Technology Magazine - July 2021

July 2021 | technologymagazine.com

Cyber Security Companies NORTHWELL HEALTH: Supercharging the data lake approach TROJAN PHONES: Why the BYOD trend has become a cybersec threat DATA STORM: Future synergies in cloud and AI

THE FUTURE OF THE ENTERPRISE Deloitte’s Abdi Goodarzi discusses the Kinetic Enterprise, Business Agility, the Rise of Connectivity, Ecosystem Co-Innovation, and the Evolving Role of the CXO

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The Technology Team SENIOR EDITOR

PADDY SMITH EDITOR

LAURA BERRIL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ PRODUCTION MANAGERS

OWEN MARTIN PHILLINE VICENTE JENNIFER SMITH

PRODUCTION EDITOR

VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

KIERAN WAITE

ANDREW STUBBINGS

CREATIVE TEAM

DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

MARKETING DIRECTOR

JANET BRICE

OSCAR HATHAWAY SOPHIE-ANN PINNELL HECTOR PENROSE SAM HUBBARD MIMI GUNN JUSTIN SMITH REBEKAH BIRLESON DUKE WEATHERILL JORDAN WOOD

SAM KEMP EVELYN HUANG MOTION DESIGNER

MARKETING MANAGER

ROSS GARRIGAN

MEDIA SALES DIRECTOR

TYLER LIVINGSTONE

JASON WESTGATE JAMES WHITE

PROJECT DIRECTORS

MANAGING DIRECTOR

KRIS PALMER MIKE SADR BEN MALTBY TOM VENTURO

LEWIS VAUGHAN

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

STACY NORMAN PRESIDENT & CEO

GLEN WHITE

EDITOR'S FOREWORD

Is the race for fastest over?

Or just getting started?

Technology – in all its forms – has always prized speed. But new race dynamics have come into play

“The race to adopt has overtaken the need for processing speed”

AI MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

5G will be the fastest adopted mobile standard in history. That’s according to Ericsson’s mobile research group, which produces regular (and, actually, excellent) reports for the progress of mobile technologies.

But that’s not really the story here. By and large, new iterations of technology should be adopted faster than the previous ones; I expect more Pentium-powered computers were sold in the first week than i386s were ever manufactured. The story is that the race to adopt, say, 5G has significant geo-industrial ramifications.

Northern Asia is leading the pack for 5G, says the report, with Europe lagging behind other industrialised zones.

Technology hasn’t stopped worshipping speed, but the definition of speed is changing. As connection and processing speeds become ample for a large sample of businesses, the competitive edge becomes adoption.

Digital transformations aren’t happening because it’s a fad. It’s just that putting an adoption driver (CTO Verstappen) in your racing car is the fastest route to being, well, fast.

The definition of what it means to be fast may be shifting. But when it comes to competition, the brakes are still off.

PADDY SMITH

paddy.smith@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Bringing the Community to LIVE Broadcast from London to the World

September

14th - 16th 2021 A BizClik Media Group Brand

Featuring:

Keynote Speakers LIVE Roundtable Q&As Networking Lunch Inspirational Presentations

Over 5 Stages:

Technology Stage Digital Transformation Stage Cloud & Cyber AI & Automation Tech Expo Stage

EARLY BIRD TICKETS

Creating Digital Communities

CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 12 Big Picture 14 The Brief 16 Global News 18 People Moves 20 Timeline: PayPal 22 Legend:

Kara Swisher 26 Five Mins With:

Greig Johnston

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Digital Transformation The human side of digital transformation

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60

Abdi Goodarzi on the Future of Enterprise Performance

Defining tomorrow’s healthcare today

Deloitte

Northwell Health

CLOUD & CYBER

82

110

Left to Our Own Devices

Customer is King

Cloud & Cyber

Enterprise IT

92

120

Innovation and Shifting Mindsets

People, Not Systems

Liberty Global Ventures

Bell Food Group

Enabling educators.

Empowering students.

Explore how we accelerate student discovery, learning and innovation with our Digital Education 3D Experience.

EXPLORE THE 3D EXPERIENCE

136

AI & Data Analytics

AI + Cloud + Data = Future

172 Abellio

Sustainable Digitalisation: Abellio UK Seeks Solutions

146

MercyOne

Transforming the ecosystem of healthcare

160

184

Cyber Security Companies

A Smart City in Action

Top 10

City of Mesa

CONTENTS

228

Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric Leads Sustainability Change

200 PwC

Germany’s Digital Journey: A Tale of Two Transformations

214

238 IGT

IGT Drives Gaming Technology Evolution

Viatris

Adapting to change the Viatris way

250

JG Summit Holdings

Digital Transformation at Scale

262

308

Design and Improve Experiences with Qualtrics XM

Audits and AI in a Time of Upheaval

Qualtrics

280 GBG

Building Trust in a Digital World

294 Teranet

Cybersecurity and Zero Trust Solutions in an Agile World

PRGX

318

Cloudflare Inc

On a Mission to Help to Build a Better Internet

330 Kohler

Evolving Data Centre Power

CLOUDFLAR

BIG PICTURE

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July 2021

Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft Washington, US

The New Shephard lifts off. Blue Origin is a spaceflight company working to send tourists to space on its reusable suborbital rocket, New Shepard. It was created in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. Bezos will fly on its first crewed flight, he announced on June 7.

The flight is scheduled for July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

It will launch from the West Texas facility in approximately 11 minutes.

Image by: Blue Origin technologymagazine.com

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THE BRIEF “[THE USE OF CLOUD SYSTEMS] HAS SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED THE POTENTIAL SECURITY RISKS AND ATTACK SURFACE AREA OF ORGANISATIONS”

BY THE NUMBERS How much time has been spent online during the pandemic so far?

This was according to a national report by Ofcom in2021.

Matthew Gribben

CTO and Data Protection Officer Farmison  READ MORE

“The rising emphasis placed by customers on CX means CRM has become a business necessity rather than a luxury” Stephen Higgins Head of CRM Columbus UK 

READ MORE

“LARGE PROGRAMMES CARRY MORE RISK, SO A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THAT IS PEOPLECENTRIC MAY BE MORE SUCCESSFUL IN THE LONG RUN” Hilary Robertson

YES UK adults spent an average of t hree hours and 47 minutes online every day

NO

Online shopping sales in the UK rose by 48% to £113bn, 62% of adults and 92% of 16 - 24 year-olds said they played computer games.

EDITORS CHOICE Bitcoin goes mainstream in El Salvador El Salvador makes history in government vote to pass laws bringing Bitcoin into its mainstream financial system. The motion was passed and signed on June 9th READ MORE

Cow poo powering cryptomining Farmer turns hand to mining using powerful computers powered by renewable energy:"cow muck".

READ MORE

Strategy Director Sopra Steria 

Robot dog to carry people’s water Robust-looking four-legged bot that’s remarkably cheap, with prices starting at just $2,700 will carry walkers’ water

READ MORE

READ MORE

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July 2021

 ZOOM Use of the software jumped 30-fold in April, as the coronavirus pandemic forced millions to work, learn and socialise remotely.

At its peak, the firm counted more than 300 million daily participants and paying customers have more than tripled.

LEAD STORY

Tiny Artificial Intelligence What is it? – Also known as Tiny ML (machine learning), the technology is a big focus for AI researchers. The aim is to reduce the size of algorithms, especially those using large quantities of data and computational power.

Why do we need it? – Training sophisticated AI uses huge amounts of energy, leaving a big carbon footprint. As adoption grows, it’s clear it needs to be less polluting. Then there’s the need to run inference models at the edge for use cases like robotics, automated video security and anomaly detection in manufacturing.

What is happening in the field? – As well as academics, tech giants such as Google, IBM, Amazon and Apple are undertaking research around it. There have been commercial moves by cloud providers, for example AWS’ Sagemaker Neo. There are also collaborations between big tech and academia.

When will it become commonplace? – It’s very much an emerging area and is mainly research driven, with few companies leveraging Tiny AI in production.

 COCKROACH LABS Known for CockroachDB, a cloudnative, distributed SQL database providing “next-level consistency, ultra-resilience, data locality and scale to modern cloud applications.”

Its revenue more than doubled in 2020. The startup expects similar growth levels this year and to double its workforce from 200-400 by the end of the year.  FASTLY A bug in the edge cloud platform’s code caused an internet blackout for some of the world’s biggest websites and took out 85% of the company’s network.  BITCOIN Its value plunged 30% to nearly $30,000 in May and was down more than 50% since its record high of $64,829 in midApril.Overall, more than $250 billion evaporated from the bitcoin market.

W A Y U P JUL 21

W A Y D O W N

technologymagazine.com

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GLOBAL NEWS 3

CANADA

Mystery bidder pays $28 million for seat on Bezos first crewed spaceflight A mystery bidder paid $28m (£20m) for a seat on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's first crewed spaceflight. This winning bid was made on June 12th and Blue Origin saying their identity would be revealed in coming weeks.

The bidding process attracted interest from more than 140 countries.

2

USA

Verizon offers 10% off accessories if vaccinated

1

GLOBAL

ECB survey shows Europeans want digital euro to be private The European Central Bank (ECB) has published the results of a public consultation on a digital euro with responses citing they want it to be private, safe and cheap.

The results show that what the public and professionals want the most from a digital currency is privacy (43 per cent), followed by security (18 per cent).

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July 2021

The nation's largest network operator announced a new promotion giving 10% off selected accessories to vaccinated customers.

People are asked to fill out a questionnaire, enter a phone number and do a survey asking if they have received the vaccine. The carrier doesn't need someone to provide a vaccination card.

4

UNITED KINGDOM

British quantum computing firm to combine with US giant Honeywell’s quantum solutions arm Cambridge-based Cambridge Quantum Computing, founded in 2014, has announced it is to combine with the multinational conglomerate in a bid to lead the quantum computing industry. It says it aims to offer advanced, fully-integrated hardware and software solutions to large, high growth markets worldwide.

5

ISRAEL

Israeli startup to use Artificial Intelligence in fight against mosquito threat Diptera.ai has raised $3 million in a seed round to use AI technology to help fight the spread of malaria, Zika, dengue and yellow fever.

The Jerusalem-based company employs computer vision and ecofriendly technology for the sterile insect technique (SIT) which sends sterilised males to mate with females.

technologymagazine.com

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PEOPLE MOVES JEROME GUILLEN FROM: TESLA. PRESIDENT, HEAVY DUTY TRUCKING TO: CURRENTLY UNKNOWN WAS: MARCH 2021 NOW: JUNE 2021

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July 2021

Jerome Guillen was on the board of San Francisco Symphony and President-Heavy Trucking at Tesla, Inc. Before this Guillen had led the company’s entire vehicles business since 2018. During his time as president of Automotive, Tesla opened its first plant overseas, in Shanghai and expanded its battery cell partnerships. Guillen has worked at the company in roles reporting directly to CEO Elon Musk since 2010.

In the past he was Engineer at Daimler AG and General Manager-Cascadia Program at Daimler Trucks North America LLC (a subsidiary of Daimler AG).

Dr. Guillen received a doctorate from the University of Michigan, an undergraduate degree from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées and a graduate degree from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Guillen is the second high-level executive to leave Tesla in recent months, following former vice president of legal, Al Prescott, who left in April.

PAUL GRECO FROM: MAGIC LEAP TO: CURRENTLY UNKNOWN WAS: OCTOBER 2020 NOW: JUNE 2021

LARRY AUGUSTIN FROM: AMAZON WEB SERVICES TO: CURRENTLY UNKNOWN WAS: JULY 2019 NOW: MAY 2020

Greco was CTO of augmented reality (AR) wearable and technology giant, Magic Leap but is now reportedly leaving the firm alongside Chief Patent Officer, David Lundmark.

Greco was responsible for research and development and the launch of the firm’s spatial computing product platform.

He was previously Senior Vice President of hardware engineering and programmes there and before that, VP Engineering at Tessera and Director of Engineering at Motorola, where he helped run its smartphone production facility.

He holds an MBA from the University of Miami, an MSME from the University of Conneticut and a BSME from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Augustin, VP of Applications at AWS reportedly left the company at the end of May. He was an integral part of the cloud giant’s effort to generate more revenue from applications, rather than cloud servers and databases.

During his time there, Augustin oversaw a host of services, including the Amazon Connect contact centre service, Alexa for Business and Honeycode, a service letting non-developers build apps on the cloud.

He has more than 30 years’ experience in open-source software as an exec, board member and investor and part of the group who coined the term. Most recently he was CEO of SugarCRM, an open source developer of customer management software. technologymagazine.com

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TIMELINE The prolific payment tool past and present PayPal has come a long way in a short time, as 286 million active users and around 10 billion payments annually can attest. PayPal (PYPL) is the e-commerce giant with a loyal user base which is seeing younger consumers embracing the digital payment platform.The company is highly profitable and global in scope, dealing with 100 currencies in more than 200 world markets.

Dec 1998

Original name PayPal wasn't even named PayPal when it was founded in 1998 by technology entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Max Levchin.

Instead, the company's initial name was Confinity, a company founded on the premise of low-cost, almost effortless digital payments for consumers and businesses.

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July 2021

Oct 1999 early 2000

Email-based payment technology Within two years, the founders renamed their company PayPal, after a decision was made to focus only on payments made over the burgeoning internet.

Thiel and Levchin adeptly leveraged an opening in the payments market, as nobody was really focusing on a digital payment platform between consumers and businesses.

PayPal took off at the start of the new century.

Mar 2000 Feb 2002

Going public In March 2000 Paypal (which changed from Confinity to this name later that year in June) cleared the one million customer mark. The next month, February 2002, the company goes public with the issuance of new stock. The IPO is hit as PayPal stock rises by more than 50% and first day trading closes at $20 per share.

Oct 2002 Dec 2008

Ebay and mobile Paypal is sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, it goes on to surpass 100 million enduser accounts. In April 2006 it rolls out its new mobile payment platform for smartphones: PayPal Mobile. Byy the end of the year it hits its tenth birthday and nears the 150 million users mark.

Sep 2013 now

Growth and the future PayPal splits with eBay in 2014 and its market value reaches $49 billion. The next year it buys Xoom and accelerates its international payments handling. In January the next year its subsidiary Venmo surpasses $1 billion payments in one month.

In 2017 it launched its first peer-to-peer system.

Currently the company is edging into the cryptocurrency market and focusing on Blockchain.

LEGEND

Revolution: Recode technology podcast founder and both ‘feared’ and well-liked journalist Name: Kara Swisher Job Title: Co-founder and Editor-at-Large Company: Recode

K

ara Swisher is the co-founder and editor-at-large of Recode, producer and host of the Recode Decode and Pivot podcasts, and co-executive producer of the Code Conference series.

She has a special series on MSNBC called Revolution on the impact of technology on work and society as a whole and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Before all of this, Swisher co-produced and co-hosted the Wall Street Journal’s "D: All Things Digital" conference series (now called the Code conference) with Walt Mossberg back in 2003. It’s still the USA’'s leading conference on technology and media, with interviewees including big names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Google leadership team and Jack Dorsey.

Swisher worked in the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau and also wrote the "BoomTown" column, which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section. Previously,

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July 2021

Number of years working in the industry

20

Amount donated to charity

£1m

Swisher covered breaking news about the web’s major players and Internet policy issues and also wrote feature articles on technology.

Earlier in her career, Swisher worked as a reporter at the Washington Post and as an editor at the City Paper in Washington, DC. She graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and also holds a degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Swisher has written aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web as well as the sequel, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.

Swisher has considered running for San Francisco Mayor but says she will wait until she is in her 70s.

She wears sunglasses indoors owing to her photosensitivity sensitivity to UV rays from sunlight and other light sources such as indoor fluorescent light.

“The tech industry - and more specifically Silicon Valley - continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards” technologymagazine.com

23

Top 100 Leaders in Technology September 2021 To be announced at the Technology & AI LIVE Event NOMINATE NOW

A BizClik Media Group Brand

Creating Digital Communities

5MINS WITH...

GREIG JOHNSTON The CEO at Vidatec, Greig Johnston has worked in the technology sector for over 25 years, buying and selling technology services.

He specialises in helping businesses, from start-ups to large enterp rise organisations, to developing digital strategies delivering customers’ and people experiences.

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July 2021

Q. COULD YOU GIVE ME AN OVERVIEW OF YOUR POSITION AND WHAT IT ENTAILS?

» I’m CEO at mobile web and app

specialist Vidatec. We work with brands and organisations under a banner of using technology to improve people’s experience of life. This could be an eat healthier initiative with Ryvita, the popular Couch to 5K app for Public Health England, as well as various other projects that look at ways to better connect people. This has all been especially important in the remote world we’ve found ourselves in over the pandemic.

I personally oversee the running of the company, but I am lucky to have an amazing team of designers and developers that bring our award winning digital products to life.

Q. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE?

» I’m a people person, which I think is really important when working in technology.

We want all of the digital outputs that we develop to have that same personal, warm and accessible feel as real life human interactions, so I try and instil this within our company culture. Internally, we are extremely focused on doing employee engagement correctly, and I think that starts with me being approachable and making sure that we have an environment where everyone feels comfortable and has the opportunity to bring their ideas and skills to the table.

Q. HOW HAVE YOU REACTED TO THE IMPACT OF COVID-19?

» COVID-19 has caused every business

to review its own proposition and ways of working. For us this has manifested in widening our offering to include much more consultancy-level services. We are increasingly approached to be part of the journey of discovery in developing a business or new idea into its next digital proposition.

People are always looking for fresh ways of doing things and the upgrade of technology is happening in much quicker cycles these days, so we’ve become much more agile when planning ahead. We know that things could all change quicker than might have been expected, but we see that as an opportunity to keep evolving.

Q. TO WHAT EXTENT HAS THE PANDEMIC IMPACTED EXISTING PROJECTS?

» As has been said many times, adjusting to life during the pandemic has acted to accelerate digital transformation across many different aspects of our daily lives,

“ People are always looking for fresh ways of doing things and the upgrade of technology is happening in much quicker cycles these days” which obviously puts Vidatec in a great position as this is exactly what we help organisations to do.

An interesting trend we’ve found is that our projects are increasingly looking at crossplatform experiences, where the user can interact with a brand or organisation in a much more flexible, convenient and on-demand way. This can apply to the in-work scenario, where an employer needs to use technology to incorporate more of the workplace culture as well as perform functional tasks. Or it could be related to the way we have fun or organise our personal lives.

Q. WHAT ARE YOUR PRIORITIES GOING FORWARDS?

» A big focus for us now is in working with

organisations on employee engagement strategies that harness the benefits of technology. There’s been a lot of disruption to working practices over the last year, whether it’s those that are working remotely, those getting back into industries like hospitality and retail that have been shut down for so long, or those that have been flat out through these challenging times. It’s more important than ever to use technology to connect and engage with employees, so we’re using our own experience to work on projects that can turn internal engagement into a competitive edge for organisations. technologymagazine.com

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DELOITTE

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July 2021

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

technologymagazine.com

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DELOITTE Abdi Goodarzi

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July 2021

DELOITTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER technologymagazine.com

31

DELOITTE

Alex: A Life in a Digital World

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

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

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

EP assisted another client in coordinating an ecosystem strategy across labs, universities, and businesses to support regional testing, including development of a new supply chain 32

July 2021

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

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

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

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

DELOITTE

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

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

ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

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

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

EXECUTIVE BIO

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

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

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

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

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

DELOITTE

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

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

The Kinetic Enterprise: Built to Evolve

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July 2021

DELOITTE

DELOITTE

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

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

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

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

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

Supply Chain: We are Connected

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July 2021

DELOITTE

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

KINETIC CASE STUDY: USING THE CLOUD TO EVOLVE CLEAN

DID YOU KNOW...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DELOITTE

Reduce tech and operational debt and the need for customization.

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

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

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

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

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

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Awards and Recognition: 2020-2021

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

OPN Global Cloud Transformation Partner of the Year

Financial Services Industry Innovation Award Retail & Hospitality Industry Innovation Award

INFOR PARTNER EXCELLENCE AWARDS - GLOBAL SYSTEM INTEGRATOR OF THE YEAR

DELOITTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EP 101: Ecosystem Orchestrator

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DELOITTE

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

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

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DELOITTE

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DELOITTE

THE SMART FACTORY

DID YOU KNOW...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“First, the role of CXOs for every organisation has completely changed,” he begins. “Understanding the technology footprint is a part of every business transformation. CXOs today face the 44

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

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

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

DELOITTE

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

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

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

DID YOU KNOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Future of Enterprise Resiliency

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

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

“There has to be an appropriate level of investment in your most valuable asset to take advantage of the full spectrum of capabilities. This is not an afterthought for us – the people side is of such significance that we have underscored our AI practice with the theme ‘Age of With’ – humans with machines. We bring our Human Capital teams to the table to help us with the change management brought about 46

July 2021

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

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

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

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

DELOITTE

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

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DELOITTE

Looking Forward: An Integrated World

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

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

leveraging decades of experience and a people-centred mindset.

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

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

It’s full – every day.”

ABDI GOODARZI

DELOITTE CONSULTING ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE LEADER technologymagazine.com

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

THE HUMAN SIDE OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 50

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

When it comes to digital strategy, it is human beings – not technology – that can ultimately make the difference between success and failure WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

T

raditionally, the now ubiquitous term ‘digital transformation strategy’ meant a whole load of new and innovative technologies delivering grand and far-reaching results. However, the pandemic has more or less forced businesses of all types and sizes to also adopt a range of small and localised transformations which have been very quick and just as significant.

The turbulent past 18 months have unequivocally changed the way business is done around the world.

So, how have strategies changed and how are they continuing to do so?

Harel Tayeb, CEO at RPA solutions company, Kryon Systems, thinks the speed at which digital transformation has occurred, indicates the fact that technology and budgets to make the changes have always been there, but the actual will to change wasn’t until companies had their hands forced.

“The pandemic has served to accelerate digital transformation and now businesses are looking to future-proof themselves.

According to IDC analysts, within the next two years, two-thirds of Global 2000 enterprises will have digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategy,” he says.

However, he also believes these digital strategies should not take precedence over business ones, but just be used as a guide for the business’ direction in general. technologymagazine.com

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Enabling educators.

Empowering students.

Explore how we accelerate student discovery, learning and innovation with our Digital Education 3D Experience.

EXPLORE THE 3D EXPERIENCE

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“ Within the next two years, two-thirds of Global 2000 enterprises will have digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategy” HAREL TAYEB

CEO, KRYON SYSTEMS

Hilary Robertson, Strategy Director at Sopra Steria, mirrors this view: “The digital and data first model requires larger chunks of investment and time and comes under board scrutiny. Large programmes carry more risk, so a digital transformation that is people-centric may be more successful in the long run, where everyone within an organisation with an open, can-do mindset, can drive continuous, smaller changes bottom-up.”

People skills matter Ernst & Young also believes although the creation and development of digital strategies is critical to the growth prospects of many businesses, the human element must be factored in.

James McElhone, a partner in consulting for the firm says: “It’s also important to focus on the digital capabilities and skills base within a workforce. We have a more digitally dependent future, however human insight is what often enables a business to make the most of these new technologies; based on the knowledge someone has of its objectives, the industry within which it operates, experience and expertise. This is particularly true for the consumer-led ones, or those which rely on emotive responses to sell goods or services. technologymagazine.com

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“Large programmes carry more risk, so a digital transformation that is peoplecentric may be more successful in the long run”

But if businesses and Hybrid working digital are indivisible, and the cloud the skills gap is one As the wholly virtual challenge which is cause world has now become for concern. Whereas well, embedded in most every organisation, from organisations, the hybrid banks and insurance nature of the future companies to retail and will create significant transport possessing vast ambiguity and challenges stores of data that can in how this can truly work yield valuable business for those physically and information, a survey from virtually taking part – says HILARY ROBERTSON STRATEGY DIRECTOR, SnapLogic found 73% UK Lisa Heneghan. KPMG’s SOPRA STERIA firms said they lacked chief digital officer. the talent to complete AI and data science She comments: “Inevitably there needs initiatives. This is according to Shaun Dippnall, to be a period of trialling and learning from CEO of EXPLORE Data Science Academy, who experience, however organisations need to adds: “One of the biggest constraints to digital quickly achieve some success, or there is a transformation will be the skills shortage and danger people will revert to the ways of the companies are going to have to adopt a ‘grow past and miss opportunities to continue to your own’ philosophy to realise their plans.” accelerate digital transformation.”

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Again this is a shared sentiment. Robert Rutherford, CEO at QuoStar, says hybrid working is going to be a significant trend over the next year. “A lot of focus will be on company culture and maintaining employee engagement – simply focusing on the technology will not be enough. As we move into the unknown, IT and the wider board will need to have clear strategies on how to manage this, ensuring staff are looked after, as well as clients and prospects.”

And Mark Skelton, CTO and VP of CANCOM UK&I suggests smart meeting rooms will be a crucial investment for businesses going forward. “These spaces can create a productive experience for participants, whether joining from the office or remotely, by integrating hardware and software and via new tools such as MS Viva.”

But, he adds, the use of cloud storage will also increase security concerns and the

Five lessons in digital transformation LESSON 1:

Figure out your business strategy before you invest in anything.

LESSON 2:

Leverage insiders.

LESSON 3:

Design customer experience from the outside in.

LESSON 4:

Recognize employees’ fear of being replaced.

LESSON 5:

Bring Silicon Valley start-up culture inside. technologymagazine.com

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“ Organisations need to quickly achieve some success, or there is a danger people will revert to the ways of the past and miss opportunities to continue to accelerate digital transformation” LISA HENEGHAN

CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER, KPMG

security of service providers, suppliers and partners should be validated, because any supply chain weaknesses can lead to cyber and data breaches.

Induced technical debt The speed at which business and working lives were transformed meant the amounts of projects organisations asked IT teams to deliver spiked. According to Mulesoft’s 56

July 2021

Connectivity Benchmark Report 2021, on average they grew by 30% compared to the previous year, resulting in more technical debt.

Its senior director, Lila Dorato explains: “Finding a way to solve this problem is now a core component of many organisation’s digital strategies. They need a means of reducing the technical debt they have amassed in the short term, by replacing tight couplings between systems with a more flexible integration layer. As such, API-led connectivity creates loose couplings between applications, data and devices so changes can be made quickly without impacting existing integrations or the functionality of digital services. It becomes easier to accelerate innovation and deliver new products and services faster, without the risk of business disruption or spiralling costs.”

The future role of the CIO – or CEO, or both?

Today’s CIO has to bring a business mindset to an organisation by driving it into a digital-first, customer-centric and datadriven future, according to Craig Walker - SVP, Strategic Customer Advisor to the Office of CEO at Salesforce. “Increasingly, CEOs consider their CIO as a key ally in their digital transformation journey. This has led to the rising influence of the CIO, elevation on more company boards to drive strategic and corporate decisions.

So in the digital economy, we will see more CEOs with a digital background and more CIOs becoming CEOs.” The future is agility for all The velocity at which digital transformation has moved over the last 18 months has shown global enterprise how necessity – and crisis – results in courage when it comes to adaptation.

Despite all, and inevitable, associated

DX stats 73%

UK firms said they lacked the talent to complete AI and data science initiatives – SnapLogic

30%

IT projects spiked by 30% in 2020 compared to the previous year – Mulesoft Connectivity Benchmark Report 2021

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“ In the digital economy, we will see more CEOs with a digital background and more CIOs becoming CEOs” CRAIG WALKER

SVP, STRATEGIC CUSTOMER ADVISOR TO THE OFFICE OF CEO, SALESFORCE

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challenges, Agilisys’ director, Richard Hanrahan remarks: “We couldn’t have imagined previously the rate at which change and transformation could take place. Across businesses and industries around the world, decisions were made, solutions implemented and change affected. We can no longer say we can’t be faster, more agile or more decisive.”

One final interesting example is the mortgage market. Traditionally this has been tech-adverse, but during this period, conveyancers LMS say they have seen stakeholders in all areas working to improve their own technology solutions.

“Over the next 12 months I expect data to be a primary area for change.

Fragmented, unreliable data has been a problem for all industries for many years and in conveyancing it’s a huge issue. The implementation of fast, reliable data as a single source of trust would be truly transformational to the mortgage industry.

“As data grows, the use of customer data platforms is likely to explode. As these platforms attract investments from huge tech firms, they may be the enabler required to transform less digitally advanced industries – like the mortgage industry – over the coming years,” Nick Chadbourne, CEO.

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NORTHWELL HEALTH

Defining tomorrow’s healthcare today WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

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NORTHWELL HEALTH

NORTHWELL HEALTH

A super-charged data lake strategy is helping Northwell Health connect with a population of 11 million New Yorkers – one seamless patient journey at a time

T

here are not many private healthcare providers around the world who serve an urban population of 11 million people but Northwell Health is one of them.

New York’s largest health system is leveraging technology to deliver personalised patient experiences across its 23 hospitals and more than 830 outpatient facilities in order to outpace the accelerating digital landscape created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The numbers and sheer scale of Northwell Health, which also includes medical research at the Feinstein Institutes as well as medical and nursing education through the Zucker School of Medicine, does not detract from its aim to transform the health of every unique patient with their mantra ‘be better tomorrow than we are today’ — a goal which has stood the test of time since they were founded nearly 25 years ago.

Today, it has never been more important for the 76,000-strong team to focus on a future driven by a digital transformation, which includes data lake solutions used to effectively ‘supercharge the data’. Northwell is focused on delivering connected digital patient experiences that complement their physical experiences inside and outside the Northwell system.

With more than five million patient engagements every year, this digital transformation has accelerated the ease in which patients can access their electronic health records (EHR) and consult physicians

through virtual consultations, which was vital at a time when the state of New York imposed new visitation policies.

Serving one of the biggest and most diverse populations on the planet could be perceived as a challenge but according to Marc d. Paradis, Vice President, Data Strategy for Northwell Holdings and Ventures, this provides a unique opportunity to “apply representative data and balanced analytics to real world clinical scenarios”.

As a data scientist who combines the best of academia and industry know-how to drive the data strategy for Northwell Health, Paradis is responsible for targeted investments,

“ We have to remember we’re dealing with people at the most sensitive and vulnerable points in their lives it's a real privilege to be a caring part of those moments and to help them in their journey to achieve their health and wellness goals” MARC D. PARADIS

VICE PRESIDENT OF DATA STRATEGY FOR NORTHWELL HOLDINGS AND VENTURES technologymagazine.com

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Health Catalyst: An agile approach to healthcare data How to get the most out of your investment in data with Health Catalyst

Health Catalyst is quite literally a healthcare provider’s catalyst for change when it comes to their measurable, data-informed improvement in analytics, software and services.

Founded in 2008 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Health Catalyst enables health care organisations to build a healthcare -specific, open, flexible, and scalable data platform and fully integrated suite of analytics applications.

This enables health system partners, including Northwell Health in New York which serves a population of 11 million, to realise measurable value within months. “Our customers have recognised the potential to use data, to improve their clinical, financial and operational business outcomes,” said Mike Doyle, Chief Customer Officer.

