Digital Bulletin - Issue 26 - March 2021

DIGITAL BULLETIN Issue 26 | Mar ’21

2030 THE FUTURE OF WORK The workplace of 2030 will look vastly different.

Bain & Company tells us why organisations must start embracing automation now or risk being left behind

JAMES HENDERSON Content Director

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f the last 12 months have shown us anything, it is that even the best-laid plans can go awry. Companies have had to pivot on a dime, accelerating or implementing technology transformations to enable them to keep functioning.

One of the key challenges faced by the C-Suite will have been balancing that short-term need with continuing to make medium and long-term investments in their teams and technologies.

Our cover feature this month looks at how global management consultancy Bain & Company is working with organisations across the enterprise to essentially future-proof, with an emphasis on the utilisation of automation and AI - two technologies which will go some way to defining the world of business over the next decade.

In the piece, Bain’s Ted Shelton, Expert Partner, Automation and Digital Innovation, tells Digital Bulletin how the Boston-based company - recognised as one of the “Big Three” management consultancies - is working with companies to help them use automation to not

only increase revenue but also to deliver products and services more efficiently.

The pandemic has understandably focussed the minds of executives, but Shelton says there is no time to waste when it comes to future planning.

“One of the things that we believe is that the executive team at every company needs to be thinking about automation as a part of their future workforce. A company that does not start looking at AI today is one that in three years will be behind and in five years will be at risk.”

Elsewhere, we speak to a number of experts in an attempt to find out what is driving a SPAC explosion. For so long a peripheral vehicle to take a business public, tens of billions of dollars are flowing into blank cheque companies every month, with tech firms proving to be particularly attractive targets. We ask whether this is indicative of an overheated market and if SPACs are here to stay.

For that and much more, read on and enjoy the issue.

PUBLISHED BY BULLETIN MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

CONTENTS

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26 CASE STUDY

MONTH IN REVIEW

BAIN & CO Helping the enterprise prepare for 2030

NEWS, REGULATIONS AND ANALYSIS

IT SERVICES HSBC

Dax Grant, CIO, Global Operations on people-focussed transformations

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DEBATE Keeping workforces motivated in challenging times

6686 FUTURE

Q&A Tracking the emergence of natural language processing

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CONNECTIVITY FUJITSU Talking 5G, IoT and digital transformations

A LIFE IN TECH

Moneypenny’s Pete Hanlon on 25 years as a CTO

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CLOSING BULLETIN An exclusive column from Paige Erickson, Managing Director, EMEA, Workfront

MONTH IN REVIEW

NEWS UPDATE Digital Bulletin rounds up the news that shaped the enterprise technology space over the last month

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NEWS UPDATE

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

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ata centre provider Cyxtera has merged with Starboard Value Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company. The merger implies an enterprise value of approximately $3.4bn.

Cyxtera has a footprint of 61 data centres in 29 markets around the world, serving more than 2,300 enterprises.

Tyler Technologies is acquiring payments provider NIC for $2.3bn.

NIC’s software simplifies interactions between businesses and governments. “The pandemic has accelerated the shift by governments to online services and electronic payments.” said Tyler’s CEO. NIC’s revenues fell just short of $500m in

its last fiscal year. It serves more than 7,100 U.S. federal, state and local government agencies.

Cisco completed the acquisition of cloud communications software and services business IMImobile for $730m. The combined offering will enable businesses to deliver customer experiences across the entire life cycle by incorporating cloud contact centre, AI, experience management, collaboration and omnichannel communications. The IMImobile will join Cisco’s Contact Center business unit.

The EU is to follow the UK’s lead by opening up an investigation into Nvidia’s $40bn deal to acquire British chip maker Arm, according to the Financial Times. The probe will focus on concerns over Nvidia’s intentions with Arm’s chip designs and

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its extensive client relationships, said the report and comes after a number of Arms competitors lobbied the EU and UK to take a closer look at the deal.

Data connectivity platform LiveRamp is to acquire DataFleets, a cloud data platform that enables data silos to be unified without moving data or compromising privacy. This acquisition expands LiveRamp’s data protection capabilities to unlock greater data access and control for its customers. A report from TechCrunch said that LiveRamp paid around $68m for DataFleets.

API platform RapidAPI announced the acquisition of Paw, an API design and collaboration tool. The acquisition enables RapidAPI to extend its open API platform across the entire API development lifecycle, creating a connected experience for developers from API development to consumption, across multiple clouds and gateways.

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is to pay $400m to acquire Humio, a provider of high-performance cloud log management and observability technology. CrowdStrike will further expand its eXtended Detection and Response capabilities by ingesting and correlating data from any log, application or feed to deliver actionable insights and real-time protection.

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FUNDING Databricks completed a sizeable Series G funding round with backing from the cloud hyperscalers. It has raised $1bn at a valuation of $28bn.

AWS and Microsoft are on the investor list, which also includes Salesforce and Andreessen Horowitz. More than 40% of the Fortune 500 rely on Databricks technology to prepare their data for analysis and AI. The cash will fuel expansion, said the firm.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has raised $850m in its latest funding round, as reported by CNBC. The recently acquired funding would send the company’s valuation to about $74bn, a 60% increase. This funding round will allow the company to continue working in its two future projects: the spaceship project Starship and the Starlink constellation, which aims to create a global high-speed network.

NEWS UPDATE

Automation leader UiPath closed a colossal $750m Series F funding round, valuing the company at $35bn.

The round was co-led by existing investors Alkeon Capital and Coatue. Other returning investors include Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, IVP, Sequoia, Tiger Global, and funds and accounts advised

by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. Financing to date totals almost $2bn, according to Crunchbase.

Digital employee experience firm Nexthink announced a $180m Series D financing round reaching a valuation of $1.1bn. Permira, through its Growth Opportunities Fund, led the round alongside existing investors including Highland Europe and Index Ventures. In addition, the company announced that Bruce Chizen, former CEO of Adobe and senior advisor at Permira, will join its board of directors.

Autonomous trucking startup Plus has raised $200m in funding to accelerate the global commercialisation and deployment of its automated trucking system. Plus will develop a sales and support network to help fleets integrate the Plus automated trucking system into their operations. The company will also scale deployments in the U.S. and China, and expand to Europe and other parts of Asia.

Low-code platform OutSystems has raised $150m in a funding round co-led by Abdiel Capital and Tiger Global. The raise values the business at $9.5bn and takes it funding to date to $570m. OutSystems said the funds will be used to expand investments in its R&D and go-to-market strategy. Gartner said in February that the low-code sector is likely to enjoy a period of ‘hypergrowth’ this year.

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PEOPLE Andy Jassy, who heads up AWS for Amazon, is to replace Jeff Bezos as the online giant’s CEO. Bezos announced that he will transition to the job of chairman in Q3 2021. Jassy played a significant role in the launch of AWS in the 2000s, and it is now the most successful public cloud provider on the market. Bezos says the move will give him “time and energy” to focus on other projects.

Google said Marian Croak will lead the company’s renewed efforts to develop responsible artificial intelligence. Croak will take charge of a new 10

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centre of expertise, and will report into AI chief Jeff Dean. This reorganisation comes after the high-profile sacking of Black researcher Timnit Gebru following an internal conflict. Croak is one of Google’s few Black executives.

Google director David Baker and software engineer Vinesh Kannan quit following the dismissal of AI researcher Gebru. Gebru was fired over an email she sent to an internal company group, and a dispute over an academic paper she was working on.

“We cannot say we believe in diversity, and then ignore the conspicuous

NEWS UPDATE

absence of many voices from within our walls,” Baker said.

John Matze, Parler’s Chief Executive Officer, was terminated by the company’s board. Parler was favoured by many U.S. conservatives who objected to content rules on Facebook and Twitter. “The Parler board controlled by Rebekah Mercer decided to immediately terminate my position as CEO of Parler. I did not participate in this decision,” Matze told the Parler staff.

Ivanti appointed Erik Randles as its new senior vice president of global

channels and alliances. Randles will focus on growing Ivanti’s relationships and business with partners, developing a global integrated partner ecosystem in support of Ivanti’s hypergrowth strategy. Randles will also launch Ivanti’s global partner programme.

Randles was previously VP Global Business Development at VMware.

Stay right up to date with the latest news shaping the enterprise technology sector with The Bulletin, available at digitalbulletin.com

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EUROPE’S BET TO CONTROL BIG TECH In a new regular feature, Digital Bulletin analyses one of the new digital policies that countries around the world are enforcing with the goal of regulating the online world. This month we look at the European Union’s Digital Services and Digital Markets Act

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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s Europe the past or the future?

The ‘old continent’ has struggled to compete in the technological sector against innovative Asian and North American companies. However, European leaders are not afraid of tech giants, as shown by the sweeping new legislation they proposed last December.

Four years after the approval of the General Data Protection Regulation, and likely encouraged by its success, the European Commission presented two laws outlining a much more ambitious project. The Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act aim to 12

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regulate tech giants and hold them accountable for their data practices and anti-competitive behaviour.

“The business and political interests of a handful of companies should not dictate our future,” wrote European commissioners Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton wrote in The Irish Times. “Europe has to set its own terms and conditions.”

The Digital Services Act (DSA) aims to address the perceived lack of oversight of public bodies over large technological companies. At the moment, companies that host other’s data are not liable for the content posted on them. This principle

DIGITAL POLICY

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will be maintained by the new regulations but, under the DSA, companies can be considered liable should they refuse to remove that content from their platforms once they detect it and force them to improve their detection capabilities.

“Europe plays a very special role in tackling this issue because there is no ‘Europe-grown’ AI platform to regulate and yet the continent has a lot of regulatory influence,” Jean-Philippe Vergne, Associate Professor, Strategy at UCL School of Management, tells Digital Bulletin. “The Digital Services Act promises to level the playing field and restore competition in a way that attempting to break the companies up cannot achieve.”

