny city-state where she was not only educated (excluding a year at Stanford) but has remained throughout her long and illustrious career – first as an engineer at the Ministry of Defence in 1976, where she met her husband, and most notably as CEO of Singapore Technologies, where she spent a decade, and where she is credited with repositioning and growing the group into the largest listed defence engineering company in Asia.

It’s little wonder Ho has featured on Forbes’ annual World’s Most Powerful Women list for the past 16 years, in 2007 as the third most powerful woman in business outside the US, and in 2020 at #30 worldwide.

But it’s not all business. Ho has a strong track record in Singapore public service, serving as chairman of the Singapore Institute of Standards and Industrial Research and as deputy chairman of the Economic

Development Board; and is a committed philanthropist with a focus on learning difficulties and healthcare.

As the pandemic kicked off, she not only led active investments in technology and life sciences, with German COVID-19 vaccine developer Ballrecent additions to Temasek’s portfolio, but through the Temasek Foundation – the firm’s philanthropic arm which supports vulnerable groups close to Ho’s heart, handed out hand sanitiser and face masks.

So, you would be forgiven for thinking that at age 68, Ho might simply relax. But in March 2021, just as she announced her retirement from Temasek, Ho joined the Board of Directors of Wellcome Leap, a US-based non-profit organisation that’s dedicated to accelerating innovations in global health.

Not ready to put her firmly grounded feet up yet it seems.

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FIVE MINS WITH...

LOREDANA PADUREAN A self-proclaimed ‘entrepreneurial academic’ who teaches the MIT Sloan Executive Education program at Asia School of Business Q. AS SOMEONE WHO IS CREATING ASIA PACIFIC’S BUSINESS LEADERS OF THE FUTURE, WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE ARE THE ESSENTIAL SKILLS LEADERS REQUIRE? In many ways, we need leaders who are Renaissance women/men or polymaths, as opposed to specialists of an industry or a field. A polymath is a person with profound knowledge, proficiency and expertise in multiple fields and today’s leaders have to be able to combine various ideas, look at problems in novel and useful ways, and develop a broad and yet still deep set of skills, talents, and knowledge.

»

Q. YOU’VE COINED ‘SMART’ AND ‘SHARP’ AS SKILLS OF THE FUTURE. WHAT ARE THESE? They are replacements for ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills, a concept coined by a US Army doctor in 1972 who observed that his pupils had different skills: dealing with machinery required ‘hard’ skills, while dealing with people and paper were ‘soft’ skills. This concept has served us well since, but I find it too binary, not to mention the semantic implications of the words themselves.

Soft implies gentle, delicate, mild, quiet, tender, weak. However, there is nothing soft in navigating competing perspectives and cultures, handling and delivering critical

»

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June 2021

feedback or dealing with office politics.

Instead, I prefer to call these skills ‘smart’.

Hard implies rigid, difficult, heavy, static. But how can we think of engineering or software development as static or rigid? I believe ‘sharp’ is more apt as such skills need constant updating or sharpening.

Q. HOW IMPORTANT ARE SMART SKILLS IN LEADERSHIP TODAY? Smart skills are more important than ever because we live in a world of extreme diversity: generational, ethical, value-based, gender, etc. Gone are the days when giving an order was an effective act of leadership.

I personally work with people from five

»

different continents and across five different generations, therefore as leaders, we need to know how to adapt, motivate, inspire and connect. We need to increase our investment in learning about them in action, especially as smart skills are more difficult to develop.

I believe that a successful leader today has to be both smart and sharp. Take cognitive readiness, one of my top 10 smart skills. In order to be cognitive ready, one has to master system dynamics, one of my top 10 sharp skills. Also, did you know that one of the primary reasons why digital transformation fails is not the absence of digital literacy, a sharp skill, but the need for more validation and adaptability, both smart

“IN MANY WAYS, WE NEED LEADERS WHO ARE RENAISSANCE WOMEN/MEN OR POLYMATHS, AS OPPOSED TO SPECIALISTS OF AN INDUSTRY OR A FIELD.” skills. So, instead of thinking of these skills as binary, I prefer to think of them as the yin and yang; co-existing and complementing each other. businesschief.asia

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THE FUTURE

OF TRAVEL

eDreams ODIGEO is one of the world’s largest online travel companies and one of the largest e-commerce businesses in Europe. We spoke to the business’ CEO, Dana Dunne, to get his view on the future of travel and the importance of tech innovation.

WHAT SETS EDREAMS ODIGEO APART FROM ITS COMPETITORS? Tech expertise and AI sit at the heart of our business, and our constant innovation in this area has enabled us to become a market leader offering unparalleled content to travelers across the world. We provide access to the entire travel market, including over 274,000 flight routes and 2.1 million hotels worldwide; this gives customers access to the largest combination of bookable options on a single platform. This scale of choice is not available elsewhere in the market and is a true distinction from other companies in the travel sector. Our ability to anticipate customer demand, be mobile first and develop new unique products, such as our subscription programme Prime, alongside the choice and convenience we offer has seen us become number two for flights in the global travel market.

WHY IS TECH INNOVATION AND AI SO IMPORTANT TO THE BUSINESS? Tech and AI are absolutely vital to cater to traveler needs and remain relevant within the travel sector. At eDreams ODIGEO we are proud to be continuously innovating and leveraging our tech capabilities to bring new products to market. We use AI to compare and combine billions of data points from the entire travel ecosystem to build our customers the ideal travel experience tailored to them. We are able to make up to eight billion pricing calculations per hour and compare millions of options in a matter of seconds. This all enables us to anticipate demands and offer personalised travel plans to consumers. eDreams ODIGEO has consistently been at the forefront of tech innovation, this has enabled us to provide customers with new products and provide a seamless end to end experience.

The travel journey starts for customers from the time they begin searching for their trip, this feeling will be heightened in the months ahead as people begin to make plans to reconnect with family and friends.

One product we are extremely proud of is Prime. It was the first travel related subscription program to be launched and we recently reached the

one million subscriber milestone. Prime gives consumers access to flights and hotels at highly competitive prices, presents travelers with the most relevant travel combinations and ultimately encourages loyalty.

WHAT IS EDREAMS ODIGEO’S CORE FOCUS IN THE YEAR AHEAD AS WE EMERGE FROM THE PANDEMIC? As a business we will continue to focus on the areas which took priority over the last 12 months: our team, our customers and our business. It has been absolutely critical that we have got all three correct as the travel industry dealt with an unprecedented global situation. We are immensely proud of how our team adapted to remote working.

As a company operating in the travel industry there were significant challenges and pressures, everyone in the team was incredibly engaged and committed to working together to the benefit of our customers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we launched a weekly presentation and Q&A with me and other members of the management team, this is an initiative we will keep in place as it’s been a fantastic forum to give business updates and for our team to ask questions. The most effective way of bringing our creative brain power together has been through ‘online festivals’. Each ‘festival’ has a different theme and employees can dropin to different sessions to share ideas and feedback on concepts. We try hard to make sure eDreams ODIGEO is a positive and motivating place for people to work. It is so important that our teams find their roles enjoyable and are with a company that inspires them.

Our customers have faced incredible disruption throughout the pandemic, with over two million canceled flights and refunds needing to be managed. Over the last 12 months we have worked incredibly hard on behalf of our customers, often working with airlines that have made it difficult to authorize and process refunds, causing significant delays for our customers.

Our self-service platform was enhanced to provide customers with a self-service online tool that enables them to autonomously manage their bookings, including changes and cancelations.

We will continue to focus on using our tech expertise to give customers the ability to seamlessly plan their end-to-end journey on one platform, from flights, to hotels, car hire, train and other ancillaries – our OTA model is well-placed to capture the consumer preference for convenience.

Our business has retained high levels of liquidity and a strong balance sheet throughout the pandemic. We have spent the last 12 months ensuring we are well-positioned to cater to post-pandemic traveler priorities. We have done this through product development and innovation, and this will continue to be our core focus in the months ahead.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO BE THE BIGGEST SHIFT IN TRAVEL OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS? We are optimistic about the future and expect travel to rebound to pre-Covid levels.

The rollout of vaccination programs around the world is incredibly promising, and we have already seen how responsive travelers are to announcements and progress, with an uptick in search enquiries being seen as a result. We also saw last summer how willing people were to travel when restrictions allowed. Consumers quickly came back into the market and almost 50% of our bookings returned within two months. This year with vaccination programs underway across the world we expect a stronger bounce back.

The shift from offline to online has been accelerated due to the pandemic and this has translated into how our customers are accessing our products. Mobile bookings make up 58% of total bookings, up from 18% in 2015. The use of mobile also reflects changing booking habits brought about by the pandemic, with last minute bookings for travel on the rise.

The other big shift we will see is the increased shift to automation, as health and hygiene will continue to be a big factor in travelers’ decision-making. With health and hygiene front and centre people will be keen to complete journeys through airports autonomously via mobile and computer enabled security checks.

www.edreamsodigeo.com

DELOITTE

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June 2021

Deloitte's Abdi Goodarzi on the Future of Enterprise Performance Deloitte’s Abdi Goodarzi discusses the Kinetic Enterprise, Business Agility, the Rise of Connectivity, Ecosystem Co-Innovation, and the Evolving Role of the CXO WRITTEN BY: PADDY SMITH

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DELOITTE Abdi Goodarzi

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June 2021

DELOITTE

An Early Start It’s 6 a.m. Pacific Time when Deloitte Consulting Enterprise Performance (EP) leader Abdi Goodarzi steps into his Costa Mesa, California office to start the day.

Immediately, in conversation, one can feel the optimism – and there’s no shortage of reasons why.

Within Deloitte Consulting, Abdi leads an integrated portfolio of offerings with a robust set of digital transformation capabilities that enable enterprises to solve strategic and tactical business challenges and evolve into industry-leading competitors. The EP portfolio, which includes ERP platforms, supply chain and finance solutions, and IT optimisation services – provides an enterprise-wide lens, addressing the rapid, cross-business function change occurring at the heart of the modern enterprise. With COVID-19 response and recovery at the forefront of enterprise planning, the necessity of business resiliency and adaptability is more resonant than ever.

The impact his teams have on clients is represented in an expanding list of annual accolades. EP’s SAP practice recently won four SAP Pinnacle Awards, including Partner of the Year. The Oracle practice was named the Global Cloud Transformation Partner of the Year; the Emerging ERP practice was named the Infor Global Integrator of the Year; the Workday practice won two Partner Innovation Industry Awards; and the Government and Public Sector practice won the SAP Innovation Award for Business Transformation. And that’s just looking back over the past year.

Before delving further into the world of EP, we ask Abdi how his background shaped his path to the leader he is today. Born in the Middle East, Abdi shares his experiences living in Turkey, Canada, and Boston, before settling in southern California.

“Early on, I was surrounded by very strong women who were instrumental in making me who I am,” he says. “I learned a lot about being strong, being able to face challenges in life, being straight ahead, resilient, passionate and authentic.”

Abdi continues, “I consider myself a global citizen. Exposure to many cultures has helped me shape my views about life, my clients, the work that I do.”

“You recognise that each language and every culture has its own sophistications and benefits. Similarly, when you bring a collection of individuals from diverse backgrounds with the right set of capabilities and knowledge together to solve complex problems, you quickly realise that you have to think globally in order to bring minds together, leveraging the uniqueness of each point of view.”

As the conversation continues, the significance of this statement permeates across Abdi’s leadership principles and EP initiatives, during a time when organisations and their people had to come together to navigate a way through one of the most significant disruptions ever experienced.

With introductions completed, Abdi’s boundless sense of energy continues with a tour of six unique themes across the landscape of EP – why EP matters and agility lessons from the COVID-19 crisis, the rise of the Kinetic Enterprise™, co-innovation across ecosystems, the changing roles of CXOs, embracing the power of diversity and inclusion, and the power of teams. “ I consider myself a global citizen. Exposure to many cultures has helped me shape my views about life, my clients, the work that I do” ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER businesschief.asia

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DELOITTE

Alex: A Life in a Digital World

Why EP Matters, Lessons from the COVID-19 Crisis The first of Abdi’s themes ties the shocks of the pandemic to new understandings of enterprise resiliency and agility.

The battle against COVID-19 was in its early stages when EP jumped into the front lines.

The practice helped a syringe manufacturer enable their operations to deliver COVID vaccines by conducting a detailed capacity andand smart factory analysis on multiple manufacturing lines. The team delivered its rapid assessment virtually, using remote collaboration tools, and leveraging rich manufacturing data to identify near-term capacity improvements of as much as 20 percent to help increase supplies of this critical COVID-related medical device.

EP assisted another client in coordinating an ecosystem strategy across labs, universities, and businesses to support regional testing, including development of a new supply chain 30

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model for testing supplies. The end result of the project was the client’s ability to rapidly and safely address critical risk groups.

“With COVID-19, it was about crisis management,” says Abdi. “We saw that organisations that had invested in more advanced technologies earlier had better success dealing with this disruption. It took a lot of technical capabilities in the background to go overnight into 100 percent virtual operations.”

“A magnifying factor on enterprise disruption requires a look back. For the majority of the transformations completed in the ‘90s and early 2000s, it was about integration, consolidation and tech adoptions.

They did not consider or adopt the key elements needed to thrive or survive in a rapidly changing environment. The nonstandardisation of data, and resulting complex processes and systems, did not translate well to sudden changes in working methods.”

DELOITTE

“ For the post-COVID world, it will be all about speed, scale and insights,” Abdi says. “Some organisations are in a much better position today because they had the agility to adjust, modify and manage disruptions”

ABDI GOODARZI TITLE: DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER LOCATION: CALIFORNIA, USA Abdi Goodarzi leads Deloitte Consulting’s Enterprise Performance practice. He has more than 25 years of diverse experience in large-scale global ERP enabled business transformations, Cloud, Data Management, UX, AI and Automation.

ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

Since joining Deloitte in 1998, he has successfully served many Fortune 500 companies with their large-scale transformations. He was pivotal in establishing and growing Deloitte’s SAP global delivery centers in India.

Abdi serves several high-profile Deloitte client CxOs as a trusted advisor. In his previous role as the Leader of the US SAP practice, he was instrumental in growing Deloitte’s SAP practice, earning many accolades with SAP.

EXECUTIVE BIO

“For the post-COVID world, it will be all about speed, scale and insights,” Abdi says.

“Some organisations are in a much better position today because they had the agility to adjust, modify and manage disruptions.

We have a new understanding of business resiliency today. Assisting enterprises ‘immunise’ from disruptions – creating agility for organisations to deal with unforeseeable events at a much faster pace in the future – is not just what we deliver, but where we walk the walk.”

“The investments we’ve made in technology over the years kept us ahead of trends and able to convert to 100 percent virtual operations overnight. Software, operations, and our people moved rapidly over foundational infrastructures that were pre-designed for a remote-collaboration model. Single-sources for data, accessible from anywhere, ensured our teams remained connected. In effect, we had vaccinated our business to become immune to certain kinds of disruption, which minimised the impact of the pandemic on our client projects. Now it’s clear to everyone that investments in business continuity and disaster recovery take on a whole new significance. Going forward, organisations will need to continue to find ways to vaccinate their businesses to stay immune to future disruptions. We are doing this work with our

Abdi has presented at many business and technology conferences and authored several articles, including the “You Got Cloud?” article in the WSJ CIO Journal in 2014.

DELOITTE

“ Many of our client conversations used to focus on cost reduction and making operations more manageable; today, the urgent discussion is about the acceleration of connectivity and automation between data, systems, processes, capabilities and the workforce. Autonomous businesses and processes are the must-haves for competitive relevancy today and tomorrow” ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

The Kinetic Enterprise: Built to Evolve

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clients today, and continue to invest in the forefront of innovation and technology, demonstrated by our Smart Factory capabilities and the Kinetic Enterprise framework.”

A Smarter World and the Rise of the Kinetic Enterprise “Let’s talk about future-state capabilities that are transforming the foundations of businesses today,” Abdi says. “Smart stores, connected patients, drones, smart factories, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent farms – these are all part of our smarter world vision, and they all have two elements in common: They all need to connect to enterprise systems to process and analyse data, and they demand integration of cloud and AI into every aspect of the business.”

“There will be a race for AI and automation over the next five to 10 years,” Abdi continues. “Whoever wins that race will be

the ones that will thrive in their respective industries. Many of our client conversations used to focus on cost reduction and making operations more manageable; today, the urgent discussion is about the acceleration of connectivity and automation between data, systems, processes, capabilities and the workforce. Autonomous businesses and processes are the must-haves for competitive relevancy today and tomorrow.”

Underscoring EP’s commitment to connected devices and automation is the launch of an operating Smart Factory demo site in conjunction with Wichita State University. The Factory’s end-to-end smart production line demonstrates the art of the possible through advanced manufacturing methods and technologies. The functioning factory site makes digital transformations real by facilitating conversations with clients on how to merge leading technologies with operations. Clients are encouraged to

Supply Chain: We are Connected

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Business and technology services providers are no exception to the accelerating change in business models. In a world before the pandemic, EP had already leveraged the Kinetic pillars as the driver of innovations and investments in the shift to digital delivery capabilities and platforms. Within EP’s competitive landscape, the flexibility in these platforms and assets to provide value and insight as client’s business needs evolve, became a leading differentiator. One of EP’s

KINETIC CASE STUDY: USING THE CLOUD TO EVOLVE CLEAN

DID YOU KNOW...

explore the art of the possible, leaving with new perspectives on solving challenges, and a viable pathway to implementing change.

Tinged with excitement, Abdi summarises the significance of the Smart Factory with one question: “How do you create an entire end-to-end smart operation around your factory that is enabled by cloud and AI, and dramatically changes your positioning against your competitors? Let us show you.”

For EP, smart factories are just one example of the power of connectivity to transform an industry. Abdi highlights that technological disruption is a constant, and addressing continuous evolution in the frame of capability discussions is key for the success of the modern enterprise. Where once enterprise systems were “built to last,” the rapid acceleration of technological change required a new way forward – toward enterprises that are “built to evolve.” In conjunction with its ecosystem partners, Deloitte has defined the new “North Stars” of the enterprise – Clean, Intelligent, Inclusive, and Responsive. These are the four pillars of the Kinetic Enterprise, an enterprise perpetually in motion.

“With the Kinetic Enterprise framework,” Abdi states, “we ask – how do you build intelligent enterprise business platforms, inclusive of an ecosystem of applications and microservices, that can responsively scale on demand?”

Referencing recent business adaptability challenges, Abdi highlights, “Historically, the Clean pillar was one of the biggest challenges in technology adoption and transformation programs. The technology was customised to meet individualised and siloed business expectations – which led to sub-optimisation of the overall business. The ‘clean’ core is a big factor in creating fungibility and agility – nimble platforms that allow you to scale as your business changes.”

Technical debt from excessive customisation can inhibit the fastmoving enterprise. In addition, business customisation from ineffective business alignment only serves to slow the enterprise down. Clean requires resolving legacy issues and standardising capabilities; an enterprise better adapted to future disruption and continuous innovation.

A Fortune 30 Oil and Gas client engaged Deloitte to create a single source of financial truth for enterprise leadership, in advance of a larger transformation journey. The implementation of SAP’s S/4HANA Central Finance solution enabled the enterprise to have an end-toend view of Financials across the globe.

The solution was built using the Kinetic Clean approach, as the client wished to move to Cloud in the near future.

Deloitte’s delivery included a cloudcapable reporting strategy on top of the platform, and a transformation structure that enabled automated migration of applications across business landscapes, ensuring minimal customisations and process consistency.

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Reduce tech and operational debt and the need for customization.

Use the best possible combinations of data with tech and talent to make insight-driven business decisions.

Use the power of new platforms to enable frictionless scalability and speed to win in the market.

Alignment with industry and cross-industry business capabilities enables a framework for target states and comparable business outcomes.

Measures of business outcome in standardised form via the Enterprise Value Methodology enables outcome benchmarking.

Leveraging best-of-breed solutions to achieve optimal alignment with business objectives.

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Awards and Recognition: 2020-2021

Partner of the Year - Customer Experience (Large Enterprise) Partner of the Year - Delivery Excellence Partner of the Year - SAP S/4HANA (Large Enterprise) Partner of the Year - SAP SuccessFactors Solutions (Large Enterprise)

OPN Global Cloud Transformation Partner of the Year

Financial Services Industry Innovation Award Retail & Hospitality Industry Innovation Award

INFOR PARTNER EXCELLENCE AWARDS - GLOBAL SYSTEM INTEGRATOR OF THE YEAR

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early investments was the integrated Deloitte Ascend™ platform. Blending leading industry insight with digital platforms and automation, Ascend today delivers leading practices, benchmarking data, and solution frameworks across nearly 35 industries.

“Knowledge of each industry and the way an individual process is expected to operate or drive value in any given industry is a differentiator,” he says. “Ascend provides a digital platform to access that information, which accelerates and enriches our clients’ insights, enabling us to collaborate closely to define the best fit technology solution.”

For EP, the Kinetic framework has become a unifying beacon across both clients and ecosystem partners. Its unifying language, centred on value-driven capability delivery, is written in jargon-free terms that allow the business and technology to speak on the same plane.

Ecosystem Integration and the Importance of Innovation Abdi’s third theme is the necessity of coordination and innovation across the solution ecosystem. Crossing technology platforms, manufacturers and academia, Abdi views EP’s role as the ecosystem integrator, creating a universal language that creates enterprise-level alignment.

Expanding on EP’s ecosystem approach, Abdi highlights a familiar principle.

“As individuals have differing perspectives, so do each of our ecosystem partners – a software company can think about planning in a different way from someone who does in-house manufacturing at a factory,” he says.

“As long as you can understand and connect those perspectives, you can solve their problems in a much faster way.

“We bring our industry knowledge of what our clients will need today and in the future.

EP 101: Ecosystem Orchestrator

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“ We bring our industry knowledge of what our clients will need today and in the future. Our alliance partners bring the technical platform.

We then work with our ecosystem partners to help define foundational and enhanced expectations of the software. For us, the co-innovation approach is key” ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

Our alliance partners bring the technical platform. We then work with our ecosystem partners to help define foundational and enhanced expectations of the software.

For us, the co-innovation approach is key,” he states.

“What we want to deliver to our clients is an implemented solution of the ideal version of the software – one that they can continuously evolve and operate as their business and processes transform, rather than replace, every few years.”

For Abdi, a successful ecosystem integration results in “maximum value for our clients by blending the ideal solution

of business needs, ecosystem capabilities, innovation and scalability, with a common understanding of how the solution assists the enterprise in becoming Kinetic.”

Abdi adds, “I keep mentioning this word ‘innovation’ – it has to be part of any organisation's ecosystem strategy.

Otherwise, you will not see a rise and decline is the only direction.”

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THE SMART FACTORY

DID YOU KNOW...

The Smart Factory Advantage A smart factory is a highly digitized and connected production facility that uses technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and robotics to manufacture products. Smart factory investments can boost productivity and efficiency while simultaneously driving costs down.

The Smart Factory @ Wichita Deloitte has convened a world-renowned ecosystem of solution providers, technology innovators, academic researchers, and futurists to launch The Smart Factory @ Wichita, an Industry 4.0 immersive experience center that will demonstrate how smart factory technologies are reshaping business today and offer hands-on learning opportunities on how to best partner human and technological capabilities on the shop floor. It’s an immersive experience for shop floor managers, CXOs, ecosystem partners, and students, providing tangible guidance on transforming manufacturing

processes for the next normal, integration into business operations, and building believers out of smart factory skeptics.

Deloitte and Wichita State University are constructing the brand-new facility on Wichita State’s Innovation Campus, which will include a full-scale production line, dedicated space for select ecosystem sponsors and experiential labs exploring smart factory capabilities. The facility will be a net-zero impact smart building on a smart grid featuring 60,000 square feet of sustainable space.

The Smart Factory @ Wichita will make digital transformations real by demonstrating how to merge existing technologies with new innovations, sparking a dialogue about how companies can accelerate their journey towards scalable and sustainable capabilities.

For more information on The Smart Factory, visit TheSmartFactory.io

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Evolution of the CXO, AI / Cloud as Value Multipliers For innovation to become core to an organisation’s strategy, CXO understanding and support of enterprise capabilities and platforms is critical. For his fourth theme, Abdi reflects on recent CXO conversations as he discusses the evolution of enterprise executive roles.

“First, the role of CXOs for every organisation has completely changed,” he begins. “Understanding the technology footprint is a part of every business transformation. CXOs today face the 42

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“ The only way that enterprises can reach these value multipliers is by taking advantage of more innovation and technology, such as cloud and AI, while establishing future-proof businesses and processes” ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

necessity to understand the accelerating and mission-critical infusion of technology and innovation in everyday business processes.

DELOITTE

Culture, and Diversity and Inclusion In conversation, Abdi has addressed the critical elements for the enterprise of today and tomorrow, so far discussing the Kinetic Pillars, the necessity of innovation, a common language across expanding ecosystem choices, and value assessment.

For Abdi, there is another factor for executives to consider that will define long-term success for their organizations – their people. Abdi begins: “People should not be a siloed or a second-tier factor in any organization. People are at the heart of everything.”

INNOVATION ROUNDTABLE FOR ALLIANCES AND CLIENTS: EP’S ANNUAL CLIENT SUMMIT EP’s Client Summit is an exclusive annual event that brings together 200+ attendees comprised of C-level executives from selected enterprises, Deloitte leaders and EP alliance partners to discuss and share success stories and innovations across industries. Featuring industry and thought leader luminaries, the forum encourages ideation from shared understanding of successes and lessons learned as enterprises navigate change.

DID YOU KNOW

Every company will need to think of itself as a technology company – the traditional boundaries of the CIO now encompass other CXO roles.”

“Second, the days of focus on cost management as the sole factor are over.

Today, defined value generation is equal to cost-related outcomes. Many of our clients are asking for more investments from us and skin-in-the-game concepts to make sure those outcomes are generated at the end of complex investments.”

“We completely agree and support our clients’ perspectives. Why would you do a finance or supply chain transformation if it is not impacting your shareholder value, if it is not creating efficiencies and productivity for your people, and it is not improving and advancing your culture? You have to create those mappings and ties before you can invest in anything.”

“Third, technology itself has become a lot simpler to adopt and implement. We've gone from an age when it was important to have the right technology to where you can have many choices. As a result, CXOs’ mindsets about what they were expecting out of their investments are also changing – the amplification of outcomes and value that are driven out of these investments – those expectations are increasing by considerable multipliers.”

Abdi addresses the new CXO expectation, stating: “The only way enterprises can reach these value multipliers is by taking advantage of more innovation and technology, such as cloud and AI, which are dramatically changing the ways an enterprise can advance their business.

The more you invest in these concepts as enablers of innovation, the better you empower your business against disruptions and align your future enterprise goals.”

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The Future of Enterprise Resiliency

“In the context of transformations, investments in people have not been on par with investments in systems and processes.”

Abdi continues, “There's no point in having all the technology if you don't have the responsive culture and programs in which people can adapt to new ways of doing things, where the technology becomes a part of the company working alongside the people.”

“There has to be an appropriate level of investment in your most valuable asset to take advantage of the full spectrum of capabilities. This is not an afterthought for us – the people side is of such significance that we have underscored our AI practice with the theme ‘Age of With’ – humans with machines. We bring our Human Capital teams to the table to help us with the change management brought about 44

June 2021

by industrial and societal changes, with our Future of Work solutions.”