Formed by a group of healthcare veterans - with a quest to develop a data warehouse that could handle the complexities unique to healthcare data - they discovered the solution now known as Adaptive Data Architecture. Today, Health Catalyst helps clinicians in more than 250 hospitals, caring for more than 100 million patients each year.

Health Catalyst offers a solution in three parts: Data Operating System Cloud-based DOS is healthcare-specific, open, flexible and scalable.

Analytics Applications Allows customers to make measurable clinical, financial and operational improvements.

Services Expertise Experts that leverage technology to help customers make measurable, data-informed improvements.

“I think a key differentiator is our open platform that enables our clients to accelerate their own integration of data, but it is customisable, configurable in ways that make it unique. For example, during the pandemic our clients were able to put this healthcare-specific, flexible platform and fully integrated suite of analytics applications to use in ways we could never have predicted,” said Doyle.

“We’re very grateful for our partnership with Northwell Health and want to thank these visionary leaders who are able to envision a future using data that is light years beyond what we can think of today.”

Learn more

NORTHWELL HEALTH

Northwell Health: Defining tomorrow’s healthcare today

joint ventures and innovations that support Northwell’s clinical and social missions by leveraging Northwell's data assets, intellectual expertise and clinical platforms.

He also focuses on data strategy, predictive algorithms and digital partnerships.

“My role is to empower our patients, augment our providers, support their families and to improve the health of all of the communities we serve through the use of innovative data solutions,” said Paradis who joined Northwell in January of 2020, just before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.

“I have the privilege to help the system as a whole think through data strategy, looking at how we can enrich and leverage our differentiable and defensible assets.

We have a decade of data on 11 million lives covering all of Long Island, the five New York City Boroughs and Westchester County which is probably the most genetically, culturally and demographically diverse 66

July 2021

population and clinical data set in the world. This is a tremendous resource to have,” he said.

Paradis pointed out that the data set they are working with is unique and allows them to produce predictive models which can be validated on real world data in diverse clinical scenarios, which gives Northwell a competitive advantage. He also said that having such a vast platform of hospitals, ambulatory surgery centres and outpatient facilities enables them to rigorously test new technologies in the context of the full care continuum.

“It gives us this fantastic platform to test new ideas, new technologies and put them through their paces. We use evidence-based best practices to ensure that they are actually delivering clinically relevant hard outcomes on the basis of changes in people’s behavior at specific points of intervention in the clinical workflow. These model-driven interventions are then packaged in solutions

NORTHWELL HEALTH

that lead to measurable value and clinical impact,” he said.

MARC D. PARADIS TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT OF DATA STRATEGY

• Northwell has a vast network of collaborators from research pioneers to entrepreneurs and educators who are all dedicated on their ‘mission to serve’ and are committed to providing: • The highest quality clinical care • Educating the current and future generations of healthcare professionals

INDUSTRY: HOSPITAL & HEALTH CARE LOCATION: NEW YORK Marc d. Paradis is Vice President of Data Strategy at Northwell Health. It is his responsibility to enrich Northwell Health's data assets in order to empower patients, augment providers, support families and raise the health of all the communities Northwell serves.

For 25 years, Marc has been implementing models that drive action, providing measurable value to all stakeholders. While leading Optum's Data Science University he taught his unique approach to Product-Centric Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI to more than 2,200 individuals.

He has a Master's in Cellular & Molecular Neurobiology from MIT and a Bachelor's in Chemistry from Cornell University.

Searching for new advances in medicine through the conduct of biomedical research Promoting health education and caring for the community regardless of the ability to pay

“ We have a decade of data on 11 million lives covering all of Long Island, the five New York City Boroughs and Westchester County which is probably the most genetically, culturally and demographically diverse population and clinical data set in the world. This is a tremendous resource to have” MARC D. PARADIS

VICE PRESIDENT OF DATA STRATEGY, NORTHWELL HOLDINGS AND VENTURES

EXECUTIVE BIO

Response to the pandemic Northwell has been on their digital transformation journey for several years but what the pandemic emphasised was the crucial role of cross-functional teams in which everyone across the organisation worked together to achieve a common goal.

They quickly rolled out devices that enabled audio and video connections with patients.

We help you to digitize human experiences in healthcare by meeting you where you are.

Sutherland is your partner in your quest to achieve the Quadruple Aim of improving patient experience, clinical experience, and health outcomes— all while lowering costs. We meet you at any point along your journey and accelerate your digital transformation.

Learn More

Sutherland Healthcare human touch to digital world Combine a human-centered design with the scale and accuracy of real-time analytics with Sutherland Healthcare Sutherland Healthcare provides the human touch to any stage of a digital journey. They do this by combining a human-centered design with the scale and accuracy of real-time analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), cognitive technology and automation.

“We serve clients across the spectrum from backoffice processes, through to the end-of-customer experience and along the way, leverage big data and deep analytics”, said Matthew Collier, CEO of Sutherland Healthcare.

Founded in 1986, Sutherland Health Solutions is a global organisation covering 144 countries with a team of 38,000 professionals conducting more than 43 million transactions each month. They work with businesses across a broad range of industries, from healthcare to hospitality and banking to retail.

“We bring a deep domain expertise to each of the industries, particularly in healthcare,” commented Collier who stresses they meet their clients wherever they are on their digital transformation.

“From the earliest spectrum of outsourcing through to the point of cloud, we can meet them.”

We help you to di experiences in he by meeting you wh

For 12 years, Sutherland has been a partner of Northwell Health-New York’s largest health system serving 11 million people. “This has been a true partnership and the outcomes have been really impressive,” said Collier. “I am looking forward to taking our partnership to the next level in this new era of big supercharged data sets, data lakes and deep analytics.”

The company heritage of being a “future-ready organisation” came to fruition during the pandemic.

Sutherland is your partner in your quest to “By having deeply digital technology enabled service in the RCM arena, we were experience, able to flex up andclinical down improving patient exp with demands from our clients,” said Collier.

all while lowering costs. We meet you at a

“Sutherland is, at its heart, a tech enabled services accelerate your digital transformation. company and that gives us the edge when the best solution is neither a technology or services solution, but rather the hybrid of the two.”

Learn More

NORTHWELL HEALTH

11m

population served

by Northwell Health

$13.4bn in annual revenue

23

Hospitals

830+ outpatient facilities

76,000 employees

$1.44bn investment in community impact

3,800

members of Northwell Health Physician Partners — the health system’s medical group

2m+

patients treated annually

5.5 m patient encounters annually

36,300

births each year

865,260 emergency visits

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NORTHWELL HEALTH

“ Part of our strategy over the coming years is continuing to build out that data Lake infrastructure and architecture. It's not just focused on EHR data. There are separate systems for lab data and radiology data, among others. The point of the data lake is to bring all of that data together in one place for a complete and personalized view of each patient that will supercharge Northwell’s data and analytics” MARC D. PARADIS

VICE PRESIDENT OF DATA STRATEGY, NORTHWELL HOLDINGS AND VENTURES

“When COVID hit it demonstrated to us the priority to move this digital transformation to the very top of the list and we moved rapidly — today we are in a place which would have probably taken years to achieve pre-pandemic,” said Paradis who pointed out it only took weeks to implement the entire telemedicine infrastructure for over 8,000 clinicians, including physicians in training and medical students.

“People had been talking about telehealth for over a decade prior to COVID, and the foundational technology had been ready several years prior to the pandemic, but it required the pandemic to jump start the change management and adoption.

“Even though we are over the peak of the pandemic we still expect to see a portion of care in a telehealth format to give patients the flexibility and choice to see their care providers at more convenient times and with less interruption to their daily lives. Telehealth visits also have the additional advantage of helping with sustainability and reducing the carbon footprint in NYS.” Paradis pointed out it was one small step at a time when it comes to changes in healthcare. “The way we solve complex problems is not with one expansive technology or one big application. We solve it by lots of little improvements which might only make it better for one per cent technologymagazine.com

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Katz Institute for Women’s Health Northwell created the Katz Institute for Women’s Health, the only network of experts devoted to every aspect of women’s care as part of Northwell’s commitment to #RaiseHealth for all.

DID YOU KNOW...

Paradis pointed out much of medicine over the last 200 years has been defined by the simplistic research construct of the “75 kilogram spherical man”.

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“So much of the research, so much of the drug testing for so long has been based around adult males, sidelining women and minorities. We recently started an initiative to recognise what is different and unique about women’s health and how we can make sure that we address those appropriately,” he said.

July 2021

How Northwell is reaching out to New Yorkers The image of a simple bubble travelling on the breeze through the Big Apple is used by Northwell Healthcare as a symbol of life’s resilience and fragility and is part of their Raise Health awareness campaign.

The advert released in February 2021 challenges New Yorkers to collectively raise their expectations when it comes to healthcare – a year after the city became the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. As Northwell continues to roll-out the COVID-19 vaccines to millions of people, the healthcare provider has vowed to make public health their biggest priority.

NORTHWELL HEALTH

“ We have a decade of data on 11 million lives covering all of Long Island, the five New York City Boroughs and Westchester County which is probably the most genetically, culturally and demographically diverse population and clinical data set in the world. This is a tremendous resource to have” MARC D. PARADIS

VICE PRESIDENT OF DATA STRATEGY, NORTHWELL HOLDINGS AND VENTURES

of the population. But if you do a hundred of those improvements, pretty soon you make it better for close to 100 per cent of the population.”

But Paradis pointed out that although the technological changes were rapidly altering the way Northwell delivered their healthcare, the patient is always put first. “We have to

remember we’re dealing with people at the most sensitive and vulnerable points in their lives it's a real privilege to be a caring part of those moments and to help them in their journey to achieve their health and wellness goals.”

‘Supercharged’ data lakes Data lakes are next-generation data management solutions that help data scientists meet big data challenges and drive new levels of real-time analytics and are being used at Northwell Health for EHR and laboratory data.

Their highly scalable environment supports large data volumes, collecting petabytes of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data in its native format from a variety of sources, including those previously untapped such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

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NORTHWELL HEALTH

Here for you today.

Invested in your future success.

When you’re under pressure to achieve better financial performance, it helps to have a dedicated revenue cycle management partner at your side.

With athenahealth’s insights, technology, and expert support, you can close the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

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July 2021

Northwell Health taps athenaIDX to support revenue cycle performance and analytics efforts A beneficial partnership that enables efficient revenue cycle management athenahealth’s cloud-based and on-premise technology delivers measurable clinical and financial results to healthcare providers across the U.S. The relationship between athenahealth and Northwell Health dates back to 1984, delivering significant financial benefit to New York’s largest healthcare system. Marc d. Paradis, VP of Data Strategy at Northwell, is responsible for leveraging Northwell’s data assets. Partnership is essential, he says. “I welcome the opportunity to work with companies like athenahealth to create a balanced relationship, with mutual respect and shared goals.”

A key goal for Northwell is to connect siloed information together in a data lake so it can be seen, linked and interrogated. “athenaIDX, athenahealth’s on-premise enterprise revenue cycle management suite, is one of the most vital data sets feeding into our data lake: without it we couldn’t deliver the best care or interact with the various groups we support.”

Dave Haight, VP of Advisory Services at athenahealth, confirms: “We’ve supported many facets of Northwell’s business operations. As Marc said, we are feeding the data lake that allows Northwell to look at strategic aspects of population health and value-based care. We are part of the ecosystem that feeds information to their organization, facilitating strategic decisions and investments, and how they reach out to the different communities that they serve. We’ve created a data-powered healthcare ecosystem that helps improve patient outcomes and business incomes. athenaIDX enables clients to control data and analytics, ambulatory and hospital billing, at scale across multiple states, boroughs and locations.

It’s essential for them to be able to aggregate that information in a meaningful manner.” And athenaIDX is an important part of athenahealth’s robust revenue cycle portfolio, which allows us to meet the needs of large-scale systems like Northwell who have unique needs and require a customizable solution.

See our solutions

NORTHWELL HEALTH

“Part of our strategy over the coming years is continuing to build out that data Lake infrastructure and architecture,” said Paradis.

“It's not just focused on EHR data. There are separate systems for lab data and radiology data, among others. The point of the data lake is to bring all of that data together in one place for a complete and personalized view of each 76

July 2021

patient that will supercharge Northwell’s data and analytics.

“This will build the connections between those disparate data sets, while ensuring the appropriate data quality work resulting in datasets that, in a much more effective and efficient way, really follow and track the care journey within Northwell.

NORTHWELL HEALTH

LIFE-CHANGING BENEFITS FROM NORTHWELL’S 3D PRINTING Northwell's automated 3D printing laboratory is creating state-of-the-art, personalised treatments which will change the life for their patients. By uniting world class resources in prosthetics, aerospace and 3D printing, Northwell created a first-of-its-kind prosthetic known as the Fin. The Fin allows an amputee to enter and exit the water without changing prosthetics. It uses state-of-the-art carbon fibre materials and an ergonomic shape to ensure durable and efficient movement.

The Fin is printed using a carbon fibre enhanced nylon to provide strength and flexibility. The result is a durable solution that is highly functional on land and in the water.

Anatomical models Tumor resection models – used to highlight a tumor and surrounding tissue Orthopedic models – built from bone-like materials used for pre-surgery measuring Vascular models – These can be printed to identify abnormalities in the organ, tumors, blood flow, sliced chambers, valves, muscle tissue and calcified tissue Dentistry – digital dentistry in the form of 3D printed dental appliances

DID YOU KNOW...

3D printing is technology that produces a three-dimensional object from a digital 3D

file, such as a computer-aided design (CAD) drawing or a CT/MRI scan. This creates a device that is matched to a patient’s anatomy and is used in the following:

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NORTHWELL HEALTH

“Our health information exchange is done through InterSystems and they do a fantastic job of giving us a single view of the patients, at the time of care and the point of care — even if they’ve been to multiple different hospitals and touchpoints across Northwell.

“Bringing together our data lake and our health information exchange at an analytical level really empowers new kinds of analytics and applications that address each unique patient as a whole, not just limited to snapshots at points of time,” he said.

Commenting on the road ahead for a more digitised healthcare, Paradis said the dynamics of care are changing rapidly — using the analogy of cars merging onto a highway where drivers respond dynamically to each other’s actions.

“We make choices to deliver particular kinds of treatment or care and those choices impact the system, creating these interesting feedback 78

July 2021

loops. We're building out systems, machine learning systems and AI systems to understand and to track and to be able to intervene in these loops in a positive way that creates virtuous cycles of care. In effect we're learning how to merge onto these incredibly complex highways of health successfully and safely.”

Importance of partnership with Health Catalyst Commenting on the foundational importance to Northwell’s ecosystem, Paradis pointed out the value Health Catalyst, Athena, Sutherland and Allscripts.

“Health Catalyst is our data lake, they were very smart when they started by recognising that if you can’t efficiently and reliably connect to your data sources and move that data in a repeatable, scalable, high quality way, it doesn't matter what you build

NORTHWELL HEALTH

“ When COVID hit it demonstrated to us the priority to move this digital transformation to the very top of the list and we moved rapidly”

TOP 10 FACTS ABOUT NORTHWELL HEALTH

MARC D. PARADIS

downstream. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

Health Catalyst built out these connectors that allow us to pull in data from all of our transactional and operational systems, and to write directly into a data lake that then feeds into their Data Operating System (DOS™), a canonical healthcare data model that includes clinical, claims, administrative and other data. Downstream from that Data Operating System, Health Catalyst has a whole series of pre-built applications to support clinical workflows, patient flow, finance and regulatory issues, among many others.

“Health Catalyst is a fantastic partner from that standpoint and they also give us a world-class infrastructure that empowers us to generate our own insights in less time and with fewer resources.

Paradis pointed out that Northwell’s partnerships with Athena, Sutherland and Allscripts were also essential for the correct functioning of the transactional and operational systems that feed the data lake.

Sutherland’s robotic process automation automates outreach to payer websites for

DID YOU KNOW...

VICE PRESIDENT OF DATA STRATEGY, NORTHWELL HOLDINGS AND VENTURES

1. Pioneering bioelectronic medicine research at the Feinstein Institutes, which includes trial sites for treating lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and paralysis 2. Treats more New Yorkers for cancer than any other health care provider 3. One of the largest medical residency programs in the US, with 1,900+ residents and fellows 4. Sandra Atlas Bass Heart Hospital — one of top two cardiac surgery programs in US and Canada 5. Named a Best Place to Work by both Fortune and Glassdoor 6. Only hospital-based helicopter emergency transport service in the tri-state area 7. Largest hospital-based laboratory in North America 8. Lenox Hill Hospital the first on the East Coast to use the 3D video exoscope for neurosurgery 9. Created New York State’s first Centre for Cancer, Pregnancy and Reproduction 10. Cohen Children’s Medical Centre treats more paediatric cancer cases than any other children’s hospital in New York

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Better Care, Simplified.

It’s possible.

Helping patients stay healthy and safe is the mission. A trusted partnership that addresses new challenges through innovation is the path to success.

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claim status updates, coding validations for bundled denials and electronic submission of clinical medical records data to the payers.

These intelligent process automations have driven efficiencies of scale, increased productivity and accuracy across silos. In addition to RPA, Sutherland’s Health Analytics portal capabilities delivers actionable and prescriptive insights to end users via interactive dashboards, self-service BI and real-time business alerts.

Athena has been a crucial revenue cycle partner for many years with respect to administering physician billing, accounts receivable management and associated analytics. All told Sutherland and Athena help to ensure the accuracy, timeliness and impact of data from the administrative source systems that feed the Health Catalyst data lake.

“Of course, Paradis made sure to emphasise, none of this would be possible without the incredible partnership 80

July 2021

Northwell has with Allscripts. The Allscripts EHR powers everything that we are able to do for our patients and providers. The openness, scalability and extensibility of Allscripts are unique differentiators of their EHR. Other essential partners for the Northwell ecosystem include: • Tableau – an interface which helps to visualise and analyse data • Microsoft – provide the IT infrastructure • Microsoft Azure – platform for cloud, AI and ML • Google and Fitbit – wearables are being worked into the process of healthcare “Having a tool like Fitbit, which has wearables that can track heart rhythms to identify silent arrhythmias and atrial fibrillation, when tied to a user-interface, can empower a person, in partnership with

NORTHWELL HEALTH

VACCINE CLOUD TECHNOLOGY

DID YOU KNOW...

Northwell Health responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by leveraging Salesforce’s Vaccine Cloud technology.

When the pandemic hit New York, the city’s biggest healthcare provider was already using Health Cloud so they extended that to include Salesforce’s new suite for vaccine management.

Vaccine Cloud is part of Salesforce’s COVID-19 response technology solutions, which include vaccine inventory management, appointment scheduling, outcome monitoring, and public health outreach.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Northwell started using Experience Cloud to allow self-service appointmentbooking for patients to schedule COVID-19 PCR testing. They customised workflows for call centres to automate incoming calls and added live chat on the website and built another patient self-scheduling application for vaccine appointments.

The use of Marketing Cloud also helped them to communicate with patients through email and text messaging rounding off the patient experience.

“ I looked at ways to treat business data sets with the same methodological rigor and clarity of thought that we treat academic data sets with but on business timeframes and with a focus towards delivering products and services that work and provide value to people” MARC D. PARADIS

VICE PRESIDENT OF DATA STRATEGY, NORTHWELL HOLDINGS AND VENTURES

their care team, to change behaviours and prevent adverse outcomes,” said Paradis who pointed out that in the next couple of years streaming data sources such as wearables will revolutionise medicine.

Predicting the future of healthcare Paradis said there will be a focus on the genome which will help cancer care. “That's been driven by an understanding of the specific mutations in a patient tumors and designing drugs targeted at those. I think we can expect to see similar types of drugs, similar types of interventions and procedures in other areas along with a change in protocol linked to a more personalised care.

“My dream is that we begin to move the healthcare system from this episodic interventional system that we have now to fix a problem that's already occurred towards a continuous preventive maintenance and care model where the data from all aspects of your life is in full view of you and your care team in order to empower you to achieve your ideal health outcomes as you define them,” he said.

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LEFT TO OUR

OWN

DEVICES

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CLOUD & CYBER

Bring-your-own-device culture (BYOD) has created a headache for CSOs. And the prospect of a hybrid working future is far from the tonic WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

W

hen it comes to enterprise and business, the proliferation of home and hybrid working models means keeping an eye on both work and personal computing devices’ cyber security.

So, what is endpoint technology? An endpoint is a remote computing device that communicates back and forth with a network to which it is connected. Examples are desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, servers, workstations and IoT devices.

Attack surface The problem is endpoints also represent key vulnerable points of entry for cyber criminals. They are commonly used as entry points because they are the end user interface to an IT system.

Additionally, each one can provide critical information, as well as being linked to each other, which enables hackers to move laterally across other machines within organisations they are attacking.

If people are working from home a lot of the time and also using ‘bring your own’ ie: personal devices, then there is risk to corporate security, so it’s a balancing act between corporate control and a ‘big brother’ approach.

Pete Braithwaite, COO at KIT Online says: “Despite the positives of home working and BYO being flexibility, agility and infrastructure cost savings, the lack of technologymagazine.com

81

The Website and Magazine for Global Cyber Executives Join now for notifications about the upcoming launch and never miss an issue...

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Creating Digital Communities in Cyber

CLOUD & CYBER

67%

of employees use personal devices at work

$350

BYOD generates $350 of value each year per employee

2hrs

A BYOD-carrying employee works an extra two hours

87%

“ [Cloud systems have] significantly increased the potential security risks and attack surface area of organisation” MATTHEW GRIBBEN

CTO AND DATA PROTECTION OFFICER, FARMISON

a coherent security posture and control over a company’s data are the main negatives. Therefore it is important to align the best security software to a company’s defined and regularly-tested processes and procedures in order to mitigate the threats.”

Cloud versus on-prem Former cyber security consultant at GCHQ, Matthew Gribben, now CTO and data protection officer at Farmison, says there has been a marked increase in

of businesses are dependent on their employee’s ability to access mobile business apps from their smartphone

moving to the cloud from on-premises services, exacerbated by the pandemic, in both large and small organisations.

“What this means is that previously businesses had systems that lived within the organisation’s own infrastructure (ie actually in the building) and behind a firewall, or a perimeter. Now we are all using a mixture of these on-premise systems and those that live in the cloud: Office 365, Teams, Zoom meetings, task management and so on. This has significantly increased the potential security risks and attack surface area of organisations and workers’ identities are at more risk of compromise via phishing attacks, or simple brute force attacks, to much more complex risks like supply chain attacks – take SolarWinds, for example.” technologymagazine.com

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Zero Trust has come of age Casey Cheyne, VP of cloud at IGEL Technologies warns: “Businesses can no longer simply hand out a corporate managed laptop with a VPN connection required to access corporate resources when away from the office. Working from anywhere means we constantly need to access both work and personal IT services across a variety of devices and networks on a daily basis. Most of these endpoint devices are not company owned, yet security and data privacy are as important as ever.”

This, with the increase in the number of endpoints which could be compromised, he adds, means it is important to ensure all are secured and that any sensitive data that could reside on, or be accessed from, them is protected.

Along with the usual security tools to have on an endpoint, such as anti-virus software, dual factor authentication, local firewall and so on, organisations now need to do more. This is where the Zero Trust approach comes in.

The Zero Trust Network, or Zero Trust Architecture model was created back in 2010 by John Kindervag when he was a

“ Despite the positives of home working and BYOD being flexibility, agility and infrastructure cost savings, the lack of a coherent security posture and control over a company’s data are the main negatives” PETE BRAITHWAITE COO, KIT ONLINE

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July 2021

principal analyst at Forrester Research.

This model is increasingly being implemented into the mainstream inside organisations owing to the growing pressure to protect enterprise systems and as attacks become more sophisticated.

Zero Trust is a concept centred on the belief that organisations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside its perimeters and instead must verify anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before granting access. With the current situation as well as BYO, this is becoming more of a go-to model.

Roger Grimes, a senior computer security consultant and cybersecurity specialist at KnowBe4, agrees that Zero Trust is the

Mirgrating to a zero trust architecture

future for computer security, despite describing it as currently being another buzzword for many companies.

“Using real zero trust protection tools really is the right thing to be doing. Right now, most trust is binary and before you authenticate, you are not trusted at all because once you’re logged in you can do anything your account is permissioned to do. What Zero Trust says is we are going to constantly monitor you and your actions and give you a risk score that ranks you at all times. If that rank becomes high risk, you will be denied or asked to do another authentication.

“The great thing about zero trust is that it is designed to evaluate your risk regardless of where you are logging in from, being it from a company desktop, inside the

Implementing a ZTA is a journey rather than a wholesale replacement of infrastructure or processes. An organisation should seek to incrementally implement zero trust principles, process changes, and technology solutions that protect its highest value data assets.

Most enterprises will continue to operate in a hybrid zero-trust/perimeterbased mode for an indefinite period while continuing to invest in ongoing IT modernization initiatives. Having an IT modernisation plan that includes moving to an architecture based on ZT principles may help an enterprise form roadmaps for small scale workflow migrations How an enterprise migrates to a strategy depends on its current cybersecurity posture and operations.

An enterprise should reach a baseline of competence before it becomes possible to deploy a significant ZT-focused environment [ACT-IAC]. This baseline includes having assets, subjects, business processes, traffic flows and dependency mappings identified and cataloged for the enterprise. The enterprise needs this information before it can develop a list of candidate business processes and the subjects/assets involved in this process.

ZERO TRUST ARCHITECTURE, AUGUST 2020 | Scott Rose, Oliver Borchert, Stu Mitchell, Sean Connelly

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company or from home. Logging in from home may increase your risk ranking, but it is baked into the system. It trusts no one, not even the person at work logging in from their normal workstation.”

He sums up: “Zero trust assumes that the user's workstation could be compromised and the hacker or malware program acting with the permissions of the compromised user. So, all users are suspected the same whether inside or out."

Education, education, education Yet the solution to the problem doesn’t just rest with the technology 86

July 2021

CLOUD & CYBER

a company employs. Education of staff as to the risks and dangers to be aware of is also an important factor.

As cyber security trainer and Psybersafe founder, Mark Brown, says: “Getting to grips with attacks like phishing should be seen as part of our overall cyber hygiene and just one of several areas we need to be more careful with. Firstly, people need to realise and accept that everyone is a potential target, only then can you motivate people to actually take action. As most are busy with their actual jobs, we need to help employees take responsibility for their own as well as their organisation’s security and

“ The great thing about zero trust is that it is designed to evaluate your risk regardless of where you are logging in from, being it from a company desktop, inside the company or from home” ROGER GRIMES

SENIOR COMPUTER SECURITY CONSULTANT AND CYBERSECURITY SPECIALIST, KNOWBE4 technologymagazine.com

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CLOUD & CYBER

“ Businesses can no longer simply hand out a corporate managed laptop with a VPN connection required to access corporate resources when away from the office” CASEY CHEYNE

VP OF CLOUD, IGEL TECHNOLOGIES

$366.95bn

BYOD market size is expected to reach $366.95 billion by 2022

69%

of IT decision-makers in the U.S. say BYOD is a good thing

59%

of organizations adopt BYOD

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CLOUD & CYBER

help them become an effective first line of defence. Employees need to know not only how to recognise phishing mails, for example, but to understand why and how to create strong passwords and ensure their own and company data is protected.

Training on top of education is also viewed as a cornerstone of building better security for companies embarking on their own recovery roadmaps.

Senior IEEE member and professor of cybersecurity at Ulster University, Kevin Curran concurs: “As companies begin their recovery roadmaps and the hybrid working model which will likely follow the pandemic, cybersecurity training will prove vital, as people are often the weakest link in security. As such, it is important to ensure all employees are well trained on aspects such as cyber security best practice, including phishing and data sharing practices, keeping software updated, unique strong passwords and enabling two-factor authentication. The first line of defence for organisations to stop some attacks is to simply educate employees about the dangers of clicking on links.

“There has recently been a new movement where security teams send phishing emails containing fake malware to their employees which, when activated, simply leads them to a site telling them about their mistake and educating them on the dangers of what they did.

Education is crucial. The move towards fully remote working is an obvious risk. Some organisations will have built policies and procedures over many years which protect staff and the organisation's infrastructure.

However, unless a significant percentage of employees had previous access to proper remote access technologies, there is a real risk of them making bad choices.” technologymagazine.com

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LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

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LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES: Innovation and Shifting Mindsets WRITTEN BY: LAURA V. GARCIA

PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK

LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES Bruce Dines

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By listening to people and nurturing creativity Liberty Global Ventures is driving innovation and helping organisations shift into a new cultural mindset

A

“ Every company, every industry, gets disrupted” BRUCE DINES

PARTNER AND LEAD IN INNOVATION, LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

bout three years or four years into Liberty Global's decision to focus on external innovation, it occurred to Bruce Dines, Partner and Lead in Innovation, that the disruptive technologies that had occurred in the last decade had removed friction, making it easier for entrepreneurs to launch and build businesses.

"There's more capital in the system, and there's less capital required to start companies now than there used to be. When I was an entrepreneur, there wasn't such a thing as on-demand computing. There wasn't such a thing as ubiquitous broadband internet access. There weren't programs specifically designed to help entrepreneurs accelerate their knowledge of how to start up and scale their businesses, and on the back end be introduced to interested investors", says Dines.

"The venture capital industry was alive, but you had to go to New York or Boston, you had to go to Sand Hill Road [Silicon Valley], and you had to schedule meetings and sit down and talk to people about your vision and your plan. Now, there's on-demand computing and an internet distributed workforce. It's possible to hire talent from anywhere in the world and have them join your team. Capital requirements are 10% of what they used to be: no IT person to run data servers, software, connectivity and telephony: all of that is now done in the cloud.” technologymagazine.com

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Liberty Global – Our Purpose

"Cloud has driven the acceleration of new businesses, the acceleration of new innovations and the acceleration of more competition.

And it has become impossible for even the largest corporations and the largest Research and Development (R&D) budgets to keep up with the level of innovation that's happening.”

"Look at the turnover in the Dow Jones exchange over the past 30 years. Many of the companies on the premier global trading exchange 30 years ago don't exist today.

They've been disrupted and replaced. The same thing will be the case 30 years from now. As the pace of innovation accelerates with cloud, compute efficiency, ubiquitous broadband connectivity and distributed workforce, every company, every industry, is faced with a greater threat of disruption.”

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"To the extent a company isn't in the slipstream of this rapid innovation cycle, they are at some level being disrupted. It is vital to recognise how this accelerated cycle of innovation and concept creation is moving and prepare your organisation to keep, at minimum, the same pace.”

"How do large corporations, in particular, with a certain level of maturity prepare for that disruption? I believe it's important to foster this culture of innovation, where

LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

Bruce Dines

“ If you look back at the Dow Jones industrial average, and the companies that were on that average 30 years ago, many don't exist today” BRUCE DINES

PARTNER AND LEAD IN INNOVATION, LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

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The technology is backed with enhanced support, educational programs, and dedicated resources.

The Wingman Partner Program ensures Pax8 is with you at every step during your cloud-buying journey, which is important today as 73% of companies would prefer to buy through a marketplace, according to Ryan Walsh, Chief Operating Officer at Pax8.

