Mobica – Road To Digital Transformation

PROJECT PARTNER

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Tony Healy is the CIO at Mobica, a global software services company with close to 1000 staff, three-quarters of whom are highly skilled engineers, who specialise in delivering enabling technologies to transform business outcomes.

Written by Anna McMahon • Produced by Danielle Harris

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Mobica offers scalable custom software engineering with technical and delivery excellence, across the stack, from chip to cloud, but Tony’s role is far more than just systems and software.

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ony Healy plans and executes Mobica’s global IT strategy and roadmap, which includes the delivery of their technology solutions and enhancement to their cybersecurity footprint. Mobica is undergoing some exciting changes, reported Tony, “My role is to implement a complete global digital system transformation, which will see a large number of legacy and custom-built applications replaced with new cloud-based technology.”

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Having expanded rapidly over the last few years, Mobica has opened new offices around the world and hired hundreds of additional employees. For a company undergoing that type of year-on-year growth, it’s easy for the internal tech stack to become outdated while everyone is focused on servicing customers. In 2018, Mobica made the decision to bring in a leading CIO, Tony, to lead the digital transformation programme covering all IT systems and roadmap, and bring together customer

Tony Healy CIO at Mobica “I am where I am because of the people who work for me, and a large part of my role is enabling my team members to grow and achieve success�

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Mobica consolidates onto one communications platform with RingCentral “RingCentral is leaps and bounds above the communications systems I’ve used in previous organisations. It is truly enabling our global, mobile workforce.”

—Tony Healy, CIO

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Named as one of the UK Sunday Times Tech track top 100

Awarded the Queen’s Named as one of Award for Enterprise: the London Stock Exchange’s 1000 companies International Trade to inspire Britain

innovation and internal system transformation. Tony explains that the success of any digital transformation program is based on three key concepts; People, Process and Technology.

People People is the first component of any Systems Digital Transformation Strategy, comprising:

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The leader who develops and implements the businessenabling vision and strategy

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The business people around whom the whole strategy and roadmap is centred and who define the requirements and content so that the roadmap is people-centric, not technology first

3. The IT team who deliver it 4. Sponsorship from the top table 7

Tony leads the Mobica team on this new journey. He has worked with high-growth global organisations including Wall Family Enterprises, Synexus and Promethean PLC, where he has performed as a visionary leader, building high-performing teams. Tony is well-known in the wider IT community, speaking at many events such as CIO summits, forums and roundtables, mentoring at Tech Manchester, and has recently been selected to chair the judging panel for the 2019 UK Digital Experience Awards to share his expertise with the rising stars in the industry.

Tony believes that the end user (employee in this case) is fundamental in driving the digital transformation journey.

The Strategy has to be businessuser-centric and enable these requirements to drive the technology choices, rather than starting with them. He explained, “The tables have turned. Systems are not driven, created and implemented by IT teams in a silo, disconnected from the business.

The users can and must now influence our ways of working and our technology choices in order to create real digital transformation.

It is about making sure that the systems and teams of people can 8

now adapt to that change in mind-set.”

Tony believes that a highly motivated and capable IT team is essential to the success of a digital transformation program, adding, “I am where I am because of the people who work for me, and a large part of my role is enabling my team members to grow and achieve success.”

He believes in establishing teams with core values of hard work, respect and trust, and is noted for his love of mentoring and coaching people, helping them to realise their potential at all times. Tony said, “I really enjoy developing people, finding their potential and real talent, and supporting them to develop further.”

Tony believes that the end user (employee in this case) is fundamental in driving the digital transformation journey

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ONE MISSION. ONE PURPOSE. ONE COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM.

RingCentral delivers a single global communications platform for modern digital business that empowers companies to work as one to better serve their customers, improve business efficiency, and boost customer satisfaction.

Visit ringcentral.co.uk to learn more.

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Process Process is the second component of digital transformation. In order for the program to be successful, it is critical that process evaluation and transformation come before technology choices.

There is a misconception that digital transformation is simply about putting a new system in place. It is a complex exercise involving understanding what the current processes are, why you want to improve them, and how you want to change them to fully optimise those processes within the business. Implementing a platform and solution capable of scaling with the organisation is key to this exercise.