Abdi shifts to a wider angle, and discusses his own organization’s culture: “In addition to the investment in skills, as a leader of any group of people today, you have to understand what is happening in society – the differing points of view, expectations and passions of individuals working in your organisations, including their social views.

You have to have that clarity and that openness. Here at Deloitte, we consider diversity, equality, and inclusiveness a vital part of our cultural fabric.”

Abdi reflects, “That culture was what initially attracted me to Deloitte – our ability to provide the diversity, opportunities and performance expectations that get the best out of me and every person who is here.”

DELOITTE

“ In addition to the investment in skills, as a leader of any group of people today, you have to understand what is happening in society – the differing points of view, expectations and passions of individuals working in your organisations, including their social views. You have to have that clarity and that openness. Here at Deloitte, we consider diversity, equality, and inclusiveness a vital part of our cultural fabric” ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

As part of Deloitte’s culture, Abdi and his team share how internal learnings go beyond keeping up to date on the latest platform updates and emerging technologies. The initiatives include open internal dialogue wherein individuals can share experiences of bias, inclusion principles and the changes that everyone needs to bring to the table to have a comprehensive set of values.

“I consider myself a ‘people person,’” he says. “You can learn a lot from everyone around you. Inclusivity includes understanding various cultures in different parts of the world. We want to make sure we have a good understanding of what those cultures are, how individuals in those cultures operate, and how we can honour our unique values. This is how we include the individuals and groups that constitute a global firm – we want them to feel like they belong to the organisation and have the best

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talent experience, regardless of where they live, what they believe, and what they do.”

The Power of Teams and Authenticity in Leadership As the sun begins to rise above California’s Santa Ana Mountains, Abdi discusses his final theme on the power of teams. He frames his approach referencing his passion for soccer and professional sports.

“First, what we do in the world of consulting isn’t a tennis match,” he says. “It’s a team sport.

It requires you to depend on others while they depend on you. It doesn’t matter who’s the captain and who’s the player – you have to trust the team, you have to respect the team and you have to empower the team. That’s been my mantra: Operate a team format.”

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“Second, every leader brings a different approach. Maintaining that authenticity to your perspective is important. The power of differentiated perspective is what turns a group of people into a powerful squad uniquely qualified to deliver exceptional outcomes.”

“Third, when a team is invested in the same cause, you must take the time to understand, respect and support what each party brings to the table. Creating a common language that is inclusive of all parties is integral to success.”

Abdi summarizes, “Then - collectively between our teams, our clients and ecosystem partners, we can solve any challenge ahead.”

The conversation ends as it began – a highenergy view into the world of tomorrow,

DELOITTE

Looking Forward: An Integrated World

“ When a team is invested in the same cause, you must take the time to understand, respect and support what each party brings to the table. Creating a common language that is inclusive of all parties is integral to success.

Then - collectively between our teams, our clients and ecosystem partners, we can solve any challenge ahead”

leveraging decades of experience and a people-centred mindset.

The ever-evolving path of enterprise evolution will require a big thinker, an innovator, a tactical mindset, and someone that can communicate across organisational borders, boundaries, and languages. For Abdi, the road ahead seems a natural fit.

“This is what I love about my role – the ability to leverage who I am,” Abdi concludes. “I love problem solving, dealing with complex challenges, and collaborating with people. For me, the glass isn’t half full.

It’s full – every day.”

ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER businesschief.asia

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LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

LESSONS FROM A CRISIS:

LEADERSHIP WITH HEART AND HUMANITY

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LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

Sally Helgesen Sally Helgesen

Max Morielli Amy Lui Abel Francine Katsoudas Accenture Interactive The Conference Board Cisco

When it comes to holding onto leadership gains made during the pandemic, prioritising people is a must.

Business Chief gains insight into leadership lessons learned from a crisis WRITTEN BY: KATE BIRCH

W

hen talking with a leadership expert recently, she recalled a conversation she’d had back in May last year with the CHRO of a large American energy producer. The CHRO had explained how the company’s rigid prohibitions on working from home had made it tough for the company to attract and retain talented women. But now, forced by the pandemic to open up to remote working, the company’s executive team had witnessed no fall-off in productivity and decided that those rules were ‘going to change’.

Welcome to ‘leadership lessons learned from a crisis’ number one. Because while the COVID-19 crisis has given rise to more than a handful of headaches and hurdles, it has also inadvertently delivered on more than a handful of positive leadership gains.

Satish Shankar Bain & Company

Leadership lesson 1: Flexibility equals greater diversity The leadership expert in question, Sally Helgesen – cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership (and author of How Women Rise) – told Business Chief that this acute observation by the energy company suggests that “while the pandemic has had a well-publicised negative impact on working women, the aftermath may prove a boon”. It may also prove helpful to skilled workers whose careers have depended upon access to scarce visas, thereby “making the workforce more global as well as more diverse”.

It’s been a similar story for Fortune 500 firm Accenture Interactive, with remote working having forced the company to change both how it hires and how it enables its people to realise their full potential.

“There are ways in which the remote working revolution has been positive for diversity”, Max Morielli, President for Europe at Accenture Interactive tells Business Chief. For example, where some individuals may not have been able to attend a daily 9-5 office role, leaders are now able to draw on talent no matter where it is in the world.

“At Accenture Interaction, we aim to work with empathy and celebrate our differences as our greatest strength and the changes brought about by the pandemic have allowed us to create a more diverse, vibrant working experience for our talent,” Morielli says. businesschief.asia

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LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

Do Good to Lead Well Through Crisis

Sally Helgesen TITLE: WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP EXPERT COMPANY: SALLY HELGESEN INDUSTRY: INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER LOCATION: NEW YORK

But this is not the only leadership lesson learnt. According to Cisco’s Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer, Francine Katsoudas, the challenges of the past year have resulted in people looking for support more than ever, and this has led them to the unlikeliest source of guidance – their company.

“In learnings from 2020, global industry analyst Josh Bersin noted that ‘communication, listening, providing authentic feedback, and taking action on employee issues’ are perhaps the most important leadership and HR practices of all,” Katsoudas says.

Leadership lesson 2: Bring your humanity to work During a year where people have lost family members, jobs, and felt more isolated than ever before, leaders have been forced to be flexible, show compassion and give employees leeway and support. It’s also given leaders a chance to connect more deeply, to show they care, to be both vulnerable and authentic, ultimately, to be human in their leadership.

Sally Helgesen is a women’s leadership expert, speaker, consultant, and bestselling author, including of The Female Advantage: Women’s Way of Leadership and How Women Rise. cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership Helgesen delivers leadership programs and keynotes in corporations, universities and associations worldwide.

“ While the pandemic has had well-publicised negative impact on working women, the aftermath may prove a boon. It may also prove helpful to skilled workers whose careers have depended upon access to scarce visas, making the workforce more global as well as more diverse” SALLY HELGESEN

INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER, SALLY HELGESEN businesschief.asia

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LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

Max Morielli TITLE: PRESIDENT FOR EUROPE COMPANY: ACCENTURE INTERACTIVE INDUSTRY: CONSULTING LOCATION: ITALY Max Morielli is president for Europe at Accenture Interactive and as such ais responsible for defining the strategy and vision, overseeing business growth and building practice and team across the region. Based in Italy, Max has a wealth of experience and passion in helping clients transform their business through digital technologies.

For Satish Shankar, Regional Managing Partner of Bain & Company for AsiaPacific, the COVID-19 crisis has “reminded us of the power of authentic human engagement with our employees”, something Shankar believes is acutely needed in times of turbulence, but that is often quickly forgotten when things go back to normal.

“The best leader will maintain that proximity, transparency, vulnerability and personal storytelling to stay deeply connected with their teams post pandemic,” Shankar tells Business Chief.

Vikram Bhalla, Senior Partner at BCG Henderson Institute (BCG’s think tank) says that moving forward leaders should 52

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leave behind such leadership stereotypes as what he calls the “confident decision maker” and the “leader from the front” and instead bring their humanity to work.

What employees and others are looking for, he explains, is an authentic and fully accessible human being and “this means sharing much more of yourself, and not just your successes, with many more people”.

Bhalla asserts that leaders must engage with their teams and act with compassion and understanding and must make themselves more visible, available, and accessible through demo days with teams, joint working efforts, and live brainstorming sessions.

LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

“ I believe that the reliance on remote working has brought an extra layer of humanity to the way we experience our professional lives. There is an opportunity here for leaders to leverage that in order to instil an open, positive, and freeing professional culture within their organisations” MAX MORIELLI

PRESIDENT FOR EUROPE, ACCENTURE INTERACTIVE

Leadership lesson 3: Prioritise employee wellbeing Acknowledging that one of the main challenges for leaders moving forward is that of workplace mental health, Amy Lui Abel, VP of Human Capital at research think tank The Conference Board, tells Business Chief that in a post-pandemic world, “leaders will need to know how to communicate with and lead their teams while demonstrating greater levels of empathy, compassion, and self-awareness”.

She adds: “The mental health challenges in our workforce will continue for a long time and will require support. Leaders can help their build resilience to thrive and create an environment of psychological safety and trust.” businesschief.asia

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It’s time to get selfish and put your people first A global company with 70,000+ employees across almost 100 countries, Cisco prides itself on being an employeecentric culture with a purpose of powering an inclusive future for all, and the crisis has further amplified the need for this. Here, Francine Katsoudas, EVP and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer, discusses the power of empathy in leadership.

Empathy is a superpower. We know that progress happens when we see the world through others' eyes. Proximity is a way of being. When we get proximate to someone else’s experience, especially those different than our own, we grow, develop new perspectives, and engage more effectively with others. In our work, then, we need to navigate how to listen, not tell; how to make space for things we may not agree with; and how to expand the space we make for our people.

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Empathy will change the way in which we engage with each other.

Today, trust in leadership is table stakes, and building this culture of trust has to start at the top. At this moment, CEOs and CHROs have the incredible opportunity to institutionalise inclusive leadership, marked by empathetic teams and leaders, and align to a broader societal purpose to compete for and retain top talent. Doing so is good for your employees, good for your company, and ultimately, good for the world.

Francine Katsoudas EVP and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer, Cisco

LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

Amy Lui Abel TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT OF HUMAN CAPITAL OF RESEARCH COMPANY: THE CONFERENCE BOARD LOCATION: NEW YORK Amy Lui Abel is Vice President of Human Capital of research think tank The Conference Board. She leads research efforts focusing on an organisation’s human capital strategy, capabilities, needs, and performance that supports broader business objectives.

“ In the post-pandemic world, leaders will need to know how to communicate with and lead their teams while demonstrating greater levels of empathy, compassion, and self-awareness” AMY LUI ABEL

VICE PRESIDENT OF HUMAN CAPITAL OF RESEARCH, THE CONFERENCE BOARD

And many companies are already planning to do so, with 77% of outperforming company CEOs recently reporting plans to prioritise employee wellbeing even it if affects nearterm profitability, according to IBM research; and 50% of firms planning to increase their HR resources to help manage employee wellbeing and mental health, according to research by KPMG. Other organisations (and leaders) are already leading the charge in this. Take Cisco.

Katsoudas explains that when Cisco started its conversation with employees around mental health a few years ago, the leadership team had hoped it would contribute to breaking down the associated stigma. “In return, our employees started telling us about their families and their own struggles. This set the groundwork for us to expand these offerings during the pandemic, giving our people the businesschief.asia

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LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

Purpose, people, planet Satish Shankar, Regional Managing Partner of Bain & Company for AsiaPacific, shares with Business Chief three positive changes that he feels the COVID-19 crisis has brought about and urges business leaders to consider carefully how they lead the recovery in a post-pandemic world.

1. Strong sense of corporate purpose COVID-19 confirmed what years of Bain & Company research has told us – that a strong sense of corporate purpose is critical to a company’s ability to navigate change.

Purpose is the anchor that provides context and focus, and the glue that holds the organisation together through flux. Being able to define, articulate and renew that purpose was a differentiator through the crisis and will continue to be critical in the leadership toolkit going forward.

2. Much greater agility In a Bain study conducted at the height of the crisis last year, 50% of respondents said their corporate teams had become more

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agile, with better prioritisation of project objectives and scope. Leaders were also reported as being more willing to take bold risks, and more tolerant of failures. Leaders should reflect on what enable this agile approach and embed that more deeply into their BAU organisation.

3. A focus on ESG Finally, COVID-19 has provided tailwinds to the sustainability/ ESG agenda in many companies, creating more urgency around employee wellness, sustainable supply chains and the general need to identify and navigate environmental risks. Leaders should seize the moment to propel their sustainability agendas forward coming out of the crisis.

Satish Shankar, Regional Managing Partner of Bain & Company for Asia-Pacific

LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY

support they need. This focus on the whole person is something that is now a core belief, and we will continue to care for our employees in all aspects of their lives.”

To help achieve this, especially within a hybrid working environment, organisations are increasingly looking to how digital tools can be used to improve communications and aid collaboration, with 78% of CEOs saying they will continue to build on their current use of digital collaboration and communication tools.

And while many people don’t believe ‘digital’ and ‘humanise’ belong in the same sentence, Katsoudas argues that they can. “When we leverage digital correctly, we can create a more human experience where we see our people better, understand gaps, inequities, and needs, and drive fresh insights.”

Leadership lesson 4: Empower and engage employees Working remotely has automatically meant that leaders are less hands-on, and that can be a good thing, explains Morielli, noting that “people work best when they feel that trust and belief”.

He adds: “The reliance on remote working has brought an extra layer of humanity to the way we experience our professional lives and there is an opportunity here for leaders to leverage that in order to instil an open, positive, and freeing professional culture within their organisations. At Accenture Interactive, we’ve learned that everyone does their best work when our talent has the freedom to experiment, to fail, and are afforded space for their ideas to flourish.”

Shankar concurs, explaining how in a Bain & Company study conducted at the height of the crisis last year, leaders reported to be more willing to take bold risks, and also more tolerant of failures, an agile leadership approach that ultimately gives employees more freedom to innovate. businesschief.asia

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NTT DOCOMO

UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR E PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK

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Hisakazu Tsuboya and Zaif Siddiqi of NTT DOCOMO discuss the Japanese telecom’s ambitious plans for 5G in Japan and overseas

T

he impact that the global 5G rollout will have across every region, industry and vertical cannot be understated. 5G connectivity will deliver ultralow latency connectivity and a generational leap in capacity, which in turn is delivering transformational innovations to enterprises, governments and the end consumer.

In Japan, where the national 5G rollout is well underway, adoption is being driven by a joint effort stemming from the public and private sectors in order to meet the exacting standards of enterprise and individual customers. “5G is about delivering ultra-low latency and higher capacity than ever before.

It's also about creating meaningful change in the industry,” says Zaif Siddiqi, Executive Director and Global Head of NTT DOCOMO’s 5G & IoT Business Department.

NTT DOCOMO is positioning itself at the forefront of 5G innovation in Japan, and is currently in the process of taking the vital next step, when the kinds of proof of concept (POC) trials that demonstrated the potential of 5G give way to POCs demonstrating the technology’s commercial viability. “The POCs we have done in the past were about finding out how to launch 5G. The POCs we are doing now are finding out how to commercialise the technology in the enterprise sector, making 5G not only beneficial to our enterprise customers, but proving its potential as a tool to solve wider social issues as well,” Siddiqi elaborates.

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Hisakazu Tsuboya (right), Senior Vice President and General Manager (NTT DOCOMO’s 5G & IoT Business Department) Zaif Siddiqi (left), Executive Director and Global Head (NTT DOCOMO’s 5G & IoT Business Department)

NTT DOCOMO

Why 5G Matters

From the Mass Market to the Enterprise Hisakazu Tsuboya, Senior Vice President and General Manager of NTT DOCOMO’s 5G & IoT Business Department, notes that, while most of the development of the technology has so far been focused on the mass market sector, there is huge potential for 5G to have a transformative effect on the enterprise space. “5G is a very cutting edge technology. Currently, much of the focus has been on the mass market, delivering smartphone solutions to end customers, but we need to think about how best to expand in the enterprise market as well,” he says.

“5G has a very big impact on the progress of companies' digital transformation.”

The roles of both Tsuboya and Siddiqi share the similar goal, of exploring and expanding NTT DOCOMO’s reach within the enterprise 5G segment. However, while Tsuboya is focused on the domestic Japanese market - where NTT DOCOMO does the majority of its business - Siddiqi 62

June 2021

is responsible for the company’s overseas ambitions, an area where he explains there is immense potential to grow and better serve NTT DOCOMO’s customers. “So far, DOCOMO has really focused on the Japanese market. We do around $43bn worth of business annually as DOCOMO, and the whole NTT Group does around $100bn.

We're a significant revenue generator for the Group, but pretty much all of that money is earned in Japan, and largely in the consumer market,” Siddiqi explains. “We want to globalise our product portfolio and make it clear that our services are not only for Japan, but also for our customers overseas. This may take time but we will make it happen.”

Globalising the 5G Business During the COVID-19 crisis, Siddiqi explains that NTT DOCOMO has already made great strides towards expanding NTT DOCOMO’s operational scope overseas, demonstrating several ways in which 5G can not only help

NTT DOCOMO

businesses overcome the challenges of the pandemic, but fully embrace the potential of Industry 4.0. During the past year, when specialised labourers from Japan were unable to leave the country, NTT DOCOMO used 5G powered virtual reality (VR) headsets in order to support a partner in Thailand. “Using our AceReal for DOCOMO AR headsets, skilled waterproof roof painters from Japan who couldn't travel to Thailand to do a job were able to give instructions to unskilled workers on site in real-time over a 5G connection with utilisation of DOCOMO Open Innovation Cloud, an MEC platform that directly connects to NTT DOCOMO's secure and lowlatency network,” he explains.

Partnerships like this, Siddiqi continues, are key to NTT DOCOMO’s efforts to integrate 5G technologies into the modern enterprise. He explains: “When you're approaching digital transformation, there's more to it than just leveraging cutting edge technologies into new customer experiences.” Unless the needs of the customer, and the underlying market forces at play, can be truly understood, “5G doesn’t mean anything,” says Siddiqi, adding that in order to find the right contexts for deployment, “Selection of the right partners is extremely important to delivering on the potential value of 5G.”

HISAKAZU TSUBOYA

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, NTT DOCOMO, INC.

TITLE: SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER OF NTT DOCOMO’S 5G & IOT BUSINESS DEPARTMENT LOCATION: JAPAN Academic history Completed the master's course of the Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo in March 1992.

2003 Completed the MIT Sloan School Management of Technology (Master of Engineering Management)

EXECUTIVE BIO

“ We have 3,600 partners in Japan, who we are working with to develop new 5G solutions”

HISAKAZU TSUBOYA

Career • Apr. 1992 Joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) • July 1992 Joined NTT Mobile Communications Network, Inc. (The current NTT DOCOMO, INC.) Oct. 2005 Director, International Business Department (technical planning) and Director, Ubiquitous Services Department • July 2008 Director, Frontier Service Department • Feb. 2015 President of DOCOMO BIKE SHARE, Inc. • July 2017 General Manager, Chiba Branch, NTT DOCOMO, INC. • June 2019 General Manager of Solution Service Department • July 2020 Senior Vice President, General Manager of 5G & IoT Business Department

Reap revenue from 5G, IoT, Data and AI Substantial investment demands quick returns.

Often business can’t wait. Which is why CSPs are so focused on eMBB and FWA as ‘easy wins’ on 5G investment. Truth is, the real revenue generators are hidden in enterprise use cases.

From self-driving vehicles to wide-area drones.

From VR events to AR-enhanced workers.

That’s how entire verticals are transformed.

5G

“39%

of CSPs indicate new revenue generation as primary stimulus for network transformation. Better CX is next at 25%.”

Your 5G network is ready, but can you generate revenue from it?

Source: GSMA: The Mobile Economy Report 2020

Learn more on 5G >

IoT “5G expands CSPs’ TAM for IoT from 15.0% to 41.8 and for IoT connectivity from 2.4% to 4.0% of total IoT value ($1.1T by 2023) “$1.1T total worldwide IoT spending 2023. Only $100B will be for connectivity. ” IoT is a long-promised revenue opportunity for CSPs. Will 5G and smart cities really deliver on this promise?

Source: Oracle commissioned IDC Infobrief: IoT in the Enterprise: New Revenue Opportunities for CSPs.

Learn more on IoT >

Seeing data in new ways, discovering insights and unlocking endless possibilities As 5G, the latest network technology gets into full swing, the latest network technology, high-speed mobile broadband, ultra-low latency, and mass device connectivity will be realized, and it is expected that our lives will change drastically.

It is said that a safer, more secure and prosperous society can be realized by appropriately utilizing cloud technology as well as 5G. In order to realize these, the utilization of Multi-access Edge Computing, which is a cloud installed in a place close to the network core, has begun all over the world.

Oracle’s in-memory technology and Sharding technology that realizes distributed management contribute to the

NTT DOCOMO

realization of regional distributed data management and processing responsiveness in MEC. Various security features of Oracle Database protect your data with fine-grained security controls.

MEC, which is expected to be highly safe, can provide a more secure environment from the user’s point of view.

Oracle’s Converged Database strategy is evolving to support many data formats and various workloads with a single DBMS (Database Management System). As a data format, it supports JSON, Graph, Spatial, Text, XML, etc. in addition to the conventional relational, and handles workloads such as data analysis, IoT, streaming, blockchain in addition to transactions.

Since Oracle Database can handle many data formats and workloads with one technology, it is possible to aggregate the skills required of administrators and developers and perform application development, operation, and maintenance in a simple environment. It will be like. This makes it possible to obtain extremely high productivity in data utilization.

Oracle’s mission is to help people see data in new ways, discover insights, unlock endless possibilities. As network technology evolves, Oracle will continue to support the provision of an environment where data can be used in a highly productive manner.

Learn more (Japanese)

Learn more (English)

NTT DOCOMO

“ We want to globalise our product and make it clear that our services are not just for Japan, but also for our customers overseas”

ZAIF SIDDIQI TITLE: EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND GLOBAL HEAD OF NTT DOCOMO’S 5G & IOT BUSINESS DEPARTMENT LOCATION: JAPAN

ZAIF SIDDIQI

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND GLOBAL HEAD, NTT DOCOMO, INC.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Siddiqi was assigned as an Executive Director of Corporate Sales & Marketing Division at NTT DOCOMO, INC. to develop and lead the global enterprise business. His responsibilities were extended in July 2018, where he was appointed to serve as a Board Member of NTT DOCOMO USA, China, Asia, Europe and Brazil to strategize the enterprise ICT business. In July 2020, he assumed the role of Global Head of 5G IoT to address the needs of enterprise clients.

Prior to the current assignment, his professional contributions were at Vodafone Global Enterprise, Microsoft and Verizon Business. Zaif Siddiqi earned his bachelor’s degree from International Islamic University, Malaysia, in the faculty of Economics and Management Sciences with a minor in Business Administration.

He speaks native Japanese, English and Urdu/Hindi and has over 44 years of living experience in Japan.

For example, NTT DOCOMO, together with EDGEMATRIX, launched a worldfirst edge AI platform for intelligent video analytics, enabling high resolution, high security, and real-time video using AI. Using the EDGEMATRIX platform, customers can select and purchase AI applications and download them to an edge AI box remotely. This is the best state-of-the-art solution deployed in Japanese market, and NTT DOCOMO, along with EDGEMATRIX, is working to offer it to overseas markets as well.

Another key partner for NTT DOCOMO is LANDLOG. The firm was founded in 2017 by multiple companies including NTT DOCOMO. LANDLOG aims to build an ecosystem through partnering not only with companies involved in the construction process but also with various stakeholders surrounding the construction industry.

LANDLOG provides an open platform

NTT DOCOMO

DOCOMO's global expansion

where various application providers can easily participate. The platform improves the productivity at the construction site by enabling the collection and processing of data obtained from all things related to construction production such as construction machinery, terrain, materials, and staff.

Contributing to Society 5.0 At home, NTT DOCOMO benefits from an established mass market customer base, a cutting edge 5G and 4G LTE network, and long-standing relationships with a diverse network of partners. “We have 3,600 partners in Japan, who we are working with to develop new 5G solutions,” says Tsuboya, adding that NTT DOCOMO has done numerous 5G trials in Japan - including one with Japan’s bullet train, the Shinkansen, and another with leading construction company, Komatsu. “We have a very close relationship

Edge AI Box and Platform

Edge AI Box

EDGEMATRIX Platform Edge view

Map view

A compact and robust device “Edge AI Box” applies AI to infer in real time videos from IP cameras and sends analysed data to the cloud, while the dedicated platform remotely manages the boxes and AI applications at many bases, notifies of any abnormality on site, and monitors edge AI video images with a browser.

Watch: EDGEMATRIX Solution

LEARN MORE

NTT DOCOMO

with Komatsu,” says Tsuboya, explaining that the 5G trial with the firm exploited the benefits of 5G in order to support the remote controlling of heavy machinery from a distance of up to 800 kilometers, a powerful solution to an increasingly common pain point in an industry where Tsuboya notes that “the market faces a severe shortage of skilled laborers. With LANDLOG, for example, NTT DOCOMO provides an open platform to create new values and solve issues related to the construction industry.”

Using 5G as the connective tissue between other transformative technologies is a key application for the technology.

Tsuboya explains that, “coupling technologies of AI, IoT, XR and cloud with the network will yield data that we never

“ 5G is about delivering ultra-low latency and higher capacity than ever before. It's also about creating meaningful change in the industry” ZAIF SIDDIQI

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND GLOBAL HEAD, NTT DOCOMO, INC. businesschief.asia

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expected before for new monetisation.” By unifying all the technologies that exist within 5G’s orbit, using a comprehensive 5G network, the possibilities start to become the stuff of science fiction.

“By leveraging our network and the technologies that are available throughout the NTT Group and our partners, we bring 5G together with backend infrastructure, AI engine, XR capabilities and cloud services,” Siddiqi explains. “It’s a very complex undertaking but, if we can unite all these technologies successfully, you have everything you need to create a smart city. For example, NTT DOCOMO is working with Oracle on backend database servers that are highly interoperable with 5G architecture. The backend infrastructure is vital to enable fast and flexible deployments of the 5G mobile network,” says Siddiqi.

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NTT DOCOMO

THE 5GEC: ENTERPRISE 5G IN SOUTHEAST ASIA In order to globalise its 5G business, Siddiqi explains that NTT DOCOMO is leveraging the considerable expertise of the NTT group as a whole and of its partners.

“NTT DOCOMO, and the Group as a whole, are working on memorandums of understanding with various governments and cities, which play a vital role in the promotion of new technologies,” explains Siddiqi.

Announced in February of this year, one of the key collaborative efforts between NTT DOCOMO, the rest of the NTT Group, and key partners from throughout the ICT industry, is the 5G Global Enterprise solution Consortium (5GEC). Siddiqi explains that, “The consortium’s mission is to provide overseas companies with professional consultation regarding 5G solutions, especially flexible and highly secure private 5G networks that function independently of public networks offered by local telecommunications operators by coordinating each member’s strength such as advantages in network technologies or sales and marketing networks.”