“We believe in offering the best partner experience, and that means riding shotgun with an IT professional so they can achieve success.” said Walsh Since it was founded in 2012, the Colorado-based company offers innovative solutions to partners, which include:

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Pax8 has gained the competitive edge by listening to their partners. “We have a very agile team that pushes updates to our platform weekly,” said Nick Heddy, Chief Revenue Officer - at Pax8 Liberty Global Ventures was an early investor in Pax8.

“It is a fantastic partnership,” said Heddy. “They have connected us to influential companies and opened doors for Pax8 worldwide.”

Pax8 acquired Wirehive in January 2021 which has given them a foothold into the UK. “Pax8 is a cross between the human touch and leading technology innovations,” said Heddy

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LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

BRUCE DINES TITLE: P ARTNER AND LEAD IN INNOVATION INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS LOCATION: DENVER METROPOLITAN AREA Bruce Dines is a founding partner of Liberty Global Ventures and is responsible for co-developing its Technology Investment Portfolio. With 25 years of tech and telecom experience – half spent in early stage environments, where he co-founded and led three businesses from concept development to exit. The other half of his career he has held senior executive leadership roles in mid and large corporations – American Telecasting (IPO’d and sold to BellSouth and Sprint), EHPT (sold to Ericsson) and Ericsson Mobile Communications post sale where he led a $1B business unit. Bruce also leads the Spark programme within Liberty Global which drives innovative thinking and development principles across operating companies.

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it becomes a core part of the DNA of the business. Many large corporations are just beginning to understand this."

Beginning in 2000, agile methodologies began to take over the world of software development after a group of 17 software practitioners created the Agile Manifesto.

Agile is rooted in three main concepts: an iterative approach to development, short feedback loops, and a disciplined project management process.

Software teams would meet every morning in 10 or 20-minute intervals known as "scrums". These faster, iterative design processes created new standards and

LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

made for more agile product development, truncated Time to Market (TTM). Dines explains, "Part of this was promoted by new software languages that had emerged and made it easier to micro architect code versus having it be part of a much larger, for lack of a better word, spaghetti system, or train of intermingled code".

Essentially, this new ability allowed for imperfect software to be launched. "It used to be in the coding world that you had to go to General Availability (GA—the release of a product to the general public, available through a company's general sales distribution channels). To get to GA was an

exhaustive process and involved testing, retesting and regression testing to ensure there were no bugs in the system. Bugs were considered a sign of poor quality testing if they showed up after release (but with large codebases, they always did). With microarchitecture and agile design, release cycles moved from once or twice a year to once a month and then accelerated to once a week and in some cases now two-to-three times per week, accelerating TTM, product release cycles and customer satisfaction. Yes, the bugs were still there, but MS educated the world that people were somewhat tolerant of bugs in exchange for better performing, technologymagazine.com

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LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

$14.4bn Revenue in US dollars

2005

Year Founded

20,200+ Number of Employees

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A Seamless Video Experience From The Moment Your Viewers Hit Play Penthera, a Liberty Global partner, is a SaaS company offering a suite of streaming solutions to OTT providers across 36 countries and 100 million devices. Our technology helps eliminate last-mile streaming issues, such as buffering and low video quality, to reduce stream abandonment and churn and increase revenue.

Learn more

LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

The importance of innovation across Liberty Global and the use of the SPARK program

“ There's more capital in the system, yet less capital required to start companies now than there used to be. When I was an entrepreneur, there weren't programs specifically designed to help entrepreneurs accelerate their startups, scale their businesses and be introduced to interested investors” BRUCE DINES

PARTNER AND LEAD IN INNOVATION, LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

more functional software. Now, there are public release forums, where bugs can be outed by crowdsharing with volunteers as part of the scrum/agile process, and with better architecture and performance tools, release cycles are both rapid with higher performance.”

As manufacturing had extraordinarily long TTM life cycles, executives looking for competitive advantage started introducing agile methodologies into their product creation and manufacturing processes. Agile then evolved into lean and other process improvement methodologies.

"I think that there are still large corporations out there who have been around a long time, but they haven't necessarily figured out how to incorporate design thinking or lean and agile methodologies into their core culture.

And so, our internal innovation programs are specifically designed to create opportunities for business units to engage in learning those methodologies." technologymagazine.com

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“ I believe it's important to foster this culture of innovation, where it almost becomes a core part of the DNA of the business” BRUCE DINES

PARTNER AND LEAD IN INNOVATION, LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

Spark, democratising creativity and shooting for the stars "You cannot shoot for stars with your feet firmly on the ground".

A grassroots movement, Liberty Global's internal innovation platform, Spark, looks to democratise creativity and begins to chip away at the culture barrier that often slows innovation and improvements.

"Our Spark program is made up of three primary legs. The first and broadest is an idea generation platform, which is an enterprisewide software that enables any one of our more than 20,000 employees worldwide to input an idea at any time of the day.

"Campaigns may be run specifically for a business unit or across the entire enterprise, and the Spark team has run many at both the local and company-wide levels. Dines says that running enterprise-wide campaigns helps to generate enthusiasm and gain cross-functional cooperation through a thorough initial assessment of ideas and voting that pulls participants from multiple business units into the process.”

"We initiate the campaign, but we're leveraging the collective brainpower and creativity inherent amongst our large pool of people, and we depend on their creativity and their brainpower to provide us with new, interesting, and beneficial ideas. Each campaign requires that we find a champion – someone who believes in the program crowd sharing and is willing to support and promote the campaign within the organisation. Now that we have been at this for a while, those internal champions often come to Spark and ask us to help them improve or solve a particular issue.

And when we succeed, it builds momentum.”

To measure success, Liberty Global tracks the cost savings or benefit attributed to the

LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

ideas that are implemented. Assuming a new idea has a life cycle of two years before it has to be refreshed, Liberty Global captures only two years of savings, regardless of the sometimes longer-term impacts. In five years, the program has generated 24 million euros of direct savings.

Matchbox The second program is branded internally as Matchbox, which is a very specific, hands-on Agile training course that walks participants through the six stages of Agile methodology.

To take advantage of the Matchbox program, business unit owners commit their participants to two hours per week for eight weeks. The first week is an introduction to the program, followed by six modules.

Then, in the last week, employees are given the opportunity to showcase the results of their work by pitching the ideas they have

developed using the rapid iteration, rapidcycle Agile methodology.

One idea generated by the program reduced after-hours customer calls by 25% and improved customer net promoter scores (“NPS”), where customers rate their satisfaction by their likelihood to recommend a product or service, by 10%.

The prior process included turning off customers’ entertainment service when their bills became too far overdue. They’d come home from work and discover they had no TV service. To make a payment and have their service turned back on, they needed to proactively contact our customer service group. An engineer had the idea to develop an integrated IVR code that enabled customers to dial a number, provide their credit card information, which could then be approved automatically, and generate a message to their set-top box to turn their technologymagazine.com

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service back on—all within 5 minutes of the call. It was a brilliantly simple, elegant idea.

The idea of Matchbox is to go deep and thoroughly develop an idea from concept to a minimum viable product, testing along the way. "As part of this program, participants are given a credit card with 500 euros that they are able to spend in bringing their idea to life.

They can put together a test website or go to a store and buy materials that they can use to display how their product might work."

“A lot of creativity comes out of the program, and ideas are better formed”, says Dines. “The results accelerate and enhance 106

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the principle of process improvements, team building, and most importantly, provide true knowledge about iterative, rapid prototyping, A/B testing, and function gain.

This, in turn, gets buy-in and engagement of employees throughout the process and results in strong implementation statistics.”

Spark's Brainwriting Due to resource constraints, there is a limited number of Matchbox sessions that can be performed in a year.

And so was born the idea for Spark's Brainwriting program.

LIBERTY GLOBAL VENTURES

“The brainchild of our dynamic Spark leader, Sarah Kelly, the Brainwriting initiative is a minimum two-hour session that is designed to get people out of their day-today routine and into a different environment where they can start thinking in new and different ways”, says Dines.

Designed to stimulate right brain thinking that focuses on creativity and ideation, the program offers another venue for unearthing solutions to specific problems and may be used in conjunction with the Spark or Matchbox programs. Depending on the depth of the issue, the Brainwriting program

may offer the best, quickest methodology to a solution.

The programs have had amazing feedback from participants, generating four and a half of five stars on average. Participants see the value of the program and bring the concepts they've learned and their new ways of thinking back into their broader group, starting to shift the company culture. And in the end, this hits the original goal right on the head, helping to launch companies into more innovative mindsets.

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CUSTOMER IS

KING

Why implementing a successful customer relationship management software is vital in today’s digital world, regardless of business type

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WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

t has been reported that the customer relationship management (CRM) software market is forecast to reach more than US$80 billion by 2025. The reason for this is in order to grow a business from the bottom line, robust and lasting relationships with their customers is indispensable. In this respect, CRM remains a vital tool to build and grow customer-based interactions.

So what is it exactly? Typically it is software that leverages technology to formulate various strategies that help companies analyse their customer data for business growth. It is also seen as a one stop solution to drive data-driven decision making and the improvement of sales and therefore revenue. It is not

there for building customer relationships, but performs task assignments and taking action when leads fall dormant. Staying ahead of customer relationship trends is both crucial and complex.

As David Robinson, founder of Redevolution explains: “What we call RevOps is selecting and implementing the right tools across the marketing, sales and customer service departments. A CRM system is a key part of a tech stack and getting the right one in place, integrated with marketing automation and customer service tools enables these departments’ staff to optimise revenue more effectively.”

Head of CRM at Columbus UK, Stephen Higgins adds: “Modern CRM solutions unify all customer-facing processes and technologymagazine.com

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“ What we call RevOps is selecting and implementing the right tools across the marketing, sales and customer service departments” DAVID ROBINSON

FOUNDER, REDEVOLUTION

centralise the data within a single system.

They enable businesses to quickly and easily access the key information needed to deliver a flawless customer experience – known as CX – from anywhere. Research from Gartner also shows CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty. The

rising emphasis placed by customers on CX means CRM has become a business necessity rather than a luxury.”

Solutions and costs There are many solutions on the market at varying costs but the key is to find the one which is fit for purpose for an individual business which fits budgets and can be customised accordingly.

Mark Hill, CIO at recruitment firm, Mason Frank International, offers the following suggestions for choosing a suitable CRM: “There are many off the shelf products available, so you have to weigh up which is most suitable with regards to where you want to take the business. If there’s not one that meets the majority of your needs, you will have to look for platforms that can be technologymagazine.com

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customised to deliver the kind of innovation you’re after. For us it was one we could modify. We chose Salesforce because it’s a platform we could innovate on and has out of the box customisation capabilities.”

Another is British-based Workbooks, a marketing automation software company which sits at the less expensive end of the market. John Cheney, CEO and co-Founder says: “Our objective was to build a platform that medium-sized enterprises could implement. The core CRM services extend beyond sales, marketing and customer services to include marketing automation, as well as event management, order management and fulfillment, invoicing and supplier management functions.

This is typically at 50-70% less cost than Salesforce or Microsoft.

Assisting technologies Cloud-hosted, or enabled, CRM plays a key role in today’s business because it is accessible for all business types, sizes and budgets, as well as being adaptable to their changing needs.

“ The rising emphasis placed by customers on CX means CRM has become a business necessity rather than a luxury” STEPHEN HIGGINS

HEAD OF CRM, COLUMBUS UK

Higgins suggests 90% of modern CRMs are now cloud-based with the best CRMs seamlessly upgrading on a regular cadence users won’t even notice being applied.

“This ‘evergreen’ strategy has been available for some time and is a given today among CRM professionals, unlike Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) that is only just getting there. So this is another headache the Enterprise IT function can happily say goodbye to and provides the chance to prove a full cloud deployment can work for an organisation before tackling a complex ERP,” he says.

Cheney echoes this view by adding: “The past year has shown us that cloud-based CRM, ie, a CRM that can be accessed from anywhere, is essential for businesses whose teams are distributed around the country, or indeed the globe.”

Artificial Intelligence also looks set to be crucial in the use of CRM. Owing to its ability to automate and empower menial and tedious tasks, enterprises are technologymagazine.com

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now expecting AI-powered CRM to help with real-time data and behaviours. Also according to Gartner’s 2019 CIO Agenda survey, it is expected AI in CRM will boost global business revenue by $1.1 trillion by the end of this year.

Additionally, automation is now used by almost every organisation for smoother customer service delivery, saving time on things like paperwork or unproductive prospecting for sales reps.

Stacey Kane, CMO at Easymerchant agrees: “The digital revolution of the business industry has compelled more and more companies to utilise CRM programmes. This is because digital 114

July 2021

marketing and customer management are 100 times enhanced when integrated with an effective AI system and with automation that only CRM softwares can efficiently deliver.”

And Jochen Toepfer, SVP Professional Services at Acxiom states: “Customer first means data first. Trusted, relevant customer data used at the right moment will drive every single customer interaction in the future. Only through a trusted data foundation can brands apply Artificial Intelligence and machine learning methods and in doing so, respond via CRM in the moment with relevance and respect so that every customer journey is a

“If there’s not [a CRM] that meets the majority of your needs, you will have to look for platforms that can be customised to deliver the kind of innovation you’re after” MARK HILL, CIO, MASON

FRANK INTERNATIONAL

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memorable one. This aspect of the customer relationship is invaluable. A CRM without a trusted data foundation is not suitable to meet customer demand in the future.”

“ Customer first means data first” JOCHEN TOEPFER

SVP PROFESSIONAL SERVICES, ACXIOM

Downsides and challenges Hill accepts that there are bound to be challenges when it comes to implementing new significant investments and systems, but getting the approach to the challenge right means they don’t have to be detrimental.

“You’re always going to have a plan when rolling out something that’s going to change the way you work so fundamentally across a large organisation. Implementing any CRM platform isn’t an IT project, it’s the catalyst for what you are trying to do.”

He adds: “The critical thing is to have sponsorship from the very top, either from the head of sales or the CEO. Plus from day one you need to clarify the business needs to be embedded in the centre of the project, to help the IT guys and other consultants involved design the outcomes needed. If not, it won’t be truly successful.”

And Higgins warns it’s important that any CRM employed by an enterprise suits both its operational needs and customer expectations.

“All businesses differ in what they sell as do the expectations of their target audiences.

This means they must ensure they have a fit-for-purpose CRM deployment or else they run the risk of providing a poor, or inconsistent, customer experience.” technologymagazine.com

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BELL FOOD GROUP

PEOPLE, NOT SYSTEMS WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

BELL FOOD GROUP

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BELL FOOD GROUP

Sven Friedli, CIO of Bell Food Group, talks AI, Machine Learning, Video Analytics, and how to make tech serve the business’ needs.

A

Sven Friedli, CIO of Bell Food Group

t its heart, every digital transformation - no matter what sorts of flashy technology you employ - needs to serve the interests of the business.

Sven Friedli, Chief Information Officer at Bell Food Group, can’t stress enough the fact that “People, not systems, make the difference. If you don't have clever people who understand how your technology works, you're not going to benefit from it. If you don't have people working hard to understand what the business needs, not just which technologies are the coolest, you'll never end up with a good result.”

Friedli joined Bell Food Group in October of 2020, taking on the significant task of driving digital adoption and transformation across the multinational meat and convenience food production company. One of the major challenges inherent to the role, he explains, is that Bell Food Group’s scale (last year, the group sold over half a billion kilos of food, including more than 300mn kilos of meat, poultry and seafood and nearly 200mn kilos of convenience products) is matched only by the diversity of its business units. It's quite a challenging prospect, given all our different locations and sites, all operating with different technologies. The Group grew quite fast over the past 10 years, so there are a lot of newlyadded companies that Bell Food owns, each with their own IT environment,” he explains.

“My job is to ensure that all these systems stay up and running, find clever harmonisations that fulfil our business needs in the future and today, and drive a step-by-step digital transformation of the company as a whole.” technologymagazine.com

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BELL FOOD GROUP

SVEN FRIEDLI TITLE: CIO INDUSTRY: FOOD PRODUCTION LOCATION: SWITZERLAND

EXECUTIVE BIO

Passionate manager with 15+ years of experience in it, telecom, enterprise architecture, manufacturing and organisational development. Before Sven entered Bell Food Group he spent the past 12 years in the telecom industry.

He started his career studying computer science and business economics at the university of applied science in Bern and worked for a startup in software development. Within Swisscom, Sven first was responsible for several managing roles in the enterprise business group, mostly focusing on managing and delivering IT projects and telecom services.

Over the last five years he was responsible for the strategic direction guiding architecture, technology, and innovation within Swisscom.

Since October 2021, Sven has been managing the IT of Bell Food Group.

He has to keep the balance in order to master the increasing complexity in IT, to ensure the daily 7/24 operation of the company, and to make sensible use of the opportunities of digitisation for Bell Food Group.

“ IT'S IMPORTANT TO SHOW OUR INDIVIDUAL BUSINESS UNITS WHAT THESE NEW TECHNOLOGIES CAN DO FOR THEM IN TERMS OF EFFICIENCY, STABILITY, AND TRANSPARENCY” SVEN FRIEDLI

CIO, BELL FOOD GROUP

BELL FOOD GROUP

Title of the video

Founded in 1869 by Samuel Bell, the once-small Swiss meat processing firm has grown into a truly pan-regional player, with operations in 15 countries throughout Europe, from Spain to Romania. “We offer products ranging from meat and poultry to charcuterie and seafood. We are also in the convenience sector, so we produce everything from salads and sandwiches to ready-made pasta, soups, and so on,” says Friedli. “We have about 12,000 employees working across our 63 locations, as well as a huge network of suppliers and sales partners in both the food industry and the IT sector who help us fulfil the needs of our customers.”

Efficiency, Stability and Transparency The potential benefits that Friedli hopes the adoption of cutting edge technologies like video analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solutions can deliver are - he stresses - firmly contingent on an IT department that truly understands and works to serve the needs of Bell Food Group’s business functions. In order to get individual business units to support and embrace new technologies, Friedli is a keen advocate of the personal touch.

“Since I started, I've been meeting a lot of different people and visiting a lot of different sites. You'd better believe that I have filled technologymagazine.com

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My ERP. Gives me what I need to know now.

It is good to follow your intuition; however, facts are now more important than ever. Gross margins, material costs, stock on hand, or simply the right pricing. The CSB-System enables you to manage your food company based on key performance indicators, so you can always have an accurate picture in complex situations.

Find out more about the CSB solutions www.csb.com

BELL FOOD GROUP

“ EACH PROJECT IS DIFFERENT, AND WE NEED TO BE FLEXIBLE”

PETER ETTRICH TITLE: HEAD OF DEVOPS CENTRE CSB INDUSTRY: FOOD PRODUCTION LOCATION: SWITZERLAND

PETER ETTRICH

HEAD OF DEVOPS CENTRE CSB, BELL FOOD GROUP

EXECUTIVE BIO

out an incredible number of forms to get back and forth to where I've been needed over the past seven months,” he laughs.

However, he readily admits that two COVID-19 tests a week and a life lived almost perpetually on the road are essential if he is to effectively drive Bell Food Group towards its digital transformation goals.

“It's important to show our individual business units what the new technologies we are exploring can do for them in terms of efficiency, stability, and transparency,” he explains. “In the food industry, digitalisation makes it much easier to show our customers exactly where our product came from, which kind of farmer is contributing the

Peter Ettrich started his career over 30 years ago with the first implementation and support of the ERP System CSB at a meat and sausage factory in south Germany.

After a few years, for the first time he connected his professional life with Bell Food Group and ended up taking care of CSB Systems at various Bell’s locations.

The next step in his career was CSB Switzerland, where he worked as a Project Manager and CSB Consultant for national and international CSB Customers.

5 years ago he joined Bell Food Group again. His previous experience and participation in many international projects allowed him to take on the position of Project Manager and Team Leader. Additionally, starting this year, Peter became the leader of the DevOps Centre CSB, and is responsible for the CSB Applications in 19 of Bell’s factories throughout Europe.

BELL FOOD GROUP

ANABELLE KLUSMANN TITLE: HEAD OF APPLICATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT INDUSTRY: FOOD PRODUCTION LOCATION: SWITZERLAND

EXECUTIVE BIO

Drives strategic digitalisation at the Bell Food Group and is enthusiastic about innovations and process optimisation.

Anabelle successfully completed her dual studies as a Bachelor of Science in Business Information Technology at the Bell Food Group in 2010 where she started as a project assistant. She then became responsible for the group’s SAP Solution Manager as a Test Manager, and was later promoted to Head of Test Management.

With the implementation of more and more ALM scenarios within the SAP Solution Manager, such as Solution Documentation, Change and Release Management, and IT Service Management. She continued to expand her area of responsibility, and was later promoted to Head of SAP ALM. This formed the basis for the Service Now project, which will become the new IT service management solution for the Bell Food Group at the end of 2021. In addition to the SAP Solution Manager scenarios and the ServiceNow project, Anabelle is responsible for SAP Basis and SAP Authorisation as Head of ALM since April 2021.

ingredients to it, what kind of quality product it is, and so on. Using a mixture of business intelligence (BI) solutions, data warehousing, and other technological innovations, we're able to bring information about our business together and, on the one side, leverage it to improve production and, on the other side, give more transparency to our customers.”

These business-driven solutions are the result of Friedli and his team’s tireless efforts to reposition Bell Food Group’s IT function into an organisation wholly focused on understanding and meeting those needs.

BELL FOOD GROUP

“WITH THE NEW IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT TOOL WE CAN ACHIEVE OUR GOAL TO REDUCE COSTS AND DRIVE STANDARDISATION” ANABELLE KLUSMANN

HEAD OF APPLICATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT, BELL FOOD GROUP technologymagazine.com

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“In the past, our organisation was a bit more technology-focused, but I've changed that structure to be completely businessoriented. The different tech units - ERP solutions, networking, and so on - are always supporting the business. Now, we put the business units at the centre of the organisation,” says Friedli. Taking ERP as an example, he notes that “lots of different ERP solutions can fulfil your needs. Lots of cloud solutions can help you reduce costs and drive standardisation,” but he can’t stress enough the importance that, “no matter what you decide to go with, you really understand the business needs that your technology is meeting.”

Total Ham-sparency Spanning 65,000 square metres, staffed by 120 full-time employees, and capable 128

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BELL FOOD GROUP

NORA HERTZSCHUCH TITLE: HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION & INFORMATION INDUSTRY: FOOD PRODUCTION

of producing 5,000 metric tonnes of raw ham (including the highly-sought after Jamon Ibérico variety, from a very specific and ancient breed of Iberian pig), Bell Spain’s factory southwest of Madrid is one of the key production facilities for the company’s raw ham revenues in Europe.

“It's a very delicious and expensive product, being produced at scale,” says Friedli. “We're talking up to a million hams hanging in our warehouses in Fuensalida as they dry and cure.” With different breeds of pig being turned into different grades of ham, which are then cured and hung for different amounts of time, depending on their quality and intended certification, the execution of thousandyear-old traditional methods in an industrial environment at scale can be a challenging one.

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: SWITZERLAND As a trainee, Nora joined the Group in July 2008. She completed a 3-year apprenticeship, during which she was able to move through a different department every six months. At the end of her training, Nora decided to stay in IT. In the IT Services department, she was first an employee until 2017, when she became the Deputy Head of the department. Her main focus here was on IT controlling, training and administration of the Bell Food Group's SharePoint, procurement of IT material resources and support of the ITSM tool.

In October of 2019, she took over the position as Junior SharePoint Administrator/Data Services in which she focused more on SharePoint administration in the area of infrastructure and identity access management.

At the end of 2020, Sven Friedli requested her for the IT Administration & Information area, which she took over in February 2021. Due to the wide range of tasks, which include the management of IT staff planning and the IT line budget, SharePoint administration and the sub-project management request management, the work is very versatile.

BELL FOOD GROUP

“IT IS INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT TO BE WELL-NETWORKED ACROSS OUR MANY LOCATIONS AND TO WORK CLOSELY TOGETHER” NORA HERTZSCHUCH

HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION & INFORMATION, BELL FOOD GROUP

PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS

DID YOU KNOW...

“In the past, the company didn't really have an accurate, comprehensive view of their production process,” Friedli explains.

“For example, when they used to do inventory, it used to take them weeks and weeks to count all their hams. Now, we've introduced an end-to-end supply chain solution that tracks the whole process, from buying the pigs to selling the ham.

All the information and data is now in one system throughout the whole process, so their inventory is a one-click process, checking revenues is a one-click process.”

The project has been a massive success, helping Bell Spain to solve pain points in their production process through technology - an achievement that Friedli emphasises was only possible due to the fact that “lots of time was taken by the IT team, by consultants, down at Bell Spain to understand what kind of problems the business was facing and how they could be solved with technology.”

He reflects: “We took the time to understand the steps involved in production, what kinds of reports the company needed to better understand that process, and how best to generate useful data from the different steps of the production cycle.”

Partners “I'm still learning lots about my new partners. Some I knew in the past; some I'm still getting to know,” Friedli reflects. He adds that, because mutual understanding of key goals, needs and capabilities is so essential to a strong partner relationship, “it's important to have a few but strong partners.”

He continues: “In difficult situations and they're always difficult situations, believe me - you have to act in a way that works for both you and your partner. So, for me, it's important to be transparent, open and honest with your partners and ask for help when you need it.”

Since he admits he is still relatively new to Bell Food Group, Friedli explains that asking for help is a big part of his problem solving process.

“I'm asking for help, asking my partners how their technologies, capabilities, and experience can help me drive better business outcomes for Bell Food Group.”

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BELL FOOD GROUP

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BELL FOOD GROUP

“ PEOPLE, NOT SYSTEMS, MAKE THE DIFFERENCE” SVEN FRIEDLI

CIO, BELL FOOD GROUP

Video Analytics for a Better Chicken Nugget Now, at Bell Food Group’s ham production sites as well as in other factories throughout Europe, video analytics backed by powerful AI and ML tools - are helping further improve the production process. “With video analytics, we can capture every important step of the production process and determine in real time whether each individual ham-slice meets the right quality standards," Friedli explains. “We do the same thing at our factories that process chickens. Based on things like size, color and structure, our video analytics can determine whether which part of a bird ends up as chicken sausage nuggets or stays, uh, chickenshaped as part of better quality products.”

At this point, Sven and I both agreed that we were reaching levels of hunger that weren’t conducive to a quality interview, and steered our discussion towards the future.

The Road Ahead Digital transformation is, as anyone overseeing a digital transformation is quick to tell you, an involved and unending process. Friedli is proud of the progress made so far, but readily admits that some elements of the business have a ways to go. “In some areas, we're really advanced.

We're using machine learning, predictive analytics and a whole load of other cutting edge technology for example to optimise our supply chain and production planning. In others, however, we still definitely have a lot more of our journey ahead of us,” he says.

As he settles into his role, meeting with different business units, learning the ropes, and finding the pain points that technology can soothe, Friedli explains that “First, I'm working to fully understand the business’ needs so that I can help use technology to meet those needs as best as possible.” Once those needs are fully understood, he continues, “My second major goal is to clearly define the digital transformation journey that the company is on - to really understand which technologies, whether that's automation, analytics, or something else to use.

It's important to have a clear goal. There are so many technology trends happening all at once that it would be very easy to do lots of cool stuff, but if we don't focus, then we will never see the benefits of those technologies reach the business. Having a clear strategy is essential.”

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AI & DATA ANALYTICS

AI+ CLOUD + DATA = FUTURE Here we look at the differences between data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the role of the cloud and how these technologies are shaping the present, as well as the future

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WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

W

e are living in a time of rapid technological advancement as computing power has been increasing at an exponential rate and meaning more complex tasks can be processed. With this development, three different main fields of technology have emerged, which also overlap.

This article looks at them becoming mainstream, some of their use cases and the associated role of the cloud in coming years.

Data close to the edge Simply put data analytics is the science of analysing data sets to find trends, answer questions and draw conclusions.

It’s very varied and often therefore relies on specialist software, the use of algorithms and automation as well.

Data analytic principles can be applied across any industry as organisations employ data analysts to help them make datadriven decisions regarding different parts of their business and trends that are identified. technologymagazine.com

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AI & DATA ANALYTICS

“ NOT ONLY CAN SMART DEVICES MAKE AUTOMATED CONTROL DECISIONS FASTER, BY PROCESSING DATA LOCALLY, BUT CURATING DATA IN REALTIME CAN BRING OTHER BENEFITS, SUCH AS SAVING BATTERY LIFE BY SENDING IT TO THE CLOUD” JACK LAWTON

DATA SCIENCE PRINCIPAL, AIIMI

According to Jack Lawton, data science principal at data analytics specialist at UK-based Aiimi, edge data and analytics will become increasingly important as we move towards a more interconnected world.

“Across industries, from utilities and the public sector, to proptech and financial services, there is growing interest and investment in edge computing. This is because there is a strong drive to make

greater use of IoT technology and explore the automated control opportunities it presents. Edge data and analytics are essential to this. For example, not only can smart devices make automated control decisions faster, by processing data locally, but curating data in real-time can bring other benefits, such as saving battery life by sending it to the cloud.”

These views are supported by James Thomason, CEO of EDJX, an edge start-up, who says data generated at the edge is currently exploding. He cites one of the reasons as Industry 4.0 – lauded as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and predicated on IoT – which is redefining event-driven software and putting machines and devices capable of infinite scalability in the place of human intervention “Computing is moving into powering augmented reality, empowering decision making via AI and machine Learning, operating cars and increasing public safety. technologymagazine.com

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Data’s exponential growth at the edge requiring processing is estimated to be 250+/1- zettabytes in the next few years.

Data is expanding and growing in an expanding curve. If the past is any prediction of the future, the amount of edge data that will be generated is currently grossly underestimated.”

“DATA IS EXPANDING AND GROWING IN AN EXPANDING CURVE. IF THE PAST IS ANY PREDICTION OF THE FUTURE, THE AMOUNT OF EDGE DATA THAT WILL BE GENERATED IS CURRENTLY GROSSLY UNDERESTIMATED”

recent years since the processing power to achieve it has been available. Again in simple terms, AI is the ability to give computers the power to replicate human intelligence and they can be taught from experience.

These systems have three main qualities: intentionality, JAMES THOMASON intelligence and CEO, EDJX adaptability, Intelligence, but not as we know it which gives them the ability to make AI is a concept which has been around for decisions traditionally needing a while, but it’s only become a reality in human levels of expertise.

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“AI always needs to be able to explain how and why a decision has been made, allowing humans to refine, challenge or alter said decision. ‘Smart AI’ simplifies this explanation process and is therefore a critical element for any organisation making decisions with moral implications,” says Rajasekar Sukumar, VP Europe at Persistent Systems.

“When you are deep into data processing, it’s vital that you factor in and address ethics and any potential bias from the offset. AI has to be scalable. On an operational level, businesses simply can’t afford to have their models slow down with growth. The point of automation using AI is to elevate efficiency, but this is not possible long term without scalability. Consumers demand to see results in real-time and if not businesses will experience ‘drop off’. Tesla is an example.