The DSA will also force companies to be more transparent about the information 14

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they collect, to both users and regulators.

Platforms of over 45 million users in Europe will be obliged to state “in plain language” the parameters used by their algorithms to rank content and create target advertising. In addition, users will receive the option to select that the platforms use algorithms that are “not based on profiling”.

Companies could face fines of up to 6% of turnover or 1% of annual revenue should they supply “incorrect, incomplete or misleading information” or refuse on-site inspections, according to the text.

“For big tech, the proposals certainly mean that it will be subject to more regulation,” Ted Shapiro, Partner at Wiggin LLP and former Head of Europe for Motion Picture Association, explains. “However, the greatest degree of regulation falls on

DIGITAL POLICY

those who have sufficient resources and capacity to comply – it is proportionate.

“For the DSA, the approach seeks balance by giving liability privileges to intermediaries but at the same time imposing due diligence obligations and other requirements. However, the balance is still tilted in favour of big tech. The proposed notice and action mechanism will create onerous obligations on notice senders and fails to guarantee that illegal content is effectively removed and stays down.”

If the DSA aims to regulate technological companies’ data use, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is intended to stop what the European Commission has considered “anticompetitive behaviour”. This law will target “gatekeepers”, or companies that dictate the terms of a marketplace, such as Amazon, Apple, Google or Facebook.

Jean-Philippe Vergne

Under the DMA, these platforms will be banned from using their competitors’ data to their advantage and obliges to ensure interoperability. The EU’s goal is to stop self-preferencing, the practice by which these “gatekeepers” display their own products higher in their marketplace, therefore giving them a competitive advantage. Failure to comply with these obligations could lead to fines of over 10% of a company’s turnover or even break-ups for repeat offenders.

Although these consequences, particularly the threat of break-ups, have created quite a stir in the technological sector, the final text of the legislation has not yet been defined, nor voted, a process that could take several years.

“The ultimate impact of the new regulations will depend on how they are amended during the political nego-

Francine Cunningham

Ted Shapiro

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tiations ahead and where a particular company sits in the digital ecosystem,” Francine Cunningham, Regulatory and Public Affairs Director at Bird & Bird LLP, explains.

“Some companies will have to comply with an accumulation of different new obligations that will require long-term changes to their systems and customer interface. Very large online platforms, in particular, will be obliged to develop risk management tools to protect the 16

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integrity of their services against the use of manipulative techniques.

“At the same time, the industry will be partly reassured that the DSA will retain the core principles of the e-Commerce Directive, which was introduced two decades ago and is regarded as the foundation stone on which digital commerce is built.”

One thing is clear: Europe is betting on these new regulations to lead the way for the creation of a new and more

DIGITAL POLICY

monitored relationship between internet platforms and users.

“Europe has the potential to become a role model for AI regulations that protect privacy, democracy, and fair competition as well as become a welcoming ground for decentralised platforms that propose a competing alternative to the centralized AI-based corporate model,” Verge states.

In fact, some countries are already following Europe’s example. The UK’s

Competition and Markets Authority has already announced its intention to create a Digital Markets Unit to keep checks on tech giants. Other countries, such as the United States, seem to be waiting and watching the repercussions of Europe’s steps before positioning themselves. Nonetheless, whatever the final text of the DSA and the DMA is, it will undoubtedly transform the continents’ relationship with the agents of the world wide web.

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The blank cheque boom

Over the last 12 months, SPACs have exploded in popularity and are currently a driving force in the financial markets. With tech companies very much in their sight, Digital Bulletin speaks to three experts in an attempt to separate the facts from the hype

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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very year, certain words become a key part of our vocabulary, often shaped by societal and cultural events.

When we look back on 2020, the words ‘unprecedented’, ‘furlough’ and, of course, ‘lockdown’ took on a greater importance than ever before. The financial world has a language all of its own, but one term that really came to the fore last year was ‘SPAC’, or ‘special purpose acquisition vehicle’.

SPACs are not new investment vehicles, having originally gained popularity in the 1990s as a route to going public for companies operating in areas such as technology, healthcare, media and communications. The model is a relatively simple one, with a shell organisation created and listed on a stock exchange with the tautology of acquiring a business, usually within a two-year timeframe. When a merger is completed, the common stock is converted into the new business.

Bill Blain

Their popularity waned after the dot com crash, making a modest return around six years ago. Numbers grew steadily, with $13.6 billion of capital invested across 59 SPAC IPOs in 2019, which was considered a healthy return to form in investment circles. But that number was blown out of the water in 2020 - dubbed the ‘year of the blank cheque company’ - with $83.3 billion invested across 248 SPAC IPOs, making them a driving force behind a record year for public offerings.

That trend shows no sign of slowing down in 2021, with $63 billion raised in SPAC IPOs in January alone, according to Bloomberg. It means 2021 is going to far outstrip the totals we saw in 2020, which was a record year for SPACs. And when it comes to the acquisition targets, technology companies find themselves in huge demand.

Paul Amiss

Yash Patel

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Since the turn of the year we have seen: electric vehicle (EV) maker Faraday Future announce a NASDAQ listing as part of a $3.4 billion SPAC merger; Edtech firm Nerdy, which owns the Varsity Tutors, say it will go public via a $1.7 billion SPAC acquisition; rocket startup Astra reveal a $2.1 billion merger; digital payments company Payoneer merging with blank cheque outfit FTAC Olympus Corp; autonomous vehicle sensor startup AEye joining forces with a SPAC sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald in an agreement which values the company at $2 billion.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, with a SPAC backed by shareholder activist Starboard Value LP announcing a $3.4 billion merger with data centre provider Cyxtera Technologies at the time of press. What is sure is that hundreds of billions of dollars are going to pour into SPACs this year, with some experts even tipping a small percentage of Elon Musk’s SpaceX to go public.

But what is fuelling this sea change?

“There are a few reasons why SPACs have become popular – speed to market is a key one,” says Yash Patel, general partner at Telstra Ventures. “There’s a window of opportunity at the moment with low interest rates and a roaring equity market thirsty for growth, so there’s a rush of companies acting now that might otherwise have waited a year or 20

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two. A traditional IPO route can take many months more in terms of preparation.

“The other main advantage is that the company will have some assurances of its valuation before it goes public with a SPAC sponsor - rather than an IPO banking syndicate determining what price the stock will go out at the day before going public, as is common with more traditional IPOs.” Bill Blain, Market Strategist at Shard Capital, tells Digital Bulletin that SPACs make perfect sense in the current investment climate. “For the past 15 years the number of public companies has tumbled as private equity buyers

NEWS ANALYSIS

scooped them up. Up to $4 trillion of equity has been withdrawn from the market via stock buybacks. With interest rates so low, the market has gone 100% into equities – a perfect environment for new share issues. The world needs more equity; SPACs are a simple way to bring companies quickly to market.”

There are a number of clear differences between conventional IPOs and this particular route to market, from the ability to control timings and valuation to how fees are handled. In addition, because a de-SPAC process is a merger, there are different disclosure standards to those required in a typical IPO.

“Forward-looking projections are able to be used to market the de-SPAC deal whereas in a traditional IPO only historical financials can be disclosed,” says Paul Amiss, London Partner at Winston & Strawn. “Being able to disclose forecasts has created an opportunity for relatively new high-growth companies who are still loss-making to go public and at the same time unlock and monetise future value. In this way, technology companies and SPACs have become rather compatible.

“An increasing number of SPACS are linked to specific sponsors with plans around a particular target company.

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Naturally, most SPACs are in technology sectors because that is where most things new are innovated. Successful sponsors are financiers who understand the intricacies of the technology sector involved and how to finance them. That is causing a paradigm shift in SPACs, rightly moving the focus away from the sponsor, on to the target company and what the sponsor brings to the deal.”

Patel points out that technology stocks are currently the largest sector in the S&P 500 at ~22% of the S&P 500 Index. “As a result, the tech industry tends to drive the broader equity markets and SPAC sponsors want to take part in that growth by partnering with high-growth tech start-ups disrupting the status quo. Tech start-ups that can command high valuations and multiples via strong, predictable revenue growth tend to be the ones that are candidates for SPAC sponsors. For tech companies, they can access pools of new capital at potentially better valuation versus relying on the private markets.”

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Automotive firms working in the electric and autonomous sectors have been one of the main drivers of the SPAC boom.

Arrival, Canoo, Lordstown Motors, Luminar, ChargePoint, The Lion Electric and Proterra are just some of the companies operating in the transportation space that have announced or closed their SPAC mergers in the past several months.

This is despite many of the companies - including EV startups NKLA and HYLN that have merged not yet booking a single dollar of revenue, leading some in the industry to talk of a bubble.

“Electric vehicle companies have seen particular interest from SPAC investors,” says Patel. “Even though a lot of them aren’t showing real revenues just yet, investors are betting on electric vehicles being ubiquitous in five years and so are placing their bets now. But anyone in the tech ecosystem with strong, predictable revenue growth at scale and a large total addressable market will be a pretty good candidate.”

NEWS ANALYSIS

EV company Lucid Motors is likely to go public via a SPAC merger One automotive outfit that is generating buzz from Silicon Valley to Wall Street is EV company Lucid Motors. It is led by Peter Rawlinson, who is well-regarded for his stint at Tesla where he was Chief Engineer on the Model S. “SPACs seem caught up in the current market crazy mood. There is a new SPAC out there – Churchill IV, a pre-deal deal – trading 3.5x its $10 share price, and no-one knows for sure what it is targeting,” says Blain. “There is a rumour it might be the ‘Tesla-Killer’, Lucid, but who knows? The stock went up then crashed when the rumoured M&A did not happen. Folk were buying the SPAC on expectations of a big deal.”

Since Blain spoke with Digital Bulletin, the rumour mill around Lucid has gone

into overdrive, with reports at time of press suggesting that the merger with Churchill is to be announced imminently, causing the SPAC’s share price to jump by 19%, although that pales into insignificance against the 425% jump since the deal with Lucid was first mooted.