Between the consortium’s 13 member companies, Siddiqi adds that it possesses “strengths and assets in varied fields capable of implementing and providing a one-stop shop for provision of private 5G services, which can be extremely beneficial to enterprises that are considering upgrading their manufacturing facilities and executing their smart factory initiatives.”

The decision to target the Thai market initially makes sense for NTT DOCOMO, due to the long-standing relations between Thailand and Japan which, Siddiqi explains,

provides not only the potential governmental support for the project, but a broad customer base. “There are more than 5,000 Japanese enterprise customers that currently operate in Thailand, so the amount of manufacturing and processing infrastructure that's present in the market makes it very attractive,” he explains.

“Japan and Thailand have over 130 years of friendship, which means that companies from Japan and Thailand are very accustomed to working together, and the affinity between the Japanese and Thai governments definitely contributes to this state of affairs.”

The consortium’s target for the coming fiscal year is to launch several successful POCs with companies operating in Thailand. Then, once those are successful, Siddiqi expects those POCs to develop into opportunities for commercialisation. Once that has been achieved, he adds that “we want to develop out into other countries in the region, as well as other continents further down the line.”

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TIMELINE: NTT DOCOMO’S 5G ROLLOUT

1

2

3

2014-2019:

2019:

March 2020:

NTT DOCOMO carries out extensive and comprehensive 5G technology verification tests across Japan.

Experimental 5G services are launched, including trials of audience experience enhancement at international sports events such as the Rugby World Cup 2019.

NTT DOCOMO launches commercial NSA 5G services across Japan.

The open platform that transforms construction sites.

The open platform brings value and allows us to work closely with customers. By collaborative creation, we contribute to the productivity of the construction industry.

LEARN MORE

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NTT DOCOMO

4

5

6

7

September 2020:

2021:

March 2022:

March 2023:

NTT DOCOMO’s 5G network achieves max download speeds of 4.1 Gbps.

NTT DOCOMO launches standalone 5G services and begins the transition away from its NSA network.

NTT DOCOMO achieves 55% population coverage with its 5G services.

NTT DOCOMO achieves 70% population coverage.

Siddiqi gestures to the window behind him, through which the last rays of evening sunlight are being replaced by the neon and LED constellation of downtown Tokyo. Less than a quarter mile from his office, Tokyo Tower glows against the darkening sky. “The city behind me was built immediately after World War Two. The technology that was used to build it is 40 to 50 years old now,” he says. “What we have to do now is be ready for a new era of infrastructure. And that's where the NTT Group's technology becomes extremely important to solving the question of how a smart city in this new era operates.”

Backed by the Japanese Government, Society 5.0 is an initiative that focuses on the unification of digital and physical space, and 5G is the essential stepping stone between them. “Society 5.0 is about achieving a high degree of convergence between the physical world and cyberspace. The way to achieve that convergence is to use a 5G network in between the two,” Siddiqi explains.

“ Currently, much of the focus has been on the mass market, but we need to think about how best to expand 5G in the enterprise market as well” HISAKAZU TSUBOYA

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, NTT DOCOMO, INC.

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Siddiqi shows a 5G portable base station which is used for immediate 5G coverage at bespoke events

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NTT DOCOMO

“Selection of the right partners is extremely important to delivering on the potential value of 5G” ZAIF SIDDIQI

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND GLOBAL HEAD, NTT DOCOMO, INC.

Tsuboya adds that, “Innovation has its value when social issues are resolved, and new values are created. For example, with the help of universities and hospitals, DOCOMO is working to provide ultralow-latency connectivity to run mission critical telemedicine applications. We aim to allow patients that are unable to transport themselves to be served by mobile hospitals equipped with state-ofart equipment that will be connected to a 5G network that allows patients to be diagnosed in real-time by medical experts located remotely.”

In Society 5.0, vast amounts of information gathered by sensors in physical space is then accumulated in cyberspace. The data is then analysed by AI, and the results are fed back to humans in physical space in various forms, contrary to the past, when humans were the ones doing the analysis. In Society 5.0, people, things, and systems are all interconnected in cyberspace and optimal results obtained

by AI exceeding the capabilities of humans are fed back to physical space to support better decision making and understanding of our world. “This process brings new value to industry and society in ways not previously possible,” Hisakazu says.

The Road Ahead Both Tsuboya and Siddiqi have an exciting, challenging journey ahead of them. At home in Japan, NTT DOCOMO’s 5G rollout continues, and finding the ways in which the technology can solve enterprise problems, and advance digital transformations throughout the country, is key to making sure NTT DOCOMO plays a central role in creating Society 5.0. Overseas, they face the challenge of building something new, in markets where overall connectivity and development are less mature, and yet customers still expect flawless service. “The Japanese market is extremely demanding, and Japanese customers expect that same level of service to be provided overseas, which can be challenging,” says Siddiqi. Nevertheless, he is optimistic about NTT DOCOMO’s future as a globalised business. “We have set very ambitious targets for our solution business.

We are aiming to have the solution segment hit revenues of $1.2bn in 2021 and to grow still further over the next few years. To achieve those big numbers, we are going to need to work closely with our customers, help them understand the benefits of 5G and what the technology means for their industry.”

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CORPORATE FINANCE

WHY WE NEED MORE

FEMALE CFOs (AND HOW TO REACH THAT GOAL) Four female global financial experts weigh in on why there are so few female CFOs, and what organisations can do to redress the executive gender imbalance WRITTEN BY: KATE BIRCH

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T

he number of women in CFO positions in Fortune 500 companies reached a record high late last year, hitting 90, up from 65 just a few years ago. It’s not surprising given the increased focus in recent years on C-suite and board parity by investors such as Blackrock, as well as other institutions including the Nasdaq, which recently stated that companies listed on its US exchange will need to have a minimum of two non-white or female Board members.

And if they do not, they must publicise the reasons as to why.

The picture is similar in the UK. According to Julia van den Bosch Wazen, CFO Practice consultant at Odgers Berndtson, The Financial Conduct Authority in the UK is now looking to the London Stock Exchange listings framework as to whether similar measures ought to be implemented, while for City firms, “there are already ongoing discussions about potentially using wider FCA powers, such as denying regulatory approves to drive diversity on Boards”.

CORPORATE FINANCE

ROUNDTAB LE

CORPORATE FINANCE

HANADY KHALIFE,

MAGGIE XU,

SENIOR DIRECTOR, MEA & INDIA OPERATIONS, INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANTS

PRINCIPAL, GREATER CHINA FINANCIAL SERVICES PRACTICE, OLIVER WYMAN

With financial and consultancy positions at the Central Bank of Lebanon and Nakheel under her belt, and deep knowledge of the MEA region having worked in the UAE, Lebanon and Saudi, Khalife has over the past 11 years led efforts to establish and grow IMA’s operations successfully designing programs and initiatives to engage industry stakeholders and help organisations execute business strategies.

Based in Shanghai, Maggie has more than 12 years of experience in serving financial institutions. She has a deep understanding of finance and risk management, interbank market business, governance and transformation of banks as well as other non-banking financial institutions in China.

JULIA VAN DEN BOSCH WAZEN, UK CONSULTANT, ODGERS BERNDTSON’S CFO PRACTICE At Odgers Berndtson, the largest executive search firm in the UK, Julia is a consultant in the CFO Practice, leading searches to place CFOs and their direct reports, working with clients, from the FTSE 100 to small-cap businesses, private equity to not-for-profit. She also spearheads the diversity agenda, which includes the bi-annual women’s networking lunches she founded in 2017, drawing together female leaders within financial management and giving them the opportunity to gain career advice from a Chairwoman or CFO keynote speaker.

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CRISTINA CATANIA, EUROPE, PARTNER, MCKINSEY & COMPANY Based in Milan, Cristina is the leader of McKinsey’s work in wealth and asset management in Europe and the head of the sustainability work in the banking sector. She is also a core leader of the Strategy & Corporate Finance Practice in EMEA. Cristina focuses on serving financial institutions throughout Europe across a broad range of services with an emphasis on large transformations in banking and a spike in asset and wealth management. She also has a passion for ESG transformation.

CORPORATE FINANCE

But while there’s certainly been improvement, the under-representation of women in executive finance positions remains less than rosy, with van den Bosch Wazen admitting that “whilst much has been done, we are still of the view that progress is too slow”.

Still too few women make CFO According to the government-backed Hampton-Alexander Review, of which Odgers Berndtson are active contributors, while women now make up one third of all board positions in the UK’s FTSE 100 companies, up from 12.5% less than a decade ago, there remains a concerning lack of female representation in senior leadership and key executive roles in FTSE companies, with just 15% of finance directors bring women.

“One of the Big Four partners informed me that their annual graduate intake split is around 52% women, 48% men. By the time this age group reaches their early thirties, The research suggests that as women the number goes down to 34% women,” advance through their careers, they steadily explains van den Bosch Wazen. “Since many lose ground to their male peers at every stage, CFOs of listed businesses in the UK take the suggesting the pathway to the CFOs office is audit route, before moving not as clearly illuminated into industry, the disparity for female candidates.

Women CFOs by of diverse talent coming into the market starts early Why women annual revenue and is not able to catch make good CFOs up later.”

According to Willard And yet the evidence Recent McKinsey Powell’s 2020 Breaking the suggests that when women research for its Women in CFO Glass Ceiling report, do make it to CFO, the the Workplace report for Women are taking on more payoff for organisations is North America backs this up.

CFO roles at larger firms. positive. Companies with While research shows that female CFOs and CEOs women and men in financial prove more profitable services begin their careers making up roughly than those led by men, with women-led firms equal portions of entry-level staff, once you get generating US$1.8 trillion more in gross profit higher up the ladder, women account for only than the sector average, according to a report 19% (one in five) of positions in the C-suite.

by S&P Global. businesschief.asia

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CORPORATE FINANCE

“ For finance there is a clear need to create multiple role model examples that can inspire young women to join this career path, which is more and more at the centre of key company decision making” CRISTINA CATANIA

PARTNER, MCKINSEY & COMPANY

Furthermore, as van den Bosch Wazen points out, according to McKinsey’s latest Diversity Wins report, companies with more than 30% of women executives are more likely to outperform companies where this percentage ranged from 10-30%.

“The benefits speak for themselves and I’m thrilled that investors are pushing harder for this,” states van den Bosch Wazen. “The more diverse your management team, the more engaged your workforce, and the better your customers are looked after. You are better informed of the world, you tend not to miss trends, making your balance sheet strong and your organisation run more efficiently.”

Cristina Catania, Partner at McKinsey & Company agrees that gender diversity “enriches decision-making and so has a positive impact on companies’ performance and sustainability”, however more specifically, and in the context of the finance function, she points out that studies have found that “women have higher risk aversion than men and that can be a good thing”.

Maggie Xu, Principal of Greater China Financial Services Practice at Oliver Wyman, agrees suggesting research shows that female CFOs are more risk averse and tend to adopt more conservative accounting 80

June 2021

policies. And for “those companies/ industries with higher litigation risk, default risk, systematic risk, or management turnover risk, who are more focused on accounting conservatism, female CFOs may well do a better job”.

Arguing that women are “equally qualified to effectively address current and future challenges and disruptions”, Hanady Khalife, Senior Director of MEA & India for the Institute of Management Accountants further points out that beyond operations,

CORPORATE FINANCE

3%

Women CFOs at firms with annual revenue greater than $100 billion

7%

Women CFOs at firms with annual revenue between $50 billion and $99 billion

28%

Women CFOs at firms with annual revenue between $10 billion and $49 billion

62%

Women CFOs at firms with annual revenue less than $9 billion

inclusive working cultures where women leaders exist have been known to attract and retain top talent.

“No matter how you look at it, women leaders are good for business and for building more sustainable, self-sufficient and increasingly shockproof businesses, even economies,” asserts Khalife.

In our roundtable, we talk to these four female financial leaders to identify the barriers facing women and discover how organisations and leaders can facilitate their advancement. businesschief.asia

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Why are women under-represented in senior financial positions, and the CFO role specifically?

Julia van den Bosch Wazen Women in key financial management roles tend to have a shared set of challenges, such as balancing home/work life, which is overcome by having the right support and an engaged sponsor at work. Sponsors are often men in senior management positions. Men are essential in furthering the development of all strands of diversity in the workplace, and the more informed diversity and inclusion allies there are, the better the company performs.

COVID has forced the majority of companies to work from home and highlighted to many employers the dual nature of a working woman’s careers. That said, pre-pandemic, many female CFOs said to me that their life was a constant balancing act of whom to disappoint more – their partners, kids, or friends. Senior women rarely disappoint their employers, just like their male peers.

During the executive search processes we run, Boards will actively seek diversity,

though in a risk adverse hiring market, like the one that we are in, many end up choosing proven Board experience over and above stepping up talent. It is widely publicised that there are more men in those roles than there are women, and so the balance is again not restored, further facilitating the lack of Board experienced women.

Cristina Catania Unfortunately, this underrepresentation of women in senior roles isn’t exclusive to finance – it’s a similar picture in business management and strategy. But, prior to COVID, concentrated efforts were making some gains. Across all industries, we’ve seen women’s representation in the C-suite increase by 24% since 2015, including some notable appointments in the financial sector, like Jane Fraser at Citi. There is, however, a broken rung at the very bottom of the corporate ladder that is stalling progress.

Our annual Women in the Workplace study of women in North America shows that for every 100 men, just 72 women are promoted and hired to manager. Women get stuck at the entry level and fewer become managers. Not businesschief.asia

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“ The more diverse your management team, the more engaged your workforce, and the better your customers are being looked after – in short. You are better informed of the world, you tend not to miss trends, making your balance sheet stronger and your organisation run more efficiently” JULIA VAN DEN BOSCH WAZEN

CONSULTANT, ODGERS BERNDTSON’S CFO PRACTICE

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surprisingly, men then end up holding 62% of manager-level positions, while women hold just 38%. The number of women decreases at every subsequent level, so despite improved hiring and promotion rates for women at senior levels, they aren’t able to catch up.

Hanady Khalife One would assume this is a problem most prevalent in the Middle East but it is global. A National Bureau of Economic Research study from Denmark found that even at the height of their careers, women tend to spend more time raising children, and so work fewer hours, take longer breaks from full-time employment, and are more likely to move into less demanding jobs with lower growth and less pay.

Other reasons include the pay gap, lack of mentorship and coaching, and aggressive

CORPORATE FINANCE

competition by male colleagues, as well as lack of female C-suite role models. When women don’t see role models or potential paths towards executive-level leadership, they are more likely to deselect themselves out of such roles.

Maggie Xu In research, we identified four critical barriers for women seeking leadership. Firstly, men and women define effective leadership differently, while women leadership candidates tend to be evaluated by men. This misalignment in key leadership traits between the genders creates obstacles to women rising to leadership roles. In China, although significant increase in the ratio of companies with female executives has been observed during the decade, extensive research indicates that the rate for female

CEO remains very low, and CEOs are critical in assessing the performance of CFO candidates.

Secondly, women’s focus or predisposition toward results, along with a dislike of ‘networking for networking’s sake,’ may cause them to miss an important dimension of what ultimately impacts leadership promotion decisions. We also discovered that qualified women are unintentionally left on the sidelines, partly because women are simply not top of mind, and so are less likely to self-advocate and must battle inaccurate assumptions related to their willingness to take on more intense roles.

Also, men and women perceive their readiness for the next role very differently, and most companies do not actively mitigate that bias at play. A woman often won’t apply to a job unless she feels she meets 100% of the described qualifications, while for men, it’s more like 60% and as we all know, raising one’s hand does not necessarily equate with capability.

Finally, research shows women are more likely to have ideas mis-attributed to others, be talked over in meetings, receive vague or unconstructive feedback, and be viewed negatively for visibly demonstrating the same confidence that is valued in male leaders.

Many high potential women, weary of bias, exit the talent pipeline, either opting out of the workforce or choosing a different career.

How can organisations and leaders motivate, empower and facilitate women in reaching CFO status?

Julia van den Bosch Wazen Mentorship from senior colleagues is vital in helping women to navigate the mid-point of their career. Our philosophy in the CFO Practice facilitates that same ethos: we want to help advise women early on to help build careers toward the three-stage interview businesschief.asia

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CORPORATE FINANCE

process they will face when stepping up to their first Main Board role. A financial management career for a listed CFO role needs to be built to answer the questions a CEO will pose (do you have commercial and operational P&L experience to be my partner in setting strategic goals); the Audit Chair (will you give me comfort in your technical financial management skills to assure that the business will not have to restate its numbers); and the Chair (do you keep my CEO ‘in check’, and will you let my Audit Chair rest easy at night).

There are a number of roles within the finance function I strongly encourage women to take en route to Board, to gather experience against the above criteria. I also urge women to do more external networking.

I’ve set up bi-annual women’s networking lunches giving senior female talent the opportunity to hear how experienced finance leaders have successfully developed their careers. These have been well-received and have now broadened out to both our Regional CFO and Financial Services Practices to help deepen the advice shared.

When selecting a headhunting firm, I would urge that you ask what they are doing to support the D&I agenda during the pitch process. Your candidate list might well be diverse, but if you see that those who are looking likely to be shortlisted are all nondiverse, check why, and what can be actioned based on feedback.

Cristina Catania Talent attraction is the first step to sustaining a pipeline to fill CFO roles long term. For finance, there is a need to create multiple role model examples to inspire young women to join this career path, which is increasingly at the centre of key company decision-making. We know from our study that when employees believe that their company offers both fairness and 86

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CORPORATE FINANCE

“In China, although significant increase in the ratio of companies with female executives has been observed during the decade, extensive research indicates that the rate for female CEO remains very low, and CEOs are critical in assessing the performance of CFO candidates” MAGGIE XU

PRINCIPAL, GREATER CHINA FINANCIAL SERVICES PRACTICE, OLIVER WYMAN

opportunity, they are three times more likely to remain at the company, be fully engaged and recommend the company to a peer. What we know about the experiences of women at entry levels in financial services indicates that a perceived lack of fairness and opportunity could be contributing to the steep drop-off in female representation between entry-level and middle management roles.

Specifically, women early in their careers are less likely to aspire to top positions.

This could be due to a lack of female role models, but women also report less interest in executive roles due to concerns about balancing work and family and the perceived pressure that accompanies top jobs. Even when women do aspire to the top positions, they typically do not receive the sponsorship support that would enable them to succeed.

Our 2017 Women in the Workplace research shows that women who receive advice from senior leaders on career advancement are more likely to be promoted, and yet earlier-tenure women receive less encouragement and support from senior leaders than do their male counterparts.

The programmes that are showing impact in creating a sustainable pipeline of women start with the creation of a more ‘inclusive’ workplace, created through HR parental businesschief.asia

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CORPORATE FINANCE

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policies (applicable also to fathers, which in turn allows for shared parental responsibilities) and doubling-down on additional welfare services like in-office daycare.

Other measures include removing gender biases in assessing criteria for being eligible for a promotion, flexibility arrangements, leveraging maternity as an upskilling moment, the introduction of sponsorship programmes, and measuring and publishing target setting.

And all steps need to be truly sponsored and promoted by the CEO and cascaded throughout the whole organisation.

Hanady Khalife Increasing opportunities for women to advance to leadership roles in the organisation begins with understanding the internal pipeline to identify barriers and obstacles to advancement and in turn, establishing measurable goals for building equity.

Organisations need to develop corporate cultures that support women who wish to achieve a healthy work/life balance, rather than breed cultures that penalises them for attempting to balance priorities. But while firms need to focus on more affirmative action to ensure gender equality, whether through quotas or recruitment programmes, they also need to pay more attention to how women can be mentored better to keep pace with new and emerging industry requirements.

Maggie Xu Organisations can be more purposeful in levelling the playing field for women, and by changing the emphasis from fixing things bottom up to top-down, effects will take place faster. We believe there are three core elements in this effort: inclusive leadership starts at the top, so educate your existing leadership and motivate them to be change agents; target D&I like a business to get more results; and double down on sponsorship, improving the effectiveness of senior leaders’ sponsorship of the women. businesschief.asia

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DIALOG AXIATA

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WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK

Dialog Axiata: Customer-focused digital transformation WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK businesschief.asia

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Sandra De Zoysa

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Sandra De Zoysa of Dialog Axiata is presiding over an ongoing digital transformation to better understand, serve, digitise and delight the customer

S

ince its foundation in 1993, Sri Lankan mobile operator Dialog has gone from upstart underdog to the country’s leading communications brand.

Dialog– a part of the Axiata Group, a panAsian telecommunications conglomerate operating in seven countries– grew its position throughout the decades by outperforming the competition in a few key areas which have formed the keystone values underpinning everything the company does.

“People come first, but technology is a close second,” says Sandra De Zoysa, Group Chief Customer Officer at Dialog Axiata.

“We believe that people come first– our customers and employees and regardless of what area of the business you are involved in– be it engineering, legal, marketing, or any other – all employees need to find a way to connect back to the customers we serve.”

“ People come first, but technology is a close second” SANDRA DE ZOYSA

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, DIALOG AXIATA

De Zoysa, who has been a part of the team at Dialog Axiata since 1997, has played an instrumental role in delivering on that ethos for more than two decades. We sat down with her to discuss her insights into leveraging the latest technologies, strategies and operational practices into a customer experience that will ensure Dialog Axiata continues “to be not only the most valuable brand, but the most loved brand in Sri Lanka.”

Digital Transformation from Top to Bottom “Our digital transformation journey started over five years ago. This initiative was envisioned by Axiata and then passed down across the whole subsidiary group,” explains De Zoysa. Axiata gathered together the senior leadership teams responsible for its brands in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal, for a series of workshops and seminars that not only laid out a roadmap for the coming years, but helped to instill a unified digital mindset that its executive teams are continuing to disseminate throughout their organisations.

“Looking back on those workshops five years later, they helped us so much,” recalls De Zoysa. “As a team, we had a cohesive vision and tackled the project in sync.

We all knew what we were supposed to businesschief.asia

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Sandra De Zoysa | Dialog Axiata

“ We're really in sync with Axiata in terms of our goals and approach… We all learn from one another’s challenges and failures, because we're all part of the same ecosystem, which is really wonderful” SANDRA DE ZOYSA

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, DIALOG AXIATA

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do. We all knew what we had to achieve.

We understood our budgets and how to spend it. And we all had the same level of understanding and knowledge of how to set about the process.”

Throughout Dialog’s own digital transformation, De Zoysa reflects that both Axiata and the other brands within the family have been an immensely valuable resource, as they have learned from one another’s failures and challenges, shared information and technology, and collaborated on creating market leading standards for customer experience. “We're really in sync with Axiata in terms of our goals and approach. The relationship between Dialog, Axiata and the other companies within our organisation is so close that sometimes you forget you're talking and working with people in other countries and markets because it all feels so collaborative and cooperative,” De Zoysa says. “We share innovations and technologies throughout Axiata. If something

DIALOG AXIATA

works at Dialog, it will likely be tweaked a little bit and then implemented somewhere else in the group. It is as good as plug-andplay, which reduces the workload and time to market. At the same time, we all learn from one another’s challenges and failures, because we're all part of the same ecosystem, which is really wonderful.”

SANDRA DE ZOYSA TITLE: GROUP CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS LOCATION: SRI LANKA

1993

Year founded

$120.1 bn Revenue

2,717 Number of employees

EXECUTIVE BIO

Service From the Heart At the core of Dialog Axiata’s approach to delivering truly seamless, enjoyable customer experiences is the company’s core ethos of “Service From the Heart”. “It stands for approaching every customer interaction with passion. It stands for being sincere and putting the customer first, not just paying lip service to the idea,” says De Zoysa. “We've really worked hard over the years on this culture transformation initiative.”

The idea of not only talking the talk, but walking the walk, is one that’s deeply important to De Zoysa. One of the more unique ways in which she and the whole Dialog leadership team are backing up this commitment can be found in the “Contact Us” section of their site.

“If you go on our website, you can find the contact information for our CEO, the CMO, many of the people on our leadership team,

Sandra De Zoysa is the Group Chief Customer Officer of Dialog and the Chairperson of the Digital Customer Experience Expert Working Group for Axiata. She serves on the board of Dialog Business Services in the capacity of a Director. She is a Founding member and a Director of SLASSCOM, the national IT-BPO chamber of Sri Lanka and a founding member and past Vice President of Sri Lanka Institute of Service Management. She is also on the Customer Advisory Board of CX Network, IQPC UK. Sandra’s experience spans over 30 years in the Mobile Industry during which she has been the recipient of AX50– Ambient Experience Leader 2020, CX Leader of the Year 2019 & CXPA Global CX Impact Award Winner 2015.

She is a Certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and a visiting lecturer at the University of Colombo School of Computing since 2009 and a Mentor and Keynote Speaker/ Presenter/ Panelist and Juror at Global CE/DX/Telco Forums/ Conferences & Awards

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DIALOG AXIATA

“ Service From the Heart means approaching every customer interaction with passion and sincerity” SANDRA DE ZOYSA

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, DIALOG AXIATA

and me,” De Zoysa says. “My mobile number can be accessed. You can call and, if I'm not sleeping, there's a good chance I will answer and be able to talk to you about whatever is troubling you in case there is a lapse in service. It's our way of putting our money where our mouth is, and really walking the walk. I don't think there's much point in saying that you're a customer-centric business if your customers can't actually reach you.”

Dialog has invested heavily over the years in training staff throughout the business to fully embody the ethos of Service From the Heart, constantly reworking and developing processes in order to “cut away barriers businesschief.asia

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DIALOG AXIATA

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between us and our customers, and work to find solutions– even when there are difficulties and trouble.” De Zoysa adds that, “There's a lot of education involved, focused on instilling cultural change, rewiring our employees to really embrace the Service From the Heart ethos, as well as bringing them along with us on our journey as we digitally transform the business and Sri Lanka through our technology and processes.”

Leveraging Technology Technology is a powerful tool at Dialog Axiata, one that De Zoysa stresses must work in tandem with and in support of the core of the business: people.

“Technology plays a very vital role for us,” she explains. “We are leveraging a multitude of technologies to support our staff to work better and more efficiently.

We want to use these technologies to

make life easier for the people within our organisation. If we can make the employee experience frictionless, they can get on with better serving the customer.”

“ We work to gently educate our customers and nudge them towards more efficient digital and social channels” SANDRA DE ZOYSA

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, DIALOG AXIATA businesschief.asia

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DID YOU KNOW...

PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS

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Partnerships are also of paramount importance to De Zoysa and Dialog as a whole. “We have very strong ties with our long term business partners who together with us ensure our business success,” she explains. “They are all part of our wider Dialog family, who help in managing our customer channels efficiently.”

Dialog manages its contact center in collaboration with its key partner, Startek. “They ensure that our customers are connected to our brand,” says De Zoysa, adding that, “Locobuzz is our social media contact management solution provider. They help us manage all our social channels on a 24/7 basis.

Zilione is a Sri Lankan company that Dialog has worked with for well over two decades, and their Customer point of sale management keeps the customer experience across the country connected efficiently in order to handle all our customer experience transactions with ease.

Dialog has worked with Verint in the contact management space for over two decades and helps Dialog Business Services with voice logging and associate quality management as well as a robust workforce management solution.”