As their cars process more and more data, any machine learning models that are not scalable could consequently be slower at making decisions – which can have both drastic and dangerous consequences.”

Retail is one industry where the level of AI being used has grown and are beginning to recognise what it takes to appraise, develop and generate systems as solutions for the future.

“Improving retail operations either online, in store, or in the warehouse are exponential”, says Alex MacPherson, director of solution consultancy and account management at Manhattan Associates.

“Research estimates that retailers will spend $15.3 billion on AI by 2025, which is $8 billion more than initially projected by the end of next year. However, before it can be truly powerful in the sector, data quality and quantity must be addressed and take full advantage of historical data that is factual, complete and textual. One good example of a solution are stores which gather information about a customer – hair colour, skin tone, size and style – to recommend new products which would be enticing to shoppers. And with the future of various high streets remaining questionable, getting the customer experience right and encouraging and resulting in repeated visits is critical.”

Machine Learning This is a subset and application of AI whereby computers are programmed to learn automatically and improve their learning as they continue to encounter more data. Much of the focus is creating programmes and software that can learn to make predictions and decisions without being directly programmed to do so. The technology is also used widely across many industries, from simply powering search technologymagazine.com

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AI & DATA ANALYTICS

engines to diagnosing medical conditions.

Digging deeper into this arena, there is the subset of deep learning. This is when the layers of machine learning algorithms build up and they form complex networks mimicking the structure of the human brain. These artificial neural networks can then learn to make decisions without any additional human input.

Businesses must have their heads in the cloud All of the above technologies often require a vast amount of processing power and cloud computing - the process of delivering on-demand computing services via the internet - can contribute to that power.

Sharon Einstein, VP Analytics, Automation and AI at NICE explains: “When it comes to AI, what has been often overlooked is the importance of cloud technology and more specifically, the need for a cloud-native open architecture to ensure AI can meet the many new possibilities in front of us. Cloud native, open architecture allows organisations to fully control costs, functionality and innovation. When AI is embedded in the core of a cloud solution, applications and processes instantly become smarter and continuously improve. For organisations to deliver next-gen customer experience, they must harness the power of AI and cloud to stay ahead.

And Steve Thorn, Executive Director at Civica believes the agile, elastic environment cloud brings, provides new tools and services for continuous innovation and gives digital twin technology as an example.

“Take digital twin technology, which continues to move beyond manufacturing and into the merging worlds of the Internet of Things, AI and data analytics. A digital twin is a digital replica of a living, or a non-living, 140

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“AI ALWAYS NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN HOW AND WHY A DECISION HAS BEEN MADE, ALLOWING HUMANS TO REFINE, CHALLENGE OR ALTER SAID DECISION” RAJASEKAR SUKUMAR VP EUROPE, PERSISTENT SYSTEMS

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“ BY BRIDGING THE PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL WORLD, DATA IS TRANSMITTED SEAMLESSLY, ALLOWING THE VIRTUAL ENTITY TO EXIST WITH THE PHYSICAL ONE SIMULTANEOUSLY” STEVE THORN

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CIVICA

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physical entity. By bridging the physical and virtual world, data is transmitted seamlessly, allowing the virtual entity to exist with the physical one simultaneously. The digital version provides real-time information from sensors and other data sources.

“In a healthcare example, a wearable device could track a person’s blood pressure and map it to their medication.

This information, combined with data on the patient’s diet, lifestyle choices and genes, can be analysed to provide a plan for medication and lifestyle.”

Technology overlap and the future of enterprise Data analytics, AI and machine learning can all be used to produce detailed insights in particular areas. By examining the data, each of them can identify patterns, highlight trends and provide valuable and actionable outcomes.

The technologies can also help create forecasts and predictions based on the existing data, and this can help business and enterprise of all kinds plan ahead and for the future of their organisation. technologymagazine.com

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MERCYONE

TRANSFORMING THE ECOSYSTEM OF HEALTHCARE WRITTEN BY: MELISSA KHAN

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PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

MERCYONE

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Mathew Dietz, Division Director, Digital and Virtual Care Strategy and Dr. Joel Ward, CMIO discuss why healthcare needs to go digital amidst the pandemic

I

f you’ve caught yourself watching one too many E.R. episodes, then this one’s for you. MercyOne – Iowa’s answer to Country General – is a relatively new health care system, founded in 1998 and currently operates out of 420 care locations across the state of Iowa and neighbouring communities. Mathew Dietz, MercyOne’s Division Director, Digital and Virtual Strategy, and MercyOne’s CMIO Dr. Joel Ward discuss everything from COVID19 to provider burnouts, and more.

Dr. Ward has been with MercyOne for a little over six years serving as the Chief Medical Informatics Officer for the health system’s Central Iowa region, along with Dietz who joined about a year ago, as the driver for all digital health strategic and regulatory implementations across MercyOne's seven centres.

Currently, the centres have been busy with vaccine implementation, and digital transformation is no longer on the back-burner. The executives talk about how COVID-19 created an urgency for telehealth and the birth of innovation in the light of adversity.

The longstanding need for transformation With more than 20,000 colleagues under its wing, MercyOne is no small organization.

To be a healthcare provider in a time when all eyes are on you is a lot of pressure, even for the most seasoned players. So what do

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MERCYONE

MercyOne Des - the virtual nursing is the new normal

you do when you’re thrown into the deep end of a global pandemic, at a time when people are looking for risk-free, affordable ways to get the best possible care they deserve? You improvise.

Dr. Ward and Matt Dietz share a camaraderie that is evident not just through the interview but also in the way tasks are managed at the health system.

While Dr. Ward oversees the provider and operational tasks in-house, Dietz spearheads the virtual care strategy at MercyOne. Together, they’re making sure the health system is at the helm of digital transformation.

“Healthcare as an industry is usually two to three generations behind technology compared to other industries. The concept of cloud-based storage is something that still requires a large change management process.” says Matt Dietz, setting the premise for why a digital transformation was challenging but very much required.

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However, the need for a shift to digital didn’t arise solely from the lack of better infrastructure. Patients today want to be in control, whether it’s choosing a healthcare provider or physically commuting to a care centre of their choosing. Keeping this in mind, it was important for MercyOne to adopt newer ways of reaching their primary consumer – the patient. As Dr. Ward points out, “As providers, we've pretty much dedicated ourselves to taking care of our patients. And when our patients tell us that what they needed at the time was a digital transformation, it was pretty obvious to us because due to COVID-19 regulations we had to pause non-essential in-person care and our patient volumes cut down drastically, and some people were just afraid to come in because of the risks. But we didn't really have to look at just the COVID19 pandemic to realize there was a need for transformation, but it’s what the patients really wanted.”

MERCYONE

“ AS PROVIDERS, WE'VE PRETTY MUCH DEDICATED OURSELVES TO TAKING CARE OF OUR PATIENTS. AND OUR PATIENTS TOLD US THAT WHAT THEY NEEDED AT THE TIME WAS A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION”

DR JOEL WARD TITLE: CHIEF MEDICAL INFORMATICS OFFICER INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE LOCATION: UNITED STATES Joel Ward is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer for MercyOne Central Iowa Medical Group. He is trained in Internal Medicine. He received his doctorate of osteopathic medicine and received a concurrent masters in bioethics from the Kansas City University.

He also has experience in utilization management and software engineering.

Dr Ward works to achieve improved clinical outcomes through technology where informatics and utilization create workflow efficiency.

DR JOEL WARD

CHIEF MEDICAL INFORMATICS OFFICER, MERCYONE

Strategic partnerships that fuel efficiency At a time when hospitals are treating more patients than ever, it has become increasingly imminent that remote monitoring is the way forward. Speaking of steps taken by MercyOne to make this as seamless as possible, the subject of strategic partnerships cannot be ignored.

Dr. Ward and Dietz mention two such partnerships that have helped the health system meet patient expectations as well as increase their provider output. “Phreesia is one of our most dynamic partners in creating the digital front door of our clinics.”

They have helped develop a patient intake platform that saved MercyOne the pain of manually onboarding details of every patient, and prevented patients from endless paperwork. The health system did see a surge in in-patient numbers, but this has been managed effectively and in record time due to this alliance.

EXECUTIVE BIO

COVID-19 has also pushed the healthcare industry into developing virtual systems of care faster than ever, as a direct consequence of restricted movement, compromised immunity and legislation.

The New Standard of Care HRS has become a nationally-recognized provider of telehealth and remote patient monitoring solutions.

HRS will continue to innovate to further the mission of improving the care and quality of life for as many patients as possible.

Hospitals + Health Systems Deliver telehealth to patients across the care continuum regardless of acuity

Payers + Payviders Empower patients to age-in-place, provide peace of mind to patients and caregivers

Hospice + Palliative Care

Provide end-of-life care to patients in the comfort of their own homes

Physician + Group Practices

Expand the care setting of your offices, reaching your patients directly at home

Home Health Agencies Manage total cost of care and utilization of members through remote monitoring

Health Recovery Solutions Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring Health Recovery Solutions (HRS) provides healthcare providers and payers with the most advanced telehealth and remote patient monitoring solutions (RPM). Aimed at changing patient behavior to improve clinical outcomes and reduce healthcare costs, the HRS solution improves patient engagement by incorporating patients into their condition management— “the HRS solution is all about engaging the patient to be proactive in their disease management. If you can give patients the tools to be successful, they’ll surprise you,” said HRS CEO Jarrett Bauer.

HRS’ disease-specific telehealth solutions are customized with symptom surveys, educational videos, care plans, and medication reminders while also integrated with Bluetooth peripherals to facilitate real-time biometric monitoring.

The solution, which can integrate into a provider’s EMR, offers seamless communication tools including video chat, wound imaging, voice calls and text messaging. On the cloudbased clinician facing dashboard, ClinicianConnect, providers monitor their patients and respond to risk alerts in-real time.

As the population ages, healthcare costs continue to rise, the capacity of hospitals is challenged, the social determinants of health continue to be center stage, and as the industry becomes more patient-centric, solutions that

enable continuous, collaborative, patient care are essential. “At the center of our product strategy is the experience of patients, clinicians, and caregivers. By harnessing the most innovative technologies, building robust integrations, and always focusing on clinical enablement, we are able to provide the most advanced telehealth and RPM solution,” said HRS Chief Product Officer, Jess Vamvas.

HRS arms patients with tools to control and understand their health and allows clinicians to view a patients’ condition(s) holistically.

Telehealth has a place across the care continuum —from primary and preventative care, to the Hospital at Home model, post-acute recovery, and end-of-life support.

Learn more

MERCYONE

“ PHREESIA IS ONE OF OUR MOST DYNAMIC PARTNERS IN CREATING THE DIGITAL FRONT DOOR OF OUR CLINICS” MATT DIETZ

DIVISION DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL AND VIRTUAL CARE STRATEGY, MERCYONE

Another noteworthy mention is Health Recovery Solutions, MercyOne’s remote monitoring partner for the Des Moines market. A historic partner of MercyOne, Health Recovery Solutions is making home health possible for over 1,600 patients just within Des Moines, allowing the care centre to make more informed empirical and algorithmic decisions without the patient leaving their home. This is a giant leap in the area of remote care, allowing patients to enjoy a quality of care that was previously unseen, from the comfort of their homes and equipped with the best technology.

Extending nursing careers through a virtually integrated care program Speaking of virtual care, Dr. Ward has also spearheaded the introduction of virtual nurses as an extension of the care provided at MercyOne. This provides two noticeable benefits – round the clock patient care and reduced nurse burnouts. Unfortunately, due to pandemic-related restrictions, healthcare providers are overworked and unable to provide round the clock care. This, along with the need to put on a full PPE suit each time can extremely limit a nurse's movement and output. Similarly, visitors are finding it harder to arrange social visits amidst the lockdown and restrictions. What the virtual nurse does is that with a simple click, provides both the 152

July 2021

MERCYONE

DIGITIAL SIGN-INS Previously, patients spent seven to ten minutes on average filling out forms before they even saw a physician. Since implementing digital sign-ins, patients are now able to fill up a form before they enter the facility, reducing the overall onboarding time to two minutes.

• Over $200,000 in paper/print savings due to paper reduction • Over 500,000 digital COVID risk screenings • Over 5000 individuals identified needing social services resources (through social determinants of health) • 18% increase in outstandin balance collection

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MERCYONE

Safe.

Convenient.

Contactless.

Phreesia powers registration at health systems nationwide.

Learn more

MERCYONE

MATT DIETZ TITLE: DIVISION DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL AND VIRTUAL CARE STRATEGY INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE LOCATION: UNITED STATES Matt Dietz is the Division Director of Digital and Virtual Care Strategy for MercyOne in Iowa. One of the industry’s telehealth leaders, Matt and his team lead the strategy, business development, and implementation of all MercyOne digital health and telehealth strategies across more than 420 care locations for MercyOne. Matt graduated with his Masters of Health Administration from Saint Louis University in 2015, and has dedicated himself as a lifelong learner in incorporating cutting edge technologies to health care such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain.

“ THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FAILURE. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS STILL NEW, AND WE TRY THINGS OUT BECAUSE WE WANT TO IMPROVE THE CURRENT EXPERIENCE” MATT DIETZ

DIVISION DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL AND VIRTUAL CARE STRATEGY, MERCYONE

EXECUTIVE BIO

physician and their families with a full update on the patient's health. This, in turn, reduces the hours that nurses need to put in on the floor and gives them the chance to mentor new resources from the tele command centre, so hospitals didn't lose that deep well of knowledge. Eventually, the support that the virtual nurse provides is unmatchable, and in the words of Dr. Ward, "We're really able to wrap the patient with all manners of care from practically every service line, and it's been something that's been relatively new to the tele-health industry because really it comes down to supporting

MERCYONE

“ WE'RE REALLY ABLE TO WRAP THE PATIENT WITH ALL MANNERS OF CARE FROM PRACTICALLY EVERY SERVICE LINE, AND IT'S BEEN SOMETHING THAT'S BEEN RELATIVELY NEW TO THE TELEHEALTH INDUSTRY” DR JOEL WARD

CHIEF MEDICAL INFORMATICS OFFICER, MERCYONE

PARTNERS MercyOne’s strategic partners at-a-glance: Phreesia: A patient intake platform that drastically cuts down the time required to access a provider Health Recovery Solutions: Home health and remote monitoring platform that takes providers directly to their patients, improving the overall quality of car

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Title of the video

the patient for the other 23 hours and 45 minutes that the doctor isn't in the room".

A fearless approach to change With all eyes on healthcare, it is no surprise that institutions across the world are rapidly evolving. Matt Dietz shares some insight for peers taking on a rightful step towards digital transformation. "There is no such thing as failure. Digital transformation is still new, and we try things out because we want to improve our current experiences. And if something doesn't work as we originally hypothesized it doesn't mean it's a failure, it means that we're learning, it gives us an opportunity to improve upon something and that's what excites us the most about digital transformation. It gives us not a reckless mindset, but it allows us to be fearless sometimes – to try things that we never thought we could before."

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CYBER SECURITY COMPANIES

Cyber attacks are grabbing headlines. Don’t get left behind in the race to stay ahead of the cyber criminals. Read our list of some of the major players in the field at the moment.

WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

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TOP TOPTEN 10

C

yber security is the practice of protecting systems, networks and computer programs from digital attacks. These are usually aimed at assessing, changing, or destroying sensitive information, extorting money from users, or interrupting business activities and processes.

Implementing effective cyber security measures is particularly challenging because there are now more devices than people, and the attackers are becoming increasingly innovative and surreptitious. But it’s

not just about protecting enterprise, business and individuals.

As a society, we rely on critical infrastructures like power plants, hospitals, educational establishments and financial service companies – securing these and other similar organisations is therefore essential to keep society functioning.

Research into cyber threats is also vital in order to educate the public on the importance of cyber security and strengthen open source tools to help combat threat actors and attacks.

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10

Cybereason Based in Boston, with offices in London, Tokyo and Tel Aviv, USA, Cybereason has been established since 2012. Its employees come from backgrounds in the military, government intelligence and enterprise security. The platform combines intelligence-based threat blocking and NGAVbased behavioural and machine learning techniques to prevent known as well as unknown threats for prevention, detection and response across networks, cloud and productivity suites.

It also leverages Indicators of Behaviour (IOBs) to detect the subtle signs of an attack, revealing an attack at the earliest stages by surfacing malicious human and machine activity before they escalate to a major breach.

“ It leverages Indicators of Behaviour (IOBs) to detect the subtle signs of an attack” 160

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09 KnowBe4

Founded in 2010, KnowBe4 is headquartered in Tampa Bay, Florida and is number 50 on Deloitte’s 2016 Technology fast 500 and named a leader in the 2020 Forrester Wave for Security Awareness and Training Solutions.

The business is a security awareness training and simulated phishing platform which helps manage social engineering.

The platform was built to scale for IT pros and provides education in the following areas: security awareness training, enterprise awareness training, a banking customer awareness programme and federal government.

“Crowdstrike provides cloud-delivered security solutions for endpoint protection”

08

Keeper Security Founded in 2011, Keeper is based in Chicago and offers password security technology for the enterprise, MSPs, business and the public sector. It creates random, high strength passwords for websites and applications’ employees, which are stored in a vault on their devices. Each employee receives a private, encrypted vault for storing and managing passwords, credentials, files and private client data.

Keeper calls itself a ZeroKnowledge security provider.

The idea that the user is the only person who has control over the encryption and decryption of their data - and this only occurs on the user’s device upon logging into the vault.

07

Crowdstrike Crowdstrike has been around since 2011 and is based in Sunnyvale, California. It employs more than 3,000 people and provides cloud-delivered security solutions for endpoint protection.

This is via its purpose-built Falcon platform through a SaaS subscription-based model. The platform includes: Falcon prevent- nextgeneration antivirus; Falcon Insight — Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR); Falcon OverWatch — Managed Threat Hunting; Falcon Discover — Security Hygiene and Falcon Intelligence — Cyber Threat Intelligence.

Its customers include 44 of the Fortune 100, 37 of the top 100 global companies and nine of the top 20 major banks. technologymagazine.com

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TOP 10

05 Avast

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Red Canary Red Canary was established in 2013 and is based in Denver, USA. It offers a managed Endpoint Detection and Response solution with zero on-premise cloud deployment along with long-term telemetry storage for unlimited data retention. It also provides configuration and management of its EDR structure, allowing staff to focus on remediating any threats.

Additionally, it employs opensource Atomic Red Team tests – a collection of small, highly portable detection tests mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, which can be run in minutes.

Another big player, Avast, has been around for nearly 30 years and is one of the largest security companies in the world. It has 1,7000 employees worldwide, and its top markets are the US and Canada, Brazil, France, UK, Russia and Germany. It is headquartered in Prague.

Avast utilises a 100% cloudbased machine learning that receives a constant stream of data from its millions of users, facilitating learning at high speed.

There are six layers to this: web Shield, Static Scanner, Emulators, DeepScreen, CyberCapture and Behaviour Shield.

“Over the years, Marc has gained knowledge supply chain industries” technologymagazine.com

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04

AppGuard Based in New York, AppGuard has only been around since 2017 and employs zero-day endpoint protection for laptops, desktops and servers for both large and small businesses, as well as individual consumers.

Its technology prevents breaches by blocking applications from performing inappropriate processes while allowing them to continue performing normal actions. It uses adaptive policy enforcement (APE) to prevent a whole range of advanced threats.

It doesn’t rely on scanning known signatures or patterns to identify good from bad files but sits at the kernel level.

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03

Cisco Systems Based in the original Silicon Valley, Cisco has been a big name in the world of IT since the mid-1980s and claims to have ‘built the internet’. It has 266 office locations in 115 countries, employs 35,000 people and serves enterprise clients, governments, utilities and educational institutions worldwide.

Its security platform is Cisco SecureX which integrates the company’s solutions Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and zero trust.

CyberArk

02

Cyberark was set up in 1999 in Massachusetts, USA and is also located in Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Australia, Turkey, Japan and India. It partners with more than 6,770 global businesses, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500 and more than 35% of the Global 2,000, employing in the region of 1,380 people.

The company focuses on privileged access management – a critical layer of IT security to protect data, infrastructure and assets across the enterprise, in the cloud and throughout the DevOps pipeline. The overall aim of its product is to reduce the risk created by privileged credentials and sensitive company information and protect against external attackers, as well as malicious insiders.

Its Identity Security Portfolio products include Privileged Access Manager, Vendor Access Manager, Cloud Entitlement Manager and Endpoint

“ Cyberark focuses on privileged access management – a critical layer of IT security to protect data, infrastructure and assets” Privilege Manager, Workforce and Customer Identity and DevSecOps products. Solutions include defending against attacks, satisfying audit and compliance, driving operational efficiencies and enabling the digital business.

Cyberark operates across the banking, insurance, healthcare and federal industries offering security, red teaming and remediation.

The company also offers training, certification and education.

Clients include Bupa, Pfizer, National Australia Bank, PwC and BT.

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“ Sapphire's penetration testers are ethical hackers who use custom toolkits to target clients’ systems”

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Sapphire Sapphire was established in 1996, so it has been a cornerstone of the sector for 25 years. It set up the National Information Security Conference (NISC) – a now acclaimed annual conference designed for cyber security professionals, by cyber security professionals, where participants explore the latest cyber security trends, risks and defence strategies. It is headquartered in Darlington, UK, with offices in Basingstoke and Glasgow, employing up to 200 people.

It has a comprehensive managed service product and a custom-built Security Operations Centre (SOC) with a specialist team of analysts monitoring its clients’ networks 24/7. Sapphire’s cyber security professionals focus on Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) whilst integrating threat intelligence and threat analysis, helping to ensure rapid responses to complex events.

Additionally, Sapphire offers a full suite of penetration testing services to both private and public sector clients. Its

penetration testers are ethical hackers who use custom toolkits to target clients’ systems. This enables an exhaustive security assessment that does not rely on automated scanners. It employs the latest machine learning capabilities and gives clients in-house training, focusing on cyber security awareness and user training – important given the underinvestment in education around cyber security.

Sapphire offers vulnerability management, endpoint detection and response, security awareness training, security information and event management, security operations centre and incident response and technical solutions including cloud security, endpoint security, identity access and management, security intelligence, email and web security, perimeter security – firewall and IPS, malware protection, web isolation, digital risk protection, data leakage protection, privileged access management, cyber security technical assessment and breach and attack simulation.

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ABELLIO UK

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ABELLIO UK

Sustainable Digitalisation: Abellio UK Seeks Solutions WRITTEN BY: LAURA GARCIA

PRODUCED BY: KRISTOFER PALMER

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“ Instead of hearing complaints, we should listen for challenges and opportunities” GRAHAM DAVIES

HEAD OF TRANSFORMATION AT ABELLIO UK

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Abellio UK takes measures to upgrade its data analytics, digital tracking methods, and demand for electric transport

E

ach day, Abellio UK delivers rail and bus services to over 1.2 million passengers in Scotland and England—keeping well-worn travel routes running smoothly.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, forced the company to pursue rapid digitalisation.

“There was very much a change in direction”, Graham Davies, Head of Transformation, said. “Everything shifted with passengers locked down, commuters not travelling, and nobody going to the office”.

Davies originally started out in finance.

After working in multiple European and international accounting operations, however, he took charge of Abellio’s digital transformation, a role Davies sees as an extension of his previous role. “Finance is always part of transformation”, he said.

“Finance is always looking at making things better and creating change. For me, it was a natural step of moving away from the month-by-month processing of accounts and moving forward to the long-term business change”.

Many leaders get caught up in the minutiae of damage control and managing day-to-day operations. Yet Davies has managed several very large, successful strategic initiatives, such as overhauling Abellio Bus’ entire financial department from budgeting to reporting.

What’s the secret to success? technologymagazine.com

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“ We have the same aims: to create a sustainable future for public transport, the environment, and passengers—not only for the industry, but for society as a whole” GRAHAM DAVIES

HEAD OF TRANSFORMATION AT ABELLIO UK

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“We hear a lot about leading from the front”, Davies said. “[But] I think it’s critically important that you listen to all the individuals who are going to be affected by the changes—not just the senior management teams, but the employees on the ground”.

For Abellio UK, a company that’s 16,000 employees strong, he added, “it’s definitely a mindset to listen to those people and think about how things could be done differently.

Instead of hearing complaints, we should listen for challenges and opportunities”.

This mindset seems to take centre stage in Abellio’s operations. Instead of accepting corporate confusion as part of the pandemic, the company strives to

ABELLIO UK

GRAHAM DAVIES TITLE: HEAD OF TRANSFORMATION COMPANY: ABELLIO UK

eliminate ambiguities that stand in the way of effective digital transformation. With Abellio, Davies notes, he’s taken a datafocused approach to improving workflows and increasing long-term profits. What remains critical is a “single, data-driven view of the truth”.

Often, companies waste hundreds of hours comparing data from sources that seem identical but display differing numbers, metrics, and conclusions.

“Somebody understands something one way”, Davies said, “and somebody else understands it another. We can’t run businesses like that. We need to have consistency”. As a leader who has worked

EXECUTIVE BIO

Graham Davies, as Head of Transformation at Abellio London, is responsible for delivering the company’s data-driven transformation strategy.

After graduating with BSc Hons Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Bristol, UK, Davies qualified as a chartered accountant with ACCA in 2009.

For the past 15 years he has worked in various finance, data, and transformation roles spanning Retail, Financial Software, and Transportation industries.

His ability to deliver sustainable business change across continents and bring together stakeholders at all levels of the organisation, sets him apart as an exceptional change agent and people leader.

ABELLIO UK

Sustainable Digitalisation: Abellio UK Seeks Solutions

across international boundaries and cultural norms, he knows firsthand the importance of a common language.

To centre Abellio’s operations around trusted data, Davies developed and implemented a strategy to provide leveltwo data analytics within the company’s operations, engineering, and performance departments. “What we’re really aiming for”, he told us, “is not just the backwardslooking descriptive analytics, which say, ‘This happened yesterday.’ We want the diagnostic level, which answers, ‘Why did this happen yesterday?’”

For example, the Abellio team recently analysed the attrition rates of their bus drivers. In their industry, especially during a global pandemic, it remains highly difficult to retain employees. “We looked at what affected those attrition rates”, Davies said, 178

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“ It’s all too easy to think, ‘Oh, I’ll plan out this wonderful digital transformation that’ll include predictive and prescriptive analytics because that’s the future.’ But if you don’t have your level one descriptive reporting in place, how are you ever going to make those changes?’”

GRAHAM DAVIES

HEAD OF TRANSFORMATION AT ABELLIO UK

“to try to find out what commonalities the leavers had”. While correlation does not imply causation, the company found that bus drivers who lived further away from the Depot left much more frequently than those who lived closer. This enabled Abellio to target its recruitment efforts, effectively mitigating driver losses before further issues emerged.

In addition, Abellio leveraged real-time APIs that were available through Transport for London (TfL) and used cloud storage through Snowflake. The company put visualisation through Tableau, used Python for select processes, and relied on a broad suite of robotic process automation (RPA) tooling. Yet Davies is a big believer in lowcode solutions. “It’s a horses for courses situation”, he said. “There’s no one tool to rule them all. You have to find the right solution for the right problem”.

At Abellio, Davies is continuing to eliminate contradictory and confusing data analytics. To do so, he’s designed data flows from source to storage to visualisation— obtaining quality data from individual silos and aggregating it in one place. “We put our metrics into a single storage space at the centre of our cloud”, he explained, “and then we link those data sets together. We might talk about a bus over here, and a driver over there, but if we’re not joining them together, we’re losing both insight and value”. technologymagazine.com

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Yet Davies emphasised that the trajectory of a company’s digitalisation depends on its situation. He pointed out that many transport companies are legacy companies with many manual processes. “It’s all too easy”, he reminded us, “to think, ‘Oh, I’ll plan out this wonderful digital transformation that’ll include predictive and prescriptive analytics because that’s the future’. But if you don’t have your level one descriptive reporting in place, how are you ever going to make those changes?”

After all, as the pandemic has taught us, entire companies, countries, and cultures can change in a matter of months. “Start small, but keep going”, Davies advised. In 2020, new pandemic regulations meant that Abellio had to adjust rapidly—often on a weekly basis. “What was really important for us”, Davies said, “was quickly developing schedules that reported when buses were running, how frequently they arrived, and when we needed drivers”.

When asked how he thinks digitalisation will impact Abellio, Davies immediately focused on digital transport tracking. “We want to have buses that are well-connected not only to enable passengers to understand that they don’t have to wait outside in the cold or the rain at the bus stop”, he said, “but also for operators to be able to maintain our vehicles at topnotch quality”.

Post-pandemic, Davies thinks we’ll maintain contactless payments and move towards a cashless society, but that working from home will eventually transition to a hybrid solution: part-time in-office, part-time remote. “I still think it’s critically important that individuals get to spend time face-toface”, he said. “Those micro-conversations that you find in offices are really where the inspiration for ideas comes from”.

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“ Finance is always part of transformation.

Finance is always looking at making things better and creating change” GRAHAM DAVIES

HEAD OF TRANSFORMATION AT ABELLIO UK

ABELLIO UK

2001

Year Founded

16,000+

Number of Employees

€3.1bn Revenue

And Abellio has no shortage of ideas for the future. Currently, about 55% of the company’s 800 single- and double-decker buses are hybrid vehicles, relying partly on batteries and partly on diesel. By the end of the year, the company will almost double its pure electric fleet. Said Davies, “we’ll increase the percentage from 4% to 8%”.

As usual, the task will have its challenges.

“One of the massive difficulties”, Davies admitted, “is that we’ve got to maintain our charging schedules and build the infrastructure with limited space”.

Yet if Abellio UK has its way, those difficulties won’t stand in the way of

necessary change. As Davies put it, 175 years of public transport experience has left the company with a social duty to its passengers. As a result, Abellio seeks out dedicated suppliers who clearly have a passion for what they do. “Our company and our suppliers”, Davies said, “have the same aims: to create a sustainable future for public transport, the environment, and passengers—not only for the industry but for society as a whole”.

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A SMART CITY

IN ACTION WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE

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PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

CITY OF MESA

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Smart innovations from City of Mesa is touching people and places with its data-driven insights making it one of the most digitally connected cities in the US

I

n downtown Mesa stands a voiceactivated digital kiosk providing citizens and visitors a safe new way to navigate what is going on in this smart city - from checking rail times to looking at a road map or simply discovering a new restaurant.

The physical presence of a Citypost kiosk in the business district of this Arizona city - population of 500,000 - is just one physical sign of how the City of Mesa government has digitally transformed the 35th largest city in the US into a smart city within the space of only two years.

This year will see the roll out of 20 more kiosks which will connect residents with Mesa City services and local businesses.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg of smart innovations which are taking place across the city’s parks, schools, libraries and emergency services.

Driving the digital acceleration is the Mesa City government, who has invested more than US$10mn, and is quick to acknowledge a smart city is ‘about people not just tech’.

The first step to becoming a smart city was to involve all of the stakeholders from the top down from the council, mayor, city manager and every single department director at City of Mesa Local Government and was led by chief information officer Travis Cutright.