Once described as a “four-letter word” on Wall Street, now even some of the biggest funds in the world are jumping on the SPAC train. Having successfully raised $604 million from a SPAC that it filed in December last year, in February Softbank filed two fresh registration statements for blank cheque companies, worth $200 million and $350 million respectively.

“The fact that the world’s largest venture fund is entering the market, to me suggests that they see the SPAC ISSUE 26

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as a legitimate product and a potential threat to their traditional venture capital business model,” says Amiss. “I think that the trend has already started, as numerous large venture capital and private equity institutions have in recent times all formed SPACs.” Blain believes that Softbank’s proven track record with its tech investments will ensure its SPAC ventures will be prosperous ones, and believes there are viable financial reasons for this new route. He also offers an interesting name which he believes could be on Softbank’s radar.

“Although SPACs are criticised for charging high fees, they basically cost 24

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about the same as an investment bank will charge to lead an IPO. It would make sense for Masayoshi Son [founder of Softbank] and his team to internalise the fees rather than hand the opportunity to an investment bank.

“Son expects the Vision Funds to produce a steady stream of 20 or so ‘golden eggs’’ each year from the 164 firms Softbank has been incubating in its three portfolios. One name in the frame is UK chip designer ARM, a world-class business where a sale to Nvidia could be delayed for months by regulators. Son has a choice; he could IPO his golden eggs, or he could SPAC them. It would make sense to

NEWS ANALYSIS

SPAC them – then Softbank can retain earnings by charging ongoing fees.”

As hundreds of billions of dollars find their way into SPACs, there is now a race on to find suitable companies with which to merge, and Patel warns that there might be a number of parties left without a dancing partner when the music stops.

“While there are a lot of high-quality tech companies going public, there may not be enough of them to meet the demand for all the SPACs out there.

So some SPACs could end up merging with some less-than-ideal companies where the revenues, unit economics and business models are not predictable.

The best SPACs are run by operators

that have deep domain or operating expertise – and that’s very important.”

And, looking forward, Amiss warns that a “seismic shift” is potentially occurring that could further exacerbate the imbalance in supply and demand.

“Operating companies are beginning to form their own SPAC subsidiaries to raise cash to acquire a target and take the combined business public.

These new captive SPACs may make traditional IPOs that are done for the purpose of raising capital to facilitate an acquisition strategy obsolete. There are even examples where the SPAC has not ruled out the possibility of merging with the operating company.

“The trend of operating companies forming their own SPACs may shrink the pool of potential target companies, making it more difficult for traditionally sponsored SPACs to complete business combinations. Not only could companies that would otherwise merge with a SPAC instead form their own SPACs but they may, in turn, acquire other IPO-ready companies as part of their business combinations.”

SPACs are here and they are evolving.

Whether they will burn bright for a period and fade away is up for debate but their impact is and will continue to be significant, for the time being at least. They are not to be ignored.

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AUTOMATING THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS Bain & Company is helping organisations plan for 2030.

Ted Shelton, Expert Partner, Automation and Digital Innovation, talks us through why executives need to embrace automation or risk their business getting left behind

PROJECT DIRECTOR: Richard Durrant AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham VIDEOGRAPHER: Fraser Harrop

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BAIN & COMPANY

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he global workforce is changing.

Professions that traditionally relied on human endeavour are increasingly automated, ushering in a revolution that promises to fundamentally reimagine the role that people play in the workplace.

It is unsurprising that organisations are turning to automation: for example, in the U.S., a Bain study found U.S. companies could invest $8 trillion in automation technologies by 2030. The report says no industry will be unaffected by these technologies; from healthcare to financial services to retail to telecommunications, in both the public and private sectors, there is a progressively critical need to transform at pace.

Of course, some organisations adapt and transform better than others. This is where Bain & Company comes in.

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BAIN & COMPANY

As one of the world’s top management consulting firms, Bain helps to define the future of some of the planet’s largest companies across all industries. With offices in 37 countries, Bain is uniquely positioned to advise global leaders on management and business solutions.

Increasingly, those solutions are underpinned by embracing digital transformation, simply because technology continues to create a set of imperatives for businesses to change the way they operate.

Much of that technology is led by automation and AI. So it is no surprise that Bain

has a team dedicated to helping largescale organisations to truly embrace and understand how automating can improve their business operations.

One of Bain’s automation leaders is Ted Shelton, Expert Partner, Automation and Digital Innovation. Shelton, who started his career as a software developer before moving into executive roles, works out of Bain’s Silicon Valley office.

“Over the last several years the automation practice here at Bain has served dozens of clients in every region of the world,” Shelton says. “We’re working in

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The C-Suite really needs to think through the business issues even more importantly than thinking through the technology issues” Ted Shelton

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North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia, and providing expertise to our clients around how to use automation to transform their business processes, to change the functions for their company – whether it’s a back office function like finance or it’s a mid-office function like a contact centre or even front office sales and marketing functions. It can really be applied anywhere.”

Shelton believes that the workforce landscape will have changed dramatically by 2030, and that technology is now one of the strategic drivers for companies – with automation the key to transformation.

“Digital has been disrupting the way we do business now for decades, but what we see in automation in particular is that there is now a parallel complementary way for companies to approach the question of how do they improve their operations,” he says. “How do they reduce cost? How do they improve speed? How do they improve quality?

“Traditional IT allows us to put the systems, the software, the infrastructure, the devices in place to be able to serve the work being done by people. What automation does is complement the people in doing that work. That’s the major strategic difference in the way we’re going to think about work going forward.”

Bain’s proposition is that the C-Suite, and executive teams, can start taking

BAIN & COMPANY

In Partnership: Bain and UiPath Bain works with UiPath, a leading Robotic Process Automation vendor, to help organisations fully embrace automation through its range of tools and platforms

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particular actions to achieve the automation Holy Grail: not only increasing revenue but also delivering services and products more efficiently. Those actions involve rethinking all of the work being done within a company, using what Shelton calls a “three-lens approach” in order to redesign business processes: What areas of the work should be simplified? What areas of the work should be eliminated? And what areas of the work should be automated?

Simplify. Eliminate. Automate.

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Automation is a critical part of the redesign process. It allows a company, at the executive level, to break all of the work it carries out into parts it wants a person to do, parts a rules-based automation can execute, and parts that use repetitive, highvolume patterns where AI can be used.

“One of the things that we believe is that the executive team at every company needs to be thinking about automation as a part of their future workforce,” says Shelton.

“A company that does not start looking at

BAIN & COMPANY

A company that does not start looking at AI today is one that in three years will be behind and in five years will be at risk”

AI today is one that in three years will be behind and in five years will be at risk.

“Every industry, every business, every part of every business, is going to be impacted by these tools and automation becomes a way to be able to insert the insights we get from these artificial intelligence tools into business processes.

So an executive team should be thinking about not just how do they change the way the existing work gets done, but what is the work they’d like to have done.”

It’s not all about technology for Shelton, or Bain, though. These are key decisions that organisations are making about the future of business, and technology plays a small part in its solutions. It’s not about a company simply choosing the right vendor or developer, it’s about changing the way the business works and how a company then utilises technology to make its objectives easier to realise.

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journey and at the tail-end of an automation journey that a business needs to think through, because it really does change the operating model for organisations and it changes the organisational structure,” says Shelton. “So the C-Suite really needs to think through the business issues even more importantly than thinking through the technology issues.”

Bain doesn’t do this alone. It partners on its automation projects with experts

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in various fields in order to deliver the best skillsets to clients across all areas of work. One of Bain’s partners is global software company UiPath, which focuses on robotic process automation (RPA). It provides an end-to-end solution platform with the full suite of capabilities to allow organisations to automate at scale.

“I think that UiPath has done a fantastic job of defining a vision for the future of automation,” says Shelton. “Working

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with them has allowed us to really take on problems for our clients that are much broader than the traditional task-oriented automation that we’ve seen in the past; to really be able to rethink the nature of work and incorporate people and AI into these redesigned business processes.

“The UiPath platform then of course gives us the ability to manage and monitor those processes once they’re in production. UiPath gives organisations that ability

to redesign the flow of work, from taking in the information to processing that information, making decisions about the information and ultimately having a faster, more accurate outcome for a business process for their employees and their customers.”

Bain also enjoys a relationship with FortressIQ. Bain uses its automated process discovery platform to uncover insights, rather than the costly and time-consuming traditional practice of sending in a group of business analysts.

“Using a process discovery tool, like FortressIQ, allows an organisation to cost-effectively, quickly and more comprehensively understand how a process is being done across an organisation,” says Shelton. “What FortressIQ will do is watch each worker and map out using machine learning the steps that person is taking to complete that process. And by doing that over a number of weeks, over a larger number of people, it builds a map of the way in which that process is commonly done and also what the variations are.”

As well as carefully choosing its partners, a strong sense of ethics underpins who Bain chooses to work with. It has declined work if it thinks ethical boundaries are being crossed by clients.

“We will take a look at a particular request from a client and we will ask ourselves ‘is this the right thing for all of the stakeholders?’ – for the people who live in ISSUE 26

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Understand Today, Plan for Tomorrow Bring process data to every employee decision, experience, and interaction.

About FortressIQ FortressIQ enables enterprises to decode work, transform experiences, and enhance workflows with the industry’s most advanced Process Intelligence platform. Using innovative computer vision and artificial intelligence, FoartressIQ delivers unprecedented process insights, extremely fast, and with detail and accuracy unattainable with traditional methods.

The platform autonomously acquires process data at scale even as processes extend across systems, empowering enterprises to understand, monitor, and improve operations, employee and customer experiences, and every business process.

FortressIQ.com

“

FortressIQ allows an organisation to cost-effectively, quickly and more comprehensively understand how a process is being done across an organisation. So organisations that are seeking to improve the way they operate are thinking about this not just from the automation lens but also from a process-understanding lens.