During COVID, Dialog is first to deploy Verint Speech Analytics to process and analyze customer interactions to drive CX and Operational Efficiency.

Together with its extensive network of partners, Dialog continues to grow and improve the range of digital channels it uses to connect with its millions-strong customer base.

June 2021

DIALOG AXIATA

“ In this post-COVID, work-from-home era, data is like oxygen. Without connectivity, you're in deep trouble” SANDRA DE ZOYSA

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, DIALOG AXIATA

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Dialog Axiata’s Customer Engagement transformed by ZILLIONe

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MALDIVES

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AUSTRALIA | SINGAPORE

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DIALOG AXIATA

From an external point of view, Dialog employs a wide range of customer channels to ensure that people can access the services they need, whenever, wherever, and however they prefer. Though a lot of these preferences are linked across generational lines, with “millennial customers preferring self service and digital channels, as opposed to older customers who would rather speak to someone on the phone or face to face,” De Zoysa adds that “more and more, we're seeing people from older generations realise that it is in fact faster to use a self-service channel to pay your bill. We try to make sure

DIALOG AXIATA

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Contact us about Speech Analytics now

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that, whatever channel you want to use, is available to you. And then of course we work to gently educate our customers and nudge them towards more efficient social and digital channels.”

These digital channels have proven to be particularly essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, but De Zyosa adds that, as the crisis passes, she expects its effect on the digitalisation of Sri Lankan society to remain.

“In this post-COVID, work-from-home era, data is like oxygen. Without connectivity, you're in deep trouble,” she says. “During the pandemic, the program has been all about engagement, looking at how we continuously build engagement between our employees and our customers– looking at how we keep that flame alive during times like these when physical engagement is no longer an option.”

Staying on Top As Dialog Axiata enters Q2 of 2021, De Zoysa is excited to continue building on the company’s relationship with over 16mn Sri Lankans as part of her role as the company’s “custodian of customers,” concluding that, “We want to continue helping our customers adapt to a digital lifestyle and help them carry on experiencing those benefits long after the pandemic has passed.”

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BUSINESS STRATEGIES FOR A SUCCESSFUL SHIFT TO HYBRID WORKING

DIGITAL STRATEGY

With hybrid the new remote, how can organisations across Asia Pacific compete for the best talent, drive innovation, maintain engagement, and create an inclusive work environment?

WRITTEN BY: KATE BIRCH

T

he future is hybrid. That’s according to Microsoft’s latest research, 70% of APAC employees want the flexible remote work options to continue. But the move to hybrid, a blended model where some employees return to the workplace and others continue to work from home, could be a challenging one, with teams becoming increasingly siloed and digital exhaustion a tangible threat.

And with 47% of Asia’s workforce considering changing employers in 2021, a thoughtful approach to hybrid working is critical for leaders looking to attract and retain diverse talent.

“Adapting to this new hybrid model will require rethinking of long-held assumptions,” asserts Rosalind Quek, General Manager, Modern Workplace, Microsoft Asia. “The choices you make today will impact your organisation for years to come… everything from how you shape culture, to how you attract and retain talent, to how you can better foster collaboration and innovation.”

We take a deep dive into Microsoft’s latest 2021 Work Trend Index (a study of thousands of people across 14 Asia Pacific countries and data-driven analysis of trillions of signals across Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn) to reveal the trends shaping hybrid working across APAC and the strategies business leaders can use to rewire their operating model for a successful shift to hybrid. businesschief.asia

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DIGITAL STRATEGY

STRATEGY 1 :

INVEST IN SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY TO BRIDGE PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL WORLDS The Facts: Employees across APAC want the best of both worlds: 73% want flexible remote work options to continue, yet 67% crave more in-person time with their teams.

The Strategy: While reliance solely on offices to collaborate, connect, and build social capital is gone, physical space will still be important for connecting, brainstorming, and office space will need to bridge the physical and digital worlds. Most businesses will require a mix of collaboration, meeting, and focus space, and spaces that encourage social interactions.

Gale Moutrey, VP of Workplace Innovation at Steelcase, says the company’s research shows that, second only to proper safety measures, workers expect a post-pandemic office to be an energetic space with a sense of community they can’t get working from home. “If workers can’t get both of these things by commuting into the office, there’s going to be a gravitational pull to work from home, because on the surface, it just seems easier,” Moutrey says.

Office space now extends to thinking about work from home with research showing 42% lack office essentials, and one in 10 without an adequate internet connection. “Along with physical spaces, organisations need to invest in technology that enables people to fully participate from home, in the office, on the go, and from the manufacturing floor. This includes creating inclusive meetings experiences where everyone can contribute regardless of location,” says Microsoft 365 Corporate VP, Jared Spataro, pointing to Microsoft’s vision of altered meeting room layouts which include “the addition of multiple screens to create dynamic views of participants, chat, whiteboards, content, and notes.”

Gale Moutrey VP of Workplace Innovation Steelcase

“Company research shows that, second only to proper safety measures, workers expect a post-pandemic office to be an energetic space with a sense of community they can’t get working from home.”

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STRATEGY 2 :

COMBAT DIGITAL EXHAUSTION FROM THE TOP The Facts: 54% of employees in Asia are feeling overworked, with 39% exhausted (48% in Japan) and 39% stressed (45% in Japan). Australia and China are the only two APAC countries where weekly meeting times haven’t tripled.

The Strategy: Addressing digital exhaustion is a priority and leaders must embrace a balance of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Dr Sean Rintel, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, suggests confronting the ‘meetingisation’ of work head-on. “We’re operating in a new world but many of us are still doing things the way we always did. We need

Dr Mary Donohue Founder The Digital Wellness Center

“In digital, information is overwhelming and can lead to a constant state of panic…you need to make a quiet space in your day to allow your brain to distil the constant flow of information.”

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to completely rethink our digital processes,” he says, suggesting that more dynamic, creative, or emotional topics may require a meeting, whereas informational, status, and technical topics may benefit from more long-form document collaboration, a Teams channel, or email. And other simple tasks can be handled by chat. He recommends actively thinking about how to introduce more asynchronous collaboration, so employees spend less time in unproductive meetings, giving employees more flexibility, creating more time for focused work, reducing fatigue, and giving them time and energy to bring “their best selves to work”.

Secondly, embrace a culture where breaks are encouraged and respected. Research shows that employees who feel more productive are more likely to take exercise or stretch breaks.

Founder of The Digital Wellness Center, Dr Mary Donohue, says breaks are even more important in a remote and hybrid world. “In digital, information is overwhelming and can lead to a constant state of panic. When this happens, you need to make a quiet space in your day to allow your brain to distil the constant flow of information. We all have ideas; the key is giving our brains some time and space to form them.”

STRATEGY 3:

REBUILD SOCIAL CAPITAL The Facts: Anonymised collaboration trends between billions of Outlook emails and Microsoft Teams meetings reveal that the shift to remote has shrunk our networks, especially distant networks and doing so is endangering innovation. Since the onset of the pandemic, 35% of workers in Asia

DIGITAL STRATEGY

experienced decreased interactions with co-workers and 67% say they crave more in-person time with their teams.

The Strategy: Broadening networks takes effort anytime but is much harder in a hybrid world as interactions feel less natural and take more effort. However, the data shows that rebuilding social capital and culture is inextricably linked to successful business outcomes, like productivity, sales, creativity, and innovation, and mustn’t be ignored. “When you lose connections, you stop innovating. It’s harder for new ideas to get in and groupthink becomes a serious possibility,” explains Dr Nancy Baym, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft.

So, how to address it? Leaders must look for ways to foster the social capital, cross-team collaboration, and spontaneous ideasharing that’s driven workplace innovation for decades.

The first step is reframing team building and bonding from a passive effort to a proactive one and expanding the networks which have contracted. Encourage teams to seek out diverse perspectives from neighbouring teams, share learnings far and wide, and check for groupthink often. Leaders should also encourage and reward managers to build social capital. “We found people who reported working at companies that encourage and reward social support with bonuses or other incentives were more likely to feel satisfied with their jobs,” says Baym. They also report

Dr Nancy Baym Senior Principal Researcher Microsoft

“We found people who reported working at companies that encourage and reward social support with bonuses or other incentives were more likely to feel satisfied with their jobs.” higher quality social interactions, crucial to high-functioning teams.

Finally, advises Baym, create a culture where social capital thrives. Cultivating a culture of kindness, fun, and cooperative collaboration is just as important to the bottom line as the work. “Organisations need to understand that being nice to each other, chatting with each other, and goofing around is part of the work that we do. They are not a distraction or unproductive. They feed productivity and nurture the soil from which people will produce ideas.” businesschief.asia

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STRATEGY 4 :

REIMAGINE HIRING FOR THE BEST AND MOST DIVERSE TALENT

Is Asia digitally exhausted?

The digital work increases across Asia between February 2020 and February 2021, according to Microsoft:

148%

on women’s careers than men’s, and that women have been disproportionately leaving the labour market since the pandemic started,” explains LinkedIn Chief Economist, Karen Kimbrough. The good news is that employers can help by “actively seeking female talent, removing bias from job descriptions, and offering more flexibility to allow for a better work-life balance.”

Similar logic creates opportunities for other struggling groups.

Increase in meeting times for Teams’ users

66%

Increase in number of people working on Office documents

45%

Increase in weekly Teams chats per person

The Facts One of the brightest sides of the shift to remote work is that it widens the talent marketplace, with 50% of employees in Australia and New Zealand likely to move to a new location because now they can work remotely.

The Strategy CHROs must reimagine hiring and onboarding in a hybrid world. Embracing extreme flexibility will be critical in retaining and attracting the top talent. With remote work positions more often preferred by women and Gen Z workers, flexible work is an amazing opportunity for leaders to create a more diverse workforce. “Our data from around the world shows that COVID19 has likely had a more damaging impact 112

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Karin Kimbrough Chief Economist LinkedIn

“As opportunity is democratised with remote work and talent movement, we’ll see a spread of skills… and this is the time for business leaders to take the opportunity to access different skills and talent not previously available to them.”

DIGITAL STRATEGY

STRATEGY 5 :

RETHINK EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE TO COMPETE FOR TALENT

Kathleen Hogan Chief People Officer Microsoft

“At Microsoft, our managers follow a framework to Model, Coach, Care, and we’ve seen measurable positive impact for remote employees when managers model wellbeing, coach employees on setting priorities and show care and support for each individual member of their team” The Facts 47% of workers in Asia are considering changing employers. More digital work, and the stress of the pandemic has left many employees feeling overworked and disconnected. With Gen Z more likely to be single and early in their careers, research shows they are also more likely to struggle balancing work with life and report difficulties feeling engaged or excited about work, getting a word in during meetings, and offering new ideas.

The Strategy HR leaders should consider how wellness programmes and work policies affect each group: wellness days can normalise taking

time off, or look to investments in increased access to therapy, subsidised daycare for working parents and flexible schedules.

And as the shift to hybrid arrives, the need for an employee experience platform that brings wellbeing, knowledge, engage­ment, and learning together in a digital world is critical.

With Gen Z most as risk, HR leaders should rethink onboarding and double down on support for employees early in their career to ensure their ideas are heard and that they can contribute fully. Cohort-based onboarding programs can also be redesigned, for instance, to ensure they foster connection and community. Kathleen Hogan, Chief People Officer, Microsoft, points to the positive impact that the company’s Model, Coach, Care framework has on employees.

Hybrid is the future Research from Microsoft’s latest 2021 Work Trend Index:

66%

Leaders who say their company is considering redesigning office space for hybrid work

73%

Employees who want flexible remote work options to stay

67%

Employees who want more in-person work or collaboration post-pandemic businesschief.asia

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

FROM BOARD TO WARD WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE

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Sandip Kumar of Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service talks transformation, innovation, change management and the future of digital healthcare

Sandip Kumar, Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service

I

n a time of generational change across the healthcare sector driven by advances in everything from telemedicine to the artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics - the COVID-19 pandemic has kicked the sector into overdrive.

For Sandip Kumar, the inaugural Executive Director of Transformation and Digital at Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service, it’s been a time of unprecedented opportunity.

Kumar, who joined Gold Coast Health close to the tipping point of the crisis, reflects that the most important thing now is to preserve the industry’s momentum.

If that can be done, then Kumar and his contemporaries have the chance to make some truly transformative changes to the way technology is leveraged into a better standard of patient care.

“In the midst of the pandemic, we turned the 'should dos' into 'must dos', and now we need to figure out which of those innovations are truly sustainable in a business as usual sense,” he says. “If we maintain that relentless ambition to adopt new and better ways of working at the scale we have done, we're set to do big things in 2021.”

Guiding the Transformation Kumar’s role, he explains, involves spinning a lot of plates. “It's a really exciting role,” he enthuses. “I have four core streams that I businesschief.asia

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GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE

Sandip Kamur

oversee: the Transformation Advisory division, the Transformation Office, the Digital Services branch, and the Health Funding and Clinical Coding Branch.”

The Transformation Advisory Branch places a small, interdisciplinary team of dedicated advisors alongside both clinical and nonclinical staff to identify and solve the kind of complex problems that can arise in a system as complex as a modern healthcare organisation with around AU$1.7bn of annual OpEx. “It's a very new model, which I designed when I started here and just recently implemented,” says Kumar. “Watching the doctors, nurses, allied health, digital advisors and other consultants all working together to gather up all the different problems that arise across those functions and look at all the different ways of solving them is really interesting.”

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approach solving them in new, more innovative and lateral ways. “We're not just solving analog problems with analog solutions, but looking at how technology can help solve problems, as well as whether we can apply different clinical models, or new ways that non-clinical staff can interact with this space,” he explains. “It really works.”

“ We need to make sure we're not bringing technology from 1998 into 2021” SANDIP KUMAR,

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF TRANSFORMATION AND DIGITAL, GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE

GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE

SANDIP KUMAR TITLE: EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE

Working in tandem with the Transformation Advisory, the Transformation Office is the power behind the vision the advisory provides. “It’s a team that's focused on figuring out how to deliver change,” says Kumar. “They're executors; trained product managers that know our system, know our methodology, know how to work with our executives, know how to work with our clinical leaders, and know how to execute projects that create meaningful change.” The two functions, working side by side, form an impactful model that Kumar has spent a significant portion of his career developing.

Now, he adds, “it's amazing that I've got the chance to implement it.”

Kumar is a relentless driver of change. The new methodologies he’s implemented are proving to be some of the foundational steps on the road to Gold Coast Health achieving the kind of meaningful transformative goals that have been set for it.

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: AUSTRALIA Sandip Kumar has served as the Executive Director for Transformation and Digital at Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service since August of 2020. He has previously held consulting and advisory roles at the Queensland Treasury Corporation and QSuper Group. Collectively, he brings 12 years of experience in management consulting, corporate finance, and strategy roles to the job.

He is the first person ever to hold the title at Gold Coast Health, and has broad responsibilities encompassing the digital transformation of the organisation and its operations, as well as the direction of its key partner relationships. Kumar leads several multi-disciplinary teams, delivering high-level strategic guidance for the developing relationship between Gold Coast Health and its digital capabilities.

He holds a Bachelor of Business from Queensland University of Technology, and a Graduate Diploma of Chartered Accounting.

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Telstra Health and Gold Coast Health: delivering virtual care

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Founded in 2013, Telstra Health works to improve lives by delivering digitally-enabled care to its communities by providing software products, solutions and platforms to governments and healthcare providers throughout Australia.

can monitor patients’ blood pressure, pulse oximetry, temperature and weight remotely.

These baseline metrics are then combined with a virtual appointment in which the clinician can follow-up with the patient to discuss and provide results.

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Telstra Health was chosen as a key partner “We’ve found that our service has helped to of Gold Coast Health Services, providing dramatically reduce readmission rates, and their virtual health consultation platform enabled early discharge, which means that as a way to deliver patient care remotely. patients get to be at home sooner,” enthuses “Traditionally, you might go to see a Spencer, who also notes that, “The overarching specialist at a hospital and, after a five monitoring aspect can also help people who minute conversation, be sent home,” Jamie readmission get back into hospital Find outneed what Australia’s digitisation Spencer, Regional General Manager opportunity sooner,means which can a huge difference formake Health.

Business Development at Telstra Health in some cases.” says. “Someone living in rural Queensland Spencer, who works closely with Sandip Kumar, might drive for up to four to six hours for Download today Gold Coast Health’s Executive Director of that five minute appointment. Now, rather Transformation and Digital, emphasises that than people having to make those long the relationship between Telstra Health and journeys to see a specialist, we can provide Gold Coast is far more than that of vendor that consultation to people in their own and client. “We’re looking for a real partner, homes, in a way that leads to a richer not just a customer.” conversation, which results in better feedback and, ultimately, a better standard of care.”

Telstra Health’s virtual care technology adopts a twofold approach. First, using Bluetooth connected devices, clinicians

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“Our digital transformation program agenda has a number of established goals,” he explains. “Number one is to be best-inclass for clinical demand management, both internally and externally. Then, we're also looking at clinical teaming and innovation, value-added corporate non-clinical functions, and becoming a digitally-enabled health service, which where our D24 roadmap comes into play.”

The Road to D24 Gold Coast Health is splitting its digital roadmap, D24, across six key areas: virtual healthcare, data and analytics, digital liberation, digital assets, change management and digital literacy, and its ecosystem of essential technology partners.

“Virtual healthcare is focused on cultivating our ability to deliver care that isn't contingent on the physical placement of the patient and the clinician,” Kumar says.

“It’s everything that doesn’t require a faceto-face interaction in a clinic; It's telehealth, remote patient monitoring, population healthcare campaigns - all of that.”

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Secondly, Kumar is driving the exploration and adoption of more data analytics capabilities than ever before, in order to help Gold Coast Health not only understand information and make better decisions, but to generate valuable insights into where the organisation is headed.

In order to fully unlock the potential of advanced data analytics, Gold Coast Health is trading heavily on one of its closest and most-valuable partners. “The founders of Healthcare Logic used to work for Gold Coast Health,” remarks Kumar. “They had this concept for a tool that visualised data in a meaningful way that clinicians, rather than just data analysts, could understand and use to make decisions.” Over the course of a partnership so close that Kumar says they might as well be “joined at the hip”, Healthcare Logic has developed its platform into an internationally recognised data visualisation and analytics tool, and Gold

GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE

Coast Health has been with them every step of the way. “Healthcare Logic is a tool that helps people really understand their business. It helps clinicians understand who's on their waiting lists, whether there's a supply vs demand deficit, theatre efficiency, and so on,” Kumar says.

“They provide us with real insight into our business, and we provide them with feedback that helps them evolve their product and take it to the next level.”

Kumar is quick to emphasise just how essential the efficiencies that Healthcare Logic’s marquee product, Systemview, are to meeting growing demand for patient care. “Our demand is far outweighed by our supply. Every minute of lost productivity in clinical time is another minute that someone isn't getting cared for, and Systemview helps us ensure we're helping as many people as possible as best we can,” he says.

“ Every minute of lost productivity in clinical time is another minute that someone isn't getting cared for, and Systemview helps us ensure we're helping as many people as possible as best we can” SANDIP KUMAR,

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF TRANSFORMATION AND DIGITAL, GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE businesschief.asia

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GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE

“ If we maintain our relentless ambition to adopt new and better ways of working at the scale we have done, we're set to do big things in 2021” SANDIP KUMAR,

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF TRANSFORMATION AND DIGITAL, GOLD COAST HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SERVICE

Beyond data analytics, the D24 roadmap is focused on a concept Kumar refers to as Digital Liberation. “It’s a really interesting facet of D24,” he says. “What that means is we're trying to liberate our staff from the need to do mundane tasks, which frees them up to do more high-value work,” something he admits is easier said than done. “If you're a clinician, we obviously want to liberate you from having to spend four days filling out rosters, or hours every day filling out forms, but we also want to liberate our admin staff.”

The fourth area of D24 involves making intelligent choices about Gold Coast’s Digital Assets. “We have ageing buildings and ageing infrastructure, both physical and digital, and we want to make smart decisions about how

Lumina and GCHKP “At the Gold Coast Health, we have all the necessary components to really be something different in the technologydriven healthcare world. On site we have a university hospital, which is public. We have a globally-renowned university literally 100 metres down the road. Go 100 metres down the road in the other direction and you have a nationally renowned private hospital.

And right beside it, we have an emerging opportunity in the form of a health and knowledge precinct. That's a space in which we're looking to create a truly innovative digital healthcare hub.

“It's a mixture of state and privately owned assets, and what we're looking to do in that space is use it as an anchor to bring digital healthcare innovators of all sizes into our proximity for high-tech industry development, research collaboration and jobs of the future.” businesschief.asia

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to maintain and sustain them in the long term,” he laughs. “We need to make sure we're not bringing technology from 1998 into 2021.”

The fifth stream is, Kumar admits, one of the most essential. Any technological shift, he explains, needs to be met with the right change management strategy. As a result, Kumar is placing a great deal of his focus on ensuring that he cultivates the necessary degree of digital literacy that will allow Gold Coast Health’s staff to embrace digital transformation. “One of the biggest challenges that all CIOs will have to face is not which innovations to adopt, but how to make sure that their staff are ready and able to digest them,” he says. “There's no point serving lamb to a vegetarian.”

Lastly, Kumar stresses how important it is for any digital transformation team to realise that they can’t do everything alone. “We need strong technology partners to help us deliver our digital strategy, think more broadly, and adopt new tools, techniques and resources.”

Maintaining the Momentum Kumar has a long, ambitious road ahead of him, but he isn’t daunted. If anything, he wants to pick up the pace. “My keystone objective for this year is that we maintain the level of ambition to innovate that we showed in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis,” he explains. “The willingness and the drive to change is the part that matters most. From board to ward, here at Gold Coast Health, we're completely committed to innovation and digital health. We really look forward to not only driving it ourselves, but partnering at the hip with the organisations who are willing to go on this mission with us.”

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THE

BIGGEST

CYBER SECURITY THREAT TO YOUR ORGANISATION COULD BE YOU

Cybersecurity is a major source of anxiety to CEOs, but they still aren’t spending to tackle it. Business Chief discusses cyber urgency and complacency WRITTEN BY: KATE BIRCH

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ybersecurity has fast become a major source of anxiety to businesses worldwide and is now second only to the chaos caused by the pandemic.

That’s according to the most recent PwC Global CEO Survey, in which nearly half of CEOs cited cyber as the biggest anxiety in 2021, up from just 33% last year. And among CEOs in North America and Western Europe, it is the top business threat, and therefore the number-one priority for CEOs in North America (69%), Western Europe (44%), the Middle East (41%) and Asia (40%).

And there’s good reason for such concern, given the increase in high-visibility cyberattacks that have occurred since the onset of the pandemic, including 2020’s most significant – SolarWinds, with hacking of the US IT firm leaving its clients including the US government and Microsoft vulnerable for nine months.

There were many others though in 2020.

In March, a major security breach with 128

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Marriott International led to the data of more than 5.2 million guests being compromised.

In May, healthcare insurance giant Magellan suffered a ransomware attack with up to 365,000 patients impacted. And in July, someone took control of 130 high-profile Twitter accounts (Apple, Elon Musk, Barack Obama) and conned people into sending Bitcoin to an account.

Even as this is being written, “Acer, ironically a tech company, has just been hit by ransomware with the criminals demanding US$50 million”, Ira Winkler, CISO of Skyline Technology Solutions, and one of the world’s most influential security professionals, tells me.

Cyberattacks happen all the time, and more frequently, and they cause tremendous damage, says Winkler, pointing to the Wannacry virus where organisations around the world suffered crippling outages.

Many incidents have been serious enough to lead “to the firing of CEOs”, he adds.

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And while organisations “which are completely IT-based, like banks, have more dependence on cybersecurity”, all types and sizes of organisations can be at risk. “If you’re a small business and you cannot service your clients without computers, which these days includes everyone from restaurants to retail stores, you need to be concerned,” warns Winkler.

The statistics are scarier still. Since the onset of the pandemic, the FBI has reported that the number of complaints about cyberattacks to its Cyber Division is up as many as 4,000 a day, a 400% increase since the COVID-19 outbreak; Interpol is seeing an “alarming rate of cyberattacks aimed at major corporations, governments, and critical infrastructure”; and according to VMware Carbon Black’s latest Modern Bank Heists report, there has been a 118% surge in cyberattacks against banks since 2020.

It’s the sort of numbers that keep banking CEOs awake at night. Like Uday Kotak, CEO of India-based Kotak Mahindra Bank, who cites cybersecurity as the company’s greatest business threat. Having “witnessed increased fraud in the banking system” during the pandemic, Kotak explains that it is the threat

Ira Winkler TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION SECURITY OFFICER COMPANY: SKYLINE TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS Dubbed a ‘Modern Day James Bond’ by the media, a title he earned by performing espionage simulations where he physical and technically ‘broke into’ some of the largest companies in the world, investigating crimes against them, and telling them how to cost effectively protect their information and computer infrastructure, Winkler is considered one of the world’s most influential security professionals.

Starting out at the National Security Agency, Winkler has since designed and implemented support security awareness programs at organisations of all sizes, industry-wide and worldwide.

Jean-Michel Azzopardi TITLE: FOUNDER AND CEO COMPANY: KRALANX CYBER SECURITY Founder of Kralanx, a one-stop-shop for advanced cyber security services and consulting located in Malta, Azzopardi has worked with IBM, SAP and Acunetix and has negotiated cyber security deals with companies and governments across Asia including Apple, Huawei and some of the largest Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

Having been involved in a number of start-ups, he prides himself in striking a balance between corporate standards and SME efficiency.

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3 cybersecurity trends for 2021 These techniques, tools and approaches were revealed by analysts at Gartner’s Security & Risk Management Summit APAC in March. The summit is further planned globally: London and Florida, in September, and Tokyo in October.

Breach and Attack Simulation Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) tools are emerging to provide continuous defensive posture assessments. When CISOs include BAS as a part of their regular security assessments, they can help their teams identify gaps in their security posture more effectively and prioritise security initiatives more efficiently.

Privacy-Enhancing Computation These techniques protect data while it’s being used, rather than while it’s at rest or in motion, enabling secure data processing, sharing,

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cross-border transfers and analytics, even in untrusted environments. Implantations of this are on the rise in fraud analysis, intelligence, data sharing, financial services, pharma and healthcare, and Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of large organisations will adopt privacyenhancing computation for processing data.

Cybersecurity Mesh This is a modern security approach that consists of deploying controls where they are most needed. Rather than every security tool running in a silo, a cybersecurity mesh enables tools to interoperate by providing foundational security services and centralised policy management and orchestration. With many IT assets now outside traditional enterprise perimeters, a mesh architecture allows firms to extend security controls to distributed assets.

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In her first speech since taking the helm of the UK cybersecurity agency, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in March 2021, CEO Lindy Cameron warned against company complacency, saying that as “our reliance on technology grows, it sadly also presents opportunities for those who want to do us harm online”.

of a cyberattack and “the thought of losing my customers’ money to theft that keeps me up at night”.

Because as Kotak explains, “while COVID has brought about a significant increase in digital adoption and transactions, it has also increased the risk associated with digital”.

And with the shift to remote/hybrid working, the risks have been greater still, with many remote workers using insecure data transmission channels to transmit organisational data and organisations lacking in effective enterprise-grade firewalls, antivirus solutions and network security solutions.