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City Mgr. Chris Brady, Chief Information Officer Travis Cutright, Vice Mayor Jenn Duff, Mayor John Giles

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His aim is to launch smart city initiatives that holistically transformed the City of Mesa.

The city now has free public Wi-Fi downtown, intelligent traffic systems and irrigation systems along with a new program which gives first responders priority access to communication channels.

Cutright’s role at the City of Mesa sees him responsible (Chief Innovation\Information Officer) to transform digital government and enhance the city's position as one of the nation's most digitally connected cities.

“These initiatives, that touch almost every department, have helped launch Mesa forward 186

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as a smart city. But that term can be vague. It requires the person or the organisation calling themselves a smart city to apply something to the phrase. Otherwise it's just a buzzword.

We looked at that term smart city and we said, how do we want to define that for the city?

And those are some of the initiatives that we've applied to it moving forward,” said Cutright.

Some examples of the smart city in action include intelligent irrigation systems - vital to a city located in a valley near the Sonoran Desert - which have been deployed across city parks. Smart traffic systems are also helping to analyse traffic.

CITY OF MESA

TRAVIS CUTRIGHT TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER LOCATION: MESA, USA

But as Cutright points out this has all been done in the most efficient way due to the fact the City of Mesa is the largest city in the US that does not have a primary property tax.

One smart city initiative which highlights this is efficiency is how the City has partnered with schools and restaurants to collect waste and turn it into methane gas. “We pump this natural gas back into our system and fuel our vehicles so you can see how being efficient can save the organisation money while expanding our services,” commented Cutright.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Travis Cutright is a service oriented executive, with expertise in driving strategic direction, enhancing organisational value, and steering continuous improvement.

During the past 22 years, he has served in executive roles in the capacity of Chief Information Officer with City of Mesa, Director of Information Technology, as well as Vice President and Regional Business Manager in both the private and public sectors. He possesses a Masters degree in Public Management from Northern Arizona University as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. He has an Executive Certificate in Public Leadership from Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Insights you can act on Success isn’t just about where you’ll go and how you’ll get there. It’s also about who you’ll team with. That’s why we’re here: to be relied upon as an insightful and resourceful partner for your IT and business transformation journey.

CGI: Driving local solutions with global expertise Embrace digital transformation and infuse it with a spirit of agility, says Aleta Jeffres, CGI Vice President Consulting Services Embrace digital transformation and infuse it with a spirit of agility, is the message to the public sector from Aleta Jeffress, CGI Senior Vice President Consulting Services.

“We partner with clients to drive value and innovation,” said Jeffress who has been working with the City of Mesa, AZ on their digital journey.

CGI is one of the largest IT and business consulting services firms in the world. It is an insights-driven and outcomes-based company, operating across 21 industries in 400 locations. CGI provides scalable and sustainable services that are informed globally and delivered locally.

“We have expertise in developing and executing strategies to help companies transform their IT to align with the business through cloud strategies, application modernization and managed services,” said Jeffress.

“Digital change can be exhausting; take the opportunity to embrace it and look for new opportunities,” said Jeffress, who suggested projects be agile with an end-user focus.

Informed globally and delivered locally

Regarding the City of Mesa, Jeffress said, “The City sought a single source of truth for their ERP business

processes. With CGI Advantage®, they found a partner in their digital transformation journey with a unified solution that supports HR, financial management, and performance budgeting business processes.”

“With CGI Advantage, the City is working with a single source of truth that lowers total cost of ownership, streamlines business processes, and increases efficiency.

Benefits also include a decrease in customization and staffing, empowering HR resources to focus on strategies vs. tactical, and moving to automated processes.”

A trusted partner

“CGI focuses very intently and intentionally on delivery – this sets us apart. As an international company, we can provide key resources to our clients in a very timely manner,” said Jeffress.

Reflecting on challenges posed by COVID-19 Jeffress said technology services have truly evolved very quickly.

Learn More Today

CITY OF MESA

The City of Mesa - the smart city is not a destination, it’s a journey, it’s a way of life.

“ These initiatives, which touch almost every department, have helped launch Mesa forward as a smart city” TRAVIS CUTRIGHT

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CITY OF MESA

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Reflecting on his holistic approach to building a smart city he said: “It’s not a destination but a journey and it continues to evolve and involves all aspects of government.

“We put this plan together by talking to all department heads and put together a citizen workshop of 150 folks from the ages of eight to 80. One of the surprising feedbacks we we received from them related to transit such as wanting more bike lanes and bus routes so that information was very valuable in our planning,” he said.

What is a smart city?

A smart city is defined as one in which the latest technologies and data-driven insights are leveraged to improve the quality of life, civic engagement, economic development,

service delivery and community vibrancy for its citizens, businesses and visitors.

In 2018, the City of Mesa engaged Think Big Partners, LLC to assist in the development of a Smart City Master Plan which included engaging citizens, businesses and the public as they identified the strategies and priorities for building a ‘smarter Mesa’.

The first step taken by the city government was to focus on seven priority pillars within their community. These included; A focus on Downtown (which is now experiencing a renaissance), the environment, government, public safety, transport and community.

“The most important thing for us is engaging with citizens and being transparent when it comes to technology. It's absolutely crucial for them to understand the

DID YOU KNOW...

SEVEN PILLARS OF A SMARTER MESA • Smart downtown - Create a vibrant downtown thriving with work and play activities for residents and businesses • Smart environment - Protect the environment and create sustainable options where possible • Smart infrastructure - Modernise essential infrastructure to provide essential city services and preserve a high quality of life in Mesa • Smart government - Create a responsive, engaged city that makes decisions based on data and understands the needs of its citizens • Smart public safety - Create a safe and secure environment for all citizens • Smart transportation - Create accessible and safe multi-modal transit options along with creating the ability to move easily throughout Mesa • Smart community - Create an engaged, inclusive and equitable community that can provide a high quality life to all Mesa citizens

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information that we have. Here's how it's being used. Here's how it's being managed,” said Cutright.

How does a ‘smart Mesa’ differ from other cities?

According to Cutright, the city government operates in a unique format. “We are very hub and spoke as we have digital communication

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specialists within individual departments who can dictate their individual messages.

“We respect our subject matter experts and we lean on them to come to the table and say, these are the initiatives that matter to our department, but also matter to our citizens.

And then we work with them to understand what their priorities are and what messaging we can craft. It’s about not having too many

CITY OF MESA

buzzwords, acronyms, government-speak and translating that into something that is more appropriate for their audience.

“Traditionally a government is very siloed but we've worked really hard to knock down those silos and empower departments to come to the table with ideas, because we don't want to be the centralised communication office on the hill dictating

35th

largest city in the US

500,000

population of Mesa, Arizona

US$3mn

city of Mesa investment in digitally transforming to a smart city

4,000

employees work at City of Mesa

2,280 acres

of parkland are in the city limits - the largest is Red Mountain Park which spans 1,146 acres

what needs to be done. We want individual departments to have a voice because when they do, then they're speaking to the true needs of the citizens.”

Saving lives through technology One important aspect of a smart city is improving the response time of the police and fire crews. NextGen 911 has been designed to improve upon the systems to take and respond to emergencies with Text to 911 and new ways to get data from mobile users with E911. The new computer-aided design (CAD) system under construction will allow emergency dispatch to use all the data to direct help where it’s needed.

NextGen 911 will enable first responders to have priority to communications channels, in order to streamline their communications across departments across cities. One of the things that law enforcement will have available in the future is the ability to change the colour of street lights when they are en-route to an emergency. It will work in a similar way to a garage door opener as it will be on the dashboard of the patrol car and they click it and the light will change.

One of the ways this will be possible is by using FirstNet which is the first high-speed, nationwide wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety.

According to Cutright, the City of Mesa’s Fire and Medical has partnered with the Transportation Department to improve response times by giving emergency services priority at traffic lights - automatically changing the lights to allow quick access. “We have a program that is in place where the GPS of our public safety vehicle interfaces with our traffic controllers to preempt the lights to change colour so they can continue through the intersection safely.” technologymagazine.com

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POWER OF CURATED CONTENT AT CITY OF MESA “An integral part of our success has stemmed from focusing on individual, traceable KPIs. Data is our best friend and we leverage our analytics to understand our audience and curate content that is tailored to them,” said chief information officer Travis Cutright.

“We have an event at the Arizona Museum of Natural History every year called beer and bones which is a craft brewery/paleontology exhibition. “We were able to work with the museum on this initiative to advertise on Facebook and we targeted people in and around Mesa. We drew a 10-mile radius and targeted people who were 21 and older, men and women who are interested in craft beer and dinosaurs. I mean, it was that specific. “We spent $200 and we made $2,400 from that one advertisement. That was pre-COVID but was something that really was a light bulb moment and a catalyst for a lot of people in the city.

“It's about understanding the audience and realising that whether it's Facebook or Twitter or the website or email marketing, these are just levers. These are levers that we can pull to try to accomplish a goal,” he said.

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The city’s digital transformation has been driven by the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), which provides secure, proven, innovative technologies that enhance operational efficiencies.

The city's technology infrastructure consists of the physical hardware and systems needed to support the city's computing environment and applications, as well as the radio communication and associated electronic systems for the Public Safety Departments and members of the TOPAZ Regional Wireless Cooperative.

A broad range of business applications, software and database systems are used to deliver city services while ensuring a secure environment.

“We are driving digital changes to support our citizens and this requires the use of data analytics and innovation,” said Cutright.

CITY OF MESA

“These initiatives, that touch almost every department, have helped launch Mesa forward as a smart city” TRAVIS CUTRIGHT

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CITY OF MESA

from home because of the pandemic they're able to completely do the job that they need to without having to rely on a centralised system.”

Cloud and Artificial Intelligence The City of Mesa has a number of digital tools that involve the cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) which is being used internally at the government and to help citizens.

“We have just launched our Mesa app which works with Alexa. Citizens can ask about their utility bill or hear about events using this technology,” said Cutright.

“We also use a number of third-party systems to do our own content creation such as Canva, Sprout Social and Adobe creative cloud. There are a number of creative assets that we've deployed across the city where individual departments are trained on this. So instead of having a centralised marketing department where all the creatives are under one roof, we've essentially drawn up the box.

“These enabling tools can be deployed across the city. If someone is working

A smarter environment As Mesa drives its digital transformation, a major focus is on improving the environment and their carbon footprint.

“Technology comes at you fast and you have to be ready to roll with it, and you have to be conscious of the environmental aspects of technology.

We're conscious of our digital footprint and the role we need to play supporting our literal ecosystem.

“One of the areas we're focused on is our environmental sustainability programs which includes recycling. It's a huge initiative for the city, we have done various experiments with recycling biomass fuel,” said Cutright.

“We also have smart irrigation controllers in parks. In monsoon season park employees no longer need to travel to every facility to stop the sprinklers. The city saves more than 80 trips every time it rains by managing the watering centrally.

The controllers also alarm if a sprinkler head breaks or a leak is detected, saving water and time.” technologymagazine.com

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Power of CGI partnership Cutright pointed out the importance and value of CGI as a partner to the City of Mesa.

“CGI has been a great partner for us as we leverage them for our financial systems. If you ask the city manager here what the most important thing is besides public safety, he'll tell you it's to make payroll and make sure we’re able to pay our bills - so, that's a critical element here at the City of Mesa.

“We leverage CGI’s advantage software for our financials. We have three utilities here in Mesa, which is also unique for most cities which are gas, electric and water and so all that data feeds into the system, and we're able to bill customers, make payroll and pay bills.

“CGI also has folks available to respond to us - if you have an issue you can always get CGI on the phone and, and work it through with them,” he said.

Cutright pointed out that giving access to citizens to pay utility bills requires a robust set of tools, business applications, software, databases and back end so “security is paramount”.

“One thing we do to protect our citizens is that we do not store their credit card information, PII (Personal Identified Identifiable Information) and we've got a two-factor authentication - so we've got a lot of strategies in place to secure our environment and make sure we're protecting the citizens data.

He pointed out that harnessing the technology provided by Wibbitz - one of their ecosystem partners - is an effective way in helping to create content.

“We've really enjoyed working with Wibbitz. “They are a video creation tool and are able to lock down certain aspects of our brand from the logo, typeface and colour pallet so our department experts can create content. These tools have 196

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enabled us to democratise these assets across the city, which is saving me and my team a huge amount of time. Our experts now have the right tools to make that content sing effectively.”

Digital one-stop-shop Mesa Cares is a program which has been launched during the pandemic to help citizens with services such as paying rent and assisting small businesses owners. It currently has (ADD NUMBER) users.

“This has been one of the best ways to reach our audience and make sure they

CITY OF MESA

know about these programs, whether we're live streaming the information on social media - like we do with council meetings - or whether we're creating custom content for our website. We have created a digital one-stop-shop for all of the programs that exist to help during the pandemic. “We have had countless responses from our audience saying, thank you. As a city government we tend to exist in the background but when something happens - that's an opportunity for us to rise to the occasion and to be there for our citizens.”

Other smart city initiatives include: • Wi-Fi in parks – broadband access in public spaces helps bridge the digital divide, giving all residents access to the internet and allows the city to deploy sensors and controllers.

• Launchpoint is the city’s technology accelerator which provides entrepreneurs and small companies business development assistance, networking and training opportunities.

• Mesa K-Ready helps children and parents prepare for kindergarten. Using a tablet device, educational app and learning activities at city museums, parks and libraries, Mesa K-Ready helps children in our community start kindergarten ready to learn.

• Thinkspot is a mini-makerspaces in all city libraries which allows citizens free or inexpensive access to the tools of creation.

• Shared Active Transportation Vehicle (SATV) - Mesa Moves. The pilot scheme started last year to allow licensed providers of SATV, including bicycles, e-bikes and scooters, to operate in Mesa.

A smarter future As citizens embrace their smart city, a number of initiatives look set to make life even easier.

These include making free wifi available near traffic signals and smart parking.

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GERMANY’S DIGITAL JOURNEY: A TALE OF TWO TRANSFORMATIONS WRITTEN BY: PADDY SMITH

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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PwC, Germany’s approach to digital transformation, is hinged on a balance of internal and external transformations.

Its German operation describes managing a dual approach

P

ractice what you preach. That’s the ethos at the heart of PwC Germany’s (PwC) approach to digital transformation. The Advisory division of PwC has two focus streams: one is client services, the other is PwC’s in-house transformation. The idea is that one begets the other. So while the internal transformation is aimed at efficiency without interruption to ongoing business, the external transformation is expected to drum up new business and digitalise the core offering to advisory services.

PwC is the leading audit and consultancy firm in Germany, with a professional service network of more than 284,000 people providing services in insurance, tax, legal and advisory matters.

The Digital Advisory team works across a number of cross-industry portfolios, delivering solutions in a time of complex business management. Ralf Jaspert, who is leading the Digital Incubator for the Advisory team, sees the approach as two pillars. “One is the citizen-led approach, which aims to motivate younger colleagues to be part of the story,” he says. “The second is businessled, understanding what is needed by e.g. industries with different functions.” technologymagazine.com

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SUSANNE ARNOLDY TITLE: PARTNER TEAM: HEAD OF DIGITAL INDUSTRY: ACCOUNTING LOCATION: GERMANY Susanne Arnoldy is partner at PwC and has 23 years of experience in digital business-led IT transformations worldwide, in SAP and / or non-SAP environments. Prior to PwC, she worked for companies such as IBM and SAP, and has assisted various clients in their transformations (e.g. Zalando).

In addition to her client activities, she is part of the German Advisory Leadership team and responsible for Digital, as well for EMEA Consulting.

This means that she is responsible for the firm's digital strategy, including its implementation, for example through an intensive upskilling programme for all employees, the establishment of new data & sharing platforms or identifying / implementation of innovative new digital solutions.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Citizen-led The ‘citizen-led’ approach is based around giving employees the time and space to learn, grow and invest in their own interests.

The project, now running for over two years, has spurred digital ‘champions’ to create their own dashboards or bots and automate e.g. parts of SAP implementations.

“We have set up a new training approach called Your Tomorrow so our young colleagues can understand how to work with e.g. emerging technologies, analytics software and how to work more agile.

We also identified a Digital Accelerator programme where they have extra time each week to understand, learn and build products, assets or automations and share them. And drive our digital agenda forward in their business teams, also from a mindset point of view.

PWC

Title of the video

“ We have a massive team of software developers, which isn’t something you may have expected from PwC in the past, but we will see more of it in the future” RALF JASPERT PARTNER, PWC

Business-led The flip side of that is the business-led model, which seeks to deliver new business models to clients through products, services and platforms developed as scalable technology solutions. For that, PwC has created a digital incubator to speed up the delivery of digital products, which Jaspert is leading.

“We understand how to run a product through governance processes, how to have the right people on board to build and maintain software, and now we are transformed in a new way so we can easily ramp up our own teams within PwC Germany, but also scale up with our partners,” says Jaspert.

Digital incubator PwC’s digital incubator, as Jaspert explains, is part of an idea to bring some of Silicon Valley’s environment to the consultancy technologymagazine.com

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Art of the possible is the inspiring message from New York-based UiPath (NYSE: PATH), which believes in the transformative power of robotic process automation (RPA) to unlock growth and save time for its global customers.

Process Mining PEAK Matrix. The company, founded in 2005 in Bucharest and has a market cap of $38 billion, and its customers include eight of the Fortune 10 companies and 63% of the Fortune Global 500 companies.

“RPA is the productivity tool of the future,” says Boris Krumrey, Global VP Automation Innovations, who is working toward the company goal of a “world with a robot for every person”.

Krumrey leads a team that helps design automation innovations for UiPath’s customers, which include Spotify and Autodesk. “As automation can be quite an abstract concept, we show our customers the art of the possible with automation in the UiPath Immersion Lab – where seeing really is believing.”

UiPath is the market leader in RPA – a software automation technology designed to let software robots take on manual, repetitive tasks and give time back to employees to focus on higher-value work. RPA adoption lies at the centre of an enterprise’s digital journey.

Some advanced robots can perform cognitive processes like interpreting text and applying advanced machine learning models to help humans make complex decisions.

For the second consecutive year, UiPath – which has offices in more than 30 countries – has been named a Leader and the vendor positioned highest for the ability to execute in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA. It is also named as a Leader in the Forrester Wave for RPA and Everest Group’s

UiPath is a close partner of PwC, working together to create gains in productivity and cost savings in retail, transportation, and the oil and gas sector.

“We have a great relationship and PwC shares our vision of a robot for every person in their own company,” said Krumrey.

Learn more

PWC

space. “The incubation comes from the huge number of ideas from the business teams. They are working at the heart of the client’s problem.

They understand what else is possible or how we can do things differently. The digital incubator is there to make a connection between content which is related to the market need or the functional need and the technology we would like to add to solve this problem. And this is how a start-up does it too.”

Clients are invited to get involved as early as possible in the process to foster a sense of co-creation, workshopping ideas for days to flesh out the details of specific problems. It’s a means of support for the client, too, all leading to the ideal software solution for the particular needs of a business.

Culture of adoption The deployment of these solutions is just the beginning. Once a technical software solution has been implemented, it must be used or the efficiencies will never materialise. For that, the culture of an organisation must change and employees must be inculcated into the digital journey that will secure their companies future in the digital age. PwC focuses “very heavily” on

“ If you’re using cloudnative solutions it’s easier to change from one solution to another.

It’s also important to be scalable, flexible and more independent” SUSANNE ARNOLDY PARTNER, PWC

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mindset change. Susanne Arnoldy, Head of Digital Strategy for the advisory business in Germany says that nobody should underestimate the importance of this piece of work.

“What’s best from our side is that we have established a network of change agents, our Digital Accelerators,across the firm to help the teams to adapt to technologies and find new creative solutions. We want to reach the way we want to do it and they are always part of that kind of transformation programme. This is an overall concept from the PwC network, not just in Germany, our Your Tomorrow programme.”

PWC

RALF JASPERT TITLE: PARTNER TEAM: HEAD OF PWC DIGITAL INCUBATOR INDUSTRY: ACCOUNTING LOCATION: GERMANY

Partnerships are key Partnerships are central to consultancies such as PwC. Without them the business ceases to exist as a conduit between business need and software engineering.

An important relationship for PwC is UiPath, a software robotics company.

“For us,” says Jaspert, “a partner is someone who thinks of digitisation end to end, so we liked their approach. They added a combination of different core technologies in one platform, which perfectly matches the way we approach a client problem. They combined, for

EXECUTIVE BIO

Ralf Jaspert is partner at PwC and part of the Advisory Digital team. He is leading the PwC Advisory Incubator, focussing on the development of digital products and application based managed services and supporting the digitisation of core functions and processes for both internal and external stakeholders. In his client activities he served global companies on large scale automation and transformation programs from strategy through execution.

PWC

example, process mining, robotics and AI in a stable and robust technology, and they also work on expanding the experience and features they can offer to clients.”

Partnership matters Isolating a single partner that ticks many of the boxes clients want is one thing, but the increasingly complex world of partnership ecosystems must be more difficult to navigate?

Arnoldy sees it differently. “I don’t know if it’s more complicated so much as more diverse. More companies are looking for best of breed solutions and it depends on how the software is structured; if you’re using cloud-native solutions it’s easier to change from one solution to another.

It’s also important to be scalable, flexible and independent. It is going to be a more diverse, best of breed ecosystem and that’s why it’s important that customers concentrate on cloud-native solutions that are more independent compared with past solutions.”

For some partnerships PwC has gone the extra mile, taking up a shareholding in the company. That’s true of Adamos, an independent platform for mechanical and plant engineering, or the Digital Business University of Applied Science in Berlin.

The latter ties neatly into PwC’s citizenled approach to learning and education in digital transformation.

“More and more we are not just focusing on classical software partnerships but working in ecosystems and we are aligning with our clients’ software providers,” says Arnoldy.

“It’s really a partnership between customers, software providers and the consultancy firm.”

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The future of consultancy When it comes to the future, PwC’s strategic direction is essential. For Arnoldy, it’s all about the expectation of the client.

“Our future is present,” she says. “Our goal is to deliver quality and trusted results to our clients, and the way we do it should follow the digitalisation road ahead.”

That brings us to the dual-pronged strategy at the heart of the company’s digital transformation. “The foundation is authentic, business-led transformation programmes, and that leads us in two directions. Firstly, we need to digitalise the core way we do our job in the best way possible with the technology available.

We need to deliver and ensure the quality

PWC

“ The incubation comes from the huge number of ideas out of the business teams. They are working at the heart of the client’s problem.

They understand what else is possible or how we can do things differently” RALF JASPERT PARTNER, PWC

our clients expect from us – RPA, data analytics, AI, whatever’s out there. We need to embed these naturally in the way we approach projects.”

“On the other hand, we need to make sure we can deliver new business models to our clients – digital products, licensable products, which you can easily acquire by way of our digital store (https://store.pwc. de/en). They can see whether the digital product fits their market, or the problem they are facing. As these are industry related technologymagazine.com

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PWC’S DUAL STRATEGY Citizen-led • New ways of working (agile) • Digital Accelerator programme • Digital Lab • Workbench Business-led • Integrated solutions • New business/digital products • Advisory digital incubator • PwC digital store

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“What’s best from our side is that we have established a network of change agents across the firm to help the teams to adapt to technologies and find new creative solutions and ways of working” SUSANNE ARNOLDY PARTNER, PWC

functions, we can offer more and more of them in the future given the operating model we’ve been working on in the past couple of months. We can see a number of tasks and processes, which look at the heart of the client’s work, and they are looking for support.

These kind of demands need external trusted providers and PwC would like to be such a provider for e.g. managed services. So we are digitalising the core and creating also new business models for our clients.

“We find answers to even the most complex questions of our time, from strategy to implementation, to bring our clients into the digital age and help them to stay there.

Or to find new portfolios, serving clients in different kinds of industries. That’s our focus as an advisory team.”

That’s the crux of PwC’s strategy: digital transformation from within and a truly consultative approach that breeds trust and finds solutions that are unique to client’s individual and sector needs. ‘Inward looking’ is not usually a term associated with business best practice, but when you are looking inwards with the intention of finding new skills and solutions that keep your clients ahead of the game and ready to face the future, that can only be a good thing.

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ADAPTING TO CHANGE THE

VIATRIS WAY WRITTEN BY: MELISSA KHAN PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

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Ramkumar Rayapureddy, Global Chief Information Officer at Viatris, tells us about successfully managing a large consolidation during a worldwide pandemic

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Ram Rayapureddy, Global CIO

he formation of pharmaceutical company Viatris has followed an atypical path. It was created in November 2020 through the combining of pharmaceutical firms Mylan and Upjohn, a Pfizer subsidiary.

But when the combination was first announced in July 2019, no one could have predicted that the world would be fighting a global pandemic less than a year later.

The IT team, led by former Mylan CIO and current Viatris CIO Ramkumar Rayapureddy, played not only a key leadership role in the successful integration but also had to help shift an entire company to working remotely on the journey to becoming Viatris.

Integrating companies is never an easy task, and the Viatris transaction is no exception. For starters, this integration involves three companies instead of two – Mylan, Upjohn, and Upjohn’s parent company, Pfizer. The companies’ first order of business was the separation of Upjohn from Pfizer; following that separation, Upjohn and Mylan could combine to become Viatris.

As Day 1 approached, timelines were tight, legalities were instrumental, budgets were analysed, and technologies had to function without a glitch. technologymagazine.com

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Viatris - A global healthcare company

Rayapureddy shared his thoughts on what energised him and his team about the integration and their critical role to stand up a new kind of healthcare company: "At Mylan, we had the global scale, but we saw certain pockets where we could benefit from having a broader reach. Upjohn brought iconic products and a strong presence in Emerging Markets and Greater China. This is how we complemented each other. The coming together of these two great companies created a new kind of global healthcare company well-positioned to achieve its mission of empowering people worldwide to live healthier at every stage of life."

The goal was to create a global company that brought together the firms’ scientific, commercial and operations expertise and portfolio of more than 1,400 approved 216

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molecules to more than 165 countries. The question facing Rayapureddy was defining a technology strategy to support the business strategy.

"It looks magical when it happens, but there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes," Rayapureddy says. The first thing he did was to create a command centre of leaders from both companies and task them with driving the business alignment of the twenty-two workstreams required to get Viatris to a successful Day 1. Viatris’ workforce of nearly 45,000 employees spans the globe, and Rayapureddy set the expectation from the start that there was to be no business disruption during integration, and everyone was to collaborate on the same Microsoft Office365 platform.

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RAM RAYAPUREDDY TITLE: GLOBAL CIO INDUSTRY: PHARMACEUTICALS

“ THE CONSOLIDATION HAS CREATED A GLOBAL ORGANISATION TO FURTHER ADVANCE OUR MISSION OF PROVIDING HIGH QUALITY HEALTHCARE TO PATIENTS ALL ACROSS THE GLOBE” RAM RAYAPUREDDY GLOBAL CIO, VIATRIS

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: UNITED STATES Ramkumar “Ram” Rayapureddy is the chief information officer of Viatris, responsible for the execution of the company’s technology strategy and the alignment of that strategy to both the company’s business strategy and mission.

Ram joined Mylan in 2014 as Head of Global IT Operations, bringing with him more than 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, including various leadership positions in business, compliance, automation, and information technology. He was promoted to chief information officer in 2016 and served in this capacity until the launch of Viatris in 2020.

Ram earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Clemson University after graduating from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad, India.

Cognizant Life Sciences: Advancing Science to Improve Patient Outcomes Cognizant drives industry impact and delivers business outcomes across life sciences companies. We are a strategic partner to Viatris delivering IT and business consulting services on key integration initiatives helping them meet their TSA commitments.

Learn more at: www.cognizant.com/lifesciences

Cognizant: Building a Vision of Efficiency Cognizant’s unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients like Viatris envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses Cognizant’s unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Srinivas Shankar, Global Head of Life Sciences for Cognizant, talks to us about the massive shifts happening in the industry and how digitisation is helping clients like Viatris to find better ways of working.

Shankar has been with the company for more than 12 years and remains so with a smile on his face. “I’m really happy to be here,” he says before delving into what makes the Cognizant life sciences business special.

“At Cognizant, for us, life sciences are two distinct industry segments. The first is biopharmaceutical companies and the second is medical device companies. We work with all of the top 30 biopharmaceutical companies and 12 of the top 15 medical device companies.

I’ve been with the company for 12 years now, all of it in life sciences. And I’m very passionate about what we do every day to leverage technology to improve the lives of patients.”

Speaking to the drivers that are influencing the life sciences industry, Shankar says, “In relation to services that we provide to clients, we see significant adoption of digital technologies,

such as cloud, IoT, data analytics, and digital engineering. And we’re using all of these digital technologies to be able to bring solutions to clients.”

On Cognizant’s relationship with Viatris, Shankar points out that the partnership is “very strategic.” “It predates the coming together of Mylan and the Upjohn division of Pfizer to form Viatris. In 2014, we started a relationship with Mylan. After that, we started providing a whole range of strategic services from infrastructure support and operations to application support services to large and complex ERP implementations. More recently, with the formation of Viatris, we have been supporting the organisation around core infrastructure services for day-one preparedness, which includes end-user support services for about 13,000 users across 14 global sites. We are also a strategic partner for post-integration services for the Viatris organisation.”

“We’re truly excited about our strategic partnership with Viatris and I think that the coming together of both these organisations, Cognizant and Viatris, can truly drive meaningful positive value in the lives of patients.”

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guidance. Bold decisions were made from the start, and any exception to the plan was evaluated with the expectation that it may not be accommodated.

2. The team was strategically integrated with business partners to ensure cross-functional needs were met.

Understanding business dependencies were actively managed.

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“ HUMANS ARE VERY RESILIENT. I ALWAYS TOLD PEOPLE KEEP LOOKING FORWARD, AND TO START PLANNING FOR THAT” RAM RAYAPUREDDY GLOBAL CIO, VIATRIS

3. A strong change management program was established with proactive and targeted communications and training.

Then came March 2020. The challenges of any integration are complex, detailed, and personal. When the pandemic hit, teams had to shift to working remotely overnight, adding an unimaginable layer of complexity.

To address this, Rayapureddy quickly divided

his team in two – one to focus on the shift to remote work and one to keep integration planning moving forward.

The remote work team ran disaster drills and upgraded infrastructure to ensure adequate bandwidth and that everyone had the right equipment to work from home.

Operations moved into the cloud, using Microsoft Office 365, and communications shifted from Skype to Microsoft Teams. "We had been planning to roll out Teams as part of our long-term strategy, and that would have been a one-year exercise if things were normal. In fact, we moved to Teams in seven days, our workforce was very supportive, and the transition happened smoothly," Rayapureddy explains.

As the full team could no longer meet in person, Rayapureddy and the integration planning team took the approach of “smaller, consistent, and concise.” Any planned in-person workshops were now conducted by smaller teams who could work remotely and focus upon very specific outcomes.

The team was equally focused on employee engagement. Every Thursday morning, they held an informal check-in call.

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share stories or swap skills with colleagues.