Ted Shelton, Partner Automation and Digital Innovation

Learn more about PROCESS INTELLIGENCE

CASE STUDY

TOOLING UP Ted Shelton on Bain’s automation toolkit

AUTOMATION QUOTIENT “Every time I walk into an organisation I find that there is a wide range of expectations and knowledge about what automation is, with very little actual concrete expectations about what it can pragmatically do in the business environments. We’ve found that there is an education programme that’s really needed, at all levels of the organisation. A front-line employee, a manager, a senior level executive – they all need to learn more about what automation is, about what it can and can not do; strengths and weaknesses.

“So we’ve developed a tool called Automation Quotient, and what AQ is intended to do is measure the knowledge of automation and the openness to the adoption of automation within an organisation, and both an individual level and a company-wide level. The purpose of that is to be able to say what the kind of things we need to be able to do as an organisation are to raise the level of knowledge and expectation, and also to help employees understand how we are going to use these automation tools to create the jobs of

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the future. To help redesign the work that people do so that they are doing the more fulfilling roles – those creative, curious, problem-solving and relationship activities.”

AUTOMATION PATHFINDER “Something that we find a lot of organisations struggling with is understanding where to get started with automation: which function might be the most beneficial to apply automation? What might be the size of that benefit? How do we think about it?

So what we’ve done is build a proprietary tool to help companies assess and size automation potential across a broad range of functions and processes.

“We call it Automation Pathfinder, and through a simple web-based interaction with employees we can understand how a particular enterprise runs its business functions. We can then compare that to benchmarks and Bain experience and identify where the biggest benefits might be from automation. So it’s a very quick way to be able to focus on specific areas and specific processes first when getting started on that automation journey.”

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the communities that this company serves, for the employees, for the customers, for the partners and of course for the shareholders. Where we do seek terrific opportunities is in helping companies expand their focus in preserving all of their needs in the community – so questions about sustainability, about the ecosystem they operate in and as well of course all of the people they serve.

“These are the core value propositions we bring and we bring an excellence and a methodology to the kind of strategy work we do which allows us to get to results faster.”

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play in the workforce will fundamentally shift. The Bain Labor 2030 study signalled one danger of automation: the fear of job losses. It estimated that automation could eliminate 20-25% of jobs by 2030.

However, Shelton emphasises that for automation to truly work, it has to be part of a hybrid work model, with people continuing to play a critical role. Automation and AI allow companies the opportunity to refocus work so that people are contributing the things that they are best at. And, outside of the movies, there are no machines to help with creativity or curiosity – and that’s what people are best at.

“Today we think about the people being the glue between our systems and our processes,” says Shelton. “And that means that a lot of people end up doing meaningless work. We call it swivel-seat activities, where I’m looking at one screen and typing information into another screen, or I’m copying from a spreadsheet into a database or vice versa.

“What a workforce could be doing is really releasing the creativity and curiosity, problem-solving, relationship-building activities that people are really good at, to be able to expand the business in new ways. So automation and AI are tools that then complement our human workers, and that’s why we talk about it as a hybrid workforce: humans, automations, AI, all working together to change the way we do 42

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Automation and AI are tools that then complement our human workers, and that’s why we talk about it as a hybrid workforce: humans, automations, AI, all working together to change the way we do work”

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work. That’s the tremendous opportunity here for the C-Suite to think through.”

Shelton uses contact centres as the perfect way to imagine how automation and AI will transform organisations over the next 10 years. Today, we think of contact centres as an environment in which the employees tend to be lower-skilled, lowerpaid workers. There also tends to be a high turnover of staff. Generally, workers follow a set of rules to answer queries, and any place where a set of rules is applied is a place when automation and AI can be used instead of people.

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However, people will always be needed because there will still be cases that are too complex for an automated process to solve. There may also be tougher queries that a company wants to answer with a high level of service and a personal touch.

“So your workforce is going to be different,” says Shelton. “Instead of having a large number of people, you’re going to have a small number of people; instead of having a low-skilled and low-paid workforce, you’re going to have a highly-skilled, highly-trained,

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highly-paid workforce. These are going to be the people that are going to be handling the most complex problems and also the most important customers.

“So that transformation – that place where we are today versus the place we’re going to be 10 years from now – brings out a whole set of questions for the C-Suite, to say: ‘What is our talent strategy? How do we transform our organisation over the next decade from the kind we have today to the kind we need 10 years from now?’ Those are the kinds of challenges our clients are facing across every activity of their business.”

It is certain that 2030 will look very different to 2021. It may feel a way off, still, but the organisations that will thrive then are the organisations that are already starting to think about how their business will look in nine years’ time. And Bain & Company is with them every step of the way.

Join Bain & Company’s James Gillies and UiPath’s Carmel Smith for advice on kickstarting your RPA programme. Click here ISSUE 26

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PEOPLE-CENTRED

DIGITISATION From humble beginnings, Dax Grant has scaled the tech ladder in impressive fashion to become CIO, Global Operations at HSBC. In a rare interview, she tells Digital Bulletin how her upbringing helped shape her people-first philosophy, the importance of entrepreneurship and how COVID-19 has taken the CIO to the centre of the C-Suite

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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HSBC

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hen it comes to executive back stories, they don’t come much more diverse than that of Dax Grant. Today, Grant holds the position of CIO, Global Operations at HSBC, but her path to one of the most coveted tech positions in the world of finance has been anything but a simple one, about as far away from a nepotistic leg-up as it is possible to get.

Grant’s mother left education behind aged just eight years old to help out on the family farm and then work as a shepherdess in Bosnia & Herzegovina, while her father spent 35 years working as a coal miner. Born in Nottingham in the 1970s, Grant began school only able to speak in her mother tongue of Serbo Croatian, but went on to teach herself English before enjoying a stellar academic career, culminating in a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Queens’ College, Cambridge (she has since earned an Executive MBA from Cranfield). Subsequently, she has been accepted to Harvard Business School.

Grant is clear that her experiences have framed her belief in putting people at the centre of business turnarounds and growth paths, her commitment to inclusivity and driven a desire to break down barriers. This philosophy has combined with a fascination for technology and how things 48

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work which has catapulted Grant to great heights.

“One thing I’ve learned is that you’ve got to be tenacious and really believe that you can achieve your ambitions,” she tells Digital Bulletin.

Grant’s remit as CIO of Global Operations is a wide-reaching one that includes oversight of the technology that supports HSBC’s day-to-day interests, with operations teams around the world looking to Grant and her team for support to keep things ticking over. In addition, Grant is key to the organisation’s digitisation

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agenda, driving digital improvements in various areas of the business and making the customer experience a seamless one.

It is a role that requires Dax to wear quite a few different hats - “you’ve got to be able to move around and you’ve got to be able to work with different teams and different types of people, but that’s what I really love about it,” she says.

“The first thing I did when I joined HSBC is I got to know the people, I got to know my team and I got to know my key customer groups, and that was where I spent my time. I know where I’m strong

and I know where I need expertise, so what I really focused on was building up the team, making sure folks were in the right place. I would move people around and just create that chemistry, which is really key when it comes to customers, as well as really in-depth knowledge. I have to rely on my team so it is really important to get that balance between soft and technical skills.”

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One thing I’ve learned is that you’ve got to be tenacious and really believe that you can achieve your ambitions” Dax Grant

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you suspect, what has driven Grant’s journey which saw her rise through the ranks at Barclays - she was central to its early online banking efforts and then the digitalisation of Barclaycard - before moving to tech leadership roles at Visa and Macmillan Cancer Support.

This human-centric approach is supported by two central pillars - entrepreneurship and inclusivity, both of which Grant speaks about with passion and conviction.

“Entrepreneurship is absolutely a key in any size of business. I’ve been fortunate to work in really small companies where I’ve been able to be creative and commercial. Knowing what you’re doing day-to-day makes or breaks that business is really important because it keeps you hungry. It makes you focus on what you have to do to get things right. It gives you a really healthy mindset and it gets you looking externally within the marketplace.

“Larger global organisations are increasingly on the lookout for entrepreneurial skillsets. When you’re digitising, it’s really about identifying the folks that can understand the company, understand the history of the company, but who can also reimagine the future and look at what things could look like and look at it commercially in a new world.

“Throughout all my conversations with large global companies, that’s one of the

HSBC

key questions that they ask - ‘what is your entrepreneurial skillset and how do you bring it in?’”

Inclusivity is “absolutely central to everything that we do”, says Grant, while also acknowledging her own heritage and background. “I’m really passionate about it because I’ve seen evidence that organisations that really invest in diversity are the ones that actually increase their performance. They increase their performance, and they increase the morale of their staff as well.”

Grant outlines how companies that have a diverse workforce tend to produce products and services that better reflect their customer bases and society in general.

“That becomes part of the DNA of an organisation, so it’s something I passionately advocate and support within the industry. I do a lot of work with various organisations and business schools and we make sure we’re looking at all of the data so we’re doing all we can with our own teams as well. As a woman in technology I do think there is more to do but what I would also say is that women shouldn’t look at a family and a career as separate choices. I’m a great believer in family, I have two children and have never had a nanny.

If you want to do both, then believe in yourself and do both.”

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of COVID-19 has been a formidable challenge for Grant and her fellow CIOs alike. With the rush to digitise, the role of the CIO has never been more important and has drawn it to the centre of the C-Suite. The importance of CIOs has been illustrated more than ever before over the last 12 months and Grant believes they can now make a convincing case for making the step up to CEO roles, ahead of CFOs who have traditionally been primed for the top job.

“The pandemic has taken the CIO and CTO to the forefront of the boardroom.

If you look across an organisation like HSBC, the amount of energy that went into enabling anybody to be able to work from home across the globe is fantastic. We’ve been able to create something that you just wouldn’t have

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thought was possible 12 or 18 months ago. These changes took a matter of days in some cases and organisations were able to continue functioning.