Kralanx Cyber Security CEO, JeanMichel Azzopardi, explains that “information security has broached the frontline” due to the majority of employees now working remotely and this has therefore heavily increased “an enterprise’s risk and reliability on information security as a whole”.

Businesses not taking cybersecurity seriously And while our reliance on digital has become much greater, and companies are forging ahead with speedy digital transformations, according to Cameron, cybersecurity is still not taken as seriously as it should be.

And PwC’s research backs this up. While nearly half of CEOs are planning increases of 10% or more in their long-term investment in digital transformation, little is being put into cybersecurity technology. So, despite the level of concerns CEOs registered about cyberattacks, just under half of those planning for heightened digital investment are also planning to boost their spending on cybersecurity and data privacy by 10% or more.

This is not a surprise for Azzopardi, who says that cyber security generally falls quite low on most businesses’ priority list due to the fact that there’s “no quantifiable value generation from direct investment”. And despite the very real urgency, that priority is lower still now due to competing business priorities. “Unfortunately, with many companies cannibalising marketing budgets in order to retain employees, InfoSec has taken a back seat for the most part.”

Winkler says he is currently seeing businesses tactically implement security. “They are doing what is obviously required, such as work from home security, but for many companies, they need a strategic rearchitecting of their security, which just isn’t happening as much.” businesschief.asia

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Cybersecurity, says Cameron, should be viewed with the same importance to CEOs as finance and legal and “our CEOs should be as close to their CISO as their finance director and general counsel”.

Though the stats suggest this simply isn’t happening. In the financial sector, for example, the majority (75%) of CISOs still report to the CIO rather than the CEO, according to VMWare’s Bank Heist report.

Azzopardi agrees, telling Business Chief that while the CISO has certainly become more important than it was previously, it’s still not as important as it should be. “Most CISOs spend their time touting the importance of what it is they do, and the reality is that most advice offered by CISOs falls on deaf ears until there is actually a breach. They are the most underappreciated, and probably the most stressed of the C-suite.”

That’s assuming of course an organisation can find a CISO. According to Gartner’s Research VP Peter Firstbrook, “80% of organisations tell us they have a hard time finding and hiring security professionals, and 71% say it’s impacting their ability to deliver security projects within their organisations”.

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“ MOST CISOS SPEND THEIR TIME TOUTING THE IMPORTANCE OF WHAT IT IS THEY DO, AND THE REALITY IS THAT MOST ADVICE OFFERED BY CISOS FALLS ON DEAF EARS UNTIL THERE IS ACTUALLY A BREACH. THEY ARE THE MOST UNDER-APPRECIATED, AND PROBABLY THE MOST STRESSED OF THE C-SUITE” JEAN-MICHEL AZZOPARDI CEO, KRALANX CYBER SECURITY

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Most common mistakes businesses make Not prioritising the CISO role is just one of many mistakes that businesses are making today. According to Winkler, businesses generally don’t focus enough on the basics and often focus too much on the obvious when what is actually needed is for firms “to focus on the underlying architecture”.

He points not to a specific cyberattack, like ransomware or phishing, as major threats to businesses in the security landscape, but “enterprise ignorance”, along with a company’s lack of applying basic security protection. And this, Winkler explains, can lead to big incidents.

“The reality is that the basics matter, we call it cyber hygiene, so while everyone loves to talk about the hype of advanced attacks, it’s the simple things that are usually exploited to create the major incidents.

Small businesses are dealing more with end user related issues and have to work

From ransomware to doxware Ransomware attacks, where cybercriminals hold your computer data or network hostage until a ransom is paid, is a serious and growing threat for businesses, both in scale and severity, and isn’t just about fraud and theft of money or data, but also “the loss of key services and unenviable choices for unprepared businesses”, says Lindy Cameron, CEO of NCSC. And ransomware has upped its game during the pandemic, with attacks up 800%, according to cybersecurity firm MonsterCloud, with founder Zohar Pinhasi suggesting that criminals have now converted ransomware to something called doxware. "If you're not going to pay us, we will sell your data and, in addition to that, notify your customers that you were hacked and that their data was compromised,” says Pinhasi. “This is a game-changer since the coronavirus started – we've seen it in the past, but not to this degree." businesschief.asia

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Threats facing financial institutions in 2021 According to VMWare’s fourth annual Modern Bank Heists report (2021), while the financial services sector is probably one of the most secure, they are dealing with the “most sophisticated cybercrime cartels”, says VMware’s Head of Cybersecurity Strategy Tom Kellerman. Here are some of the increased risks for banks in the past year.

• Time stamp manipulation Criminals now know how to evade detection by manipulating time stamps, so financial institutions need to pay greater attention to securing the integrity of these stamps to ensure this method isn’t used to alter the value of capital or trades.

• Island hopping This increased 13% (excluding SolarWinds) in 2020 and

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happens when a hacker attacks an organisation within the large bank’s information supply chain and uses a third-party to ‘island hop’ onto the bank’s network. They are not limited to supplychain vendors or tech firms and once they are inside your infrastructure, will use that to get into your customers and partners’ systems too.

• Targeting Market Strategies Increase in attacks that target a bank’s non-public information and market strategies, suggesting says Kellerman, that cybercrime cartels have become more knowledgeable about the financial sector and know a banks’ non-public information is its most valuable asset.

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“WHILE EVERYONE LOVES TO TALK ABOUT THE HYPE OF ADVANCED ATTACKS, IT’S THE SIMPLE THINGS THAT ARE USUALLY EXPLOITED TO CREATE THE MAJOR INCIDENTS.” IRA WINKLER

CISO, SKYLINE TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

on PC security and good passwords, while large companies have to worry about infrastructure concerns.”

According to Azzopardi, one of the key mistakes that businesses make is believing that a hack can be detected instantly. The reality is that most companies take on average of six months to detect a data breach, even a major one, as the SolarWinds incident proved. Information such as passwords, credit card details and social security numbers may already be compromised by the time a company is notified.

Azzopardi also explains how businesses, big and small, simply don’t attribute enough importance to the human element. That’s despite the fact that 95% of cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error.

“The main point of attack is, and will probably always be, the human element.

It’s way easier to fool a human than it is to

brute force login credentials,” explains Azzopardi. “The main issue with phishing is that it’s almost impossible to use technology in order to prevent it, instead security awareness training is perhaps our best tool and since we rely on humans to execute such a task, we must assume a significant rate of failure. It is our imperfection after all that makes us human.”

So, what should businesses prioritise in 2021 and beyond? Azzopardi points to the basics such as antivirus, antimalware, password managers and revoking of admin rights as organisational musts. “Throw in mandatory VPN access, regular training and exercises such as BCP testing and your organisation would already be much better prepared than most,” he says.

He also says that API security is right up there with companies forced to make certain APIs public. As such, a priority for security teams is to “design a robust and effective API testing strategy that doesn’t impede development too much while balancing security”.

Finally, he predicts that ransomware will continue to rise, and that cryptojacking will explode. “This is basically the process of creating a bot-net which unknowingly mines crypto for a single wallet. This can be delivered via phishing quite effectively and you will never know it's even there.” businesschief.asia

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CELLCARD CAMBODIA

THE CAMBODIAN TELCO PLAYING THE GAME Cambodia’s only locally owned telco, Cellcard, is pushing into esports and 5G. CEO Ian Watson gives us the rundown on the company’s latest progress

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WRITTEN BY: PADDY SMITH PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK

ellcard is the only telco in Cambodia that’s 100% Cambodian owned. Not only is it proud of its homegrown heritage, it’s part of the company’s identity, outlook and market position.

“The Cambodian set of family values is at the core of everything we do,” says Cellcard’s CEO Ian Watson. “The European companies have strong brand association, but we always say you can’t be selfgoverned on the outside unless you’ve got Cellcard DNA on the inside. And every year we give a lot back to the customers.

We’re approaching millions of dollars in promotion, prizes and giveaways over the past couple of years, and we’ve signed Cambodian talent to endorse Cellcard, and we’ve installed 5G telemedicine – free voice and data calls to doctors, nurses and medical staff – to help with Covid.” businesschief.asia

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“ We’re stronger together, encouraging joy and the main thing is pride” IAN WATSON

CEO, CELLCARD CAMBODIA

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And Covid isn’t the only adversity to have struck Cambodia in 2020. The country also suffered fatal floods. Yet Cellcard is committed to youth engagement. “We’ve suffered a lot this year in terms of the flooding and we’ve produced a new song celebrating the strength and resilience of the people out there. We’re stronger together, encouraging joy and the main thing is pride.”

That youth engagement goes beyond marketing, though. Watson admits Cellcard was late to market with 4G LTE, but is determined it will be first to achieve full 5G coverage in Cambodia. And that’s not all, because the company has spotted a new opportunity: e-sports.

CELLCARD CAMBODIA

IAN WATSON TITLE: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER COMPANY: CELLCARD CAMBODIA

EXECUTIVE BIO

INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATION Ian Watson is widely known in the telecommunications industry as a leading evangelist and thought leader for 5G and Digitalisation. He was awarded for 5G Asia CEO of the Year in 2018 and is regulary featured in major business and ICT industry publications including The CEO Magazine, Asia Outlook, The Silicon Review, Global Brands Magazine, and others.

He is also a regular keynote speaker at major industry events such as Mobile World Congress, Telecom World Asia, 5G Asia, and TM Forum.

Ian has been CEO of Cellcard and CEO of the Royal Group ICT Division since 2012 following his successful turnaround of Cambodia’s leading specialised bank, Wing Money.

He actively drives collaboration and synergies across the ICT operations in readiness for a digitalised economy.

The ICT Division consists of Telecom, Specialised Banking, an Internet Service Provider, Cambodia’s leading Broadcasting company, and a Digital TV Platform all of which has enormous potential for transformation and growth.

Prior to his leadership role at Wing Money, Ian had located to Cambodia to establish Refresh Mobile, the first provider of virtual commerce platforms.

This was after a successful career in telecommunications, including being Chief Operating Officer of Iris Wireless for five years and senior leadership roles with Orange in global markets for six years.

Ian is an MBA graduate and resides both in Cambodia and the UK.

Becoming a road builder of the digital economy

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CELLCARD CAMBODIA

Cellcard Mobile World Congress 2021

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“Sixty per cent of the Cambodian population is under 30,” Watson says.

“So you have this segment that can drive a lot of revenue for telcos. We realised from the research and industry trends that esports was becoming a huge phenomenon in Cambodia. So we said, what can we do to bring this to the youth? And the answer is in the network: consistency, low latency.

It’s not just about the price: it’s about the consistency, quality and everything else.”

Cellcard has launched Play Game, an online gaming platform. “And we’re getting it right. We want to say: we’ve got this. Is it relevant to you? And if it’s not, we go back to the teardown. Bring it down and build it back up.

Did Watson look to other territories before launching Play Game on home soil? “Yeah, we looked at competitive benchmarking, and what worked in other markets around the world. But really the key for us was to undertake very detailed market research: what do they do, where do they eat, what do they eat, who do they eat with. Who is who in the gaming community. And what we tried to do was build a community of esports and gamers and make that relevant to their current

“We’re getting it right.

We want to say: we’ve got this. Is it relevant to you?”

IAN WATSON

CEO, CELLCARD CAMBODIA businesschief.asia

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1997

Year Cellcard was founded

600

Approximate number of employes currently working for Cellcard

4G LTE

In 2017 Cellcard rolled out the country's fastest and widest 4G LTE network

5G

In 2020, Cellcard rolled out Cambodia's first 5G use case - a telemedicine service across four key health facilities in Phnom Penh to help cope with the Covid-19 pandemic

IAN WATSON ON CULTURE GROUP We’ve been working with Culture Group out of Singapore for about 18 months now. It’s a strong fruitful partnership where they can really focus on what’s new and trending in other markets and help bring it to Cambodia. There is so much potential, we are only limited by our imaginations and resource capacity to implement. We have an amazing youth strategy and a massive set of programmes to deliver with Culture this year and next.

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lifestyle. So when they come home at night they’ve got a consistent network, a good choice of games and it’s easy to pay.

“And we’re looking at venues, we’re looking at special venues, forums, building gaming arenas and everything else, but also we’re looking at the mental health awareness. You can’t just game for 24 hours, you’ve got to have a break, go and have a cup of tea. I’m a big gamer myself and sometimes you get sucked into these big gaming tournaments.

So it’s very important to us to be part of the lifestyle but it’s more important to understand how gaming fits into someone’s overall lifestyle.”

And what about hardware? Watson says there are territory-specific reasons why mobile gaming is at the forefront of Cambodia’s esports scene. “One of the benefits with mobile gaming is you haven’t got to buy a huge PS5 or Xbox.

These things were trading at about $1,200 before Christmas Eve. And the iPhone is about the same price, but it’s got so much more functionality. So we need to make sure people can rely on Cellcard to be a trusted partner. It’s all about the trust and relevance.”

That means security is “critical”. “The mobile phone is becoming an intrinsic part of your life. It’s the custodian of all your records, your photos. It’s the way you communicate through email, the way you pay your bills. So data privacy and data security is paramount to us. Even though there are no data privacy laws in Cambodia, we give people assurance that we won’t share their data with any third parties.”

What about partnerships? “We engage with all the big players – people like Tencent – right down to the boutique businesschief.asia

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“ We engage with all the big players – people like Tencent – right down to the boutique places” IAN WATSON

CEO, CELLCARD CAMBODIA

places coming up with new games and content. We’re not part of some huge group so we have to work twice as hard to get these big players to deal with us because our competitors are in a number of countries around the world and we’re not.

But the way we engage with the youth and the gaming sector is what makes them want to work with us. Because our approach is based around the brand values and it’s a breath of fresh air for these people to deal with us on a dayto-day basis.

They know we’re going to drive engagement. The quality of our network is very important to us, so in terms of latency and everything else, when people do come on the network to play games it’s a very very good experience.

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HOW TECH IS TRANSFORMING HR

IN A HYBRID WORKFORCE With hybrid working the next normal, how can the HR function use technology as an enabler for better employee experiences?

Business Chief talks to Andrew Duncan, Infosys Consulting and Brian Kropp, Gartner WRITTEN BY: KATE BIRCH

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or most of its history, the HR technology function has been more comfortable as an implementation partner than an innovator, handling technology enquiries from various stakeholders, collecting data and analytics, and dealing with system maintenance.

But this is starting to change, as HR technology budgets and expectations grow, says Gartner’s Group Vice President Brian Kropp, a man known for providing cutting-edge insights to the most progressive HR execs.

“With the widespread shift to remote work, HR technology leaders quickly had to address how to move a wide array of employee processes, such as performance management, onboarding and learning into a virtual space, sharply illustrating the increasing need to include HR technology input into workforce planning,” Kropp told Business Chief.

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programmes, according to Andrew Duncan, UK CEO at Infosys Consulting, with a phased approach over a number of years, and often held up by the involvement of too many stakeholders, lack of immediate ROI, and overcoming legacy systems and tech stacks.

“However, over 12 months into the pandemic, we have certainly seen organisations accelerate their HR digital transformation, as a necessity rather than a ‘nice-to-have’,” says Duncan, pointing in particular to the cloud, which, in an effort to maintain operations during the pandemic, has been “a winner of 2020 across all facets of business, including HR”.

And with hybrid expected to become the next working norm (Gartner projects that 48% of employees will keep working remotely at least some of the time postpandemic) digital transformation of the HR function utilising the cloud, AI, big data, analytics and VR, is expected to accelerate.

And fast.

HUMAN CAPITAL

40%

Businesses investing in AI to develop their HR function for whom the primary driver is to maximise cost savings, according to Gartner research.

80%

The number of organisations that have cancelled or are planning to cancel in-person Learning and Development training, with L&D instead pivoting its learning offerings to a virtual framework with the adoption of remote and hybrid work, according to Gartner research.

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Gartner says that around half of the organisations the firm has talked to are already investing in AI or planning to do so in the next three years. “AI has already proven it delivers against cost-saving expectations and is now evolving into more refined uses such as enhanced decision making, for example, not just by screening more CVs, but also by providing recommendations on which CVs to shortlist and why,” says Kropp.

And while there are those who argue that digitisation of the HR function will lead to loss of human touch, the opposite can in fact be true.

Using technology to support and engage people Duncan believes that in the future we will see AI being used as an ‘intelligent co-pilot’, complementing and enhancing the existing skills of HR teams rather than replacing them.

“AI provides HR departments with an opportunity to improve the candidate

and employee experience by automating repetitive, low-value tasks and freeing up time to focus on more strategic work,” says Duncan. He argues that with so many businesses looking at creating more flexible hybrid models of co-located and distributed work for the future, the focus long-term must shift from “how businesses can use technology to improve their bottom line to how can they use technology to support and engage their people”.

HR leaders should concentrate on using technology as an enabler for better employee experiences, working in the background to support greater workforce productivity and issue resolution.

For example, as a tool for augmented experiences, Duncan argues that technology can be a powerful enabler for connecting employees and teams who may not traditionally have face-toface interaction in an office. He points to new videoconferencing platforms based

“ Long-term, the focus must shift from how businesses can use technology to improve their bottom line to how can they can use technology to support and engage their people” ANDREW DUNCAN

CEO UK, INFOSYS CONSULTING

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on VR and AR which create simulated environments for users from around the world to meet, communicate and interact in a more natural setting.

“Similarly, virtual connection-building tools, or internal talent marketplaces, can encourage contacts between individuals and teams, make personalised recommendations to link employees with like-minded colleagues or mentors, and support onboarding processes by connecting new hires with their team,” states Duncan.

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Developing employees Since COVID-19, more organisations are employing learning experience platforms (LEPs) to facilitate continuous education and help foster employee feedback and transparency, says Kropp. “LEPs look to deliver personalised learning paths, channels and collections that enable learners to easily organise, access and share relevant resources.”

When it comes to employee training, Duncan also points to personalisation, and mobile. “I’m particularly interested in the use of AI to both virtualise and personalise

HUMAN CAPITAL

L&D initiatives, moving away from onesize-fits-all programmes and I anticipate increased development and investment in training platforms that learn your strengths, weaknesses, learning style and working preferences,” he says. “These insights can be used to automatically suggest suitable training courses and modules to match your role, as well as adapting the way your training is delivered.”

Duncan believes VR also has extensive applications for remotely upskilling employees. “Developing presentation skills can now be achieved using virtual meeting rooms, populated with realistic elements like lighting distractions and background audience noise. Solutions like these can give feedback on interpersonal elements like pace of voice, number of hesitation words and even eye-contact.”

Empowering and engaging employees Listening to employees and the ways in which employers respond has never been more crucial, says Kropp, and this has given rise increasingly to tools like voice of the employee (VoE) solutions, which help foster employee feedback and transparency. “VoE solutions deliver insights with actionable guidance to help improve employee engagement, experience, productivity and performance,” explains Kropp. “The immediate, urgent and forced transition to remote work environments during the first half of 2020 has become an equally compelling driver of end-user demand.

Organisations now want to use VoE to communicate care, listen to employee concerns, prioritise investments and quickly take action where necessary.”

Duncan says that in a hybrid workplace, without regular face-to-face meetings or the spontaneous interactions of an office

setting, managers may find it harder to spot employees who are at risk for low productivity or thinking of looking elsewhere.

However, “new AI-driven technologies based on workplace data offer employers the ability to identify employees who are struggling with motivation”, he says.

“Digital feedback platforms and collaboration tools make it possible to gain unprecedented insights into what matters

AI can eliminate bias in hiring process According to Duncan, the processes used to find, recruit and retain talent are filled with human cognitive bias, where a person’s background, experiences, social stereotypes and cultural context will unconsciously impact their decisions and actions. The use of AI, however, can help HR leaders overcome human-bias in decision making, creating inclusive job descriptions and reviewing them for gender-coded language.

Additionally, says Duncan, “AI empowers leaders to make far more informed decisions about a candidate, unearthing their true potential and eliminating the risk of hiring based upon relationship”. businesschief.asia

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HR Technologies Rising Andrew Duncan, UK CEO, Infosys Consulting, outlines the trends and technologies coming into play in the HR space.

• Chatbots These will make waves in employee experience in 2021 and beyond, solving many simple HR issues, like updating personal information. We will inevitably see a rise in voice biometrics and natural language speech recognition that improves employees’ ability to self-service, and aside from internal use, chatbots also show promise in streamlining the candidate experience, handling initial applicant screening and scheduling interviews.

• Digital Twins As we emerge from the pandemic, more organisations will turn to digital twins to better prepare for unexpected shocks and to build an intelligent and resilient employee ecosystem. A digital twin with layers of workplace insights provides a shared picture for key leadership, letting HR leaders experiment with a number of key variables, testing different scenarios and contingencies across space management, employee utilisation and facilities. With a digital twin, HR can also pair staffing forecasts with real estate costs and uncover innovative ways to maximise operational expenses.

• Health Tech Employee happiness is now a corporate responsibility, and one with a significant impact on productivity. The pandemic has shone a light on the vital role employees play in business success, and talent is more confident in expressing their needs to employers. Consequently, we will see the concept of Health Tech making its way into HR, supporting and monitoring physical fitness and the emotional and mental health of employees, from virtual meditation classes to AI-powered therapists.

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to employees, whether via surveys, chatbots or virtual feedback groups and by engaging people in a two-way dialogue, leaders have the ability to deliver personalised experiences that support their individual goals and needs and improve the employee experience.”

Monitoring employee performance Since the onset of the pandemic, according to Gartner, more than one out of four companies have purchased new technology, for the first time, to passively track and monitor their employees. However, says Kropp, “many of these same companies haven’t determined how to balance employee privacy with the technology, and employees are frustrated”.

“ AI has already proven it delivers against cost-saving expectations and is now evolving into more refined uses such as enhanced decision making, for example, not just by screening more CVs, but also by providing recommendations on which CVs to shortlist and why.”

BRIAN KROPP

GROUP VICE PRESIDENT, GARTNER

Duncan asserts that all HR leaders should make it a priority to balance such monitoring technology with employee privacy, and that when implementing such tools, leaders should build trust with a governance framework around the metrics they want to use, the data they want to collect, and how they will safeguard sensitive information.

Both Duncan and Kropp predict that new regulations will emerge this year, and these will start to put limits on what employers can track about their employees.

That’s not to say that monitoring performance can’t be beneficial. “By understanding data and behaviours that most closely correlate with workplace

success and failure, managers can identify team members suffering from emotional stress and fatigue and proactively intervene to address issues like poor engagement and feelings of low inclusivity,” explains Duncan.

“Simultaneously, they stand to improve work processes and create personalised employee experiences that create better engagement and outcomes.”

In the end, digital transformation will not be a cure-all for anything, says Duncan, but instead a platform for leadership to build their organisations of the future, “leading from the front and engaging all of their employees in the journey ahead, to shape that future ambition”. businesschief.asia

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GUIDING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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Christophe Derdeyn, Partner at delaware Singapore, talks digital transformation, automation and cyber security for the post-COVID world

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Christophe Derdeyn

he combined influences of the COVID-19 pandemic and Industry 4.0 are having a transformative effect on the ways in which businesses organise, operate and evolve around the world. The global transition to cloud, as well as the increased pressures of a multi-industry shift to remote work brought on by the pandemic, are prompting enterprises to reevaluate their approaches to technology and innovation, manage change, and break down existing siloes in order to unlock the agility and resilience they need to survive and thrive in the new normal.

“In Singapore and beyond, we are seeing more and more customers developing a preference for best in breed over one size fits all solutions. One organisation will never be able to cater to all the needs of all customers; companies need strong partnerships,” says Christophe Derdeyn, Partner at delaware Singapore.

At a time when adopting an end-to-end view, from operations and sales to IT and logistics, is more critical than ever before, delaware Singapore is stepping up to be the partner that its customers need to truly take advantage of everything that the digital age can offer them through its specialised SAP and Microsoft Cloud-focused offerings. “We focus on mid-market customers, who don't typically have an end-to-end IT platform just yet. They may have an accounting businesschief.asia

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Delaware: SAP-powered digital transformation

system, a system that manages production, another one that handles warehousing, and so forth,” Derdeyn explains. “We help these organisations achieve an end-to-end view of their operations by implementing the SAP ERP platform across all those previously siloed areas of the business.” delaware: a Different Approach Founded in 1981 in Belgium, delaware has grown into a fast-moving global consultancy that guides organisations all over the world through their digital transformation journey, using the ecosystems of its key partners, SAP and Microsoft.

“We are a two ecosystem company which focuses on solutions based on SAP and Microsoft. What we do within those two ecosystems is very similar; we focus on the core ERP and all its supporting systems, from warehousing to logistics to analytics, robotics, RPA and so on,” Derdeyn explains.

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solutions provided by SAP and Microsoft, and we help our customers become more efficient at operating their back offices using these solutions.” delaware employs more than 2700 professionals and SAP experts throughout its 28 offices spread across 14 countries.

Derdeyn was part of the team that set up the company’s Southeast Asian operations back in 2011, which has since grown into a trio of offices located in Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. One of the key factors that makes delaware unique among its competitors is the way its various sub-segments are structured. “We are a global company, but one of the things that is different about us is how we are organised,” Derdeyn tells me. “We are a very flat organisation with a lot of self-steering mechanisms. We're not a typical corporation with a central headquarters in one location that directs what the other business units do; we have a lot of different local entities

DELAWARE

“ WE ARE SEEING MORE AND MORE CUSTOMERS DEVELOPING A PREFERENCE FOR BEST IN BREED OVER ONE SIZE FITS ALL SOLUTIONS”

CHRISTOPHE DERDEYN TITLE: PARTNER INDUSTRY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES LOCATION: SINGAPORE

CHRISTOPHE DERDEYN

PARTNER, DELAWARE SINGAPORE

delaware 5.0 in Singapore At a global level, delaware’s strategy and offerings are redefined every five years, with each new iteration reaffirming the company’s goals, mission and capabilities.

“Every five years, we come together to develop the next iteration of this strategy.

Today, we're in delaware 5.0, which steers the company at a global level,” says Derdeyn.

“The more mature a delaware entity is, like our home market of Belgium, for example, the more of the global delaware 5.0 plan that

EXECUTIVE BIO

working together towards a common goal.” This non-hierarchical approach to organisation allows different divisions of delaware to better cater their offerings to their own markets, something which works hand in hand with the company’s position as a privately-held entity.

“We believe in long-term relationships with our customers. Because we are privately held, we are not defined by ‘quarterly thinking’, which is very common in the market today,” Derdeyn explains. “Our thinking is focused on developing strong, long-term relationships with our customers, and we do that by making sure that we always deliver.”

As a Partner at delaware Singapore, I partner with customers to explore opportunities for improving their processes through next-gen information management and moving toward the intelligent enterprise through SAP S/4HANA implementations.

By providing insights into how other companies in their industry are transforming their processes, I help our clients to develop an effective strategy towards transforming their ERP and information management technology.

With more than 20 years of experience across enterprise technology as a technical consultant and strategic advisor, I have extensive expertise in operational process optimisation, particularly through many years working with shared service enablement. Although every organisation is unique, I believe there are many best practices that are valuable for improving processes across a variety of industries and organisations.

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will be executed. Singapore is a relatively young entity within delaware, which means we've needed to make some choices.”