Rayapureddy’s team came up with the idea of department-wide IT Challenges consisting of quizzes, Microsoft whiteboard Pictionary games, and virtual coffees with colleagues once a month. These events helped bring people together, Rayapureddy says, particularly given that their staff span the globe and come from a variety of cultures.

“One of the other things we did was tell people that we will come out of this.

Humans are very resilient, and if history has taught us one thing, it's that humans respond and adapt to change. I always told people to keep looking forward and to start planning for that."

Despite these challenges, there was some advantage to being a global company, as team members were accustomed to working collaboratively in different time zones. And in November of 2020, Rayapureddy and the team were able to take their hard work and celebrate a successful Day 1 at Viatris. Given all of the integration planning and pandemic challenges the technology team delivered on their mission – Day 1 at Viatris saw zero glitches.

"I remember Michael Goettler, our CEO, telling me how we made a highly complex process look simple. The team across the three companies, Mylan, Upjohn, and Pfizer, did a fabulous job for countless hours and for more than 12 months. And then obviously, so did our partners." To top it off, a live town hall was broadcast to the entire global workforce, welcoming everyone to Viatris.

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tool for 45,000 users, hold over 30 training sessions, and, in the span of a few hours, provide every employee with a new email address, all while working remotely.

Viatris’ Day 1 would not have been such a success if it weren’t for Rayapureddy’ s leadership style, which created the foundation for the IT department and aligns with the Viatris mission. Despite the stresses of the last year, Rayapureddy says he never saw any finger-pointing during tense moments. "People said, Okay, we

VIATRIS

PANDEMIC SUCCESS: • Ram stayed current on the events happening globally and made pandemic prep a top priority.

• Focused a team on ensuring VPN sustainability for 45,000 employees, processes established for equipment, processes for monitoring application usage to ensure no disruption • Team transitioned smoothly to remote work with minimal disruption • Created engagement programs to keep the team from experiencing pandemic fatigue.

Pictionary with leaders involved, space to share pandemic workspaces, pets, kids, etc.

• Adapted the in-person workshops planned with Pfizer to be done virtually by changing templates, holding smaller prep sessions with workstream leads, and adopting templates to capture the information

“THE ENTIRE WORLD HAS CHANGED BECAUSE OF COVID-19, AND THIS HAS AN INFLUENCE ON HOW OUR BUSINESS OPERATES. WE HAVE TO BE NIMBLE ENOUGH TO REACT QUICKLY TO THOSE CHANGES” RAM RAYAPUREDDY GLOBAL CIO, VIATRIS

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“ WE HAD BEEN PLANNING TO ROLL OUT TEAMS AS PART OF OUR LONG TERM STRATEGY, AND THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A ONE-YEAR EXERCISE. IN FACT WE MOVED TO TEAMS IN SEVEN DAYS” RAM RAYAPUREDDY GLOBAL CIO, VIATRIS

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have a problem. Let's go see what we can do about it." We want to be flexible enough to adjust to the changes that are happening in the world," he adds. "The entire world has changed because of COVID-19, and this has an influence on how our business operates – we have to be nimble enough to make sure we can react quickly to those changes."

How well the team collaborated throughout the entire integration process and during the pandemic helped to contribute to what Rayapureddy calls “The Viatris Way.” "It is a focus on people being performance-driven, but also being highly engaged in the diverse and inclusive culture we are building together.

I’m really proud of the contributions of our IT team to the culture we are building.”

In the future, Rayapureddy envisages a hybrid working structure, where some people continue to work from home while others return to the office, potentially on a part-time basis. "We are now experimenting with different technologies to see how we as a group can facilitate that," he says.

For now, the team can celebrate the successful launch of Viatris, whose mission is to empower people worldwide to live healthier at every stage of life. “Access is part of our global mission, making high-quality medicines available to everyone, regardless of geography or circumstance,” Rayapureddy says. “If we don’t have the solution, we build partnerships so we can bring the right products to the right people. My team takes that same approach. We’re a pharma company, not an IT company, so we find partners with the technology to help us support our goals and who can provide the innovative solutions to give Viatris a competitive advantage as we deliver on our mission.”

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SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC LEADS SUSTAINABILITY CHANGE WRITTEN BY: DOMINIC ELLIS

PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Schneider Electric is proud to be named the world’s most sustainable company – however, as Natalya Makarochkina explains, its journey to drive efficiencies and cut emissions has only just begun

Natalya Makarochkina

S

chneider Electric has been quietly but determinedly embracing sustainability for the last 20 years and its efforts were recognised when it was awarded the prestigious title of ‘The World’s Most Sustainable Company’ by Canadian media and research company Corporate Knights in January 2021.

“It was a great honour to receive the award,” reflects Natalya Makarochkina, Senior Vice President, Secure Power Division, International Operations, after it jumped from 29th place the previous year. “It proves that every time we define a target, we fulfil it and lead by example.”

Five months on, you won’t find any complacency among Makarochkina nor her peers. The French company, which came fourth in Gartner’s more recent annual ranking of corporate supply chains, is busy focusing its attention on two key strategies simultaneously – aiming to eliminate its own climate footprint by 2025 via its Sustainability Impact Program, and driving down emissions amongst its customers across more than 100 countries.

“We are still at the early stages of our transformation programme – we want to cut CO2 emissions among our top 1,000 suppliers by 50%,” she said. “Future sustainability is key to us and we want to conserve our resources and protect our planet. Schneider Electric will continue to develop new products and ideas, and continue our goal of sustainability.”

To many, Schneider Electric is the first name in power management, whether that’s medium or low voltage or secure power, and automation systems – and sustainability is now linked to “multiple customer wins,” as cited within its Q1 results statement. It now earns 70% of its revenue from, and directs 73% of its investments toward, sustainable solutions. technologymagazine.com

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Global Specialist in Energy Management & Automation

Its ‘Life Is On’ brand strategy, in which the benefits of connectivity and efficiency were first promoted six years ago, seems more pertinent than ever as countries now

“ We are still at the early stages of our transformation programme – we want to cut CO2 emissions among our top 1,000 suppliers by 50%” NATALYA MAKAROCHKINA

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SECURE POWER DIVISION, INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS FOR SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

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place greater emphasis on sustainability and meeting net-zero targets.

For data centres, be they traditional or micro edge, Schneider’s expertise and knowhow are critical to success. At the moment, data centres consume 1% of global electricity use, but it’s forecast to increase significantly as demand for data grows.

“The more data we receive, the more energy we need to process it,” she said.

“Previously everyone thought that everything would go to cloud. Now we understand that traditional, hyperscale and colocation will continue to expand. We need more transformation at the Edge.”

During COVID, it has seen the emergence of many Edge solutions – and rise in ‘plug-and-play’ and prefab concepts. “It’s extremely important to deliver software too, enabling customers to not only observe the centre, but analytics to make sure they can foresee the potential risks and take the appropriate measures in advance,” she said,

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

adding that hybrid solutions have been most in-demand.

Micro Edge Data Centres are definitely growing and this will pose challenges for the industry at large. “The problem with Edge is that while individually, they consume a small amount of energy, if you look at the total amounts they consume, it’s huge amounts of power – it can be twice as much as traditional data centres.”

It recently expanded its EcoStruxure™ Micro Data Center C-Series with the new 43U, offering the greatest capacity in the company’s commercial and office line of micro data centers.

By helping customers deploy IT simply, securely, and reliably in any edge computing or commercial environment, the new solution is our largest, fully equipped model, eliminating the need for a purpose-built IT room, saving up to 48 percent on CapEx in 20 percent less time. The integration of EcoStruxture IT yielded 35% in energy savings and 30% cost savings in maintenance for the largest data centre in North Africa.

Another new addition is its Edge Software and Digital Services programme, a complete suite of benefits, support tools and certifications that enables IT solution providers to create a managed power services practice.

• Fostering equal access to digital learning for 24,000 students in India by powering 100 co-educational schools with solar energy

TITLE: SVP, SECURE POWER DIVISION, INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS INDUSTRY: ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC MANUFACTURING LOCATION: MOSCOW Natalya Makarochkina is the Senior Vice President (SVP) of Secure Power at Schneider Electric, on a mission to lead more than 1000 seasoned professionals in delivering sustainable, innovative ways to support customers and partners in their digital transformation.

Natalya is a passionate executive with strong expertise in leading successful transformations within IT and Energy Management industries. Previous leadership roles include various senior management and sales positions across international technology companies comprising HPE, Philips, Oracle, 3COM and others.

Secure Power provides complete physical infrastructure solutions for data centers, distributed IT environments, and industrial applications. As SVP position Natalya constantly empowers business success within multiple geographies – Asia, Pacific, India, Middle East, South

EXECUTIVE BIO

‘Glocal’ approach and onset of Electricity 4.0 It is important for Schneider Electric to be seen as international and local, she adds. “It’s a very flexible company and adapts to the needs of the customers. It’s not just about having offices in different parts of the world, but R&D and factories too.” Examples of local projects so far include:

NATALYA MAKAROCHKINA

America and CIS. Natalya holds an Executive MBA from the University of Antwerp, and Masters degree from the Higher School of Economics.

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC’S 6 SUSTAINABLE COMMITMENTS 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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“Previously everyone thought that everything would go to cloud. Now we understand that traditional, hyperscale and colocation will continue to expand. We need more transformation at the Edge” NATALYA MAKAROCHKINA

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SECURE POWER DIVISION, INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS FOR SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

• Transition to a 100% electric company car fleet in Norway by 2023 • Encourage Korean employees to support the shift to electrical vehicle • Add 150 circular product references to Schneider ‘s internal shop catalogue for employees in France.

• Increase five-fold Schneider’s spend with indigenous-owned suppliers in Australia as part of the Reconciliation Action Plan • Give electrical products a second life through donations to an online marketplace for educational purposes, and to improve the electrical installations of families at risk of energy poverty in Spain Natalya explains that ‘Electricity 4.0’encompasses electric and digital to create a sustainable future. “It’s really ‘green energy’, using it in the most efficient way,” she said. “It will require a lot of enabling supply and demand efficiency and lifecycle software. It’s extremely important that customers can really integrate digital products and services, where they will require a lot of saved data, moving at high speeds. We try and ‘future proof’ our customers.” technologymagazine.com

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There are four defined needs for future data centres – Sustainable, Efficient, Adaptive and Resilient. They will need to be achieved through cost optimisation and reducing the risk of downtime.

How do you see the industry evolving in 2021?

Sustainability will remain top of the agenda, and it will become increasingly important for companies to assess and target the value chain, and Scope 3 emissions. Tech trends include ‘digital first’ and ‘remote

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first’ models, which will offer more valueadd experiences; we also need to look at integrated and sustainable supply chains, which will allow customers to have scalable digital experiences.

How important is technology in driving sustainable practices?

It’s extremely important, for private and public sectors. We have developed a lot of software and technology never stops. I believe that sustainability is a priority because it’s key to the next generation – and that’s why it’s core to Schneider’s DNA.

DID YOU KNOW...

WHAT ARE THE TOP TRENDS WITH ELECTRICITY 4.0?

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

“One of the challenges is the multi-layered approach. Electricity is everywhere so we must have good software that connects the dots. Customers are not just looking at prices but partners that can reduce carbon.”

Last year was challenging, but the benefits of digitization allowed people to connect and businesses to stay operational, she adds.

More companies, especially in the industrial sector, are now entering the market at much faster speeds, as companies seek ‘quick win’ solutions. Industry 4.0 is being characterised by connectivity, data and computational power; analytics and intelligence; human-machine interaction and advanced engineering.

“We’ve also seen a big increase in e-commerce – this will require more energy, and companies will need to be more sustainable, resilient and efficient. It will be much quicker than the last 20-to-30 years,” she said. US ecommerce forecasts have been revised upwards with 18% growth expected in 2021, and growth in other regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, are being driven by rising mobile penetration.

“ It’s extremely important that customers can really integrate digital products and services, where they will require a lot of saved data, moving at high speeds” NATALYA MAKAROCHKINA

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SECURE POWER DIVISION, INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS FOR SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

The trend to ‘building back better’ is seeing major changes in the Data Centre industry. Leading Edge Data Centres, for example, are bridging the divide between regional and metropolitan Australia – and were acknowledged at the Datacloud Global Awards as a winner of The Edge Award 2021 .

Another byproduct from the crisis has been the peak in online education, so learning has become more widely distributed. “That will stimulate digitization in other areas,” she said She signs off our interview on an optimistic note – confident in Schneider’s ability in delivering solutions to meet sustainability challenges. “It is not by chance that we are called the most sustainable company in the world. I’m confident we will meet the targets.”

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IGT DRIVES

GAMING

TECHNOLOGY

EVOLUTION WRITTEN BY: ELISE LEISE

PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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Global gaming leader IGT leads the way with mobile apps, personalised AI, and automation

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GT is the world’s largest end-to-end gaming provider, delivering lottery, video, casino, sports betting, and digital gaming apps to players worldwide. Yet as gaming sweeps across the globe, the industry is focused on standardising aspects of its platforms. ‘All providers are looking for that brand differentiator, whether it is speed-to-market, personalised customer service, the latest technology, most vibrant user experience or some combination of the above’, says Pat Kamm, Vice President of Technology Operations at IGT. To do so, companies like IGT are capitalising on the mobile channel, personalised AI, automation and cashless transactions. ‘Technology is the engine and the facilitator of today’s gaming’, says Kamm. ‘Today’s gaming is feature-rich and multi-sensory. We’ve come a long way from monolithic, proprietary systems and are designing and operating highly secure, high-volume, multi-server validation transaction engines that make the player experience seamless across channels’.

Pat Kamm Vice President of Technology Operations

Open Architecture Gaming management and operating architecture used to be highly proprietary.

But in the past few decades, Kamm says, companies have shifted from this model to more open architectures, easing integration with other third parties. In fact, with the increase in small, nimble gaming startups, technologymagazine.com

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many large gaming corporations want to develop open systems that facilitate ease of collaboration with these smaller teams.

True to form, IGT refuses to be outdone by smaller startups. Kamm elaborates: ‘We invest a great deal each year in R&D, part of which is engaging players and partners in product forums. We take that feedback and respond with new games, feature rich content, and greater value. We drive for that truly engaging user experience, the WOW factor in our products’.

After all, IGT is the leader bringing new ideas to an old industry. ‘Going back 20 or 30 years, leadership teams in the corporate world were not all particularly diverse’, Kamm says. ‘[Since then], there’s been a realisation that bringing in people from different cultural backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds, and different educational backgrounds is vital. The clash of ideas is incredibly healthy’.

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“ BRINGING IN PEOPLE FROM DIFFERENT CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS, DIFFERENT ETHNIC BACKGROUNDS, AND DIFFERENT EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUNDS IS VITAL. THE CLASH OF IDEAS IS VERY HEALTHY”

PAT KAMM TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS INDUSTRY: COMPUTER SOFTWARE LOCATION: UNITED STATES Pat Kamm leads IGT’s Global Program Management Office overseeing a portfolio of Product R&D for Lottery, Casino and Video Lottery as well as customer deliveries worldwide.

He is also responsible for the technology contracting office charged with augmenting IGT’s technology staffing needs. Annually, his organization leads a portfolio of over 500 projects equating to two million hours of effort.

Prior to joining IGT, Pat was a member of the United States Army Special Operations community where he became a lifelong student of leadership that has propelled him and his teams throughout his career and helping IGT continue as the world leader in Gaming.

PAT KAMM

Diversity For a multinational gaming industry leader such as IGT, diverse sourcing of ideas couldn’t be more important. Kamm, a graduate of several prestigious executive programmes, considers professional development a leadership requirement. He recalls early in his career thinking, ‘You say to yourself, “The response to these challenges are obvious”. You think everyone will come to the same conclusions. And then when you get together as a group, you find that there are so many different perspectives among people of different backgrounds and ages’.

Kamm notes that young, diverse members of the IGT team come to the team with great ideas about content, loyalty programmes, knowing your customer (KYC), and the future of the integrated user experience across channels. The new generation of players has spoken and leaders are listening. ‘At IGT, we are working on ways to customise the

EXECUTIVE BIO

VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS, IGT

Unlocking innovation.

Personalizing gaming experiences.

Innovative and responsible technology that empowers players IGT architects the future of responsible gaming by creating dynamic player experiences. Innovative cloud and mobile gaming technology, speed-to-market strategies, user intelligence, personalized AI services, customized gaming experience for the players, and access to cashless transactions through e-wallets help IGT create a rich and unique user experience. A team culture promoting diversity, a forward-thinking leadership team, and a strategic technology partnership with HCL Technologies helps IGT to keep the players engaged with their gaming products.

Read article

www.hcltech.com

IGT

“AT IGT, WE CUSTOMISE THE GAMING EXPERIENCE FOR PLAYERS AROUND THE WORLD...THE VALUE PROPOSITION FOR OUR PLAYERS IN THE UNITED STATES VARIES FROM THAT OF SOUTH AMERICA, LATIN AMERICA, EUROPE, OR ASIA” PAT KAMM

VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS, IGT

gaming experience for players around the world. What we have found is that the value proposition for our players in the United States varies from that of South America, Latin America, Europe, or Asia’, Kamm says.

‘Values are different’.

IGT is focused on bringing awareness to the value of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and the results are clear. Fresh ideas, approaches to systems architecture and products, and methods of customer support and delivery have added value and efficiency to the business and improved the overall product suite across its portfolios.

What’s more, IGT can no longer focus solely on the player base that’s pulled the same slots for the generations. Instead, Kamm explains, gaming companies must drive demand for the next wave. To do so, the company is capitalising on two major areas of innovation: developing mobile gaming apps and facilitating personalised AI gaming and resort experiences.

User Intelligence Mobile platforms allow companies like IGT to build user intelligence into its core operating systems. ‘In today’s connected world, you open that door to a property and the record of your recent visits to the property are available. Your room, restaurant, spa, and gaming preferences are technologymagazine.com

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immediately visible to your host and hostess.

This information can be used to tailor that unique guest or player experience for the consumer’, Kamm says. ‘That knowledge becomes this acute awareness of who the players are and what they do when they are on the property’. The same can be said for the traditional lottery channels around players’ favourite games.

While such a system may sound a bit like Big Brother, IGT recognises that today’s players seek out customised experiences.

‘It becomes this add-on that players appreciate’, Kamm says. ‘They say: “Hey, this person knows who I am. They know what I like. They're bringing my favourite drink.

They're offering me tickets to my favourite restaurants or shows”’.

Apart from customising its games and content and facilitating a unique player experience, IGT has been on the frontlines of enabling cashless functionality. Prior to the pandemic, the company had cashless product offerings on the shelf, but the market appetite at the time was more of a push than a pull in terms of demand. Today, Kamm notes, IGT finds wide market interest and cashless adoption from both players and properties across all gaming verticals, from casinos to lotteries.

Cashless Future Taking control of its payment methods, IGT was the first to bring cashless to the floors in Las Vegas. ‘It’s a fantastic evolution’, Kamm says. Cashless gaming machines aren’t just more sterile. According to IGT, e-wallets help the company promote responsible gaming and make handling cash more safe.

In some cases, the gaming experience is seamless as your mobile device—and therefore your profile—instantaneously connects with the game.

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1975

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Gaming & Entertainment Industry

12,000+ Number of employees

US$3.1bn Revenue

“ ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE IS ALWAYS MET WITH SOME LEVEL OF RESISTANCE BECAUSE [AN EMPLOYEE’S] WORLD CHANGES” PAT KAMM

VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS, IGT

IGT

With these digital developments, there’s no doubt that IGT is ahead of the gaming tech curve. On top of mobile apps and cashless transactions—not to mention AI and blockchain—the company has implemented new cloud capabilities. Led by some of IGT’s most senior architects, the company’s dedicated cloud center of excellenc has accelerated development an test environments.

While Kamm acknowledges that cloud operations trigger concerns by some around security, he emphasises that the architecture is secure and its critical systems redundant.

‘There are arguments you can make that the cloud is more secure than on-premise systems’, he says. ‘From an operational expense perspective, there are also benefits to

be realised. In the cloud, you pay for use versus maintaining on-premise systems that require licensing, environmental, and power costs’. In fact, IGT anticipates increased cloud adoption over the next five years and intends to lead the way forward.

Five years will come fast. In the gaming industry, technology is moving more rapidly than ever. ‘The operational tempo at IGT is unlike any other I’ve seen in the public sector’, says Kamm. ‘We’ve got more technicallysavvy players who understand and know what they want’. To keep up, IGT has automated several of its capabilities to expand the range and speed of its testing and development.

Ultimately, this has allowed the company to produce higher-quality products and shorten its time to market. technologymagazine.com

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“PLAYERS APPRECIATE A CUSTOMISED EXPERIENCE” PAT KAMM

VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS, IGT

AI Additional innovations include machine learning and robotics, both of which add to IGT’s pace of development. As Kamm puts it, the company couldn’t be more pleased with the result. ‘Once we run our code through the automation tools, we know that 85% of it has already been tested’, he says. ‘Each time thereafter, test teams write additional scripts for the balance, thereby increasing the breadth of testing over a shorter amount of time’.

As change accelerates, that manual 15% drops lower and lower. For some companies, this rapid change can unsettle team members. ‘Organisational change is always met with some level of resistance because an employee’s world changes’, Kamm reflects. ‘They think: “How is it going to impact me? Is it going to make my work easier or harder?”’.

But for Kamm, IGT’s recent innovations, including the functionality that enables funding bets with cryptocurrency, couldn’t be more exciting. ‘We’re changing not only to improve our operational efficiency, but also to architect the future of gaming’, he says. ‘The quality of our product suites across all channels is through the roof. Our time to market is faster than it’s ever been. It’s all very forward-looking’.

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Striking the Balance Between Cost, Complexity and Scale WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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Carlos Santos, Group CIO at JG Summit Holdings, talks digital transformation at scale, business-driven technology adoption, and partnering for success.

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“ JG Summit touches the lives of almost every Filipino” CARLOS SANTOS

GROUP CIO, JG SUMMIT HOLDINGS

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xecuting a successful digital transformation is a challenging prospect, regardless of the scale of your enterprise or the complexity of its operations.

Some digital transformations, however, are undoubtedly an even more delicate balancing act – between cost, complexity, sustainability, and scale – than others.

For Carlos Santos, Group Chief Information Officer at JG Summit Holdings, executing on the digital transformation goals of one of Southeast Asia’s biggest, most diverse conglomerates, represents a herculean endeavour. Santos, however, takes a brighter view of things. “We have investments across the banking, real estate, airline, food and petrochemical manufacturing, retail, and digital media sectors. We touch the lives of almost every Filipino,” he explains to me.

“Typically, if you're working for a largescale conglomerate, you're working in just one industry. At JG Summit, you're working across multiple business units in lots of different verticals. There are a lot of differences between the IT services at an airline compared to a retail organisation or a bank, so it's very exciting.”

Overseeing the IT operations for a multibillion dollar holdings conglomerate with assets in industries ranging from petrochemical manufacturing to retail and banking is, Santos admits, an exercise in managing complexity. “It's very complex as well because there's no one-size-fits-all solution. You have to be adaptable,” he says.

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While creating an overarching, group-level digital transformation strategy for a range of business units with diverse and individual needs might initially seem like a mutually exclusive set of goals, Santos explains that in reality it’s about striking “a very delicate balance. At the end of the day, the corporate function needs to support the business units, not the other way around.”

Managing Complexity at Scale In order to manage the complexity of implementing a digital transformation strategy across an organisation with the scale and diversity of JG Summit Holdings, Santos notes that there are “few things I think are really important.” First, finding the right partners is essential, both internally and externally.

“You have to partner with the right people, especially the CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs in our individual business units, to really identify where we can create synergies within the group as a whole,” he says. “Driving digital transformation has to be a collaborative process. I can't just tell all my CIOs that we're going to be implementing X platform – it doesn't work. We need to work together to figure out what's best for each business unit and how those business units can work together to create the synergies that I mentioned.”

CARLOS SANTOS TITLE: GROUP CIO INDUSTRY: INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LOCATION: PHILIPPINES

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EXECUTIVE BIO

Carlos “Caloi” Santos is currently the Group CIO and Corporate Shared Services Vice President of JG Summit Holdings. JG Summit is one of the leading conglomerates in Asia with investments in Food Manufacturing, Airlines, Retail, Real Estate, Petrochemicals and Banking. Caloi has more than 25 years of IT experience working in very diversified IT areas from Business Intelligence, IT Audit, ERP Implementations, Security, Customer facing Solutions and Plant Infrastructure and Network. He had 18 years of Procter & Gamble experience prior to joining JG summit. Lastly, he is very passionate in driving IT Professionalism in his region by adopting world class IT standards in Service Management, Project Management, Security and Infrastructure.

“ At the end of the day, the corporate function needs to support the business units, not the other way around” CARLOS SANTOS

GROUP CIO, JG SUMMIT HOLDINGS

JG SUMMIT HOLDINGS

JG Summit Holdings: Digital Transformation at Scale

Finding the right partners externally is also “very key” for Santos. “When I came into this role, I knew that there were a lot of things to be done, and I'm humble enough to say that we don't have the capability and capacity to be able to do them alone,” he reflects, continuing that, for him, “partnering means a win-win – not like a vendor/supplier relationship. I am very keen to partner because I know that, from a capability point of view, we don't have everything we need to succeed by ourselves at the speeds we need. If I didn't have the partners that I work with, I wouldn't be able to do all the things that I need to do.” In order to ensure successful partnerships, Santos exposes his strategic partners to “the highest levels of JG Summit’s management,” holding topto-top discussions between the heads of JG Summit’s partners and the conglomerate’s chairman and CEO to best identify the areas where innovation and synergies can be pursued.

Serving the Business Digital transformation for the sake of digital transformation, Santos explains, will never be as effective as a strategy driven by a desire to solve concrete pain points for the business and drive efficiency, as well as cost reductions. In order to be successful, he continues, it’s vital to “really interrogate why we as a group exist.”

Santos notes that “We exist as a group because of scale, and the value of what that means is mostly related to cost. But one of the other benefits of doing digital transformation across the whole group is that you're able to do things faster because you're able to leverage a bigger pool of knowledge and expertise.” Since his arrival at JG Summit Holdings four years ago, Santos has implemented a unified communications platform across the entire business – something that, he adds, was instrumental in JG Summit’s efforts to weather the COVID19 crisis last year. “Our employees are now technologymagazine.com

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“ Because of the diversity and scale of our business units, I can't afford to lose any time embracing digital transformation” CARLOS SANTOS

GROUP CIO, JG SUMMIT HOLDINGS

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able to collaborate virtually. We moved people away from Microsoft Office to adopt a full suite of Microsoft collaboration tools.

Even Microsoft has lauded how quickly we were able to implement that transformation,” he says. “We're definitely a leader in terms of cloud adoption in the Philippines.”

Now, Santos is taking a similar approach to pan-organisational analytics. “We spearheaded training in order to get people comfortable with using analytics dashboards and reports. We've started to ingrain these analytics into each of our business units, and are now using them as part of their day to day operations and strategy,” he says.

Santos and his team’s drive to identify common needs between different business units is also allowing various JG Summit’s different business units to digitally transform their ERP capabilities faster and more successfully than organisations half their size – and with significantly less complexity.

“We're already one of the few players in our market that is already in the process of fully upgrading to SAP S/4 HANA,” he says.

“We've already transitioned four out of eight business units to S/4 HANA, and we're already ahead of where we wanted to be in terms of our roadmap. I expect that, in the

CARLOS SANTOS

GROUP CIO, JG SUMMIT HOLDINGS

Infosys and JG Summit Holdings have partnered on three key projects so far, the latest being the company’s data centre migration and consolidation. “We had an eight month bidding process in the latter part of 2018 through to 2019, and Infosys won the right to move our whole data centre architecture to the cloud, both public and private,” says Santos.

DID YOU KNOW...

“ We're definitely a leader in terms of cloud adoption in the Philippines”

INFOSYS: PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS

As a result of Infosys’ expertise, and by leveraging the scale of JG Summit, the project – which migrated a disparate data centre architecture spread across multiple business units into a single, unified, cloud-based solution – “we were able to reduce cost, which also passed those reductions along to the individual business units,” Santos explains. “If you're a business unit and you do a data centre migration alone, you're going to pay more than if you do it as part of the group.”

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next few years, we'll successfully complete the transition for all of our business units. It's something that the team is very proud of.”

The Road Ahead Santos and his team have made incredible progress over the past few years, leaving JG Summit Holdings far better prepared to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities the future holds. However, there is still work to be done, and Santos is quick to point out that past successes are no justification for the department to 258

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“ Because of the diversity and scale of our business units, I can't afford to lose any time embracing digital transformation” CARLOS SANTOS

GROUP CIO, JG SUMMIT HOLDINGS

JG SUMMIT HOLDINGS

rest on its laurels. “Because of the diversity and scale of all our business units, I can't afford to lose any time embracing digital transformation.”

From sustainability – where JG Summit is embracing a rigorous ESG roadmap in order to “operate in line with the United Nations' climate goals” – to continuing change management, Santos is continuing to press ahead with his goal of creating synergies and implementing new strategies and solutions across JG Summit Holdings.

“Tech is an enabler rather than the primary

solution. Technology always needs to be looked at in terms of its ability to solve a problem for the business,” he reflects. “Once you really embrace that mindset, it really helps you understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. You start asking the right questions and getting more valuable answers.

Once you've grounded your approach in finding solutions to business problems, technological advancements abound.”

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Design and improve experiences with Qualtrics XM WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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The Qualtrics XM Platform is enhancing the experience of a company’s stakeholders to drive loyalty and growth

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hat’s the difference between customer experience (CX) and experience management (XM)? This is one of the first questions a client asks Qualtrics before using its software.

To clear up any confusion, Yusdi Santoso, Head of CustomerXM Solutions Strategy EMEA at Qualtrics is on hand to explain what XM is all about. “It’s all about identifying and closing experience gaps and designing new breakthrough experiences that your customers and employees want next,” is the simple answer from Santoso.

“XM is a business discipline to listen to your stakeholders - whether it's your consumer, employee, supplier or partner and use their insights to design experiences and continually improve them.

“The simple concept of listening and acting on the feedback of your customer was so alien to the corporate world I first entered in 2010, but the impact to the business is significant. That is what has kept me hooked, and two years ago I decided to join Qualtrics, a SaaS company that pioneered and championed the XM category.

“Qualtrics is one of the first, if not THE first, company that had the vision and understood the potential of breaking down the experience silos and the value of technologymagazine.com

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Title of the video

connecting the dots across all aspects of experience,” he said pointing out we live in a world where people demand more from products, brands, and experiences.

Qualtrics is used by organisations to launch new experiences based on powerful market research to uncover unmet customer and employee needs, and then to continually optimise those experiences as their market and their stakeholders change.