“It has created a sense of virtual teamwork that as an organisation now we really leverage and the ability to be able to connect with anybody anywhere around anything is just so powerful. It was about galvanising around a global crisis, but digitisation is also about galvanising around a vision, around something very positive rather than a reaction to something. We’ve seen a real shift - CIOs or CTOs in any organisation are able to fully drive that digitisation.”

Against that backdrop, Grant says that she has still carved out 10% of her schedule to concentrate solely on new and emerging technologies and their

HSBC

Throughout all my conversations with large global companies, that’s one of the key questions that they ask - ‘what is your entrepreneurial skillset and how do you bring it in?’” potential within an organisation like HSBC, as well as wider society.

“It’s really important to understand what new technologies are coming up, not just in your own sector, but across all industries. I’m interested in things like 3D printing and leading technology to enable memorable customer experiences. Grant is involved in entrepreneurial groups, echoing ‘the groups I’m involved in there is a real stimulation of ideas when it comes to how we can utilise these new technologies’. When you see how sensor and voice technology is developing, you can imagine all their uses in a COVID and post-COVID world, because it eliminates the need for touch.

“It also comes back to digitisation and building that innovation culture, because you can identify those technologies, but then it’s about how they then synthesise

them into the vision and values of the organisation and how they’re ultimately used to solve a customer need.”

Keen to document her experiences and explore her ideas on all things digital, Grant recently finished work on a personal project and will soon release her Digital Leadership Playbook.

“I’ve been meaning to write for a little while and because I’m so involved and I love what I do. I discuss how digitisation works in balance with keeping the business operational and my personal style is within that. I really want to use my years of experience and insight to help others really fast-track their digitisation efforts within their organisations. It’s been a fascinating journey for me and a good time for reflection. I really hope folks get something out of the book and enjoy what they read.”

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INNOVATING IN THE WFH AGE

In every issue, Digital Bulletin picks the brains of experts in a particular sector of the technology world. This month, we ask: “With remote working here to stay, what must CIOs do to foster innovation amongst their workforces and ensure employees don’t feel like they are being held back in the WFH environment?”

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“ Shift thinking to digital-first” Dan Higgins, EY Global Technology Consulting Leader

From a technology standpoint, CIOs must focus on the digital enablement aspect of empowering people to work virtually. Even more importantly, they need to embrace the realisation that digital enablement helps engage and motivate people and that nurtures collaboration and innovation and brings in the diversity of thought, perspective and background that is so key to business success.

Our experience is that companies with this “digital first” strategy were able to quickly and successfully shift to the new model of a vastly dispersed workforce, while keeping their people engaged and ultimately focused on customer satisfaction for business success.

One example that’s been key to transformation leaders’ success is the proliferation of cloud-based capabilities to empower people. Moving to a cloudbased ecosystem has been embraced

by CIOs because it connects all parts of the business, fostering and encouraging continuous innovation and collaboration between everyone, across the enterprise.

While technology is fundamental to enabling a virtual workforce, we learned

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that the companies most successful in this transformation to virtual work were the ones that recognised that putting humans at the very centre of their business was absolutely key.

As a result, CIOs should be mindful that their roles will continue to expand and evolve. In particular, companies are moving away from the belief that a CIO must have only a technology background. CIOs also need a large degree of business acumen and the ability to speak the same language as other C-levels.

This is especially true when it comes to establishing relationships with and establishing trust across people, organisations, the C-Suite and the board.

In fact, CIOs’ collaborations with the human resourcing and people management teams within organisations will continue to grow. One example resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is the huge increase in people joining organisations almost entirely virtually, with HR teams needing new ways, and new tools, to manage the human interaction which is often so important in the onboarding process.

As CIOs collaborate more closely with people management, they will need to ensure the technologies and collaboration tools are in place to attract and onboard people, enable them to do their jobs, and stay engaged and motivated.

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“ Structure, balance and support” Caroline Sands, Partner and Head of the CIO Practice, Odgers Berndtson

For CIOs looking to foster innovation and help their teams progress and develop, the remote environment is fraught with challenges, as well as opportunities.

Things like ‘corporate osmosis’ that provides learning and development through pure proximity and the creative energy that comes from bouncing ideas around a physical (not breakout) room are all but things of the past.

At the same time, morale is low and stress levels are at an all-time high. Trust is critical and CIOs need to build this through a culture of open communication. Schedule more time with individual team members and make it ‘ok’ to have out of the blue video calls just to bounce ideas off each other. Lead by example in this and don’t assume it’s just happening.

Brainstorming sessions should be structured and focused. There’s no physical energy to thrive off anymore, so conversations need to be guided and the CIO will need to act as chair to bring in team members that might be

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Trust is critical and CIOs need to build this through a culture of open communication”

disengaged. Have one of the team take notes and follow-up with minutes, even if there are no actions. It’s too easy for people to trudge from Zoom to Zoom half interested and forgetting most of what’s been said.

Encourage team members to put forward new ideas. The way organisations operate has changed dramatically and there’s huge scope for people to try new approaches in anything

from product life cycle to IT business support. This keeps individual team members engaged and motivated. It also provides them with the opportunity to learn and develop professionally in an environment where it’s difficult to pick up skills from others.

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team members to join the plethora of professional networks that have popped up or the many internal focus groups that organisations are forming to find solutions to the evolving world of working. Zoom culture now means people can interact easily across time zones and across different types of organisations. Your team members will bring richer ideas and lateral thinking to meetings and brainstorm sessions as a result.

Consider implementing a mentoring or ‘buddy system’. Many people are going through tough personal challenges and this is likely to include some of your team. Having people step up as mentors not only provides support to team members but is a way of helping the individual acting as mentor to develop their own management and leadership skills in a remote environment.

Finally, ensure you create space for personal growth. Most businesses are working flat out and so learning and development for their people has fallen by the wayside. There are plenty of free seminars and training courses, and you should allow your team members to take part in these as part of their working week rather than outside of the 9-5. Individuals in your team will feel looked after and supported by the organisation as result, providing a much needed morale boost during this time.

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“ CIOs must focus on engagement” Sam Schofield, VP EMEA at Udacity

Working in a remote environment longterm can be a significant challenge for employees regardless of seniority or role. Difficult economic circumstances can create low morale which is compounded by a lack of training which may stifle career development.

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For UK businesses to remain competitive in the rapidly shifting global employment landscape, it’s vital that they invest time and capital to create a strong talent pool of workers with cutting-edge digital skills. Especially as the technical skills gap is one of the biggest challenges cited by management, businesses need to take a more direct approach to training their workforce to reskill and retrain employees to fill those in-demand positions.

In order to drive digital transformation and foster innovation whilst working from home, CIOs and other C-Suite

level executives need to lead the charge in upskilling their employees to not only future-proof their workforce, but give purpose, empower and demonstrate loyalty towards existing employees.

With access to continuous employer-driven skills training, employees are likely to feel reassured and prepared for the evolving workplace. This can help boost learner engagement, which is particularly critical whilst working remotely as it helps to provide a positive outlook on the future, meanwhile motivating employees everyday to focus on their own development.

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With access to continuous employerdriven skills training, employees are likely to feel reassured and prepared for the evolving workplace” Engagement can be created by implementing real-world projects into the training curriculum, providing project-based learning outcomes.

Learning without the practical skills in technology offers no real benefits for an organisation, but incorporating realworld challenges or projects helps to deliver high quality based learning that aligns with the goals of the organisation at a top level.

Furthermore, job satisfaction can’t be solved with money, but creating a company culture where the employees development plans are a priority can positively impact employee satisfaction and morale. This is particularly important for businesses feeling the squeeze due to the pandemic.

Similarly, as the roles of CIOs and other C-Suites are evolving, where they are allocating much of their time to digital transformation, it’s becoming 60

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even more important for them to understand the potential of the technology that underpins their business and potential opportunities and pitfalls of nascent technologies.

By dedicating more time to upskilling themselves, they can recognise the pain points in their organisations, assign training where required and manage teams and projects more effectively.

Many will risk being left behind given the unprecedented pace of technology if they don’t have the insight into, and literacy in, technology the organisation is leveraging.

The last year has rapidly accelerated many workplace transformation and innovation initiatives, management teams need to ensure that the workforce feel they have the opportunity to develop the necessary skills to play a positive role in these transformations, while also developing their careers.

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“ DEX must not be ignored”

place environment, just as they felt when physically in work. The way to do this is by ensuring employees feel valued and feel nurtured.

Tim Christensen, Organisations also need to prioritise CTO at SocialChorus skills investment. A company’s training and skills development programme shouldn’t just stop because employees One of the lasting impacts of COVID-19 are working from home, it should continue will be the exponential increase in those and evolve so that employees are taught working from home. Working from home new skills as we all adapt to a changing has several perks - but also carries working environment. its own challenges and frustrations. The Engagement must remain strong, key challenge is how to maintain an as well as culture and the key to ensuring organisational culture virtually, particuthis is by developing and maintaining larly one that empowers employees and a strong employee experience. In drives innovation. a working from home environment, The main factor in ensuring that employees do not feel like they are being a Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is what sits at the centre of an engaged, left behind in the WFH environment is collaborative, and motivated workforce. engagement. They need to feel empowIf organisations are to foster a strong ered, motivated and inspired to learn DEX, CIOs and their team must work and progress within the remote work-

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In a working from home environment, a Digital Employee Experience is what sits at the centre of an engaged, collaborative, and motivated workforce” together with HR and Internal Communications (IC) to provide a robust DEX. However, as our latest research has uncovered, organisations are struggling to do this with the DEX effort being hampered by a lack of collaboration between these departments - with only 30% of HR and IT teams working together to deliver a cohesive DEX. Unfortunately, without a strong DEX, businesses risk creating a workforce that’s feeling burnout and disconnected from the business, hindering success.