At a global level, delaware 5.0 spreads the company’s services across seven different industries: both food and discrete manufacturing, automotive, aerospace and defense, chemicals, pharma, retail, and utilities. In Singapore, Derdeyn and his team are choosing to focus on delivering best in breed services to three key verticals. delaware Singapore has selected SAP core ERP with Microsoft Azure as a supporting cloud platform as its main offering, with a focus on the food manufacturing, discrete and hightech manufacturing, and retail industries. delaware Singapore also focuses heavily on information management consulting across multiple industries throughout the market. “About 40% of our business is related to information management, and a large portion of our client base is in the public sector,” says Derdeyn. “That covers the management of information and documents within an organisation in any shape or form. Whether you need to access your documents in a certain way, or need to store them in a compliant fashion, or require anything involving workflows, approvals,

CHRISTOPHE DERDEYN

PARTNER, DELAWARE SINGAPORE

FOCUS DIGITECH

“ WE HELP OUR CUSTOMERS ACHIEVE AN END-TO-END VIEW OF THEIR OPERATIONS

BY IMPLEMENTING THE SAP ERP PLATFORM ACROSS ALL THE PREVIOUSLY SILOED AREAS OF THEIR BUSINESS”

LEADING-EDGE CYBERSECURITY INSIGHTS To make a network safe, you need to understand everything that goes on within it. A significant source of cyber threat to modern organisations stems from unseen devices connecting to the network, which leave a potential back door for threat actors to exploit. When it comes to ensuring its customers have the best possible visibility into their networks in order to keep them as secure and safe as possible, delaware regularly turns to its trusted partner, Focus Digitech.

“Focus Digitech has been a partner of ours for a long time,” Derdeyn explains.

“There's their hardware business, which has been around for about 30 years, and then they also have their cybersecurity business, which provides very specific tools to ensure that organisations can gain reliable insights that allow them to improve their cybersecurity approach.”

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digital signatures – all these aspects which are essential, especially to heavily regulated industries like banking, insurance, utilities or heavy industries like oil and gas, where documentation is of paramount importance. delaware helps its customers manage those documents.”

The other key areas of business for delaware Singapore involve customer service, including the management of all customer engagement between “our customers and their customers”, from marketing and sales automation to e-commerce platforms, and – in addition to customer-facing services – value added solutions. “These are more niche solutions which are intended to extend the other platforms that we focus on. They tend to be smaller in scope but can have significant added value in terms of how a company operates,” Derdeyn explains, adding that these value added solutions span cutting edge automation-focused technologies, like the automation of SAP’s security services and the implementation of robotic process automation (RPA).

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1981

Year founded

€365M Revenue (2019)

2700 Number of employees

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FOCUSED ON CREATING PROSPERITY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD THROUGH SECURE, SUSTAINABLE AND INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS Your system is only as secure as the weakest link.

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Misconfiguration of cloud security parameters making cloud resources vulnerable Data Privacy / Confidentiality / Sovereignty & Residency concerns which have legal and regulatory implications (PDPA, GDPR) Privileged Credentials leakages and Confidential Data leakages Insecure APIs / Interfaces causing application breaches Malicious insiders with privileged access exposing cloud resources to external parties

While there can never be zero risk, organisations need to adopt a Zero-Trust policy with systems and processes in place to de-risk their business security exposure.

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DESIRED OUTCOME Reduce Attack Surface

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SAP intelligent Robotic Process Automation | delaware Singapore

Securing the New Normal “One of the things we saw during the pandemic was that, because so many more people were working remotely, there was also a much higher prevalence of cyber threats,” recalls Derdeyn, noting that all threat types, from malware and phishing campaigns to state-sponsored hacking all became more common. The shift to remote work over the past year has prompted a huge rise in the number of cyber attacks worldwide. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky estimates that, last year, remote workers experienced a 242% jump in cyber attacks on remote desktop protocols compared to 2019.

For organisations with an end-to-end SAP integration, Derdeyn explains, fully understanding the kinds of cyber risks they are facing and remaining consistently compliant can represent a challenge for

many enterprises. “SAP releases support and patches on a very regular basis. Applying these updates typically requires a lot of very specialised security knowledge of SAP's solutions, as well as a lot of work on behalf of your system admins,” he says. One of delaware Singapore’s most powerful added value solutions, he continues, effectively automates that process, while providing greater visibility into extant cyber threats.

“We can essentially automate the entire process. We provide a dashboard with an overview of the customer's current

“ WE ARE NOT DEFINED BY QUARTERLY THINKING” CHRISTOPHE DERDEYN

PARTNER, DELAWARE SINGAPORE

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S4/HANA MIGRATIONS MADE SIMPLE WITH DATAVARD

DID YOU KNOW...

One of the things that is happening in the SAP market right now is the ongoing release of SAP S/4HANA, the latest generation of its ERP system,” says Derdeyn. “S/4HANA first hit the market in 2015, but SAP platforms have a very long lifecycle, so the previous generation is very slowly easing towards its end-of-life in 2027. It's only 2021, but an ERP platform is typically of such magnitude and is intertwined with so many different business processes that converting from one generation to another is typically not a straightforward process.”

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A classic SAP migration – called a brownfield – involves a technical database conversion.

While the process is common throughout many industries, and generally quite an achievable task, Derdeyn warns that it has some downsides. “If you are moving to a new platform and you had heavily-customised your old one, a brownfield migration means

June 2021

that all that customised code gets carried over to your new platform,” he explains. “It's not really a fresh start. It could take a long time, be difficult to manage, or result in periods of downtime that your company just cannot afford – from several days to even a week.”

When delaware looks at finding alternate migration strategies for its customers, the company believes in selecting the right tools. Datavard, a key partner of delaware, is providing those tools as part of a collaborative project the two companies are engaged in to migrate a Singaporean customer to SAP S4/HANA. “By using the tools that Datavard provides, we can ensure that, instead of having a downtime of several days for the migration – which our customer simply cannot afford – they won't experience downtime of more than 10 hours,” Derdeyn says.

DELAWARE

vulnerability status, which allows them to make a more informed decision about which vulnerabilities they need to close up and which ones they feel comfortable leaving as they are,” he adds. “It's about helping our customers understand where they want to be on the curve, and what level of risk they can allow themselves.”

Delivering on the Potential of RPA Successfully implementing automation into an enterprise’s ERP can be the difference between speed, agility and resilience, and the loss of thousands of hours inputting data manually. Derdeyn explains that, at delaware Singapore, they take two approaches to incorporating automation (specifically RPA) in their customers’ ERPs. “We have created about 50 different common business scenarios for SAP. We offer these scenarios in small accelerator packages to our customers, who can then plug them in and immediately start automating particular processes. These accelerators apply to the more run-of-themill scenarios which have a big common

“ ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS FOR DELAWARE IS THAT OUR CUSTOMERS FEEL AS THOUGH WE HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE FOR THEM” CHRISTOPHE DERDEYN

PARTNER, DELAWARE SINGAPORE

denominator across lots of companies,” he says. “We also engage in very particular use cases where customers might have very unique problems, and in those cases we can also work with those customers to map out the process they want and solve that more niche challenge.”

The Road Ahead Over the coming years, delaware Singapore plans to continue leveraging its unique business model and specialised array of best in breed services to build long-lasting, beneficial relationships with Singaporean companies as they progress through their digital transformation journeys. “One of the most important things for Delaware is that our customers feel as though we have made a difference for them,” Derdeyn says. “Our key objective this year is to make sure that I can say that I have four to five new, happy customers that we can talk about proudly and who are hopefully talking proudly about their collaboration with us.”

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TOP TEN

STARTUP CITIES: The top 10 entrepreneurial ecosystems in Asia Pacific

WRITTEN BY: KATE BIRCH

F

rom access to tech talent and incubator programmes, to government policy and available funding, Business Chief charts APAC’s top 10 entrepreneurial locations, ranked by number of unicorns.

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10 SYDNEY

Notable unicorns Digital graphic

business Canva (US$15bn) * digital bank Judo Bank (US$1.6bn)

One of APAC’s most startup-friendly cities, Sydney is home to two Top 50 universities and 160,000+ STEM graduates, the highest of any Australian states. Startup support is strong here: University of Sydney offers heavy investment in startup funding/ programs; Sydney Startup Hub is home to 2,500+ residents including 500 startups and multiple incubators; Tech Central is set to become Australia’s biggest tech hub with US$48.2m in funding; and non-profit tech incubator Stone & Chalk has just merged with cybersecurity network AustCyber to give startups and scaleups access to a combined pool of customers, talent, expertise and capital. As the financial capital of Australia, the fintech sector is strong with the New South Wales’ fintech sector quintupling between 2014-2017 and 733 active fintechs as of December 2020 with unicorn Judo Bank increasing 60% in value during COVID. Cybersecurity startups are supported by various government initiatives including US$240m investment in the sector.

“ One of APAC’s most startup-friendly cities” 174

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09 TOKYO

Notable unicorns Crytocurrency

platform Liquid (US$1bn) * AI-powered news app SmartNews (US$1.2bn) * gaming platform Playco (US$1bn)

As a mature market, Tokyo has advanced tech infrastructure, engineering and life sciences talent and world-class R&D, and while it only has four unicorns, it has a rising startup scene, with lots of government backing: the Startup Ecosystem Consortium incubates innovative startups through collaboration between government, research institutions and private firms, while the 7-step strategy includes creating a startup city with entrepreneurial education and funding.

AI, robotic and fintech startups are thriving including one of Japan’s highest funded startups, satellite data firm Synspective (raised US$100m) and payment services provider Paidy, which raised US$281m. Tokyo Metropolitan Government offers grants to financial institutions who create innovative products and services.

TOP TEN

“ Dubbed the ‘wealth management centre of Asia’”

08

HONG KONG

Notable unicorns Courier service

provider Lalamove (US$10bn) * travel book platform Klook (US$1.4bn) * fintech WeLab (US$1bn)

The most western of Asia’s cities, like Singapore, Hong Kong features countless benefits for entrepreneurs, including a pro-business climate, strategic location, world-class infrastructure and productive workforce, and was named the world’s most attractive place for M&A and IPOs in 2020 by Oxford Economics.

The city has long been a leading source of entrepreneurship and the last few years despite the social unrest has seen an increase in startups, a rise of 28% from 2018-2020 to 3,360, according to InvestHK, with biotech, ecommerce and fintech thriving; there are 600+ fintech startups here. Dubbed the ‘wealth management centre of Asia’, Hong Kong’s government is focused on wealthtech, insurtech, regtech, and has injected US$12.9bn into increasing R&D resources, attracting tech talent, providing investment funding and tech research infrastructure, and introducing enhanced R&D tax deductions. The city has 116 co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators.

07

SINGAPORE

Notable unicorns Ride-hailing firm

Grab (US$14.3bn) * image recognition tech startup Trax (US$1.3 bn) * IP analytics firm PatSnap (US$1bn)

With its pro-business climate, strategic location and savvy government, Singapore is the second-best country to conduct business (World Bank) and houses 80+ of the world’s top 100 tech firms. The city-state has an active R&D ecosystem, recording the most FDI in R&D of any global city (US$210m, 2015-2020) with 150+ VC funds, incubators and accelerators, thousands of startups, five unicorns and Southeast Asia’s first decacorn (Grab). The Singapore government is supportive of tech startups. Enterprise Singapore’s StartupSG program consolidates startup assistance schemes, providing access to financing and mentorship and includes co-investment funding for digital startups. Digital health is strong with Singapore allocating US $4bn to health and biomedical sciences R&D, more than any other sector, and launching Catalyst, Singapore’s first coworking innovation space for medtech and healthtech startups.

Fintech is strong too, with Singapore boasting a regulatory sandbox program, innovation lab, innovation village, and the biggest fintech event worldwide.

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06 SEOUL

Notable unicorns Fintech Viva

Republica (US$2.6bn) * Krafton Game Union (US$5bn) * fashion ecommerce firm Musinsa

Like Tokyo, Seoul’s business climate has allowed corporates like Samsung and Hyundai to emerge, and the city has been a tech frontier and R&D leader since the 90s. But more recently an entrepreneurial ecosystem has evolved thanks to government initiatives, increased funding, a wealth of talent (home to 50 universities, ranks third worldwide for knowledge and produces worldclass engineers), and one of the fastest internet connections globally, resulting in 8,700+ startups, 85 accelerators and a network of incubators offering mentoring and office space. South Korea’s government and the city has the highest government backing per capital of startups worldwide with Seoul spending US$9.9bn of VC to accelerate startup growth. The biotech sector is thriving, thanks to South Korea’s R&D programmes in biotech, with the number of startups doubling from 2015-2018, and attracting US$1bn of VC investments. Gaming is big too with South Korea’s gaming industry the fourth largest worldwide.

In January 2021, drug developer SK Biopharm raised US$28.5bn becoming the country’s biggest IPO since mobile gaming firm Netmarble raised US$2.4bn in 2017.

05

HANGZHOU

Notable unicorns Fintechs Cgtz

(US$2.4bn) and PingPon (US$1.5bn) * Medtech firm WeDoctor (US$7bn) * electric car company Leap Motors (US$2.2bn)

One of China’s leading innovation centres with a vibrant tech startup scene, Hangzhou is home to Alibaba, with the ecommerce giant nurturing spinoffs (Ant Financial, LianLian and KouBei) and former Alibaba tech talent launching startups; while Zhejiang University produces top business talent, and has given birth to leading unicorn WeDoctor. The city boasts a strong tech infrastructure that’s led to a proliferation of innovation hubs, including Startup incubator Dream Town, home to hundreds of startups, offering office space, funding and mentorship; innovation complex Future SciTech City, and tech hub HITEIP, the first global entrepreneurial innovation park in China, home to businesses focused on frontier technologies like AI, IoT and big data and incubating startup programs. There are 100+ AI startups here, including AI security unicorn Tongdun Technologies (US$2bn), with ecommerce, fintech, medtech and biotech further sector strengths. A new government-backed infrastructure initiative is expected to generate US$2tn over the next five years. businesschief.asia

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BANGALORE

Notable unicorns K-12 edtech app

Byju’s (US$12bn) * vehicle marketplace Ola Cabs (US$6.3bn) * food-ordering app Swiggy (US$3.6bn)

Dubbed the Silicon Valley of India, home to the largest number of IT firms, Bangalore is known as India’s startup capital, with 30% of the country’s startups based here, and 15 unicorns including India’s first unicorn InMobi (2014) and Flipkart, acquired

by Walmart in 2018. It’s more recently emerged as the world’s fastest-growing mature tech ecosystem (London & Partners) with VC investment here growing 5.4 times since 2016, making it sixth worldwide for tech VC investments. Strong in software startups, the city houses 1 in 3 of Nasscom’s top 50 innovative software firms, and boasts high growth sectors in edtech, fintech and ecommerce, with biotech and medtech innovation growing. Last year, a MedTech Innovation Centre opened for startups in healthcare and Siemens Healthineers is investing in an innovation hub here. The state is supportive with policies to promote startups and tech entrepreneurship, and thanks to the city’s leading institutions, Bangalore is home to a world-class tech talent pool.

“Dubbed the Silicon Valley of India” 178

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03

SHENZHEN

Notable unicorns AI company

SenseTime ($12bn) * Fintech firm WeBank ($21bn) * Fashion ecommerce SHEIN ($15bn)

China’s first special economic zone, which has fast become a strategic hub in China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA), Shenzhen (Silicon Valley of hardware) is China’s tech manufacturing powerhouse. To support this and incubate startups, the city boasts a large number of multinational and domestic research institutes in hardware, embedded systems and 5G, and has nurtured 15,000 homegrown national-level high-tech companies, including tech titan startups Tencent and Huawei, and unicorn robotics startup DJI Innovations. Government plans are in place for the city to become ‘a capital of innovation, business and ideas with global influence’, with a focus on chips, AI and biomedicine. Its proximity to Hong Kong gives the city an edge in attracting global talent and gaining access to global capital. It ranks first in China for number of granted patents.

02 TOP TEN

SHANGHAI

Notable unicorns AI innovator Megvil Technology (US$4bn) * bike-sharing app Hello TransTech (US$5bn) * bitcoin miner Bitmain Technologies (US$12bn)

Traditionally regarded as China’s financial centre, Shanghai has emerged as a fintech powerhouse (think online lending giant Lufax) and edtech and gaming innovator counting nearly 50 unicorns and thousands of entrepreneurs. Some 1,000 Edtech companies are headquartered here with successes including OneSmart Education platform which raised US$28m in an IPO. The city is also home to 130 gaming startups, is a satellite for industry giants such as Ubisoft, and hosts Asia’s largest gaming expo ChinaJoy. Shanghai’s venture capital network includes some

5,000 angel investors and associations.

Government investment is generous with R&D investment 4% of GDP, including Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park (home to 400 R&D institutions), a dedicated zone for AI-research firms, ambitions to achieve 5G coverage citywide, and plans for a national science centre to focus on biomedicine, AI and integrated circuits. In January, the city picked 1,000 tech startups with potential to list on the Nasdaq-style Star Market, to offer support and incentives to quicken their IPO pace.

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“Beijing is the world’s unicorn capital”

BEIJING

Notable unicorns AI firm ByteDance (US$140bn)

* ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing (US$62bn) * search engine Baidu (US$69.2bn)

The startup capital of China with 1,000+ startups, Beijing is also the world’s ‘unicorn capital’, with 57+, including the world’s most valuable, Bytedance (US$140bn). Established as China’s R&D and tech hub, Beijing boasts two clusters, including China’s Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun, home to 9,000 tech giants, unicorns and startups including Baidu, SIna Corp and Lenovo. Beijing is AI’s heartland and the city counts 1,070 AI firms, 12 advanced AI labs and a US$2.1bn AI tech park is planned. Fintech is also strong, nurtured by the Beijing Fintech Demonstration Zone. The city’s startup

success is due to generous government support and an abundance of scientific and tech resources, with 90+ universities, 1,000 scientific research institutes, and 30,000 high-tech enterprises, not to mention extensive available funding (the largest in China). In January 2021, Chinese officials announced plans to make Beijing into a global sci-tech innovation hub by 2025, with plans to build an international science and tech innovation centre, and to promote core technologies in frontier areas like AI and blockchain, while regional government aims to introduce US$2.2bn in private capital to tech projects.

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FINASTRA

Finastra: Redefining

good with WRITTEN BY: WILL GIRLING PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE & CAITLYN COLE

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Smita Gupta describes the changes that COVID-19 has brought to Finastra and why its vision of improving the world through technology is undiminished

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f the pandemic has demonstrated anything, it’s that fintech can truly be a force for societal good and an anchor that provides surety during even the most uncertain times. Although this assessment is no surprise to industry leader Finastra, the potential for positive change has, in its view, reached a pivotal moment. Accelerated digital transformation around the world is widening the company’s scope to shape and be a part of the financial services industry’s new reality in every sense, from enabling broader financial inclusion to investing in the environment and developing its renowned FusionFabric.cloud platform.

Smita Gupta, Global Head of Platform Ecosystem, Developer and Marketplaces Marketing, returned to speak with us about how Finastra is helping to redefine the future of finance.

Having joined the company in 2016 - just as Open Banking started to gain momentum - Gupta relates that it was always evident that Finastra offered a very different proposition in the fintech world: “I saw a tremendous opportunity to build an entire APAC marketing organisation from scratch and bring together several innovative digital marketing technologies.” Starting out as the Chief Marketing Officer for Finastra in 186

June 2021

the APAC region (based in Singapore), she relocated to London in 2019 and developed her current role from there. Bringing a wealth of experience from some of the largest tech companies in the world, Gupta knows the enterprise value not only of Finastra’s solutions and software, but also its culture.

“Finastra is a fintech that values diversity,” she states, "Everything we do encourages an open culture and an environment of innovation.”

Finastra’s belief that fintech can work “to redefine finance for good” was fully put to the test in 2020, and it has succeeded in validating this stance. In May, the company

“ Finastra is a global fintech that values diversity, both in terms of its people and the experience we bring to the table" SMITA GUPTA

GLOBAL HEAD OF PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM, DEVELOPER AND MARKETPLACES MARKETING, FINASTRA

FINASTRA

Smita Gupta, Global Head of Platform Ecosystem, Developer and Marketplaces Marketing businesschief.asia

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FINASTRA

Finastra: World Leader in Financial Technology

“ I saw a tremendous opportunity to shape the APAC marketing organisation and invest in digital technologies that enable us, with new insights and innovative services, to address customers’ increasingly-sophisticated desires and needs. We have transformed marketing to become the headlights of the business” SMITA GUPTA

GLOBAL HEAD OF PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM, DEVELOPER AND MARKETPLACES MARKETING, FINASTRA

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launched a solution to support the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security) Act, and created a virtual lending platform to help process loans for small businesses as part of the US Government’s Payment Protection Programme (PPP).

Elsewhere, Gupta adds, Finastra has been keenly exploring new ‘finance for good’ alternatives, many of which, because of pandemic-related digital transformation acceleration, have been brought forward a lot sooner. “What might have taken years has had to be completed in months. Businesses have seen a reduction in cash transactions in favour of contactless payment methods, and cloud technology has enabled businesses to keep running by allowing employees to work from home.” The latter development has applications not just relating to business continuity but also reduced carbon emissions through less staff commuting.

During the peak of the pandemic, Finastra also operated remotely, with over 90% of its

FINASTRA

employees working at home, enabling it to roll out mission-critical tech for banks and financial institutions while also prioritising the wellbeing of its people.

If one attempted to summarise Finastra succinctly, then ‘unlocking new digital ecosystem opportunities, fuelling smart growth, and future-proofing organisations’ would be a good start. A critical pillar of its capability to fulfill these goals is FusionFabric.cloud, an open and synergistic developer platform and app marketplace for the finance industry. “We're encouraging collaboration and enabling banks to access innovation faster, such as via sprint programmes and 100-day jumpstart initiatives,” says Gupta. A champion of Open Banking, Finastra’s solutions can help accelerate innovation by utilising APIs that allow disparate products and modules to combine in refreshing new ways. With capabilities that extend from retail and corporate banking to payments, lending, and capital markets, FusionFabric.cloud can facilitate:

The company isn’t just enabling change for others; things are evolving at Finastra, too. Placing increased emphasis on integrated digital marketing and leveraging data analytics to personalise products to customers’ needs, Finastra is also considering new ways of operating internally.

“We’re reimagining the workplaces of the

TITLE: GLOBAL HEAD OF PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM, DEVELOPER AND MARKETPLACES MARKETING INDUSTRY: FINANCIAL SERVICES LOCATION: LONDON

EXECUTIVE BIO

• Collaboration • Accelerated innovation and product time to market • Enhanced customer engagement • Better decision-making through data insights • Optimised workflows • New revenue streams

SMITA GUPTA

Global Marketing Executive, influential thought leader, keynote speaker and pioneering advocate for diversity and inclusion in the technology industry. Known for high-impact global marketing transformations in fintech, SaaS and cloud technology sectors as a pacesetting leader who reinvents organisations into future power houses for sustained relevance and growth.

As a visionary change maker, has led global teams to deliver business growth through new models of platform and marketplaces development.

Currently, Smita leads Finastra’s global platform ecosystem, applications and marketplaces marketing function.

She has created a commercially driven, diverse global marketing organization focused on innovation, go-to-market strategies, partnerships, revenue generation and growth.

FINASTRA

2017

Year founded

$1.9bn Revenue

8,600+ Number of employees

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FINASTRA

“ We're encouraging collaboration between banks and fintechs to help them access innovation faster” SMITA GUPTA

GLOBAL HEAD OF PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM, DEVELOPER AND MARKETPLACES MARKETING, FINASTRA

FINASTRA

future based on our employees’ feedback,” says Gupta. “80% of our employees favour a ‘two-plus’ model for returning to the office, where they will work two days in the office, two days at home, and then decide with their managers where to spend the fifth day. Furthermore, we’ve invested heavily in collaboration tools, committed to 50% less travel in the future, and have galvanised staff by offering both flexible and uncapped holidays.” Keeping up morale, she reasons, is key, and utilising these modern working

FINASTRA: PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST Women's History Month throughout March 2021 drew a lot of attention both to the success and the struggles of women in modern business. Gupta remarks that, for Finastra, every month is an opportunity to celebrate diversity:

DID YOU KNOW...

“We believe it is key to support people, whatever their background, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, to feel safe, have a voice and an opportunity to reach their full potential at work, at home, and in society.

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“Finastra is careful to ensure that whatever we do is inclusive and empowering. Examples include our recent hackathon to tackle gender bias in artificial intelligence through FusionFabric.cloud. As a company we’re extremely vocal and supportive about equality and inclusion; innovation and creativity often result from the more diversity you bring to the table.”

June 2021

FINASTRA

“ The future of finance is open: open technology, open platforms, open collaboration and open innovation” SMITA GUPTA

GLOBAL HEAD OF PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM, DEVELOPER AND MARKETPLACES MARKETING, FINASTRA

practices are invaluable for “supporting colleagues in the most abnormal of times.”

Alongside its own transformation, Finastra is helping to usher in a new vision for the world of finance. Dedicated to serving and making a difference to the communities within which it operates, the company insists on an equivalent level of commitment from its partners. “The future of finance is open: open technology, open platforms, open collaboration and open innovation,” states Gupta. “The fintechs

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FusionFabric cloud - Overview Video

DID YOU KNOW...

GREEN BANKING

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Fintech innovators like Finastra are providing finance’s global community with the opportunity to change the world and help solve some of its biggest challenges. Not least of these is climate change. Finastra’s partnership with Climate First Bank(in organization) is a good example of how these values can align.

Climate First Bank (in organization) provides environmentally-focused investment programmes and solar loan options, as well as operating with complete carbon neutrality and working with local communities to provide ‘green infrastructure’.

June 2021

Finastra is contributing cloud-based banking systems through its Fusion Phoenix product, and other tech-based solutions. “Through the digitisation of banking processes or the digitalisation of financial services, our solutions can aid the reduction of employee travel, paper consumption or energy, and we are committed to reducing emissions within our sector, in collaboration with our customers and partners,” said Chris Zingo, SVP and GM of Americas Field Operations, in a press release.

“I encourage everybody to look at this interesting case study to find out how cloudification and digital transformation are going to be the key to the future of finance,” added Gupta.

FINASTRA

and banks we work with embrace both this mantra and our platform. It’s truly open collaboration.” Throughout 2021 and beyond, she foresees renewed focus around issues such as financial inclusion in underserved areas, support for global trade, and the continued development of cloud’s industry applications. “I’m also passionate that marketing, as a function, can be at the forefront of this change. We are at an extremely pivotal moment: the pandemic

has brought the future forward, and with it has come accelerated digitalisation. Finastra has a chance to truly redefine finance for good.” As a final plea to the industry, Gupta concludes by encouraging all organisations to embrace collaboration and inclusion, which fosters innovation and, in turn, creates new opportunities for everyone.”

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J - TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

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DRIVING

GROWTH

IN ASIA

Process know-how, open control systems and independence from suppliers is leveraging business growth for J-Tec Material Handling in South-East Asia

WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: THOMAS LIVERMORE

O

pen control systems, an independent approach to suppliers and the skill to design tailor-made solutions is helping J-Tec Material Handling leverage its growth throughout South-East Asia.