The future of CX is XM So, to be clear on the difference between CX and XM; legacy CX programs tend to rely on limited feedback from a handful of customers — usually directly after a transaction or interaction and tend to be focused on tracking a customer experience metric like CSAT or NPS. 264

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“ The simple concept of listening and acting on the feedback of your customer was so alien to the corporate world I first entered in 2010, but the impact to the business is significant” YUSDI SANTOSO

HEAD OF CUSTOMERXM SOLUTIONS STRATEGY EMEA, QUALTRICS

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YUSDI SANTOSO TITLE: HEAD OF CUSTOMERXM SOLUTIONS STRATEGY EMEA INDUSTRY: COMPUTER SOFTWARE IT

While XM is about listening to every stakeholder, whether external or external to the organisation - giving the company a detailed understanding of every individual and then using that to take the right actions to deliver an exceptional experience.

Qualtrics is the only software platform that helps brands continually assess the quality of the four core experiences of customers, employees, products and brands. The platform is powering experience management programs at 13,500 global clients - from Japan to Europe and the US including Disney, BMW and Barclays.

According to Santoso, the platform is easily scalable thanks to automated actions which include identifying the best way to close the loop with a customer, whether 1 to 1 or 1 to many. “We are moving away from manual follow-up to creating repeatable, automated actions to ensure that you can easily scale the impact across the organisation every time,” he said.

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM Yusdi heads the Customer Experience solutions for Qualtrics EMEA. Yusdi is a seasoned Experience Management and Strategy leader with over a decade of experience advising and working closely with senior management teams to set up, refine, and communicate XM strategy and relentlessly execute customer-centric transformation programs.

Prior to Qualtrics, Yusdi was part of the customer-centricity team of the Boston Consulting Group and more recently led the Professional Services delivery team and Product Strategy for Medallia.

Yusdi has advised various global organisations on strategic and transformational topics. He has more than 30 major XM transformations across various sectors under his belt.

Yusdi has a Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from NTU Singapore and PhD in biophysics from University of Oxford.

Ensure your company’s success

Here’s why you need a data-driven Experience Management program Business leaders often have an inherent desire to act on the data available to them. But in reality, less than half follow through.

As a human-centered company and partner of SAP & Qualtrics, we offer end-to-end services to our customers. This means you can rely on us to help you create a fully-integrated Experience Management program that combines your operational and experience data. Doing so allows you to make informed business decisions.

To get there, we advise our customers to: 1. Go one step further!

It’s not enough to only rely on your existing operational data that tells you what’s happening. By combining it with employee and customer experience data, you gain a much clearer view of your organization and begin to understand how and why your processes affect your performance.

2. Open up and be authentic!

Maximize the chance that your employees and customers provide truly meaningful insights. To do this, it’s important that you establish a feedback culture and provide respondents with a great feedback experience.

Go the extra mile with your program! Pay attention to how you internally communicate the program and design your survey carefully, so that it authentically reflects your organization.

3. Continuously improve!

Live dashboards help you get the most out of your combined operational and experience data. These enable you to make effective business decisions and should be regularly updated to ensure you get the answers to your questions.

Let’s build a program that provides a reliable basis for your decisions!

START NOW

www.sovanta.com

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“ That's ultimately what we want to do at Qualtrics: empower everybody in an organisation to design and improve experiences for customers and employees” YUSDI SANTOSO

HEAD OF CUSTOMERXM SOLUTIONS STRATEGY EMEA, QUALTRICS

“XM will increasingly define whether an organisation will be successful or not.

A company who doesn't care to listen to their customers and employees - or process feedback on its products and its brands - is a company that will fail,” commented Santoso.

“XM is now appearing on the executive business agenda and is being recognised by the C-suite. We are seeing “The Rise of The Chief Experience Officer” - a Forbes article written by Gerard Szatvanyi in 2019 - played out in many board rooms across the globe.

Businesses that are able to not only monitor experiences they deliver, but also to think ahead to where the gaps are and design the next experiences, will be the businesses that create breakthroughs and lead the market.”

which started back in 2002 when we first addressed the academic research field,” said Santoso.

“Qualtrics was trying to solve how to make market research a lot easier and more efficient by using technology. Since then we have applied this in other areas as we realised the same thing that we built for market research was relevant for the broader corporate needs, including in customer insights, marketing, operations, HR and procurement among other areas.

“We ask the questions such as; how do you engage with customers, employees or even partners or suppliers? How do you understand their voice and what is relevant to them? We help businesses to understand the “why” behind what happened, as well as helping them to design experience to answer the “what’s next” question.”

Human-centric approach with sovanta AG Helping to drive this human-centric approach for customers is Qualtrics’ partnership with sovanta. For the past two years, sovanta has helped Qualtrics’ customers to combine the power of experience data (X-data) gathered on

Calling on a market research heritage A focus on reaching out to the customer for feedback is not a new concept for Qualtrics which was founded in a garage in Utah nearly 20 years ago as a market research software company by co-founder Ryan Smith and his brother Jared and father Scott.

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CODY WEDL TITLE: HEAD OF EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT COMPANY: SOVANTA AG LOCATION: GERMANY Cody Wedl is heading the Experience Management Program and Business Development at sovanta AG. Throughout his 15 years of work experience he has over nine years working within the US DOD and NATO, culminating as a lead project and program manager. In 2015 he made a career transition to SAP and worked as a project and program lead within SAP Design/UX working on several strategic topics. In 2019 he came to sovanta AG and is working with colleagues and customers to realize the potential of experience management within digital landscapes built for the New Experience Economy.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Qualtrics with operational data (O-data) from enterprise systems such as SAP, to design and improve experiences for employees and customers. Through their heritage in delivering innovative business solutions based on SAP technology, sovanta is well placed to help clients to connect the X and O-worlds.

“The Qualtrics Partner Network (QPN) is made up of hundreds of organisations, and continuously expands the range of robust, scalable, and tailored experience management solutions available in the market,” said Santoso. “As a member of the QPN, we enjoy working with sovanta AG as they are like-minded and share our vision of bringing XM to the world.

“Combining the power of X-data gathered on Qualtrics with O-data from an existing

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“ We quickly learnt that Qualtrics is simply the best way to collect, analyse and act on the feedback that is provided by customers and employees. It's such a great platform, and allows us to infuse user experience into XM programs” CODY WEDL

HEAD OF EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, SOVANTA AG

enterprise IT landscape is very powerful.

Connecting the two is where the magic happens and where true value is added because you’re able to connect what’s happening with why it’s happening, in order to truly understand what’s driving positive customer experience. Having a partner like sovanta that can bridge the two worlds is critical for businesses to unlock the full value of XM.” Cody Wedl, Head of eXperience Management & Business Development at sovanta AG, said they follow the humancentric approach when building solutions for their customers and embraced becoming an end-to-end partner with Qualtrics.

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the feedback that is provided by customers and employees. It's such a great platform, and it allows us to infuse user experience into XM programs,” said Wedl.

“As an end-to-end partner, we can help companies scale their programs, no matter where they are in their level of XM maturity.

For example, we can assist a company that doesn't know a lot about XM, but understands the necessity for gathering feedback, whether it be from customers or employees. We can help them build a program from the ground up based on their requirements and their goals.”

“We can do this with any type of infrastructure, but being a Gold partner of SAP as well, our heart lies with them. We also have great solutions integrated with Qualtrics for companies who have a more mature XM program. The first is our User Experience Score which provides quantified 270

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“ A company who doesn't care to listen to their customers and employees or process feedback on its products and brands is a company that will fail” YUSDI SANTOSO

HEAD OF CUSTOMERXM SOLUTIONS STRATEGY EMEA, QUALTRICS

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User Experience data to measure business applications. The second is our e-commerce and HR chatbots which provide customers and employees the ability to provide feedback with a great user experience.

“The buzzword around all this is really following a data-driven decision-making process. We want to enable companies to combine the experience data with operational data to have that holistic perspective in order for them to act appropriately for their businesses. That's why we're in lockstep Qualtrics. We're a customer, as well as a partner, we believe in them so strongly.”

How Qualtrics retains its edge Santoso points out Qualtrics’ advantage originates from the company’s market research heritage giving it a “human-centered” focus. He cited three points that set it apart from the pack:

DID YOU KNOW...

THREE STEPS TO SUCCESS WITH QUALTRICS XM 1. Listen and remember Clients get to know every stakeholder so they can deliver hyper-personalised experiences.

When someone says something about their company they can capture it and store it in the XM Directory - Qualtrics’ single database for all customer and employee experience data.

“Listening more, asking less and retaining important information about customers and employees is the first step,” said Santoso.

2. Process and understand A powerful AI-powered analytics engine the iQ suite - works in the background 24/7 to uncover trends and insights buried deep within unstructured qualitative feedback.

“We enable organisations to get smarter, faster. Qualtrics generates specific insights for a specific person in the company so they can act,” said Santoso.

3. Build a culture of action Make taking action an automatic response, right across the organisation. From triggering actions that improve the experience of millions of customers, to alerting the right person in the organisation to what they need to do next, XFlow - Qualtrics’ zerocode workflow engine - makes taking action scalable.

“The successful companies are the ones that create a cycle of continuous improvement all across the organisation,” said Santoso.

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FOUR CORE EXPERIENCES OF QUALTRICS XM The four core experiences of Qualtrics XM focus on the following: Customer XM Experience Design - re-think and re-invent the experiences you deliver to your customers Experience Improvement - hunt down and close experience gaps to continually exceed customer expectations Employee XM Experience Design - design a workplace experience that drives engagement and productivity Experience Improvement continually improve the experience and respond to the changing needs of your people Product XM Experience Design - uncover unmet market needs and design the products people want next Experience Improvement continuously iterate and improve your products to stay highly competitive

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DID YOU KNOW...

Brand XM Experience Design - drive brand loyalty with new, disruptive experiences that delight Experience Improvement - respond to changes in your market through continuous improvement to the brand experience

1 Vision and investment for the long-term “We created the category and invested in the long-term which reflects in the way we think and position ourselves and the investment we are making. For example, a few years ago we acquired the Temkin Group, the leading thought leader in the field, and brought them in as our XM Institute. The XM Institute is focused on helping us and our customers to look ahead and be a few steps ahead of the curve.

“We developed the vision, and cascading that vision, to bring our cutting-edge perspective to our customers and get them to think about how they can propel their program forward. There was no playbook for

QUALTRICS

this, but we created the playbook and we are supporting our clients on that journey.”

As an example, the Qualtrics XM Institute has just recently launched a global Consumer Trends report, one of the largest studies of its kind with 18,000 participants across 17 industries and 18 countries, that looks at how consumer behavior will continue to change post pandemic - from ordering groceries to going to the gym, from dining to managing money. Our research helped our clients to understand what happens next and design the next set of experiences that customers want.

“ XM will increasingly define whether an organisation will be successful or not” YUSDI SANTOSO

HEAD OF CUSTOMERXM SOLUTIONS STRATEGY EMEA, QUALTRICS

2 Ability to execute “The ability to execute is really important, especially when you work with some of the world’s most ambitious companies.

Qualtrics has an extensive ecosystem of internal capabilities and partners - like Sovanta and others - that can support our customers in realising their XM vision. In fact, in their latest Magic Quadrant report, Gartner rated Qualtrics as the vendor with the best ability to execute on helping customers realise value from their XM program.”

A great example of this is how Qualtrics helped UK Post Office to become the #1 public service brand in 2020. The Post Office is the largest retail network in the country, with more branches than all UK banks and building societies combined. “With 11,500 branches, one of our biggest challenges is achieving a consistent level of service across the country. And it’s compounded by the fact we know soft skills are driving satisfaction. With Qualtrics, we’ve been able to pinpoint which areas our branches are struggling in, put together an action plan for improvement, drive up customer experience, and then share key learnings across branches,” said Jesus de Sousa, Area Manager of the Post Office. technologymagazine.com

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3. Technology at the heart “Technology changes a lot of our habits as humans, take the mobile phone for example which is responsible for shaping our modern habits - how we travel, how we communicate, how we work, and how we enjoy our leisure time. It works so well because it is so personal and embedded into your day to day. We believe XM is not just a corporate fad, but when embedded inside the business it is a platform that will help you transform the organisational culture and habit to be more experience-centric.”

Qualtrics recently announced that its customers are on track to complete a record 1.5 billion actions in 2021. With more than 130 out-of-the-box integrations with companies like SAP and ServiceNow, communications tools like Teams and Slack, CRM like Salesforce, and a ticketing system 274

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$763.5mn 2020 revenue

2002

Year founded

100+

Countries use the service

4,000+

Number of employees

3.6bn

Customer & employee profiles and growing

13,500+

Brands rely on Qualtrics XM

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like Zendesk - Qualtrics enables companies to automate experience management processes like combining operational and experience data and quickly act on it in the systems they use every day.

Taking stock during pandemic Santoso said that Qualtrics was integral to thousands of brands during the COVID-19 pandemic, empowering them to make fast decisions in times of crisis.

“We helped them to take stock and just checked in with our customers, employees and partners to say ‘how are you doing and how can we help you?’ We wanted to make sure they had all the help they needed. As businesses start to reopen in America and Europe we pivot into helping our customers to get back to business in a way that is safe and secure for everybody. We’re helping

organisations understand what their customers and employees want next.

“Take Royal Caribbean International, which expanded the use of Qualtrics in the last few months. Very few industries were hit by the pandemic as hard as travel and hospitality, and Royal Caribbean had to rewrite their playbook. And rather than pulling back like some of their competitors, what Royal Caribbean did is they chose to lean in and invest. Qualtrics has been instrumental in helping them to engage with their customers and employees and understand how a re-imagined cruise journey might look like post-pandemic.

“As we are, hopefully, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, we are helping our clients a lot to envision what the future looks like and create resilience as they move forward. technologymagazine.com

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“ We want to help organisations close experience gaps” YUSDI SANTOSO

HEAD OF CUSTOMERXM SOLUTIONS STRATEGY EMEA, QUALTRICS

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“The pandemic gave organisations permission to do things that they wouldn't have been able to do before and created this urgency, this burning platform, for them to do more drastic changes.

And what it means is there is more permission, and a window to dream up new experiences, and to try it out, and to optimise it.

“The companies that will be successful are the ones that grab this opportunity by the collar and run with it. There are a lot of industries that haven't thought about doing anything digital and are now being pushed into it. But rather than taking it as a necessary evil they can turn it on its head and say, can we really rethink what the experiences our customers, employees, partners, or suppliers really want to get from us? And how can we deliver that experience and exceed expectations?”

Looking ahead to how Qualtrics will stay agile to the needs of the consumer, Santoso reinforced the message that it was all about listening. “We will not stop listening and will seek to accelerate the cycle of listening, understanding, and acting which is critical to making a company agile,” said Santoso.

“Delivering great experiences is not about the next best thing, but it's about every single person, every single day, thinking about what one thing they could do to make life better.”

Santoso concluded: “That's ultimately what we want to do at Qualtrics: empower everybody in an organisation to make the improvement they need to deliver, to create and to deliver an exceptional experience.”

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BUILDING TRUST IN A DIGITAL WORLD WRITTEN BY: MELISSA KHAN

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY technologymagazine.com

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GBG Mark Mamone Group CIO, GBG

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CIO Mark Mamone discusses the impact of data intelligence in a post-pandemic world and what that means for the next normal

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n 2020, the world experienced a digital acceleration which had a massive impact on technology consumption. Mobile adoption soared amongst consumers, as did the importance of verifying identities, transactions and interactions online. As digital ecommerce grew, a wealth of new online accounts and services appeared across a wealth of industry sectors with digital strategies needing to adapt and looking to specialists for data and technology support.

While the world continues to grapple with the pandemic and it's now-prominent longterm effects, organisations such as GBG are working hard to provide safer ways to operate in a digital world using data & technology.

It will also see us step in and support companies whose technology foundation isn’t fit for purpose and work to drive the new hybrid digital operating model we’ll all have to become accustomed to.

In a time when most transactions and interactions have moved online, businesses are looking for technology to offer secure transactions, manage compliance, and enhance the user experience.

Meet GBG’s chief technology geek With a career spanning over three decades, it is only fair to mention that GBG’s technology office is in the right hands. Speaking of the role of the CIO on a board level, Mamone says "Previously, technology often felt like the second class citizen, the silent operational business enabler, whereas now, and especially with the barriers to entry being lowered for our customers, my role has become a key boardroom strategy and talking point.” Mark’s position and that of his near 370 strong global technology department has taken centre stage – whether it's the CTO driving the technology strategies and technologymagazine.com

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reviewing the next emerging trends, to the engineering teams who build the products and eventually the cyber security teams protecting systems and data. The team is focused on the customer to engage and make them feel safe, secure, and valued with their technology decisions. The conversation starts at the CIO level, where Mamone feels at home; he loved to code as a child, and still does as he is currently learning Rust and researching ‘mob programming’, so is happy to talk tech at any point. However, he also sees the bigger picture and the compliance accountability required to make decisions that affect the use and control of data mindfully.

A leader focused on collaboration and respectful challenge to drive tech change Mamone's leadership style is that of the 'Participative Leader', meaning he recognises 282

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the value in working together to reach decisions on solutions, ensuring he has the right team supporting him with the best collective capability. Mamone uses respectful challenge to encourage a sense of healthy and empowering debate within his team whenever he can. He is a firm believer that successful leadership comes from autonomy, and Mamone feels his role lies in effectively mentoring his team, providing the guide rails for them to make the right decisions, and becomes autocratic only when necessary.

A motivational leader and technical visionary, Mamone has spearheaded the strategic data and technology evolution at GBG, firstly to help cope with the pandemic and then over the long term, is setting the strategic focus for the delivery of a technology approach that keeps data at its core.

GBG

More power in data than ever before: The root of tech transformation COVID-19 saw global business fast forward ten years or more into the future which had a huge impact on technology transformation.

It required prioritisation on data access and securing it against a growing threat landscape, as well as reforming IT to ensure seamless access is available anywhere and at any time.

Mark feels this new digital platform is focused on two key drivers – the emergence of data alongside technology delivery that supersedes any human interference.

With data, Mamone and his team at GBG are clear on the responsibilities it has surrounding the use, care and availability of digital data , "When we think of data, we think of it from different perspectives. The first thing is making sure that we don't let

MARK MAMONE GROUP CIO, GBG

TITLE: GROUP CHIEF INFO OFFICER INDUSTRY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM

EXECUTIVE BIO

“ When we think of data, we think of it from different perspectives.

The first thing is making sure that we don't let our customers down on the care we put around that use of data, but also the trust that our customers place upon us in terms of securing that data”

MARK MAMONE

With over three decades of experience, Mark Mamone is a seasoned and experienced Chief Technology & Information Officer, having started his career as a software engineer and worked his way through the ranks to become GBG’s CIO. Mark is now an internationally published author in the tech space, but still retains the same enthusiasm for technology that he had as a child; he still, to this day, follows his realisation that armed only with a computer and their own ability, technologists around the world can create anything.

In more recent years, having delivered global transformations, Mark enjoys delivering exciting, innovative new products in the field of Digital Identity, Location Intelligence and Fraud.

We Champion Identity

Ping Identity is the Intelligent Identity solution for the enterprise. We enable companies to achieve Zero Trust identity-defined security and more personalized, streamlined user experiences.

ENGAGE HERE »

With its world-class network of partners, Ping Identity enables secure, authenticated digital interactions. As companies have moved online, they’ve experienced fraud, cyberattacks, and fake user profiles—all of which slowly chip away at online trust.

But Ping intends to change that. According to Loren Russon, Vice President of Product Management and Technology at Ping, he and his team build verified identity tools for the world’s largest enterprise customers in order to ensure their digital success.

Ping and GBG Partner Up In order to accelerate adoption of identity verification programmes, Ping recently announced that it will partner with GBG, a global specialist in digital identity. Each day, GBG serves 20,000 customers. ‘If we consider Ping’s customer journey— verify, register, trust, authorise—GBG is an excellent partner’, Russon explained. As the only identity vendor that champions the scale, performance, and security of large enterprises, Ping manages 2 billion identities and handles unusually complex identity operations. ‘But with GBG’s international expertise’, Russon noted, ‘we can build a frictionless customer experience’.

What Does the Future Hold?

Over the next 12 to 18 months, Russon anticipates that Ping and GBG will continue to improve the customer journey.

As remote work drives investment in identity verification, both companies aim to reduce fraud, help enterprise systems achieve regulatory compliance, and build a better digital future. ‘Trust is connectivity’, Russon said. He added: ‘Together, [GBG and Ping] look forward to bringing online trust to a global community’.

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our customers down on the care we put around that use of it, but also the trust that our customers place upon us in terms of securing their data." To meet this demand GBG has built two key operational initiatives – privacy by design and security by design.

Privacy by design is orientated around the different rules and regulations, and remaining diligent about compliance so that customers understand what data is available and how GBG uses it and for customers legal rights surrounding that information are preserved.

Security by design is making sure that security

“During the pandemic, we tried to ensure that individuals have the flexibility and are empowered to drive their own agenda and schedule” MARK MAMONE GROUP CIO, GBG

is “shifted left” and thought about from the outset and designed into our products and our processes, meaning consumers can be assured of the security of the systems and data and that the right level of protection around it is applied.

When it comes to the technology Mamone points out that it’s the foundation to manage user data. The right technology works to ingest the data received and then enhance it in a way that is usable and beneficial to the user. GBG uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to take data and by using advanced algorithmic techniques, create intelligence insights and value that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, enabling a level of technologymagazine.com

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“ Many years ago, technology often felt like a second class citizen, whereas nowadays, and especially with the barriers to entry being lowered for our customers, technology becomes the first conversation we have” MARK MAMONE GROUP CIO, GBG

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accuracy & quality that’s beneficial to its customers and their consumers. Speaking of GBG’s key differentiator and competitive advantage however, Mamone adds that there is a human element that sits atop the whole machine learning ecosystem.

He says “There are a variety of different techniques that we implement for human engagement; for example when you look at automation and the use of machine learning, we introduce human checks and balances into that process where it is sensible to do so, especially early on as we're proving out a new algorithm that we've built.” Human checks are integral in identifying and synthesising behavior signals, and oftentimes, these aberrations can be overlooked by machines. A common use case is for our products to highlight something as suspicious, for a human-inthe-loop to then check. However, humans can introduce disadvantages as well. At GBG, Mamone and his team understand that with human involvement comes a risk of introducing bias into the data pool, and this bias can unintentionally create havoc in how that data is then synthesised. It’s for this reason that we take special care in considering such impacts and explore solutions to avoid it.

Security remains key to trust in a digital world GBG continues to invest in security, offering to enable customers, to deliver frictionless digital experiences, whilst eliminating fraud and compliance risks online while safeguarding them from theft, and at the base of it all, keeping the cost of compliance to a minimum. As the operating environment shifts again to a more hybrid model GBG supports customers with a best of breed toolset and partners to

meet evolving customer demands. It’s that flexibility who can ensure users can transact online securely and with confidence serves us well and sees us build long-term partnerships with our customers.

Partnerships: An open source to technology Equally, with partnerships, the expectation is bi-directional, with Mamone adding that they let the experts be experts and this is the key to a successful strategic alliance.

Moreover, choosing a partner that fill a need for the organisation also frees up time for the organisation’s resources so they can focus on fulfilling their objectives

GBG at a glance: • Identity Verification & Validation (IDV); Verifying the person against who they say they are online. This can be used for claims-based validation, document-based validation, and biometric validation.

Through a combination of customerconfigured rules & thresholds, as well as algorithmic techniques • Location; providing high levels of fidelity & accuracy around location intelligence, being able to accurately help all customers in the world reach every customer in the world.

Allows users to free-type an address and find what they're looking for, anywhere in the world, in as little as 5 real-time key presses • Fraud; using data including metadata, behaviours and other methods of detecting whether a transaction is suspicious or not, and this can either offer more frictionless journey or request further verification.

GBG

and meeting their goals without worrying about the logistics involved in building an infrastructure from scratch. For example, using cloud partners, such as AWS, Azure, Google has given GBG presence across a number of markets, and that has helped it penetrate and serve locations that were previously not under its purview or jurisdiction. “Our ability to grow globally, and to satisfy more specific requirements like data sovereignty would have been much harder without the relationship with cloud partners.

They can and will always do better in all the geographies that we operate” adds Mamone.

The elastic nature of their scalability means GBG can save time, money and grow with their customers. Mamone says “The big cloud partners can accommodate considerable volumes that we see through our products – but it also means that when we don’t need an environment to be up and running, we can switch it off, reducing cost.” GBG’s focus lies on the application layer and building a great product, so we sit on top of that infrastructure and focus on the functional sides of the microservices that bring our products to life, helping GBG operate smoothly and seamlessly across borders.

In a way, GBG looks at strategic alliances as an open source to technology, where partners are brought on board to help GBG meet client needs that sit apart from their core offering. This ecosystem of partnerships helps GBG remain true to their customer’s needs while also providing the best version of their product without compromising on resources and time.

Fast to transition to remote working GBG is now supporting to do the same As many organisations are now adopting a workplace culture to meet the new normal, GBG has also introduced initiatives that look 290

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“ There are a variety of different techniques that we implement to include humans, we've introduced human checks and balances into automation and the use of machine learning, especially early on as we're proving out a new algorithm that we've built” MARK MAMONE GROUP CIO, GBG

GBG

at the overall wellbeing of employees at the current place of work – their homes. Mamone adds “We worked hard to ensure individuals have the flexibility and are empowered to drive their own agenda and schedule.” Mark runs the largest team at GBG, and so any and all business-specific strategies have been introduced in one way or another by the office of the CIO. Keeping in mind the macroeconomic landscape that COVID-19 has now presented to the world, customers want methods that are safe, secure and seamless.

This growing move to online means that products by GBG need to be able to cope with concerns of reach, security, compliance, scale and speed. To do this, GBG leveraged the cloud and the very latest technologies

within that cloud such as event-driven architecture, micro-services, containerisation and functions as a service (FaaS).

Speaking about trust and the backbone GBG has to play in that, Mamone emphasises that now is not the time to be complacent, adding further "You could have argued that Polaroid or Nokia had their respective markets sewn up. They didn’t. You could argue that there was no marketplace larger than Walmart – you’d be wrong. Tesla has disrupted Space. Amazon, online retail.

Netflix, online media. But if you think these can’t be overthrown, you’re wrong. It’s going to be hard but in the current climate, nobody can be complacent - we certainly aren’t.

That’s why we focus on our team members and the customer, with data and technology at the core of who we are.This is valued by a growing global customer base looking for secure solutions that can evolve to help them prosper and grow. It’s ever changing, and we’ll never get complacent.”

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CYBERSECURITY AND ZERO TRUST SOLUTIONS IN AN AGILE WORLD WRITTEN BY: JOANNA ENGLAND

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Creating a secure IT network that enables remote workers to operate with confidence is essential, says Brenda McCulloch, CISO of Teranet

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have enjoyed working from home,” says Brenda McCulloch, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Teranet, as we chat over Zoom on a Friday afternoon.

“I’ve discovered lots of local walking routes that I didn’t know existed before the pandemic. I’ve even taken up skiing something I wouldn’t have considered before.”

The world has changed, she acknowledges, and some of it has been for the better.

Although, her area of expertise - highlevel cybersecurity, has definitely faced its challenges of late.

The pandemic and the resulting increased digitisation of companies have unleashed a tidal wave of malware and ransomware cyberattacks across all industries globally.

Companies that hold sensitive information have been especially vulnerable to attack. And for many, 2020 resulted in the worst hacking and breach incidents on record.

McCulloch is responsible for the cyber fortification at Teranet, Canada's leader in the delivery and transformation of registry solutions, data and analytics, and platform modernization. As a provider of extensive expertise in land and commercial registries, data - the protection of it, is paramount to its success.

But her 20-year career in the IT industry now stands her in good stead, and she believes an organized team, careful prep work, and properly allocated expertise and resources are the keys to making sure companies maintain their security correctly in these challenging times.

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Brenda McCulloch CISO, Teranet

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“It’s always about balance,” she says, with a hint of zen. “Ultimately, it’s risk versus reward.

What you want to achieve out of a security programme and what you want to invest, versus what kind of exposures and risks that organization faces.

As a self-confessed computer nerd, McCulloch has been immersed in the industry since an IT module caught her attention at university. Following a 16-month internship at IBM, where she says she learned “an immense amount”, her love for the IT industry was cemented, and McCulloch enjoyed a number of high-flying roles.

“My past roles include positions where I was internally facing and externally facing, so I have consulting experience as well as building an in-house security practice from scratch.

“From those two experiences and perspectives, I have built a very balanced view of different ways to deliver a security protocol to different companies.

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“So, I bring that balanced view to Teranet, and I work in tandem very closely with the executives on that.

Corporate cybersecurity post-pandemic McCulloch has the onerous task of making sure Teranet utilises cutting-edge technology to maintain its robust and agile architecture against cyber threats - a challenge that she relishes.

As part of her role, she has built a security practice programme and team and also works on Teranet’s identity and access management multi-factor programme. She also oversees the security posture enhancing initiatives including the zero trust model development.

“The past 12 months have been an eyeopener for companies globally in terms of cyber awareness and breaches. Although, we keep saying this annually, to be honest with you,” she says.

TERANET

“ Richter helped us identify where we sat, as well as where we needed to go”

BRENDA MCCULLOCH TITLE: CISO INDUSTRY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SERVICES LOCATION: CANADA

BRENDA MCCULLOCH CISO, TERANET

Digital transformation The rush towards digital transformation has been instrumental, McCulloch says, in opening up companies to cyberattacks, whole populations have shifted to online operations, and that is causing a massive vulnerability.

“Last year, there were more vulnerabilities reported than in any other year,” she says.

“People are online more than ever before, and there are so many more digitized services. Even our kids are online. Literally, everyone is online.

That inherently will have risks associated with it.

EXECUTIVE BIO

“But I agree that cyberattacks do continuously get more sophisticated and advanced. Teranet understands that, and in order to stay current, we have to continuously invest in our security and that our practise can't stagnate.”

Ultimately, it's not the high flying glamorous side of being a tech genius that’s going to prevent a company from data haemorrhaging in an attack, says McCulloch, but the meat and potatoes of the job.

“We know that security hygiene, as well as operations, are not exciting. But they are very important. Because of competing new initiatives, we know that we have to inject additional resources to support them and not rely on repurposing existing resources that are dedicated to the hygiene of the operational activity.”

Brenda McCulloch is a proven security professional with over 20 years of experience and is the CISO of Teranet. Under her thoughtful leadership, Teranet has undergone an ambitious modernization of its security program. In a short period of time, she expanded Teranet’s security practice and capabilities, led critical security initiatives and programs to fruition, and effectively led the integration of new solutions and processes.

Brenda has a demonstrable track record in delivering forward thinking security strategy and programs in her previous roles as the Director of Information Security at IIROC and Senior Manager at Deloitte.

Brenda is an alumni of the University of Toronto and holds various leadership and security certifications.

TERANET

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Creating value and security, every step of the way.

TERANET

“ We know that security hygiene, as well as operations, are not exciting. But they are very important” BRENDA MCCULLOCH CISO, TERANET

McCulloch says that very often, the way companies maintain their hygiene routines on a day to day basis is the cause of unexpected hacks.

“I think many of the root causes of many breaches were because of persistent vulnerabilities, phished users, excessive privileges, etc.

“I think it's really important that when you augment new initiatives, that you also augment the resources at the same time,” she says.