The study found that there was a conflicting approach to engagement between the teams - with CIOs taking a “pull” approach to DEX technology (build it and they will come) and HR/IC having a “push” approach that was more centred around employee needs, with the 62

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fallout of this clash being felt at all levels.

One of the most worrying findings was that 88% of CIOs believe the purchasing decision for collaboration and communications tools rested with them, with only 11% stating it was a decision for their HR and IC colleagues. It’s easy to see how such disparity at a senior level will be felt further down the organisation.

But all hope is not lost. Despite these difficulties CIOs and heads of HR and Internal Communications did agree that there was a huge opportunity around DEX when it came to increasing productivity (56% of CIOs cite this output along with 47% of HR/ICs) and improved employee retention (50% of CIOs suggested this is the case vs. 42% of HR/ICs).

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Two-way communication is another area which a comprehensive DEX approach would facilitate, which will have a direct impact on levels of employee engagement - people need to feel that they have a voice. CIOs (46%) and HR/ICs (40%) agreed that this was a major opportunity for DEX. It’s only when individuals feel heard and supported that they can fulfil their potential. Promisingly, 41% of CIOs and 44% of HR/ICs agreed that investing in mental health and wellbeing support should be a major part of any DEX programme.

In this new era of work, it will be impossible for a business to foster innovation and ultimately thrive without making DEX a priority. The need for employee engagement has far reaching impacts, which affects an organisation’s bottom line. This means that a CIO’s commitment to DEX really could make or break a business going forward.

If organisations are going to foster a culture of togetherness, innovation and employee progression regardless of location, CIOs must commit to working closely with their HR and IC colleagues in order to deliver a DEX that works for every employee, everywhere. We need to take the engagement, motivation, and inspiration to them, rather than waiting for them to find it.

“ Collaboration will remain key” Simon Hill, CEO, Wazoku

How do you drive innovation among your employees when they are isolated by working from home? We conducted research during the first lockdown which found two of the areas of business most affected by people working from home were internal collaboration around ideas and external collaboration around ideas.

But homeworking isn’t going to stop even when the pandemic eases. The future of work will be a hybrid model. So how can organisations drive innovation now and in the long-term in this new working environment? Happily there is much that businesses can do to address this and inspire their employees to focus on innovation. Providing the right tools and processes to encourage innovation is one measure. Email is just not the right medium to discuss and develop innovation and neither are platforms such as Zoom and Teams. Both have their benefits as a communication tool but are not suitable for fostering innovation.

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Proactively involving your employees in discussions about new innovations or the future direction of the company helps cement relationships”

have in place the frameworks to build on them, to collaborate and see them through to fruition. It can also connect disparate groups – not just employees, but customers, partners and even external communities with a track record of solving challenges.

It provides employees with the right place to submit ideas, meaning that not only will a business reap the rewards from the ideas themselves, but will more fully engage with employees. With most people working from home, this takes on a new importance. Proactively 64

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involving your employees in discussions about new innovations or the future direction of the company helps cement relationships and allows them to feel more valued and appreciated wherever they are working.

Engaging employees in this way helps to create a culture of innovation, which supports, encourages and rewards innovative thinking. It is driven from the top but relies on the engagement and involvement of the whole organisation.

People know their input is valued and are empowered to come forward with

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ideas and innovative new approaches.

Without a culture of innovation, any organisation’s innovation plans will fail to get off the ground.

But even with a healthy culture of innovation businesses will face challenges their own innovation ecosystem can’t solve. A willingness to embrace open innovation can play a big role here.

Businesses that have embraced an open innovation crowd have found they can tap into an even greater resource than their own employees. It’s an approach already favoured by govern-

ments, pharmas, NGOs and other organisations and by working collaboratively with wider external groups, a business can benefit from their collective expertise and know-how.

Not only does connecting with an on-demand, highly educated global workforce help drive innovation in itself, but it can also inspire your internal teams to be more innovative too.

Good ideas and innovation have never been as important as they are now, so employees must be empowered and encouraged as much as possible.

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THE RAPID RISE OF NLP Following its partnership with GreenKey Technologies, IPC recently rolled out its data visualisation tool – Blotter – which utilises natural language processing and machine learning technology. Digital Bulletin speaks to Tim Carmody, IPC’s Chief Technology Officer, to learn more about how NLP is revolutionising the financial services industry and what the technology holds for the future

INTERVIEW: James Henderson

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IPC

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i Tim, thanks for speaking with Digital Bulletin. Let’s start with the basics – what is Natural language processing and why is it important? What technologies does NLP leverage and is there a convergence of them that is driving this momentum?

Natural language processing (NLP) is essentially the processing of unstructured data from different sources so that analytics systems can interpret it. It is often referred to as a sibling of artificial intelligence (AI) and has grown leaps and bounds over the last ten years thanks to advances in machine learning.

The evolution of AI is drastically transforming the financial services industry by helping to streamline and enrich processes for financial market participants and enabling quicker and more efficient trading and settlement.

Deep learning – a subset of machine learning – consists of the use of complex artificial neural networks to develop analytic models. Deep learning techniques are especially useful for image processing and recognition, natural language processing and speech recognition tasks.

NLP builds on AI and deep learning as it is the ability of a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken. Recently, deep learning techniques have obtained high performance 68

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in NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, language translation and virtual agents.

NLP is one of the technologies that kept coming up when we asked a panel of experts to make their 2021 predictions. Why is NLP coming to the fore now?

NLP is already seeing a huge rise in adoption and deployment throughout the financial services industry, but we’re still only just scratching the surface of its capabilities. The advances we’ve seen over the last several years in machine learning to

IPC

NLP is already seeing a huge rise in adoption and deployment throughout the financial services industry, but we’re still only just scratching the surface of its capabilities” Tim Carmody

power NLP are allowing trading desks to realise faster execution, more efficient communications, and streamlined settlement and reporting processes right now, today.

Voice continues to be one of the most valuable data sources in today’s financial markets, but the financial services industry is not the only sector that produces an immense amount of text data every day though, so it is not surprising that experts have highlighted NLP as a technology to watch.

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tions, the efficacy and accuracy with which financial market participants are able to execute mission-critical communications with NLP continue to increase and improve, and this can spread across into other industries too.

Could you tell us how IPC uses NLP? Voice trading and being compliant are two critical factors among financial market participants. Traders are often negotiating and executing trades by voice. All trades are recorded for compliance purposes and then separately transcribed for regulators and include keyword searches as needed.

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Given the sheer number of trades that take place even in just one day, this is an extremely arduous process. From the outset, IPC has been passionate about improving the trading experience, and we recognise that NLP greatly facilitates trading in all three crucial areas: execution, analytics, and compliance.

NLP accelerates many front-office workflows, including real-time speech-totext transcriptions, capture of in-stream orders and quotes, voice populated trade tickets, and call transcription integrations with CRM systems. It enables users to voice populate forms and applications on their desktops through dictation or

IPC

With COVID-19, the capabilities of NLP and other cloud-solutions has been crucial in helping financial market participants continue their critical function in society” an in-line telephony bot on trader calls, which greatly increases productivity, as it allows traders to more expeditiously book trades and respond to price requests.

For analytics, NLP digitises voice trading, enabling better analysation and automation of workflows by turning voice data into actionable and intelligent insights. Through the voice data it captures, it better illuminates trader-customer interactions by answering questions like: which customers generate the most business?

Which customers request prices but don’t trade? What percentage of price requests lead to a booked trade?

With compliance, workflows are accelerated by many orders of magnitude thanks to Blotter by allowing users to quickly populate and search through transcribed text archives instead of manually culling and listening to snippets of audio. Teams can also monitor trading communications

in near real-time and receive alerts for behaviours and violations through detection of key words and phrases. Blotter can extract each quote and trade from voice communications and pass that through to the compliance database.

You have a background working with NLP alongside machine learning.

How do you reflect on its trajectory and where is it today?

Yes, IPC utilised NLP technology back in September 2019. We quickly saw NLP being adopted by some of the largest financial institutions in the world, and we have been expanding in areas like Dictation-as-a-Service ever since. We expect NLP to follow on its positive trajectory as institutions continue to adopt AI and machine learning technologies in a bid to improve efficiency and workflows.

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trading platform by ensuring highquality pristine audio is available even in the most complex environments.

Unigy’s Real Time Audio Gateway (RTAG) and BlueWave API provide access to large simultaneous calls in real-time unlocking NLP beyond the more traditional use cases such as post-trade analysis and compliance.

Could you speak about the joint development you made with GreenKey in the NLP space and how is that progressing? Could you tell us about Blotter and how it is being used in the trading environment?

With Unigy and Connexus as open platforms, IPC maintains an agnostic approach to ensure that our customers are able to employ best-of-breed enabling technologies, but we also work with industry leaders to create solutions. IPC partnered with Natural Language Processing (NLP) specialist GreenKey Technologies to leverage its machine-learning powered voice recognition technology. This was so we could build a voice-recognition solution tailor-made for traders on IPC’s financial cloud ecosystem of 7,000 financial market participants.

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providing a SaaS delivery. We believe these are unlike anything else in the trading technology industry, allowing traders to easily access a visible, transcribed stream of transaction threads, breaking new ground in data optimisation, customer relationship management and workflow empowerment. When you consider how fast-paced financial trading is and that it often takes place in noisy environments, you can understand that this is no small feat. Giving traders the ability to seamlessly flow from chat and

IPC

instant message to more complex voice trading communications is a completely unique ability.

At a high level, Blotter utilises an NLP engine to convert over-the-counter (OTC) voice quotes into a structured data feed. With millions of voice quotes currently being generated daily over IPC’s communications platform, Blotter has the capability to unlock this market data, and we believe it is transforming not only financial trading, but perhaps the entire market.

How is NLP being used by financial service companies today and has COVID-19 had a noticeable impact?