Just three years after the Belgium-owned company - a wholly-owned business unit of its parent company Katoen Natie - put down roots in Rayong, Thailand they are driving growth across SEA as a process engineering partner to clients in the food and chemical industry.

“Part of our business plan focused on the possible synergies with Katoen Natie who have been in Thailand (and Asia) for more than 20 years,” said Arnaud Nelissen Grade, Sales Director Asia at J-Tec Material Handling.

“Aligning ourselves with Katoen Natie allows us to share resources like IT and HR more efficiently. But more importantly, it has resulted in a closer cooperation between the existing business units here which now makes our group quite unique in the region in terms of what we can offer to our clients. businesschief.asia

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“ In terms of growth we just got started, but we've already exceeded most company targets and expectations that we set up three years ago.”

ARNAUD NELISSEN GRADE SALES DIRECTOR ASIA, J-TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

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“We were also attracted to Thailand because it is a big market with a lot of investments going on in the food and the chemical industry. On top of that, J-Tec previously had some success with significant projects in Thailand - so we felt that we could easily build on those to gain momentum.”

For more than five decades, J-Tec has focused on its customer-centric approach and has retained its competitive edge in handling solids and liquids due to the fact it is totally supplier independent and offers clients open control systems moving away from the more standardised approach of most of their competitors.

“This means we can guarantee a customised solution for every challenge,”

J - TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

ARNAUD NELISSEN GRADE TITLE: SALES DIRECTOR COMPANY: J-TEC MATERIAL HANDLING LOCATION: ASIA

said Nelissen Grade who bridges the gap between Europe and Asia as he spearheads the rapid growth in the region.

Speaking from J-Tec’s Asian headquarters in Rayong, he said: “We don’t offer a onesize-fits-all approach; instead we listen to the client and use our in-house knowledge and tools to develop a tailored solution for their project.

“J-Tec acts as a partner during the complete process: from the conceptual design, on through detailed engineering, procurement and manufacturing, up until installation and commissioning, and if required training and maintenance.”

He pointed out the open control systems mean clients are not ‘handcuffed’ to J-Tec

EXECUTIVE BIO

INDUSTRY: INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION Arnaud holds a Master Degree in Industrial Engineering from GroupT Leuven Engineering School.

Graduating in 2009, he spent most of his career abroad, mostly in China for Jan De Nul and in Rotterdam for Fabricom, working in various project and construction engineering roles.

After earning a Postgraduate Degree in Business Administration, he joined J-Tec in late 2014 where he immediately contributed to J-Tec’s success as a Sales Engineer.

In 2016, he moved to Thailand to spearhead J-Tec’s business development in SEA. Since then, he has devoted his time to putting J-Tec on the Asian map, taking the lead in Sales, HR and Strategy, establishing J-Tec Material Handling Ltd. as the regional HQ and focusing on building a sustainable foundation for J-Tec’s growth in the future.

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J - TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

“We have all the experience and all the competencies in-house at J-Tec but we just need to keep working on how to effectively apply this in Asia without really rushing it.”

ARNAUD NELISSEN GRADE SALES DIRECTOR ASIA, J-TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

if they want to extend the factory or system in the future. “Instead, we believe in delivering quality and that keeping this promise means J-Tec will hopefully be involved again in the future” he said.

Supplier independent Independence from suppliers is one of J-Tec’s key differentiators. “If we look back 50 years, J-Tec started as a representative of certain brands of component manufacturers. Over the years the projects became more complex and we evolved towards an engineering company,” commented Nelissen Grade.

“We knew our competitors and at that time, we made a very clear decision to start designing our own systems and become completely supplier independent in order to offer that additional flexibility.

“Today, in contrast with many of our competitors, we don't produce our own equipment. Most of the equipment in our systems are purchased from third parties, OEM for standard equipment and independent manufacturers for custommade equipment that we design ourselves, but is then manufactured by these third parties.

“The way we make a difference is by leveraging this strategy. We always focus on finding the real optimal process design for

any given application, which will then define which original equipment manufacturer (OEM) equipment we will source and where to source it. If it doesn't exist or if it needs to be custom made, we will design it and have it fabricated, typically in the region where the project is located.”

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Arnaud NelisseN Grade talks J-Tec Material Handling

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J-Tec is a company member of EHEDG The European hygienic engineering & design group.

“We are involved in several relevant associations related to our industry, the most important one being EHEDG. J-Tec is an active, contributing member of EHEDG and has been assisting in the development of the industry standards with regards to hygienic design for Dry Material Handling for more than 10 years now. Such collaborations help us stay up-to-date and highly relevant in what we do.”

1970

J-Tec Material Handling was founded in 1970.

140+

Number of employees

€50+mn Company revenue

Three-dimensional experience One way in which J-Tec is turning to technology to give them a competitive edge is offering customers a virtual tour of a proposed factory development. “By using the power of Virtual Reality (VR) we are able to elevate a factory design from a flat plan to a three dimensional experience,” said Nelissen Grade.

“It enables us to show the customer and let them discover their future factory before it's even built which also helps us in the design of our systems. If our engineers and our customers can walk around a realistic 3D representation of the plant, we can discover potential problems, find alternative solutions and adjust the design much faster and more efficiently which benefits both J-Tec and its customers.

“A small thing like being able to visualise their factory also adds an element of wonder for the customer,” he said.

Commenting on J-Tec’s digital transformation to Industry 4.0, Nelissen Grade said: “Like many companies, we have an Industry “4.0” plan that is being rolled out to improve and expand our services during and after projects.

“We are developing several technologies involving the use of big data related to the businesschief.asia

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systems we build. This can, in turn, lead to remote monitoring of certain metrics and KPIs, preventive maintenance and the further expansion of our internal know-how on how to design the best possible systems with optimal performance using realistic process simulations.

“Furthermore, we have accelerated our remote assistance program, finding ways to support our global customers without needing to be physically present, for example using AR, which has become highly relevant due to the pandemic.”

Future technology trends “For our industry specifically, we do believe and invest in big data and remote assistance and see this as a trend across several industries,” said Nelissen Grade.

“Also, hygienic design, contamination prevention… are big trends and we are continuously developing solutions for our clients in this regard, particularly in infant nutrition.

“Lastly, automation is gaining momentum even in countries with a lower labour cost.

Automation has many advantages such as a higher efficiency and accuracy, improved working conditions… but especially in these COVID times, it limits the required manpower needed in factories and prevents contamination to a large extent.”

Nelissen Grade helped spearhead the original business plan on the value of J-Tec moving into the Asia market.

“The ultimate goal was to set up an entity in Thailand that acts as a regional headquarters.

We will take the lead from here for our further expansion in the region. In terms of growth we just got started, but we've already exceeded most company targets and expectations that we set up three years ago.

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HQ

The company's headquaters are located in Antwerp, Belgium

8

Locations worldwide

2018

Year regional headquarters in Rayong, Thailand openned

J - TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

“This means we can guarantee a customised solution for every challenge,” said Arnaud Nelissen Grade, Sales Director Asia at J-Tec Material Handling, who bridges the gap between Europe and Asia as he spearheads the growth in the region.”

ARNAUD NELISSEN GRADE

SALES DIRECTOR ASIA, J-TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

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“ When it comes to highly advanced packaging systems, we have worked with Statec Binder on various occasions.

They share a lot of our values such as high quality and an impeccable service.”

ARNAUD NELISSEN GRADE SALES DIRECTOR ASIA, J-TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

“One of the targets we had was to grow a local team to perform key client-oriented activities like Sales and Project Management more locally. And so we grew from a fulltime equivalent of two to about 13 people permanently based in the office in Thailand in just three years. We are still actively hiring but with the mindset that we have only got started, so we are slowly building the foundation of a durable business.

“We have all the experience and all the competencies in-house at J-Tec but we just need to keep working on how to effectively apply that experience and competencies in Asia without really rushing it. There's no point coming to Asia just to be in Asia, we need to do it right. That is what we are focusing on right now.”

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4 ADVANTAGES OF J-TEC’S OPEN CONTROL SYSTEMS

J

-Tec’s open control systems is just one of the key differentiators setting them apart from most of their competitors. Nelissen Grade explains the main reasons why this gives the company such an advantage.

“The first is flexibility - which is something we're proud of because we are independent. We are flexible in selecting equipment and in the same way, we want to make sure that that flexibility is translated into the control system. More often than not, our main competitors have more standardized control systems that are not very flexible, based on their own equipment. J-Tec is different in that we also have limited standards that guide us, but every system is completely custom made based on specific needs of the project. This results in a more lean control system with smaller and cheaper hardware.

“Number two is that our systems are “open”. We are not like some of our competitors who design “black box” type systems which means the client needs their intervention if they want to expand.

We had an example of this when one of our key accounts in Indonesia actually contacted us. They wanted us to do an expansion to their factory, but in the end, they were forced to go back to the previous supplier because the control system was locked which would be very costly to change. Instead, we offer open and transparent control systems using building blocks that are then ‘assembled’ based on the process design. The blocks themselves may be protected, but the program itself is open-source and can be accessed by our clients directly.

“Number three is the fact that our independence from suppliers means that we work with a large variety of different

suppliers from all over the world. As a result, our experts have gained quite a significant understanding of how to control the variety of equipment. They often have a better understanding of how to control certain equipment as part of a broader system than the actual manufacturer of that equipment. This means that they can correctly use the specific characteristics of each equipment to optimise the performance through automation. And since these programmers are actually involved during commissioning on site, this greatly improves the efficiency, expedites commissioning and avoids all the hassle of finding bugs that would happen when using third-party programmers.”

“Finally, we are able to design a fully comprehensive control system involving all aspects of the production line, even for equipment that normally comes with its own control software. We can use our experience and know-how in using many different systems to program software for that equipment and integrate this in a single control system. As an example, whether the extruder itself is part of our scope or not, we can integrate it in a single SCADA system, avoiding the need for communication between various control systems from various suppliers.”

“In the same way Steve jobs did with Apple - controlling the product design from end to end: hardware and software - we are doing exactly the same with our control systems.”

“All these things means that we are very good at designing and offering control systems that are lean and simple - a single control system for the entire process, regardless of whether the equipment in that process is supplied by J-Tec or not.

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J - TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

Partnership with Statec Binder Although we don’t have fixed partnership agreements with any supplier – one of our core strategies – we do have a list of preferred OEM that we tend to work with.

This follows a rigorous supplier selection process to make sure that our approved suppliers can support us and our customers in the best possible way.

“In the same way Steve jobs did with Apple - controlling the product design from end to end: hardware and software - we are doing exactly the same with our control systems.”

ARNAUD NELISSEN GRADE

SALES DIRECTOR ASIA, J-TEC MATERIAL HANDLING

One of J-Tec’s preferred suppliers is Statec Binder who offer high-performance packaging systems for open-mouth bags, FFS machines and related palletising and bagging systems used in a wide variety of industries for packing different products worldwide.

“When it comes to highly advanced packaging systems, we have worked with Statec Binder on various occasions worldwide. They share a lot of our values such as an impeccable service and a high quality and performance level. I hope that the global partnership can continue for many years to come.

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BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

DELIVERING THROUGH DISRUPTION WRITTEN BY: RHYS THOMAS PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE & CAITLYN COLE businesschief.asia

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BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

Harnessing the power of digital is key to delivering on expectations through procurement, says BT Global Procurement Manager, Vanitha Prabhu

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Vanitha Prabhu Global Procurement Manager, BT Global Services India

n a year defined by the disruption of the biggest global health crisis in living memory, the focus for Vanitha Prabhu, Global Procurement Manager, IT and IT Services at BT Global Services India, remains relatively unchanged. Based in India, Prabhu oversees IT indirect sourcing for Asia Pacific and globally, as a captive unit of the telecoms giant. The company offers managed telecom and IT services for a broad range of customers across the healthcare, finance and contact centre sectors. At a time when communicating remotely is at the heart of both professional and personal life, the company’s services are arguably more vital than ever.

Prabhu’s teams have been forced to overcome the same challenges all companies have faced during the past 12 or so months. But the fundamentals of her job, she says, remain the same: delivering value to stakeholders and suppliers inline with the group business objectives of BT. Creating stability and minimising disruption has been key to business continuity, and is built upon the core tenets of strategic sourcing, a critical process which Prabhu defines as the application of group-wide data, paired with consolidated purchasing power to find the best possible value in the marketplace. businesschief.asia

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“Our goals are to achieve lowest cost of ownership along with minimal supply chain risk”

Value, in this instance, understand what their does not necessarily strategy is and what mean most costtheir expectations are. efficient upfront; value Then we spend time can be measured by with our suppliers, to many metrics, and for understand how they're Prabhu that means going to fit into our delivering ecosystems, deliver the a “win-win proposition” services, come up with to BT, stakeholders and new plans and ideas, suppliers alike. Alongside and how they are going VANITHA PRABHU cost, procurement to improve efficiencies.

GLOBAL PROCUREMENT MANAGER leaders are now tasked That's where we try to BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA with combatting the evaluate our supply base most pressing issues threatening supply and our business stakeholders, and we try chains, namely risk-mitigation, agility and to collaborate with all of them to ensure we resilience. provide the best possible services.”

“Our goals are to achieve lowest cost of So how does one successfully deliver on ownership along with minimal supply chain these objectives? The answer in Prabhu’s risk,” Prabhu says. “To do this we spend a experience is leading with a collaborative lot of time speaking with stakeholders to mindset, and spending the time to explore 214

June 2021

how each and every business within the ecosystem can improve and grow.

“We always believe in a win-win position for both suppliers and BT,” Prabhu says. “When we onboard a new thirdparty supplier, we work with them in collaboration, because ultimately we are reselling the supplier’s products to our end customers. That means suppliers have to be very collaborative, they need to understand the BT ecosystem and the customer so that they can deliver upon our expectations, as well as our customers’ expectations.”

Keeping lines of communication open and maintaining these relationships is an ongoing process that goes far beyond onboarding, Prabhu explains: “It’s also how you manage the relationship throughout the lifetime of that contract.” BT conduct quarterly reviews to understand how all

VANITHA PRABHU TITLE: GLOBAL PROCUREMENT MANAGER INDUSTRY: CONSUMER SERVICES LOCATION: INDIA A keen leader ensuring accomplishment of functional objectives through effective team contribution by breaking down objectives into operational activities. Working with & guiding team members in executing activities with required means, knowledge, or opportunities.

16+ years of qualitative operational delivery experience in: •

Strategic Sourcing, Contract Management and Procurement Operations

•

Managerial Level Operational Reporting

•

Procurement Tools & Systems management

•

Exposure of managing all commercial aspects of complex contracts involving liaison with various departments for smooth operations of contracts.

•

Adept in handling a gamut of activities pertaining to opening/ evaluation of bids and negotiation, award &

EXECUTIVE BIO

review of contracts as per contract regimes, bridging contract agreement, settlement of contract claims and disputes •

An effective communicator with excellent leadership, planning, team management and relationship management skills and abilities in managing simultaneous projects.

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ADVERT PAGE GOLD parties are delivering on the contract, and hold meetings with suppliers to discuss how and where improvements can be made. Auditors, meanwhile, investigate security and data handling compliance; it’s a process of continued orientation.

“We identify whether any mitigation plan is required, and if so collaborative work towards that,” Prabhu says. “We also work on amendments and contract variations as and when required, so that they meet up to our expectations, as well as minimise and mitigate the risk to BT and our customers.”

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“ We spend more time on the value-add jobs rather than just a mechanical task” VANITHA PRABHU

GLOBAL PROCUREMENT MANAGER, BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

In many ways the direction of Prabhu’s attention remains unchanged by the pandemic. The means the organisation uses to navigate the increasingly choppy waters of global procurement, however, are undergoing a dramatic digital transformation journey, equipping BT’s procurement professionals with the modern tools and resources to react to the ever shifting landscape.

"We believe in new ways of working,” Prabhu says. “We have been focusing more on artificial intelligence (AI), machine

learning (ML) and many more emerging technologies. The focus is on simplifying the actual process and minimising the time we are investing in these tasks. We have introduced many tools within procurement to ensure the life of our procurement personnel is simple but brilliant. We now have all the information, data, and everything else we require available in one click. We have also started a digital garage, which will help us to please an order and get what we want in one click. That is a power of digitisation.” businesschief.asia

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BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

“We always believe in a win-win position for both suppliers and BT” VANITHA PRABHU

GLOBAL PROCUREMENT MANAGER, BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

The result is a virtuous circle: greater levels of digitisation place more power in the hands of Prabhu and her teams to focus on meeting customer expectations and adding value. “We are driving new projects and implementing strategic tools like designed-to-cost, design-to-value, and teardown analysis. And the more we invest in digital, the more time we can dedicate to strategic sourcing, meeting with our suppliers, understanding new techniques and innovations,” she says. “We spend more time on the value-add jobs rather than just a mechanical task. It is really helping us to leverage our expertise to commit to the things that matter, rather than wasting our time on those unproductive jobs.” businesschief.asia

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“ The more we invest in digital, the more time we can dedicate to strategic sourcing, meeting with our suppliers, understanding new techniques and innovations” VANITHA PRABHU

GLOBAL PROCUREMENT MANAGER, BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

Though COVID-19 placed further pressures on even the most basic procurement functions, Prabhu believes the outbreak was an energising testing ground for the unit’s new capabilities, and how procurement organisations can lead from the front in risk-mitigation. “We took a very proactive approach and we never waited long to act,” she says. “We started monitoring the performance of our suppliers, how they're doing, what the impact might be, and then ensuring there is business continuity so there is no impact to the supply chain.”

As the pandemic took hold of countries around the world, Prabhu’s teams were forced to wrestle not only with how quickly they reacted, but “how swiftly you are able to make decisions”. She uses the example of a supplier in China, which was unable to fulfil its obligations due to restrictions imposed in response to the virus. “Now you see the supply chain is getting impacted, so you have to ask what are the other sources of suppliers? Do you have in-country sourcing, or are there local country sourcing where 220

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you can quickly procure the services so that your supply chain is not disrupted? I don't want that experience again in future,” she jokes. “But we are prepared for those now.”

For Prabhu, the future holds vast opportunity. As a leader in India, she is something of an outlier: a woman in a senior leadership role in a country she says is more broadly prone to rewarding braggadocio above merit and experience.

“Procurement is a very male dominated area; there are very few women employees in the sector,” she says. “Oftentimes you find many capable women will think they

BT GLOBAL SERVICES INDIA

are not ready for a promotion when an opportunity comes up. Men are more likely to think they can take on the role, even if they are not yet ready. But BT does a lot to support women in the workplace. The BT TechWomen programme, which I joined about two years ago, really helped me to develop my professional self, build my brand and develop my career.”

Prabhu hopes to extend that professional develop to the rest of her team, regardless of gender. Using the new digital tools at their fingertips, she believes in empowering employees. “Once the job is given to them,

they need to own it end to end. I trust them, and I ensure that they get all the trainings, support and motivation they need from me so that they can deliver up to that expectation,” she says.

“They always come up with new ideas, challenges, and I always entertain people who want to come and challenge me, too.

That helps me to understand what my team expects from me, and help me to learn and grow along with my team.”

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Enabling SMEs and Communities to Thrive WRITTEN BY: JOANNA ENGLAND

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PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

BUKALAPAK

BUKALAPAK

Bima Tjahja VP of Growth and Data

BUKALAPAK

As Bukalapak takes off in Indonesia, we talk to the company’s VP of Growth and Data, Bima Tjahja about company culture and the magic of data

B

ima Tjahja is a numbers man. As a Vice President of Growth and Data for Bukalapak - an Indonesian E-commerce and business services company that was founded in 2010, his work with the swiftly expanding startup is a mixture of mathematics and behavioral science.

Bukalapak is an online marketplace that enables small and medium enterprises to utilize essential online services and has expanded to support smaller traditional family-owned businesses throughout Indonesia. Positioning itself as a facilitator of services between supplier and customer, Bukalapak has achieved extraordinary success by actually helping small businesses thrive, rather than bulldozering through them, large corporation style.

Tjahja, who has led the marketing efforts of the company and helped compile its strategy, is understandably proud of Bukalapak’s success. But his background, which started off in software engineering, seems a far stretch from his current role.

During his 12-year-stint in Australia, the self-confessed data whizz moved into the banking sector and became a data scientist, where he honed his skills on the cutting-edge of cybersecurity. examining fraud detection, money laundering, and criminal behaviors.

Now, as the leader of a team that examines the business relationship between data and marketing, he says his time spent in cybercrime has been incredibly valuable.

“When I worked at Commonwealth Bank in Australia, I led a data science team that specializes in fraud detection, which is very far from my current role. How does a guy that used to manage data science teams to detect credit card fraud, money laundering end up working in marketing?

Well, it’s really all about data and behavioral science,” he says.

“As the VP of growth and data in Bukalapak, there are two parts to my role.

There is the growth part and the data part and traditionally, these disciplines are not businesschief.asia

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combined into one department.”

However, Tjahja explains, by looking at growth strategies as demand generation, these two areas of business are inextricably linked. Bukalapak facilitates commerce between suppliers and what is commonly known as mom-and-pop shops - which essentially are small family-owned businesses that make up the backbone of Indonesia's economy.

By providing a service that enables businesses to expand their offerings to customers and help them to deliver better service, Bukalapak is generating better business practices and encouraging the use of technology at the heart of community businesses.

Tjahja says, “my team is responsible for generating demand, so most of our products 226

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are either B2C or C2C products. Essentially we match-make between suppliers and sellers so that our customers can come in and find the things they want, and we also inspire them to buy or to use things that

“ The point is that every action tells you something about a customer and demand for goods or services. And reading and analyzing data is unbelievably valuable” BIMA TJAHJA

VP OF GROWTH AND DATA, BUKALAPAK

BUKALAPAK

BIMA TJAHJA TITLE: VP OF GROWTH AND DATA COMPANY: BUKALAPAK LOCATION: INDONESIA Bima Indrajati Tjahja is a welltrained leader with expertise in Data, Growth, and strong experience in the cybersecurity-related field

they weren't using before because they had no idea of the value. This encourages them to expand their offerings to customers by providing online purchases; they could purchase online, for example, but the growth side is essentially responsible for generating demand.”

Part of Tjahja’s role is also to combine online experiences with marketing.

To examine customer behaviors, preferences and generate strategies, the team devises ways to market products to Bukalapak’s network of customers. “We use promotional campaigns and gamification to keep customers engaged with the platform,” he explains. “They are not really games in the ordinary sense but we create games in the purchasing experience so that clients become more engaged with the platform.”

EXECUTIVE BIO

Bima started his career as a software engineer and data scientist at Freelancer.com, Australia.

Supporting his role today as an expert in Data, he previously served as the Senior Manager at the Bank of Commonwealth of Australia in Sydney to specialize himself in Fraud Technologies, including, fraud detection, money laundering, and criminal behaviors.

He was awarded a Bachelor of Engineering from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Melbourne, Australia with honors, and currently, Bima is serving as the Vice President of Data & Growth at Bukalapak.

BUKALAPAK

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BUKALAPAK

“ In the West, you would simply run social media campaigns and contact influencers to get the word out.

But in Indonesia, community and more specifically, community leaders are the key to doing business” BIMA TJAHJA

VP OF GROWTH AND DATA, BUKALAPAK

Following the data In terms of predictive analytics though, data is king, says Tjahja, who explains why his background in cybersecurity has stood him in good stead. “I look after performance marketing where every view and every click means something. That is very data-driven in terms of experimentation on certain things and certain behaviors.

“Back in the Commonwealth Bank, I studied customer behaviors a lot. When you look at fraudsters and you examine genuine customers transacting on the platform, a lot of the detection comes down to logical consumer behavior. You can instantly recognize when a transaction is out of the norm - for example, how did someone use their credit card they have logged in in a totally different area of the city from where they last used it?

“That’s an obvious example - but the point is that every action tells you something about a customer and demand for goods or services. And reading and analyzing data is unbelievably valuable.”

Bukalapak HQ in Jakarta, Indonesia

BUKALAPAK Founded in 2010, Bukalapak is an E-commerce, supply chain facilitator that matches suppliers with mom and pop enterprises and other SMEs in Indonesia.

The system enables small businesses to access new products and make use of the latest convenient online services, as well as supporting enterprises in the local economy.

Currently, Bukalapak partners with more than 13.5 million SMEs alongside 100 million registered users.

In fact, Tjahja is so convinced about the value of data, that he champions the use of it in every department - and wants to make sure every employee understands its value.

“I always remember, in one of my past roles, I was told in no uncertain terms that there was information our senior-level staff had, that was not the concern of employees further down the ladder. I’ve always felt that attitude is incorrect. If we are all working for the same cause, it’s very important that every member of my team understand the challenges I am facing - and the company is facing. That way there is more of a chance to find solutions.” businesschief.asia

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Leadership culture Nurturing an agile and flexible mentality is also essential to Tjahja, who is fully behind Bukalapak’s company philosophy of inclusion. “When it comes to hiring, first and foremost I like to have a good mix of people that are essentially smarter than me in their areas of expertise. It’s important that they know their job well so that my job is more about unlocking their potential and providing them with opportunities, rather than just directing them. If you hire people who can challenge you and push the boundaries of what they do, then you stand a much greater chance of driving innovation.”

The hiring process and what TJahja looks for in his team members is also an example of making the most of Bukalapak’s human capital. “My philosophy for hiring boils down to four keywords,” he says.

“Trust - I need to be able to trust my team members to carry out their work and innovate. Transparency - because everyone should be aware of what our goals are and where our challenges lie.

I don’t believe in withholding information.

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As a leader, it's also my job to be open with my staff so that they feel they can be open with me.”

Empathy for his staff is another essential part of managing a successful team. “It’s really important that your people know that you have their back when things go South. They must trust that you won’t toss them under the bus or hang them out to dry when things happen. Everyone has different challenges and difficulties in their life. It’s important to remember that.”

Finally, vision is the fourth component.

“Having an innovative team that can visualize and contributes to the direction of the company is so important - and must also be encouraged,” he says.

BUKALAPAK

“When it comes to hiring, first and foremost I like to have a good mix of people that are essentially smarter than me in their areas of expertise” BIMA TJAHJA

VP OF GROWTH AND DATA BUKALAPAK

Bukalapak community Valuing their people is a trait that spills into the Bukalapak business model, which, despite its state-of-the-art technologybased platform, is heavily invested in its community of customers. Tjahja explains, “In Indonesia, the business culture is very different from the west. When I was in Australia, I experienced a business environment that had a lot of trust in big government institutions.

“Your life is basically centered around your bank - from bills and rent to savings and financial transactions. But in Indonesia, there is a natural distrust for big corporations. The population generally is very supportive of small businesses and

communities, which is why mom and pop shops have become the lifeblood of our economy.”

Tjahaj says that this unique business environment, therefore, presented several marketing challenges for Bukalapak. “In the west, you would simply run social media campaigns and contact influencers to get the word out. But in Indonesia, community and more specifically, community leaders are the key to doing business. It sounds very untechnical, but in order to reach our customers, after exploring several other avenues and realizing they weren’t going to work, we hired teams of reps to go and visit the communities we wanted to do business with. businesschief.asia

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Growth of online/offline commerce

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“Essentially we match-make between suppliers and sellers so that our customers can come in and find the things they want. This means they get a wider variety of products to sell, can make use of convenient online deliveries, and can offer their local customers better service” BIMA TJAHJA

VP OF GROWTH AND DATA, BUKALAPAK

“We spoke to the community leaders, people who are influential in their locales and showed them our offerings. Once they gave the products their seal of approval, other businesses in the community were keen to come on board.”