Tony explains, “Taking a growing business on a digital transformation journey requires full company buy-in and a lot of trust from the entire staff that the journey will be worth it. It involves balancing the vision of the longterm transformation plan along with implementing continuous prioritised improvements all the way along that journey. So when I started at Mobica in 2018, we looked initially at the quick wins for the business, addressing the areas that were potentially costing

us a lot of money, were very complicated, or caused our users frustration.

To make life easier for people within the business, we stabilised the core infrastructure, improved our security footprint, enabled a process review across key technology requirement areas, ensured we were GDPR compliant, and consolidated a number of our online meeting and telephony platforms into a single standardised collaboration tool.

“Mobica partners with RingCentral to consolidate its collaboration solutions and telephony platforms�

Tony Healy, CIO at Mobica

Technology The third leg of any digital transformation program is the technology choices and onboarding the right, reliable platform and solution providers to enable your business to achieve the roadmap goals with 11

Tony Healy CIO at Mobica

“It’s essential that we continue to streamline our processes to make life easier for people and enable them to deliver the truly world-leading innovations that our customers demand”

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maximum impact and minimum disruption.

Mobica partners with RingCentral to consolidate its collaboration solutions and telephony platforms.

Tony said, “I started looking at an all-in-one cloud collaboration tool for telephony. Being a global business of nearly 1000 people, I also needed something that we could use on multiple devices.

Since its implementation, we have dramatically reduced the amount of money we were paying in onpremises telephony systems and various platforms, and improved our employees’ experience in their day-to-day work, reducing multiple phones and systems.”

Security is a key enabler to digital transformation, and as a wrapper around all activity, can be the key component as to whether an IT digital transformation program implementation fails or

is successful. With a background in security, architecture and strategy, Tony is well-placed to enhance Mobica’s cybersecurity footprint. He said, “In this day and age, reputation is everything. When you are dealing with customers who demand and expect a high level of security, we need to ensure that we are as protected as possible.”

The company now partners with Triangulate, who have introduced them to Rebasoft for its security software.

Tony added, “I need a single view of my enterprise, so I know what people are doing from a network and security perspective. I wanted to be able to control the devices coming in and out of the business, and to see how much traffic is being generated. It is important to go through a robust process to on-board a supplier-partner you trust with a core component such as security, especially in a high technology innovation area that we are in.

“We have built a robust security policy which protects the business and our users, and we take a common-sense approach. Rather than having 10 different security systems

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Mobica is already well on its way with the digital transformation journey and intends to be even better placed in the market once this journey is complete, with far more flexible and dynamic systems

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As for Mobica’s future plans, the organisation has aggressive growth targets to continue its reach as a leading software solutions company

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monitoring 10 different things, we decided to pull everything into one single system, because if you’ve got a number of alerts being triggered in 10 different systems, it’s quite hard to track them through to resolution.

One system allows us to easily drill through to the issue and rapidly resolve it.

We are also investing heavily in perimeter security, internal security and the right anti-virus products, but more importantly, we are focusing on the user element. We are rolling out cyber training with our employees, such as how to spot phishing attacks and how to be secure when accessing company information remotely.”

What’s Next?

Mobica is already well on its way with the digital transformation journey and intends to be even better placed in the market once this journey is complete, with far more flexible and dynamic systems.

Tony expands on this, “Last week, we had sign-off on our 12-18 month transformation plan, which will see sales, HR, marketing and finance all move to new cloud-based solutions that will generate business process improvements, easier ways of working, and enable the business to flex depending on the business strategy.”

As for Mobica’s future plans, the organisation has aggressive growth targets to continue its reach as a leading software solutions company. Tony concluded, “Our new CEO, Simon Wilkinson, has an excellent vision for the company. Between Simon and Inflexion, who are our private equity partner, they see the great potential for the business to grow.

We are very good at what we do, and they want to take it to the next level. To grow our business model, Simon realises that we need to give our workforce the right tools to do their job, and simplify processes and systems as much as possible to enable every individual to focus on the areas where they individually excel in innovative R&D development.

My role is to provide the platforms that will enable Mobica to reach this ambitious vision, ensuring that they are flexible to adjust as we grow and move into different markets. It’s essential that we continue to streamline our processes to make life easier for people and enable them to deliver the truly world-leading innovations that our customers demand.”

For further information on Mobica, visit www.mobica.com 17

Call: +44 1625 446140 Email sales: sales@mobica.com Headquarter Mobica Limited, Crown House, Manchester Road, Wilmslow SK9 1BH UK