NLP is being actively deployed in three main areas in the financial services industry. It enables trading strategies across all asset classes, delivering valuable insight and converts complex audio into usable data to automate and analyse tasks. These tasks include quote capture, writing and sorting call notes, consuming voice as data, surveillance and supervision, and much more. With ISSUE 26

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Statista predicts that the NLP market could be almost 14 times larger in 2025 than it was in 2017, increasing from around $3 billion in 2017 to over $43 billion in 2025”

COVID-19, the capabilities of NLP and other cloud-solutions has been crucial in helping financial market participants continue their critical function in society – while still adhering to strict compliance requirements – when forced to step away from their highly regulated trading floors and work from home.

What other industry sectors are utilising NLP and where do you see opportunities for growth?

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services industry, but most people will be familiar with NLP already with virtual assistants such as Apple’s “Siri” or Amazon’s “Alexa”.

However, these types of virtual assistants are notorious for struggling to understand and decipher different accents, languages and slang or colloquial phases. There is certainly the opportunity here for much more sophisticated NLP technologies, such as Blotter, to grow and cross over from enterprises into the consumer market so that in time, speaking to a bot may be as effortless as human interactions.

IPC

IPC has created Connexus Labs, which provides on-demand private network computing resources with secure access to our expansive Connexus ecosystem of content providers, exchanges, ISVs, OMS/EMS, and more than 7,000 customer locations to provide a testing ground for new technology or certification for IPC’s clients.

There can be synergies with specific NLP implementations, and it is wise to take advantage of that, but we don’t see any risk for lock-in more so than with any other technology, especially given the popularity of the SaaS model with NLP.

How much are you able to tell us about the customisation experience within the NLP space?

We’re huge believers in NLP-as-a-Service, in large part because many of our customers have said that they believe the subscription model is more efficient and enables a best-of-breed approach.

Addressing the demand for the SaaS model has been a recent, key area of focus for IPC — not only regarding our NLP offerings but in other areas as well.

Trialling or integrating NLP and AI can be challenging to introduce into a production environment. This is why

How do you think NLP will develop over the next three to five years?

It is always difficult to say how any technology will develop given the speed and rate at which it is evolving. Having said that, Statista predicts that the NLP market could be almost 14 times larger in 2025 than it was in 2017, increasing from around $3 billion in 2017 to over $43 billion in 2025.

We expect NLP to accelerate among industry leaders over the coming five years, and this will not be limited to tech-savvy companies. NLP has use cases in a wide array of industries and we are only just beginning to tap into the revolutionary power and immense opportunities that NLP offers.

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CONNECTING THE POST-COVID ENTERPRISE Brad Mallard, Fujitsu’s CTO for Digital Technology Services North-West Europe, speaks to Digital Bulletin about how COVID-19 has turned digital transformation initiatives upside down and gives an insight into the company’s projects in the 5G and IoT spaces

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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FUJITSU

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f two years ago globalisation and decentralisation were an undeniable market trend, the advent of COVID-19 has turned them into a reality.

However, despite the distance that has separated teams and enterprises over the last 12 months, new technologies in the area of connectivity have been able to ensure communication and adaptability.

During this time, blockchain, 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and other solutions that provide for realtime services have proven to be key for future-proofing industry. Each day, more and more businesses are taking advantage of the benefits that these technologies provide to keep up with the 78

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changing times and market demands.

Fujitsu is no exception.

As a company with over 85 years of experience, Fujitsu is no stranger to change. Over 2020, the Japanese multinational has been enabling remote working and helping companies overcome the challenges of the pandemic. But the virus has not stopped Fujitsu from expanding its products and services further into the connectivity area and developing innovative solutions to enable improved digital transformation initiatives.

But the best way of understanding customers’ needs is to just ask.

Fujitsu recently published Fragile to

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Agile, a report based on a survey of 750 international business leaders and IT decision-makers carried out over the last few months, with the goal of understanding the pandemic’s impact on the industry. Overall, the results revealed that COVID-19 has prompted a complete restructuring of business activity and digital transformation initiatives.

“COVID caused the world to stop in its tracks,” says Brad Mallard, CTO for Digital Technology Services, North-West Europe, Fujitsu, and leader of Fragile to Agile.

“It’s no surprise that most organisations are struggling to keep pace with market demands and customer expectations.

Whilst many have pivoted and changed

the way they operate, they now need to aggressively shift their focus, from reactively increasing resilience to proactively building an adaptive organisation.”

Fragile to Agile discovered that two thirds (64%) of the surveyed leaders are prepared to scrap their current transformation strategies and replace them with new ones that are able to adapt to the changing market demands. This feeling is enhanced within the UK and Ireland, where 70% of those surveyed admitted they need a drastic overhaul. Quality customer experience and operational resilience were overwhelmingly named as the top priorities to achieving agility.

“The big change initiatives that might have been multi-year before are all now expected to be delivered in days, weeks or months at maximum,” Mallard explains. “The pace and urgency of change against a backdrop of uncertainty and unpredictable government policy or market forces are still challenging businesses.

“Every organisation needs to transform.

It’s how to enable your organisation with enough resources and the right structures to put the business and technology together and work with purpose against the business goals that are constantly changing. This move from a fragile, unpredictable state, to a point where people are embracing the agile mindset of, ‘let’s ISSUE 26

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COVID caused the world to stop in its tracks. It’s no surprise that most organisations are struggling to keep pace with market demands and customer expectations” Brad Mallard

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focus on the outcome and put the right people together with the right mindset to achieve that goal,’ is ultimately what we’re trying to move towards. And the answer is about cross-functional teams, embracing business- prioritised change and matching the decision-making pace and urgency that we saw a year ago during the outset of COVID-19.”

The goal is to enable a completely new way of working. And, although changing mentalities is a fundamental aspect of this transformation, technological innovations have also played a key role in enabling communication and collaboration. As a result, connectivity has become an overarching theme of the transition process.

“Cloud and connectivity, with things like 5G and IoT are prevalent in how companies modernise customer’s digital experiences,” Mallard says.

Fujitsu has been providing solutions for the telecommunications sector since the development of radio access networks infrastructure in 1995. Its remote radio unit (RU) became in 2004 the world’s first RU to be shipped and, since 2014, Fujitsu has supplied customer-specific frequency band combinations for dual- and tripleband applications. Now, the Japanese giant has turned its focus to 5G. “Fujitsu has a long heritage in telecommunications and connectivity, and we still do,” Mallard explains. “5G provides

FUJITSU

really low latency and high bandwidth.

It gives the opportunity for real-time services like we’ve never known before.”

Fujitsu has developed and supplied many of the leading telecoms organisations with open radio access units (RAN) which are fundamental for the integration and interoperability of 5G and allow any supplier and network to provide a consistent approach to connectivity. Although the provision of this type of equipment has seemingly been dominated by companies such as Nokia and Ericsson, Fujitsu has been expanding its reach since it set its view of 5G technologies back in 2019, and has no plans to stop any time soon.

Last December Fujitsu announced that its O-RAN compatible 5G RU had been selected by KDDI, one of Japan’s largest telecoms, for the construction of a virtualised base station for 5G commercial services in the country, with a roll-out predicted for the second half of the year.

Moreover, earlier this month, Fujitsu and Xilinx announced a partnership for the deployment and management of 5G units and solutions in a new United States 5G network.

“But our focus is not just on hardware manufacturing,” Mallard stresses.

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insights and to give them an opportunity to think differently about their business.

We’ve got a 5G-specific co-creation space in Kawasaki, Japan, which is all about reimagining customer experiences to create a compelling immersive experience; and 5G is really good at enabling that flexibility.”

As part of this co-creation philosophy, Fujitsu has partnered with Ericsson and several European organisations to provide technology hardware as well as the integration and management of 5G solutions in the manufacturing and automotive industries.

“We are doing quite a lot of proofs of value to look at how organisations can deploy private 5G networks to improve the management of IoT devices in their factories and create smart industry solutions,” Mallard says.

Fujitsu’s co-created solutions not only leverage 5G but also other technologies necessary to foster hyperconnected business, such as IoT. Fujitsu provides IoT solutions across sectors, from manufacturing to mobility and retail and logistics.

“IoT can be many things to many people,” Mallard says. “For example, we have got IoT services that are helping people day in and day out with digital ticketing. We are managing multiple different point-of-sale terminal devices and enabling people to transact on the

Fujitsu has a long heritage in telecommunications and connectivity” move everywhere. We’ve also got IoT capabilities for water treatment and energy supplies, managing and securing multiple different devices wherever they are.”

Large utility companies, as well as telecommunications providers, have millions of devices that they need to monitor and protect. The rise of automation has brought about an increasing concern regarding cybersecurity, and Fujitsu is determined to provide its clients with the tools to ensure it.

“Operational technology is often a bigger risk factor than information technology, so it needs to be secure,” Mallard says. “At the moment, a lot of our focus is around ‘How do we provide that security and enable that capability so that clients can get the benefits of real-time services that IoT enables effectively?’”

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machines. They can also be leveraged to understand human behaviour.

“We have been working in our labs on technologies that map human behaviour from video feeds,” Mallard explains.

“What that does is provide you with a real-time understanding of what people are doing, which can be used in the context of demonstrating compliance with a process or identifying crime.”

Fujitsu has been working with a leading security company to leverage AI to analyse CCTV feeds and predict when a person will attempt to commit a crime. The AI is able to identify suspicious behaviour in real-time, such as a person who walks down a street and suddenly stops, looks around, crouches down and extends their arms against a door. In this context, it would allow users to act before the suspect can break into a building.

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“By identifying that chain of events you can proactively alert and catch criminals or operate in a particular way based upon the situation that you can observe, that today you couldn’t do,” Mallard says. “There just aren’t enough people to do that. IoT and 5G open up a collection of more preventative and proactive services in many contexts, not just the security one.”

But Fujitsu’s partnerships do not solely span the enterprise world. In fact, Mallard’s responsibilities include overseeing the company’s collaboration with universities and research organisations across Europe to foster innovation and provide expert insight to clients.