With that in mind, we create many approaches in doing our business. Hence, we are not only focusing on Marketplace, but also we focus on our O2O Business, Mitra Bukalapak. These lines of business are focused on supply chain management, as our business presence is to bridge all of our users with the principal and to provide our customers with more products and services, and harness the power of technology to boost their offerings to their customers.

It is this respect for small businesses that sets Bukalapak apart from other global trading platforms that have disrupted the small business layer in other countries.

A marriage of partnerships Working with strategic partners as closely as they work with their community of business customers, is essential for success, explains Tjahja.

“Don't go at it alone, is another core philosophy for our business. It’s important to do our part - but we shouldn’t try to do everything. We work with a great bunch of partners - such as Microsoft and we use their services to make sure that we can do things better.

“Back in the day when you talk about data platforms, people tended to just go open source and build things themselves if they needed something done. But it's counterproductive and expensive and it delays the market delivery times. So, it slows up business. By working with expert partners, we are able to make use of their vast data wealth and knowledge, without having to create something for ourselves.

And that is an incredible advantage.

“For example, Microsoft’s cloud platform provides a lot of our data services banking.

We also rely on our tech partners with their ton of experience in the data world. So, why would we try to build our own database system when we can partner with the best?

Our partners allow us to enable things to do things faster.”

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Transforming Supply Chain and Procurement WRITTEN BY: LAURA V. GARCIA 234

June 2021

PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE

SA HEALTH

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Andrea Andrews, Executive Director Procurement and SCM at SA Health, on transforming supply chain and procurement and the lessons learned from COVID

W

ith Andrea Andrews, Executive Director Procurement and Supply Chain Management, at the helm, SA Health has kicked off its supply chain and procurement transformation journey.

“We've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years trying to improve our processes and recognised that we needed technology for that. So we are looking to implement a contract management system this year. We’re also looking to implement a new Catalogue management system for the thousands of products that we distribute across hospitals and SA Ambulance. We're really in the middle of our technological transformation whilst also trying to implement spend analytics as well.”

“We use an ERP system here at SA health, and you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to say. So we had to assess what we had and identify where the gaps were, and then develop that vision of where we wanted to be. It's taken us time. I would say at least three years to get us to the point where we are now looking to implement these changes. It's a big exercise. We have to implement it all across SA Health, in all our hospitals and across our network as well. When it comes to implementation and change management, it’s important to hit the right note. That’s a massive piece of the work, and so we spent a lot of time in the planning stage to ensure we get it right.”

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SA HEALTH

Andrea Andrews, Executive Director Procurement and SCM at SA Health businesschief.asia

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“Prior to COVID, our hope was to have our spend analytics implemented last year.

So some of our projects have been paused because we had to divert our resources to other priorities. So we are still on our digital transformation journey. We never got to that finish line. But I don't believe there is a finish line. I think that technology will keep evolving and improving, and we will have to evolve with it.”

It seems, however, that the global pandemic caused a cultural shift and brought its own set of lessons to be learned.

The Covid Lesson: A Cultural Shift Andrea was on vacation when COVID hit. And as all good supply chain and procurement professionals do, regardless of where in the world they may be, or if they are on or off “the clock, began to immediately think of the repercussions. By the time she got back to work, usage had started to spike.

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Andrea shares the story. “On the 2nd of February, we saw all our hospitals draw down about six months of PPE stock in about five days. Fortunately for us, we were watching it and saw it happening. We quickly realised we had to put some controls in place. But then we had to come to longer-term solutions.”

“The first half of 2020, we focused on PPE and identifying our supply chain vulnerabilities. People thought it was great to see oil prices for Petro going down, but for us, it signified possible supply chain issues as a raw material, e.g. polypropylene used in PPE and hospital supplies. You have to start connecting the dots fast. The team did a great job of that.”

“I put the team into functional streams early on so we could focus on those areas, and we got some support from government agencies. One of the key things we did early on was to centralise PPE for all government agencies, and that really helped us. I

ANDREA ANDREWS TITLE: EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PROCUREMENT AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT LOCATION: SA HEALTH

ANDREA ANDREWS

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PROCUREMENT AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, SA HEALTH

EXECUTIVE BIO

“ I don't believe there is a finish line. I think that technology will keep evolving and improving, and we will have to evolve with it”

Andrea is the Chief Procurement Officer, South Australian Health.

She has more than 20 years experience across private, public and not-for-profit sectors in Australia and the United Kingdom. Her experience has proved invaluable throughout the COVID19 pandemic, navigating the various challenges with procurement and supply chains. Recognising the prompt actions required at the commencement of COVID-19 allowed for a team, led by Andrea, to oversee logistics supporting the State wide response.

Andrea is driven to maximize results and deliver value for money through the establishment of crossfunctional relationships.

She understands the importance of mutually beneficial partnerships with business leaders, customers, suppliers and service providers all with the patient in mind.

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From first-time-right diagnosis to hospitals that go where the patient goes, we’re breaking the boundaries standing in the way of progress. There’s no limit to what we can do together. Because today health knows no bounds, and neither should healthcare.

See how Philips is removing the bounds of care at: www.philips.com/nobounds There’s always a way to make life better.

SA HEALTH

“ We learned that the public sector could be fast, effective and efficient. We realised we had the skills and tools that we needed. We just had to believe that it could be done” ANDREA ANDREWS

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PROCUREMENT AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, SA HEALTH

remember sitting with all the heads of procurement, all the people in roles similar to mine, across all the government agencies, police, education and the department of infrastructure and transport. And in that meeting, we talked about centralising supply through health. We were competing for scarce resources, and we could prioritise from a health perspective how we supplied.”

“I think controlling the demand as well as the supply helped us tremendously, and I thank my colleagues for working with us and trusting us to assume control of that for them. The fact that the public sector could pull together like that was a real benefit. We learned that the public sector could be fast, effective and efficient. We realised we had the skills and tools that we needed. We just had to believe that it could be done.”

“I think the common practice we had across corporates, across the health system, as well as the government agencies, all coming together towards a common goal helped speed things up.

We set up PPE manufacturing companies within weeks when normally it would take years. We were lucky to have suppliers who are willing to come to the party and trusted us. I think it's been heartening to see how the community pulled together and how the private sector was able to work with us.” businesschief.asia

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Healthy Supplier Relationships for a Healthy Supply Chain Upon stepping into the role, Andrea was keen to improve supplier relationship management, something her team embraced. “It’s important to realise you must talk to suppliers and build up those important relationships. Otherwise, you can’t look at things like innovation. You must have those relationships in place, and it’s important to be clear about what the guidelines are. We should have good working practices that allow us to have those conversations.”

“We run an annual supplier conference.

When we had our first one, people questioned why we would run a supplier conference in the public sector. But it’s important to pull everyone in, which allows everyone to hear the same information at the same time. We can share with them our vision and our business planning and strategy and where we're heading, which then makes it easier for all of us when we’re looking for support for goods or services, or whatever it may be.”

“The supplier conference has been growing year-over-year. Last year, we moved it to a virtual conference, and that still worked well. We incorporated one-onone meetings as well, either with myself, Directors of Procurement, our the Head of SRM or other members of my team. We make sure that suppliers have as much access to us as we can. Everyone is really busy, but we deliberately set that time.

And the suppliers know that we do those round tables throughout the year, so that is certainly improving how we work together and the innovation that comes from that.”

“It’s important to remember that it’s those relationships with suppliers that we relied on when Covid hit. Maintaining those relationships meant we could pick up the 242

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10,000+

Number of Employees businesschief.asia

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phone and see if they could help us. We aren’t the biggest state in Australia, and for a lot of international companies, we are on the other side of the world. So if we want to be a key customer, then we need to think differently because it's not necessarily going to be about scope and scale. I think the fact that we really built those relationships up really helped us throughout, and I hope to maintain those moving forward.”

Automating for Better Contract and Relationship Management Andrea highlights how tighter contract management allows for better relationship management.

“Facts and data enable you to have these relationships because you want to be able to be clear and quantitative. We want to have contract management meetings, agendas and minutes and action logs and all that good stuff because that's the foundation.

And if you can get those things right, then it allows you to be able to do some of the more innovative work.”

“Is that an area we could improve in?

Absolutely, and the technology piece for me is really key. I want us to automate as much as we can because I want contract management to be not just about talking to suppliers and having contract management meetings but going to talk to our customers.

Actually getting out into the hospitals and talking to the nurses and doctors, the endusers. To be able to do that, I need to make time, which means I need to automate what I can so I can get out there.”

In terms of long term plans, Andrea wants to continue to leverage technology for easier ways of working. “I want to come in in the morning, click a button and see a supplier dashboard with colour coding and early warning signals where we can see any 244

June 2021

“ It's been heartening to see how the community pulled together and how the private sector was able to work with us” ANDREA ANDREWS

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PROCUREMENT AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, SA HEALTH

SA HEALTH

challenges, where we may have to go and have a conversation. But also where we can see that suppliers are going above and beyond, and there may be opportunities.

I want those early indicators. The benefit is for our contract managers to be actually out with our customers and talking to suppliers and preparing the whole life cycle management of contracts, looking for better ways of working, preplanning for the next tender or whatever is next.

“We’re not there yet, but we're stepping towards it, and that certainly is our end objective. Much of the transactional work can be automated, so we can really get into those other analytical pieces and opportunities, hence the technological transformation that we need to go through to get there.”

“Oracle is our ERP system, and there are additional Oracle modules we're looking

to implement. Certainly, I think that having everything on one platform will help us.

We are bringing in service partners to come in and help complete implementation for us. We’re supply chain management experts. You can ask us how many SKUs we have in distribution, or you can ask us about negotiation strategies, but we’re not ICT experts, so we do need help from our Digital Health department and from service providers to do that.”

The Distribution Centre “We are constructing a new distribution centre, and I went out to see it last week, it’s looking brilliant. It’s about 11,000 square meters with office areas on top of that. And we're looking to automate as much as we can. We’ll be putting in a new procurement system and warehouse management system. Our new goods to person picking businesschief.asia

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“ I think we were very brave and bold through COVID, and I would like us to maintain that kind of boldness that things can be done differently” ANDREA ANDREWS

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PROCUREMENT AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, SA HEALTH

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SA HEALTH

system alone will hold about 10,400 high volume fast-moving SKUs,” says Andrea.

“We’re working to move the unit picking work to the distribution centre. We’re actually looking at what they need at ward level and then building it back. So at the distribution centre, we pack it in a way that when it arrives at the imprest, ward level, the first thing they need to unpack is at the top. So that's been a massive project for us. We will be working carefully with our customers. I don't think our stakeholders fully understand what the supply chain will look like yet, but certainly, it will be far more effective and efficient while improving quality, speed and volume as well.”

“It’s impressive to see it go from drawing to reality. I hope that the team enjoys it and understands that we tried to make it as positive for our team as possible. We did some surveys early on to decide on things like do we want bike racks in, or outdoor eating area, touchpoints like that. I want it to be a good place to work. The ribbon should be cut sometime at the beginning of September, and we should be operating from there from then on.”

As Andrea and her team look to get back on track with their digital transformation, Andrea hopes they hold onto the lessons they’ve learned along the way. “I would really like to see us imbed a real culture of continuous improvement throughout our network. I think we were very brave and bold through COVID, and I would like us to maintain that kind of boldness that things can be done differently. We don't need to keep doing things the same way we did them before.”

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GREEN

POWER IN THE

TROPICS

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WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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THE EXECUTIVE TEAM BEHIND SPACEDC TALKS GREEN POWER, EMERGING MARKETS, AND COLLABORATING WITH THE OCP

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cross Southeast Asia (SEA), the region’s data centre industry is experiencing a period of generational change. In Singapore, the region’s most mature market, construction of new data centres has ground to a halt, stopped short by a government moratorium that took effect back in 2019 - part of the government’s attempts to find a way to reconcile a powerhungry business with its own commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement. Elsewhere, the rise of e-commerce and cloud, combined with the effects of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, is driving demand for digital infrastructure to all-time highs. “In 2019, SEA’s digital economy was worth about $100bn. That figure is showing every sign of tripling by 2025,” says Darren Hawkins, CEO of SpaceDC. SpaceDC’s COO, Carolyn Harrington, explains that, “Traditionally, companies would look to house their data and compute resources in Singaporean data centres. But Singapore has a moratorium going on right now as the country grapples with how to reconcile its data centre industry with its carbon-neutrality goals.” The trend emerging in response, she continues, is that companies across SEA are now gravitating towards data centres within emerging markets like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, as opposed to Singapore.

This is where SpaceDC comes in. Founded in 2019, the Singapore-based startup is bringing new levels of technical sophistication, and a focus on green power, to emerging markets

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“ OUR MISSION IS TO BE A ONE-STOPSHOP FOR CUSTOMERS LOOKING TO EXPAND IN BOTH MATURE AND EMERGING MARKETS” DARREN HAWKINS TITLE: CEO COMPANY: SPACEDC INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRES LOCATION: SINGAPORE Darren Hawkins is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of SpaceDC, the first data center provider in Singapore to establish a partnership with the government's sovereign wealth fund (GIC). Over the course of a 30+ year career in the data centre and critical infrastructure industries, Hawkins has worked for clients such as ANZ, Global Switch, Toyota, HSBC, BAA, TfL and Telstra. He has a proven reputation for delivering a broad range of capital-intensive projects that led to long-term business advantages across Europe and Asia Pacific, with successful projects ranging in value of up to $10bn.

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SpaceDC Chief Executive Officer Darren Hawkins

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State of the Art Data Centres with resilient and high-quality infrastructure | Space DC

“GREEN POWER IS GOING TO BE IMMENSELY IMPORTANT OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS”

throughout SEA. The - well underway, we company opened its sat down with Hawkins, first data centre in the Harrington, and SpaceDC’s Indonesian capital of CTO Nick Stavroulakis, Jakarta in November of to discuss the changing last year. Housed in an landscape of SEA’s elegant, yet industrial, data centre industry, silver building 15 the legacy of COVIDkilometres from the heart 19, and the realities of of the city, JAK2 delivers delivering green data 1.45 MW of carrier neutral centre infrastructure in data centre capacity in a the tropics.

DARREN HAWKINS Tier III facility that not only CEO, delivers a PUE of 1.3 in a Staying cool and keeping SPACEDC country where average it green in the tropics temperatures never fall below 25 Degrees “Climate is a huge factor to consider Celsius, but also holds the title of Asia’s first when expanding into both developing OCP-Ready data centre. and mature markets in SEA. Jakarta DC Now, with Space ’s next project, JAK1 - a 24 and Singapore are both very hot and MW hyperscale facility that both dramatically humid climates year-round, as opposed expands the company’s capacity in Indonesia, to Melbourne or Sydney, or markets and maintains the exacting standards that further north where you get seasons,” make JAK2 stand out from the competition explains Stavroulakis, the man in charge 254

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of designing and building a portfolio of data centres that are not only capable of delivering world-class colocation services in the heart of Jakarta, but doing it sustainably. “Success in SEA is really dependent on building to a design that maximises your facility's efficiency in this hot and humid climate.”

As a result, SpaceDC’s Jakarta data centres - which are both housed on its 1.8 hectare ID01 campus - take a novel approach to cooling their server racks.

“Rather than use a very traditional chilled water solution, or even a DX CRAC unit design, we're using high-efficiency, variable-speed chillers, which bring our efficiency right up and our PUE right down,” Stavroulakis explains. “With the design of JAK2, we spent a lot of time designing and building to both international and Indonesian standards to make sure that the

facility meets the needs and expectations of both overseas and domestic customers.” JAK2 uses fan walls to cool its server racks which, as opposed to a traditional CRAC unit, is far more efficient.

Stavroulakis adds that, from a design and maintenance perspective, “Fan walls also mean that there's no raised floor, which means we can install bigger, heavier, denser racks. The other advantage there is that the fan walls can all be maintained by the onsite staff, as opposed to having to call in a more specialised contractor to come and repair a broken CRAC unit.”

Keeping both temperatures and PUE’s low in a climate like Jakarta is no mean feat, but for SpaceDC, it’s a nonnegotiable issue. As Harrington explains, “Sustainability really is at the heart of our philosophy, starting from the design phase of the data centre.”

JAK1: BRINGING HYPERSCALE TO INDONESIA

CASE STUDY...

“Indonesia’s data centre sector is expected to grow significantly, driven largely by mass e-commerce adoption.

Currently, there is more than 100 MW of hyperscale capacity that's expected to be added to the market over the next few years,” Hawkins says. “And we'll be developing 25 MW of that ourselves in our ID01 campus.”

The overwhelming share of that capacity will be housed in JAK1, SpaceDC’s 24 MW hyperscale data centre. Built to exacting Tier III, OCP-Ready, Colo Solution Provider Status standards, JAK1 promises to be one of the most cutting-edge, efficient and green data centres, both in Indonesia and all of SEA.

JAK1 at a glance: Capacity: 24 MW Uptime Institute Tier III certification N+1 redundancy on all critical power and cooling systems 99.995% availability 24 x 1,000kW data halls Floorspace: 26,000m2

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SpaceDC Chief Technology Officer Nick Stavroulakis

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“SUCCESS IN SEA IS REALLY DEPENDENT ON BUILDING TO A DESIGN THAT MAXIMISES YOUR FACILITY'S EFFICIENCY IN THIS HOT AND HUMID CLIMATE”

NICK STAVROULAKIS TITLE: CTO COMPANY: SPACEDC INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRES LOCATION: SINGAPORE As the Chief Technology Officer at SpaceDC, Nick Stavroulakis oversees the design and construction of all the company’s data centre campuses. Prior to joining SpaceDC, Stavroulakis served as the Principal and Project Engineer at Wood & Grieve Engineers, spearheading multidisciplinary teams of more than 25 technical staff with major projects exceeding AUD500mn in value. Some of the clients and projects include ANZ Bank, Global Switch, Telstra and Fujitsu Data Centers. He currently lives in Singapore with his family.

He has a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering and holds a certificate by Uptime Institute as an Accredited Tier Designer.

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2019

SpaceDC was founded in 2019

50+

The company currently has 50+ employees

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Going green in SEA, however, can be an uphill struggle. “Jakarta still uses mostly coal-fired power stations,” says Stavroulakis. “Which is why we've also got several options for doing onsite gas power generation, which is good compared to buying exclusively from the grid. Natural gas is a very good transition fuel in countries like Indonesia where there aren't enough renewables to go around.” JAK2 was the first data centre in Indonesia to fit a Selective Catalytic Reduction system to the diesel generators used to power its UPS, ensuring that maintaining its rate of 99.982% uptime availability doesn’t come at the cost of its green ambitions.

SpaceDC is also actively exploring more on-demand renewable energy generation for the customers for whom green power is a must-have. “If we have the demand from the customer, we'll develop our own solar array to fuel their presence in our facility,” says Hawkins. “We've been working away in the background developing those options, and we're ready to start having those conversations with our customers.

It's a good interim step that allows us to offer a far more environmentally friendly and efficient alternative to grid supply.”

In the meantime, Stavroulakis and his team are exhibiting a laser-like focus on reducing the power that SpaceDC’s facilities consume. In a market where renewables are in short supply, “It's better to reduce the amount of energy we use in the first place than to try and buy just solar power in a market where it isn't widely available.”

Harrington, whose job as COO is very much the Yin to Stavroulakis’ Yang, is quick to add that “Sustainability is at the heart of our business, and we instil it in everything we do - not just how we run our data centres.” businesschief.asia

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SpaceDC Site Tour

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groundbreaking in many ways, its 1.45 MWs pale in comparison to the next phase of SpaceDC’s Indonesian expansion. “JAK1 takes us to a new level in terms of being able to provide better performance and technical specifications to our customers,” enthuses Hawkins, adding that, “We've spent a lot of time during the building of JAK2 using the lessons we learned along the way to improve JAK1.” The four-storey facility can accommodate taller racks, and even denser server deployment of up to 10 kilowatts per rack, and promises to deliver some of the greenest, most efficientlyused power of any data centre in the region. To do that, JAK1’s design is breaking with a lot of the accepted practices in the Indonesian data centre market. “There's a lot of accepted redundancy in the design of some of the data centres in the Indonesian market,” explains Hawkins, “which is obviously inefficient, from a product, design, and environmental perspective.” SpaceDC, Hawkins adds, is looking to educate its customers about the From cutting down on paper usage in the office, using as little power as possible, and making sure that the power that is used is the greenest power possible, to reusing building materials. “When we built JAK2, we didn't throw anything away; all waste materials were reused in the construction process,” she adds.

JAK1: Taking it to the next level “As a design objective, what we wanted to do with JAK2 was provide a robust and resilient data centre built to international standards that matched the quality of facility you might see in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and other tier one markets,” says Hawkins.

JAK2 has been up and running for just under six months now and, while

“JAK1 TAKES US TO A NEW LEVEL IN TERMS OF BEING ABLE TO PROVIDE BETTER PERFORMANCE AND TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS TO OUR CUSTOMERS” DARREN HAWKINS CEO, SPACEDC

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Meet the SpaceDC team

“ SUSTAINABILITY IS AT THE HEART OF OUR BUSINESS, AND WE INSTIL IT IN EVERYTHING WE DO - NOT JUST HOW WE RUN OUR DATA CENTRES” CAROLYN HARRINGTON COO, SPACEDC

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fact that, because JAK1 (and JAK2) facilities are built to next generation standards of quality, they don't need the same amount of built-in resilience that more traditional facilities require.

“The average PUE for a data centre in Jakarta is close to 2, and the Uptime Industry calculates the global average at around 1.58,” says Stavroulakis. “We have a PUE of 1.3 which, if you look at a cold climate, isn't that impressive. But if you look at the kinds of PUE being recorded in tropical climates like ours, it's quite good.”

JAK1 was originally going to spin up in 2021, but the pressures of COVID-19 have conspired to push the launch date to early next year - still an impressive feat given the

DC SPACE SpaceDC Chief

Operating Officer Carolyn Harrington

CAROLYN HARRINGTON TITLE: COO COMPANY: SPACEDC INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRES

hammer blow that the pandemic delivered to the delicate Swiss watch of the global just-in-time manufacturing industry. “I think the world of manufacturing has spent the last 20 years or so really refining that 'just in time' model, where you have the minimum amount of inventory possible, parts from one factory get finished and then shipped straight out to another factory for the next step, and so on,” says Stavroulakis. “It was a really big eye opener to see how COVID19 threw that whole model out the window more or less overnight.” Over the past 12 months, SpaceDC has worked closely with its manufacturing partners and suppliers to overcome the challenges of the pandemic.

“Everyone’s thinking three, four, five steps

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: SINGAPORE Carolyn Harrington is the Chief Operating Officer of SpaceDC, a role in which she oversees not only the overall operations of the company’s data centre assets, but also the business’ commercial arm, including sales, customer account management, legal, and marketing. She brings more than two decades of experience establishing and growing new companies to the role, and excels at strategic planning, as well as effective management of staff and development of market ready products and services.

Harrington has received widespread recognition by various establishments, including Springboard Enterprises and, more recently, Portfolio Magazine Singapore, as an accomplished women entrepreneur leading technologydriven companies.

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“ IN ORDER TO STAY AHEAD IN THE DATA CENTRE INDUSTRY, STAVROULAKIS EXPLAINS THAT YOU NEED TO THINK, DESIGN, AND BUILD AHEAD OF THE CURVE” 264

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ahead, as opposed to before COVID-19, when you could just think of the next one or two,” Stavroulakis adds.

Building for the future “Green power is going to be immensely important over the next few years.

Customers are looking for end-to-end services that include green power and we're developing the solutions to meet those needs,” says Hawkins. “Our focus at SpaceDC is to provide technically focused and green-driven data centre development in Asia. Our mission is to be a one-stopshop for customers looking to expand in both mature and emerging markets.” In the coming years, SpaceDC is set to grow, not only in Indonesia - where the company is

SPACE DC

already exploring projects in other cities outside Jakarta - but across emerging markets throughout SEA. The plan, Hawkins explains, is to continue driving data centre standards to higher and higher levels in the markets where SpaceDC operates, while continuing to keep sustainability at the forefront of everything the company does.

In order to stay ahead in the data centre industry, Stavroulakis explains that you need to think, design, and build ahead of the curve. “It takes about three to six months to design a new facility, then you have permitting, building, equipping progressing from the point where you start a project to the day when it goes online can take two to three years,” he explains.

When the SpaceDC team sits down to

DID YOU KNOW...

THE OCP IN SEA Originally founded as part of Facebook, the Open Compute Project (OCP) has spent the past decade building a global community of technology leaders looking to bring the benefits of open-sourced design and manufacturing - which already has a firm foothold in the software space - to the data centre hardware industry.

“JAK2 is the first OCP-ready data centre in all of SEA. Besides the facility being OCP-ready, we've also achieved Colo Solution Provider Status from the OCP, which translates to our offerings having a strong technical service and support capability, which enables our customers to scale their deployments of OCP infrastructure,” says Hawkins.

“It's really exciting to be a part of the OCP community. It really helps to distinguish us as a brand in terms of being part of the same community as tech giants like Google and Facebook, and it helps us position ourselves as a brand that our customers can depend on to deliver world-class solutions.”

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JAK2: BREAKING THE MOULD

CASE STUDY...

SpaceDC’s first Indonesian data centre, JAK2, came online in the midst of COVID-19 - amid social distancing, lockdowns, supply chain disruptions and travel bans. With most of its team based in Singapore, the company had to get creative with the process of, as Harrington describes it, “building a data centre from the ground up, from another country altogether.”

From using modularised, containerised, prefabricated construction techniques, to virtual site inspections - which then became virtual customer tours - SpaceDC has adapted well to the unexpected and unprecedented constraints of data centre construction in the age of COVID-19.

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JAK2 at a glance: Capacity: 1.45 MW Average density design: 3.8kW per rack (maximum of 15kW per rack) Uptime Institute Tier III certification 99.982% availability PUE rating of 1.3

SPACE DC

plan the next generation of facilities, the key is to “always be looking at that next wave of innovations and ways to create efficiencies. If we sat down and designed our data centres to look like the ones that are operating today, by the time they came to market, they'd already be a few years behind the curve. Designing for the future is a huge focus for us.”

This cutting edge design, Harrington adds, is only as effective as the team behind its day-to-day operations. “You can build an amazing data centre, but if you don't operate it right and have the right team in place, it doesn't matter,” she says. “I can say unequivocally that, in our operation team, the left hand definitely knows what the right hand is doing.

COVID-19 placed a huge task in front of them and, as a company, we're immensely proud of the work that they've done.”

For Hawkins, as the originator and guiding force behind SpaceDC’s strategic direction, the ID01 campus is just the beginning. “It’s the start of a broader strategy for us in SEA. We're very much looking to provide capacity for our customers to grow,” he says. “We're embracing the challenge of driving data centre standards in Indonesia, and we look forward to continuing in the future, not just in Indonesia, but in other countries as well.”

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