Last June, Fujitsu announced a partnership with POLI.design, a key developer of Milan Polytechnic’s Design School courses. The collaboration includes a jointly-designed Fujitsu

FUJITSU

Our focus is not just on hardware manufacturing.

We’ve also built a co-creation space, which focuses on working with our customers to deliver new value, new insights and to give them an opportunity to think differently about their business” Human Centric Experience Design training curriculum, as well as a collaborative research project into the use of strategic design to create value for business and society. In addition, Fujitsu also several centres of excellence in various European cities, including one in Paris focused on AI and another one in Brussels specialised in blockchain.

“We embed academia into our organisation to help our customers understand their problems in a deep way and provide potential innovative solutions,” Mallard explains. “For example, in the UK we have run a co-creation session with a leading transport organisation, where we pulled together Fujitsu expertise from our distinguished engineer committee and an academic organisation called Nottingham Trent University, to look at suicide prevention.

We brought in an academic expert on suicide prevention, who started

a number of conversations that the customer hadn’t thought about before.”

COVID-19 has turned innovation from a target to a necessity. It has changed the way we work, and how companies conduct business. The world has become our office. Dispute the accelerated vaccination programmes, Mallard believes that the decentralisation of society is here to stay.

“The opportunity that COVID has introduced to overcome the challenge of digital skill is, on a global basis, to have a talent pool of experts everywhere that you can leverage and they can interact based upon the prevalence of modern tools and a decentralised society,” Mallard explains. “Blockchain, 5G, connectivity, technologies that are essentially on the cloud and allow you to work from anywhere, these are the technologies that underpin the decentralisation agenda.”

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A LIFE IN TECH

A LIFE IN TECH

In the hotseat sharing pearls of technology wisdom this month is Pete Hanlon, CTO of outsourced communications provider Moneypenny. During his 25-year career, Hanlon has also worked as Group CTO for Autotrader and Moneysupermarket

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PETE HANLON

M

y first computer was a Sinclair ZX80 that my brother and I shared. Each week we would get magazines containing programmes and type them into the computer. It was tense, you had to be careful to enter everything right the first time as an error could cause the computer to crash!

The feeling of satisfaction when a programme worked was amazing.

I was also lucky enough to visit my uncle’s workplace in the 80s, where they had a Cray Supercomputer, seeing that in action got me hooked, and I knew I wanted to work in technology.

My first full-time job was working for a small consultancy called George James Consultants. We were writing reverse engineering tools for a language called MUMPS, which was a niche

language developed for hospital laboratory systems.

There were only two of us, and it was great fun, but being so small, I was involved in everything, so I also got a great insight into overall business.

Having lots of freedom and responsibility early on in my career has helped me on my work journey.

I worked at Autotrader for over 10 years and during that time the company shifted from a traditional magazine to a pure-play digital company listed in the FTSE 250. I was privileged to work with my peers as part of the leadership team and learned a great deal about the challenges a company faces in hyper-growth.

The person that influenced me the most was the CIO who helped me

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understand what it takes to be an effective leader in a highly volatile environment.

When I first started working the CTO would act as a translator between the business and the technology department. The role generally had a low level of influence and the technology teams would act as order takers for the wider business.

Today the CTO role is very different.

The CTO plays a vital role in the executive, defining strategy, product development, innovation and focusing on the future to ensure businesses remain relevant. Today’s CTO needs to be a business leader and a security expert, constantly innovating and evolving in a fast-paced environment.

COVID-19 has impacted companies all around the world with massive operational changes as leaders scramble to respond and survive. It has shown us the importance of agility in our business plans but also how critical communication, both internal and external, is to businesses not simply surviving but thriving.

Those businesses who have weathered the storms and are seeing the calmer waters ahead are doing so thanks to a combination of technology 88

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and the human touch. Together, these two factors will be the secrets to success moving forwards.

I can’t predict what the future will look like exactly, however, technology is advancing quicker than ever before, and it is especially true in the field of communication and at Moneypenny we have innovated some exciting new communication tools to help our clients manage their communications and reopen their offices.

It has given us more options to communicate, improved the ways we communicate and generally pulled

PETE HANLON

us into a new world of opportunity.

COVID-19 has brought to the fore what can be achieved and what is on the cusp of being achieved in communication.

It has highlighted that we crave that human interaction facilitated by technology and together these two elements will shape the way the world communicates as we step into our new future.

The use of live chat for example has skyrocketed during the pandemic and this is something we expect to continue.

It is key that we address the challenge of bias in AI. It is easy to get carried away when an AI model responds with

an answer to a question that seems magical. But all too often the data used to train those models contains bias.

The recent GPT-3 model from Open AI is amazing but the model has specific biases towards gender, race, and religion.

The data used to train GPT-3 has been gathered from crawling the web so the biases that exist on the web are reflected in the model.

If we want to build AI’s that are a force for good, we need to be more selective about where we get the training data to teach our AI’s so that they are built on foundations of equality and diversity.

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The biggest mistake CIOs, CTOs and CISOs are making is assuming their cybersecurity controls are complete.

Cybersecurity should be managed in the same way as a product development lifecycle, it is never finished and needs constant iteration. Cybercriminals are always changing and evolving, so security controls need to do the same.

The one piece advice I would give to aspiring technologists is work in as many technical roles as possible early on in your career and find an area of technology that you enjoy.

Over the next decade, AI technology will have the most significant impact on our day-to-day lives. It will impact how we work, play, travel and commu-

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nicate. Today AI has a massive role in the workplace with products like our digital switchboard automating tasks that only a few years ago would have been impossible.

The best computer games have complex AI engines that allow you to play against the computer. Tesla is releasing its full self-driving car and you can get Apps for your mobile phone that will translate between two languages in real time. This is where we are today and the rate of innovation is increasing, who knows what we will be capable of in 10 years’ time.

I would describe myself as friendly, creative, motivated, adaptable and a team player.

PETE HANLON

I find walking Barney, our Shetland Sheepdog is a great way to switch off and get away from technology for a while.

Also, family film night with a glass of wine has been known to work well too.

Moneypenny is all about connecting people and having great conversations.

We’re building technology that works in tandem with our people to ensure those conversations are the best they can be.

We strongly believe that tech superpowers our people and focus on places whereby the caller and customer experience is enhanced through technology and not reduced. We’ve been supporting businesses throughout

COVID by offering our digital switchboard product for free, making sure those conversations never stop.

From a career perspective, I want to be remembered as someone that doesn’t take himself too seriously, isn’t afraid to fail but has left a positive and enduring legacy with the businesses and colleagues I’ve worked with over the years.

Tech is no longer a sub-division of business; it is an integral part of how the business world operates and I am privileged to have experienced that transformation. Technology is now about powering the future and the opportunities are vast.

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THE CLOSING BULLETIN

Writing exclusively for Digital Bulletin, Paige Erickson, Managing Director, EMEA, Workfront outlines how enterprises can build out a robust digital workplace

T

here is no doubt that the way we all work has been transformed.

The business status quo has fundamentally changed, and some have simply not been able to keep up. While the likes of Debenhams and Topshop have caught the headlines, it has been predicted that unfortunately as many a quarter of a million UK businesses could collapse as a result of the pandemic. A further one in six companies say they are likely to need at least 12 months to recover and get back on track. That could simply be too late.

One thing that has become clear this year is that an accessible and effective digital workplace is critical to establishing resilience and business agility. As a result we are seeing an overhaul of business 92

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practices across nearly every industry.

Businesses have accelerated beyond merely paying lip service to digitisation and have launched head-first into it.

Connecting data across the remote workplace Digital transformation is a term that is often overused and under-delivered upon. However, when the UK was first plunged into lockdown in March, those businesses that had already embraced digitisation were able to more easily transition their teams, processes and practices to the “new normal”.

As we continue to head unerringly towards a digitally connecting future, the need for digital resilience has never been

PAIGE ERICKSON

greater. As highlighted in Gartner’s recent Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace, the need to improve digital resilience during and after the pandemic has firmly placed top-to-bottom organisational support for digital workplace initiatives into the spotlight. This is not the time for business leaders to drag their heels.

Digital resilience is one of the most valuable long-term principles of an organisation today. It defines an organisation’s ability to grow and survive in

a changing environment by giving them the tools to successfully evolve with the times. By connecting data and work across distributed teams throughout the globe, organisations can be responsive and agile, making informed decisions that achieve real business outcomes.

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business so that teams can work remotely and at speed. This requires a central solution so that workers can have full visibility across the organisation’s strategy. Only then can they make informed data-driven decisions to reach that overriding strategy.

A work management solution can serve as an operational system of record for work, providing businesses with the ability to pivot quickly and adapt to new ways of working when change is needed.

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This year has marked a paradigm shift in working practices. There is no doubt that we have all grown accustomed to the benefits of remote working. In fact, recent research found that almost three quarters (74%) of employees wanted to keep a hybrid approach to working in the future. Today’s employees demand flexibility. Organisations themselves have also embraced the change. After seeing no reductions to productivity, companies such as Facebook and Twitter announced that their employees could

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A work management platform provides the essential building blocks to keep companies productive and ensure they can scale new programmes with ease”

opt to continue working from home even after the coronavirus crisis eases.

A wake-up call for business leaders The pandemic has been a wakeup call for savvy business leaders. Many organisations have struggled to cope with the changes brought upon by the pandemic due to a simple lack of digital resilience.

Good enough is no longer enough. Following a year where the world of work was turned on its head overnight, digital resilience must be embraced in order to thrive.

Resilient organisations will be best prepared to face and adapt to any challenges that lie ahead. While there are a variety of elements integral to digital resilience, a work management platform provides the essential building blocks to keep companies productive and ensure they can scale new programmes with ease. There does seem to be light at the end of the tunnel. Make sure your business is one that is able to come out the other side stronger than before.

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