Cybersecurity and the cloud The shift to cloud-based systems has been massively instrumental in creating greater vulnerabilities, points out McCulloch, and mainly, this has been caused by limited security resources.

She explains, “One of the challenges has been the movement to the cloud and the augmentation of security resources to support them, both on premise infrastructure as well as cloud services.

“Most organizations have limited security resources, so during the transition phase, the augmented resources and skills required to support the paradigm shift is always challenging - especially if you look at other initiatives that you want to accomplish at the same time.”

Ensuring that an organization remains abreast of novel cyber threats is a constant challenge, and only one that can be met when cyber security is considered a top priority. And at Teranet, this mentality is evident. “At Teranet, we have very strong executive support, and we meet regularly to discuss our posture as well as challenges that the security office faces,” McCulloch says.

Richter partnership and security The strategic partnership with Richter has also been highly instrumental in maintaining a secure footprint for the company.

McCulloch says Richter entered the security journey “very early”; it was this longterm partnership that has helped in Teranet’s cybersecurity strengthening process.

“They were engaged [in providing] a security maturity and threat risk assessment because of the security programme.”

McCulloch says it’s essential to know precisely where companies sit in maturity in order to know what needs to be achieved.

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“At the same time, Richter helped us based on what our client’s risk trauma level was. We needed to come up with an end game.”

She continues, “Richter helped us identify where we sat, as well as where we needed to go - and ultimately, that kind of risk assessment and maturity assessment has given us a view that we can execute on.

“It wasn’t a one-time thing for us. After we brought in Richter, we consistently looked back at this report and ensured that we were progressing against it. So it was a living document. It wasn’t a document we parked; the assessment helped us execute with a roadmap and a plan.”

McCulloch says the Teranet team still relies on their strategic partnership with Richter to maintain thorough assessments of their 300

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TERANET

In a traditional security model, you protect the doors of the home. You lock the doors to ensure no security breach occurs. You use a strong lock and you make sure only certain people have keys to the lock.

She continues, “Zero trust is different from that model because even if I have a key to the home and I live in the house, it doesn’t mean that I have access to every single drawer and cabinet in the house.

“But, if I live in a room in the house, I also have the key to my room door, and if I share a room with someone else, then I get only the keys to the areas and cupboards that I am allowed access to.

“We might both have keys to the closet, but I have access to the left drawers and my husband would have keys to the right drawers.

“It’s essentially a multi-layer security architecture. And that means if you have a breach at the front door, it doesn’t put the jewels in the closet at risk right away. Hackers will have to work harder to get to it. There are barriers to other controls to get to the more sensitive data.” security as they evolve. “We bring Richter back as changes within the business happen, for example, M&A, to make sure our threat risk assessment is updated. It's definitely a partnership between Richter and Teranet.”

Zero Trust modelling in cybersecurity Teranet is in the process of moving over to a zero-trust model in terms of its security architecture. This multi-layered solution that prevents and slows down the damage that can be wrought in a major breach has been instrumental in fortifying the company’s cyber strategy.

McCulloch uses an analogy to describe exactly how the architecture works. “So, in terms of a home, you’ve got the doors to your house and there are keys to the door.

ID cybersecurity solutions As well as the zero-trust security architecture, Teranet has adopted and is also developing a number of ID gateways via its access management multi-factor programme.

This means authentication, especially for sensitive data, requires several steps before access is provided.

“For privileged accounts, authentication to sensitive data, systems and apps should be more than just passwords,” says McCulloch.

“The difficulty in today’s landscape is that many providers are getting breached and hackers can stealthily steal a database of usernames and passwords which go on sale on the black market. This means the user is not the only person to have access to that account. technologymagazine.com

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She continues, “At Teranet we use more than one factor to authenticate our users for when they want to access sensitive data or systems or applications to our cloud single sign-on or VPN.” The authentication factors used by Teranet include the password, tokens on mobile phones and devices. The company is also exploring other types of authentication - such as biometrics.”

Security practice programmes As part of her work at Teranet, McCulloch has also been instrumental in building a security practice programme and team. The challenges involved in such a project often hinge on resources and executive-level approval.

“You’ve got to make sure the executives at the organization are mindful of the endgame - because the endgame is where they believe that investment must go - and a lot of the time the endgame is where the risk appetite ends.

Ultimately, says McCulloch, if companies have low investment but high-risk weakness items, that's something they should definitely address.

She says that executives have to be very aware of these programmes because there are so many non-security initiatives that are competing with the security initiative.

She says companies should also prioritise the roadmap to decipher which initiatives are more important in terms of security and that building an expert and responsive team is part of the challenge.

“I am extremely picky when selecting team members since we can only hire a certain number of security resources. We also want to ensure that each of the resources is able to deliver certain parts of the programme.”

Looking at the whole skillset and not just the technical expertise, is the main hiring practice for McCulloch. She explains, “A lot of people in 302

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the industry look at technical skills in terms of hiring. But I also look at soft skills because those are the ones that are more difficult to teach.

“The way a team interacts and communicates with each other, that’s extremely important because if you have too many casualties along the way you are not going to be able to do another initiative down the road. We want to make sure when we hire someone it’s for the long haul for sure.

She adds that authenticity is a critical element required of every team member.

“Lastly, once we bring on team members, we’re very considerate of their desires. We like to make sure that team members can bring their whole self and true self to work.”

Security post-covid McCulloch believes the hybrid working model is the answer to the bigger question regarding work/life balance, but with it, comes additional risk. Things are different now, she acknowledges, and companies need to move with the times and minimise their vulnerability footprints.

For businesses to operate in today's landscape, they need to be able to connect with others and transmit data. “It’s part of our core business to enable customers to access the data and applications they need,” she says.

“That comes with cyber risk so we have to leverage advanced malware detection technologies, automation, AI, adaptive policies and behavioural deviation detection as much as possible to optimise our resources.

“In the last year, we saw more advanced supply chain attacks, ransomware attacks, and more vulnerabilities than we’ve ever seen before. So we know that plugging every single hole at all possible times simply isn't possible and the reality is, we just need to make sure we are as prepared as possible to contain and mitigate the extent of a breach.” technologymagazine.com

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“For privileged accounts, authentication to sensitive data, systems and apps should be more than just passwords” BRENDA MCCULLOCH CISO, TERANET

Work may be more challenging than it's ever been, but McCulloch is irrepressibly optimistic - and embraces the new remote working culture, despite the issues it presents.

“Post pandemic, we really don’t know how it's going to look. So we just want to be ready with our strategy. If we take the scalable approach we can ensure the entire workforce can operate from home - or any location,” she says.

And working from home is a pleasure that suits McCulloch well. “I personally am thankful I’ve had this chance to have more family time and the opportunity to try new things,” she says.

“These days when I finish work, I don’t have a long and late commute. I simply shut down my computer and my son and I might go for a bike ride together. It’s a simple but wonderful pleasure that we never would have been able to enjoy before because working life didn’t allow for such mid-week activities.”

Through the pandemic, innovations have been discovered, solutions to problems are steadily being solved, while families can have more time together. It’s not difficult to see why McCulloch is pleased to be part of a company that is embracing the change.

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AUDITS AND AI IN A TIME OF UPHEAVAL: PRGX WEIGHS IN WRITTEN BY: ELISE LEISE

PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE

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Andy Green, PRGX Vice President of Global Infrastructure and IT Operations, talks operational excellence and technology transformation

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Andy Green, VP Global Infrastructure & IT Operations, PRGX

verpayments, missed discounts, shipment shortages: these errors are not strangers to companies coping with the aftershocks of COVID-19. While supply chains have been hit by delays and backups over the past year, companies like PRGX have stepped up. According to Andy Green, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and IT Operations at PRGX, the source-topay audit industry has never witnessed such growth, as auditing capabilities have taken on new importance.

After all, supply chains in 2021 crave end-to-end visibility. PRGX is a recovery audit and spend analytics company that looks at source-to-pay cycles for large national and multinational companies. They target profit leakage points: in other words, any shortages, errors, or overpayments that traditionally fall through the cracks. Their modus operandi is all about accuracy and finding what companies miss.

As Green noted, recovery audit is an incredibly data-heavy field and requires an impressive amount of infrastructure. But over the past 50 years, PRGX has continually evolved and improved to stay ahead of new technologymagazine.com

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digitalisation norms. “We started back in the day when there were literally boxes of paper delivered to the office,” Green said.

“Somebody would sort through that paper and look for points of leakage by physically reviewing documents.”

Now the world turns at a more rapid pace. When customers request an audit, their transaction data could include several hundred terabytes or even petabytes. “It’s not uncommon,” Green told me, “to have databases that are billions of rows deep.

Analyzing such large volumes of complex data requires automation and industry expertise, which is why we pair our advanced technology platform with people who are very familiar with that specific client to maximize our ability to find leakage.”

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difficult, if not impossible. “If we go back to supplier one and tell them that we overpaid them a million dollars based on the discount program they had in place from 2019,” Green explained, “they’re going to say, what do you expect me to do about it now?” Often, this forced companies to enter negotiations and reach settlements that involved discounts on future purchases a solution that struck them as far from ideal.

AI and automation have since changed the playing field. PRGX is leading the digital transformation, aspiring to automate as much as possible. Rather than being a post-event auditor, they seek to be a pre-event partner, helping companies identify and mitigate potential points of leakage. “PRGX’s transformation,” Green said, “is occurring as we speak.”

Most companies would benefit from this expert level of digitalisation: unprecedented

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agility, immediacy, and efficiency. After I inquired how PRGX uses AI to bring advantages to their client companies, Green answered with characteristic enthusiasm. “[AI] has been a huge time saver,” he said.

“It no longer takes one person to do this and then pass it off to someone else, and someone else after that. Now, because of the efficiencies of automation and computing power, we can run these [processes] in parallel. A one-month transformation is now a matter of days or hours.”

Updating digital processes allowed PRGX to decrease the gap between the time when data arrives and when they identify areas of profit leakage. AI also allowed them to look for duplicates and common data errors within their audits. “We went from a billion rows in a spreadsheet to a hundred million rows,” Green said. “And now, through AI, we’re able to say: we know these are good claims.”

From that point, their auditor can take the data and examine it in a compressed

“ When you’re transforming, people often get left out of the equation. So I make sure that my people have access to the tools, training, and resources to understand these new technologies. They’re not employees; they’re team members”

ANDY GREEN TITLE: VP GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE & IT OPERATIONS COMPANY: PRGX LOCATION: US Andy Green serves as PRGX, Vice President of Global Infrastructure Support and Operations.

He leads the development and transformation of a global IT operation that manages SaaS solutions and IT services for Amazon, Kroger, Target, Walmart, Tesco, and other global retail leaders. He is responsible for the delivery of IT services including Software-as-a-Service, Data Centers, Network Operations, Cloud, Security, Compliance, and DevOps. Prior to joining PRGX, Green was Senior Director of Cloud Infrastructure for PTC where he led global IT operations that managed SaaS solutions and IT services for Coca-Cola Refreshments, Dell, Austal, US Navy and other manufacturing, retail and defense organizations. In 2015 and 2016, he was recognized for excellence in service delivery.

In addition to various technical certifications, he holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Florida Atlantic University. Andy graduated with honors from FAU.

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window of time. This, according to Green, is where data still requires a human touch. “[AI] is really about empowering people to do what they’re good at rather than complete every task manually,” he said.

“But if you think about what [examining an audit] takes, it’s as much an art as it is a skill. You can’t just take someone off the street and put them in front of a dataset.”

To make tough decisions about which new technologies to use, Green defaults to placing PRGX clients first. “What’s the business trying to achieve?” he asked. “Is it additional revenue? Is it increasing the client pool size? We’re focused on what the business wants.” Moving to Cloud PBX — a virtual, internet-based business phone system - for example, was a lifesaver. “In early 2020, when we started working from

home, we didn’t lose communication.

It’s that kind of empowerment and desire to serve our clients that really makes us successful.”

Given his focus on people and building strong teams, it’s no surprise that Green advised not to overlook the personnel aspect of digitalisation. “When you’re transforming,” he said, “people often get left out of the equation. But the last thing I want to do is alienate anyone as we start this journey, so I make sure that my people have access to the tools, training, and resources to understand these new technologies. They’re not employees; they’re team members.”

Improvements to audit processing now occur on an hourly basis. “The technology is changing,” Green said. “What you’re

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“[AI] is really about empowering people to do what they’re good at rather than complete every task manually. Auditing is as much an art as it is a skill” ANDY GREEN

VP OF GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND IT OPERATIONS, PRGX

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trying to do tomorrow may not be the same thing you’re trying to do the day after. If you build a vision of what you want your environment and your expectations to be in three years, that’s fantastic. But you have to be flexible in your platforms and design because the world will change.”

To balance present objectives with future plans, Green seeks out not technology vendors but partners. “I don’t work any other way,” he said. “I can’t just bring a vendor in and ask them to give me technology. I want partners that understand what we’re trying to become.

I like to have faith in a partnership and work with people that I trust.”

“I can’t just bring a vendor in and ask them to give me technology. I want partners that understand what we’re trying to become” ANDY GREEN

VP OF GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND IT OPERATIONS, PRGX

As for long-term goals for the PRGX team, Green hopes to focus on streamlining their technology pipeline. “Rather than having one focal point, we’re currently trying to keep legacy processes alive while moving toward the future.”This time next year, PRGX aims to be entirely focused on enhancing audit delivery and the end-user experience.

“We’re working on that right now,” he assured me. “People will have access to our audit services, whether we’re backin an office or not.”

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ON A MISSION TO HELP TO BUILD A BETTER INTERNET WRITTEN BY: LAURA V. GARCIA PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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Harnish Kanani Chief Customer Officer, Cloudflare

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Serving four million customers around the world, Chief Customer Officer, Harnish Kanani of Cloudflare is on a mission to build a better Internet for all

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everaging its people and empowered by critical partnerships, Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better, safer Internet. As one of the world’s largest networks, Cloudflare believes its duty is to help protect the most vulnerable voices and most critical institutions on the Internet.

It’s a mission Chief Customer Officer, Harnish Kanani, takes to heart, nurturing and empowering a successful team by ensuring they have the tools they need to proactively service some of the world’s biggest companies around the clock and the globe.

His aim is to provide not only the best service but, as he puts it, the most awesome service.

“At Cloudflare, I have the opportunity to serve our customers and deliver the most awesome customer experience possible. I see my role at Cloudflare in three prongs.

Number one, I have to get into the shoes of my customers. I have to feel their pain. I have to imagine what they are going through when solving a business problem or their companies or environments are under

“ The Internet was brilliantly architected, no doubt about it. However, it wasn't architected for today's performance, security, and reliability considerations” HARNISH KANANI

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, CLOUDFLARE

attack. It's the only way for us to understand what they are going through,” says Kanani.

“Number two, once we understand what our customers need from us, the next part of my role includes working with my team members, mentoring and coaching them to go beyond the status quo”.

“The third part of my role is to make sure that we have systems, processes, technology, and tools that allow my team to get proactive in delivering that awesome experience”.

“What is also important as we build organisations and teams around the world is to make sure we incorporate the right culture.

What's most important to us is that we serve our customers in a proactive manner and that we optimise their experience. What that entails is that every day when you come to work, you wake up to serve your customers in the best possible manner”.

“We are in a subscription economy, which means that the customer always has a choice either to leverage applicational services from us or from our competitors

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Cloudflare, on a Mission to Help to Build a Better Internet

“ When a situation arises with a customer that we need to connect with, Gainsight provides us critical centralised data, repositories, and reporting dashboarding to effectively help us serve our customers” HARNISH KANANI

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for cybersecurity and networking solutions, and they are coming to us. When you are building a global culture, you need to make sure that your customers are taken care of 24/7 around the world because their people, their customers, and the people who use the services and products are around the world and at all times of the day. So it’s important to wake up every day to serve our customers. And that culture of customer success is what we are trying to build around the world”.

Cloudflare, Bringing Safety to the Cloud Today, approximately 17% of the Fortune 1000 companies are customers of Cloudflare. Each and every day, Cloudflare blocks approximately 70 billion cyber threats each day and powers approximately 25 million Internet properties.

“Cloudflare has a very simple yet ambitious mission. Our mission in life is to make the Internet environment better

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for everyone. There is no question that the Internet is the lifeblood of every business.

We use the Internet for collaboration.

We use the Internet for commerce, and we use the Internet for communication.

The Internet was brilliantly architected, no doubt about it. However, it wasn't architected for today's performance, security, and reliability considerations”.

Kanani says that for decades there were many hardware vendors who designed hardware boxes that were meant to alleviate the problems that the Internet had around performance, security, and reliability. These hardware boxes could be put on-premise situations, behind firewalls, or in data centres, and were in theory meant to alleviate the problems of the Internet.

Until ‘the cloud’, when companies suddenly began to move security and work processes to the Internet. “As that began to happen, more attacks began to happen, and things began to get more complex”.

Harnish Kanani is Cloudflare’s Chief Customer Officer.

Cloudflare runs one of the world’s largest networks which provides security, performance, and reliability to Internet applications, including websites and APIs to corporate networks and remote teams. Today Cloudflare has more than four million customers, including 17% of the Fortune 1000.

Harnish has spent his career working with enterprise customers large and small and within networking and security. He joined Cloudflare after working with Palo Alto Networks, RedLock Security, and CipherCloud, overseeing post-sales and customer success, and with Ernst & Young and Tata Consultancy Services as a management consultant.

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“Suddenly, these hardware boxes that at one point in time were serving the needs of enterprises around the world could no longer handle the traffic or the complexity of the attacks. It began to build an architectural shift at the network layer, and culture was at its forefront. What Cloudflare did is build a highly scalable and efficient global network platform that delivers secure network services. This network became the backbone of our platform. The job of Cloudflare’s network service is to make sure that cloud applications are secure and that they are delivered in a fast and efficient manner. They are highly scalable, and they are reliable”.

“We are now able to deliver applications, products, and services in a very seamless manner and with less cost. All of this helped to alleviate the industry problems that the

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“ Today, 17% of the Fortune 1000 companies are customers of Cloudflare. We block on average 70 billion cyber threats every day and power approximately 25 million Internet properties on our network. We are proud to be in this business” HARNISH KANANI

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, CLOUDFLARE

hardware boxes brought to the cloud and to the transformation journey. There is no other solution that can help customers deliver their applications and Internet properties in a fast, reliable, and secure manner”.

“Today, approximately 17% of the Fortune 1000 companies are customers of Cloudflare. We block an average of 70 billion cyber threats every day and have approximately 25 million Internet properties powered by our network. We are proud to be in this business”.

“I can't emphasise enough the importance of cloud security solutions. Take, for example, the Colonial Pipeline attack that suddenly exposed millions of people worldwide to the impact cyber threat has on our day-to-day lives. It's a really big concern of mine right now that we see more and more of these cyber attacks on a regular basis. In the last six months, I would say we've seen a real uptick in the global attacks that specifically are happening around critical infrastructure. We are obviously working around the clock to make sure our customers are safe. We are making sure that we can become thought leaders in the industry and guide the industry as well”.

Gainsight, a Key Partner in Customer Success “The partnership with Gainsight is of premier importance to Cloudflare. Around the world, people want to make sure that we are delivering our services in a very proactive manner and that we are there for our customers 24/7. As a result, my customer success team needs to have all of the information around a particular customer in a centralised place. Gainsight is one of those technologies that we use and have embraced because Gainsight allows us to pull all of that data in one central place”. technologymagazine.com

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“ The job of Cloudflare’s network service is to make sure that cloud applications are secure and delivered in a fast and efficient manner, and that they are highly scalable and reliable” HARNISH KANANI

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“We use Gainsight to have visibility into how our customers have purchased our services and products and ultimately how they're utilising these offerings and the return on investment they're getting from our offerings. We also use it for tracking usage and adoption of our services by our customers.

Gainsight helps us to see how connected they are, who their customers are, and what the engagement is like with our company.

That allows our customer success team to proactively reach out to customers around the world. When a situation arises with a customer that we need to connect with, Gainsight provides us critical centralised data, repositories, and reporting dashboarding so we can effectively serve our customers. The

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best part is, we are alerted when something is wrong with a particular customer situation.

We have gained a lot of insights so far, and we continue to embrace the technology. It's a critical part of making our customer service team efficient and scalable around the world”.

Cloudflare, Nurturing Businesses of the Future Cloudflare believes in helping to nurture startups and helping to create businesses of the future. Partnering with organisations such as DigitalOcean and the Hatch program, which helps developers create, launch, and scale their startups, Cloudflare for startups offers cloud-first services for up to 12 months free.

Project Galileo June is the seventh anniversary of Cloudflare’s Project Galileo, which offers free cybersecurity services for nonprofits or organisations working in the fields of arts, human rights, civil society, journalism, or democracy. “All of these organisations around the world have a voice on the Internet, but it is possible that without Cloudflare services, these voices could be suppressed on the Internet. We have approximately a thousand members and participants and have literally stopped millions of cyber attacks and cyber threats on these Internet properties such as their websites. And we are proud to be in partnership with them”. technologymagazine.com

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The Athenian Project Election websites serve a powerful role in democratic elections, yet election websites are often the targets of attacks and face vulnerabilities. Helping to meet Cloudflare’s mission of creating a better, safer Internet, the Athenian Project protects against these vulnerabilities.

Cloudflare created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration.

The COVID-19 Response Kanani says COVID-19 has been a test for the cyber resilience of corporations around the world. “There are no longer walls to a company.

As companies began to work from home, cyber attackers started to become more sophisticated and skilled in their capabilities and tactics. They adapted. Attackers no longer go after website properties. What we've begun to see is that they've begun to infect and attack the critical infrastructure behind each of the companies. As employees work from home, they bring increased vulnerabilities and an increased level of attacks”.

“This put a strain back on the IT and the security teams. Cloudflare responded by providing information and messaging through blog posts and, at the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic, began to offer a borderless security access product for free. We’ve seen huge demand, and it was no surprise that on-premise networking and security solutions have now moved to the cloud at a much faster speed. Security models have to evolve in this cloud-first world, and Cloudflare is here to help lead the way”.

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POWER EVOLVING DATA CENTRE

WRITTEN BY: DAN BRIGHTMORE

PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Kohler is driving innovation in power systems with a sustainable approach to manufacturing that delivers guaranteed uptime

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ohler is meeting the challenges posed by mission critical facilities with a focus on innovation across a wide range of data centre applications. Serving the diverse needs of its customers is key when increasing processing and power density in restricted locations while continuing the drive to improve sustainability and efficiency.

Power Across Generations Industrialist John Michael Kohler established the business that still bears his name in 1873.

Initially developing farm machinery, the company went on to manufacture a host of kitchen and bathroom appliances with its products used in homes across the word.

Kohler first entered the power business back in 1920 providing generators to farmers who weren’t yet connected to the grid. Over the past 100 years the company’s offering expanded to include switchgear, ATS and now UPS. As the largest private power generation manufacturer in the world, Kohler has more than 100 years of experience in industrial power and benefits from the integration of global R&D, manufacturing, sales and distribution. The company’s worldwide distribution locations provide personalized customer support and technical assistance 24/7. A consistent, world class approach to customer service sees all of its equipment supported by a global network of certified

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“ Is it a revolution where we're going to throw out diesel generators and move to hydrogen fuel cell technology, or is it evolution?

Are we going to continue to tweak and refine and make our existing products more efficient so they run cleaner and greener?

The answer is both” SEAN FARNEY,

DIRECTOR, DATA CENTRE MARKETING, KOHLER businesschief.com

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Kohler: uninterruptible power

Kohler distributor technicians and backed by factory-direct technical support.

“We have a full ecosystem of data centre power products,” adds Sean Farney, Director of Data Centre Marketing. “We've been providing generators and power systems to all types of mission critical and commercial customers, as well as residential customers for many years - everything from a residential home generator for back up, to the systems that power facilities like hospital, medical care, university and municipal, to keep power running if there's ever an issue with utility.”

the data centre industry worldwide. Kohler’s PODs (Power Optimised Designs) for mission critical facilities are designed with standard and reliable components, and available in a variety of configurations. Whether you need to secure the power supply of your data centre or simply replace your current backup generators, customizable power options are available. Kohler’s qualified technical teams guide customers towards the right technical solution for each project, based on individual requirements and regulations. Stackable and rackable solutions can be deployed with short lead times…

Kohler - Power Optimised Designs for Data Centres (PODS) Inspired by collaborations with its clients, Kohler has developed dedicated solutions for

• Density PODs: Walk-in enclosure/canopy or 45ft container. Best power density on the market. For Hyperscale data centres up to 500MW

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“ We aim to collaborate across the industry within a sphere of knowledge leadership to continue to develop new products with the environmental responsibility that reflects our sustainability goals”

SEAN FARNEY TITLE: DIRECTOR, DATA CENTRE MARKETING COMPANY: KOHLER INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY

SEAN FARNEY,

DIRECTOR, DATA CENTRE MARKETING, KOHLER

Hyperscale Kohler’s growing focus on data centres reacts to the sector demanding more and more power gear to the point where it’s now one of its biggest customer areas globally. “Hyperscalers spend $150bn a year in Capex to build new facilities,” notes Farney of a sector whose global footprint is growing at a rate of 20% per year. “They’re an important global customer segment so we're meeting that demand with new products. A perfect example is our 4MW Gen Set, the KT4000 series is the largest on the market in the world right now. It’s really specific to Hyperscale data centre operators who are building 100-200MW facilities. This approach complements our full product set from 100kW now up to 3.2MW.

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• Modular PODs: Skin tight enclosure/canopy or 40ft container. Stackable, rackable and ready for quick deployment. For Regional data centres up to 25MW • X-Press PODs: Skin tight enclosure/canopy or 20ft container. Compact and with a short lead time. For Edge data centres up to 5MW.

Sean heads up Marketing & Business Development for Kohler's burgeoning data center power business.

Previously, Sean built and ran Microsoft's Chicago Container Data Center, was the Founder of Edge Data Center company Ubiquity Critical Environments and managed technical operations for startup data center provider 7ticks (Intercontinental Exchange). Sean's work has been highlighted in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Data Center Frontier & others. He speaks frequently at industry events such as 7x24 Exchange, Data Center Dynamics, The Uptime Institute Symposium, IMN, CRE, and Bisnow data center conferences. Sean holds a Master's degree in Information Technology from Northwestern University and received his Bachelor's degree from Miami University. He shares his passion for learning and research as an adjunct instructor teaching graduate students about IT infrastructure at Northwestern's McCormick School of engineering.

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Our World – Kohler

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“And now there's a new term: ‘Gigawatt Campus’, which to me is shocking because 10 years ago, when I was running data centres for Microsoft, our 120MW facility was considered huge! The stakes have been raised so Kohler is meeting that need with larger scale products and you'll see continued development from us across the space.”

Recent Synergy research calculated a US$1.5bn uptick for the Hyperscalers due to the global pandemic which Farney notes

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shows the resilience of the sector and how it’s growing: “If this new modality of how we work remotely from home and anywhere does become the new normal with less interaction in office environments, then we will see continued impact to the upside for data centre builds and providers.”

Expansion Kohler has broken ground for its new manufacturing facility in Mosel, Wisconsin where it is developing 155,00 square feet

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“Our 4MW Gen Set, the KT4000 series, is the largest on the market in the world right now. It’s really specific to hyperscale data centre operators who are building 100 and 200 megawatt facilities” SEAN FARNEY,

DIRECTOR, DATA CENTRE MARKETING, KOHLER

A GRACIOUS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE “We want to do things a little bit differently in the industry,” says Kohler’s Director for Data Centre Marketing Sean Farney. “I bring that perspective as a former customer.

We pay attention to our customer's needs, particularly around their value chain with many of our products - how we offer them and how we deliver them. It sounds kind of simple, but it's complicated; a big change, and not necessarily what a lot of our customers experience today. Currently it’s more of an industrial factory manufacturing experience where your products are ordered and delivered; but there's a lack of customer intimacy. We focus on that intimacy. One of the key components of Kohler culture is driven by our mission statement we are very clear around one of our key goals and that's a gracious customer experience. We want to delight our customers, something we’ve been doing for 148 years, and if we continue to do that successfully we’ll build strong relationships for the future.”

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221AU5062 - Global Power Partner

of manufacturing space to keep up with demand. An aggressive expansion roadmap will see increased overall production capabilities for power products and test capabilities. “We're also going to make it easier for customers to do factory witness testing and access our engineering consultant expertise at our new customer experience centre,” adds Farney. “We're very excited about this expansion and it shows our commitment to be all in for the data centre sector. Our manufacturing facility in Brest, France continues to grow and we're increasing our US presence alongside capabilities to supplement what we do in Asia.”

Trends How will Kohler be reacting to trends across the data centre panorama to meet

the needs of its customers? “There are some fascinating innovations going on in the data centre field and not necessarily influenced by the fallout from Covid,” explains Farney. “The likes of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon - have robust R&D budgets and teams of PhD level electrical and mechanical engineers working on better ways of doing things because for the Hyperscalers, when you're running gigawatts of critical load, small tweaks can make a really big difference. At Microsoft, we would change the ambient temperature in a co-location facility by just a few degrees and see thousands of dollars of savings. Hyperscalers are incentivised by the green dollar, but also by the push for sustainability. Really forward-looking leaders like Christian Maier at Microsoft are experimenting with immersion cooling, for technologymagazine.com

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example, using evaporative and conductive cooling of liquid to reduce or increase the ability to exhaust heat. Hats off to the data centre leaders for funding this research and looking ahead at different ways to be more sustainable, to be more efficient, and to run their operations tighter.”

Innovation “It's innovate or die,” maintains Farney.

“That never changes... We need to continue to drive new product growth. Everyone knows the importance of generators for mission critical facilities. They have contractual agreements and binding SLAs in those contracts to guarantee uptime.

Data centre operators are financially incentivized to retain that uptime and make sure the facilities don't go down.

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power to ensure that. We recently saw the importance of generators in the US in Texas, when they experienced power grid issues, but the data centres stayed up because they were running on diesel generators. It’s very important to continue to innovate and appreciate the importance of the growing role of backup power in data centres in general.”

Sustainability Kohler is investing heavily in its R&D to develop alternatives to diesel generators.

“We’re exploring parallel options with new technologies like hydrogen fuel cells,” reveals Farney. “We like to innovate under the umbrella of sustainability. Is it a revolution where we're going to throw out diesel generators and move to hydrogen fuel cell technology, or is it evolution? Are

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we going to continue to tweak and refine and make our existing products more efficient so they run cleaner and greener?

The answer is both.”

Kohler pledges to continue to innovate and develop revolutionary new products while increasing the efficiency of existing products to adhere to the EPA Tier 4 final specification in the US for emissions. “We’re changing approaches to maintenance routines and testing procedures,” adds Farney. “We’re aligning our engine technologies so we can help data centre operators do their testing and operations and maintenance in a cleaner, greener way.”

Farney acknowledges that data centres are power hungry; they currently consume almost 3% of global power as they react to the culture of our insatiable appetite for technology and connectivity. “We’re living

in what I call a data centred economy,” he says. “Everyone starts and ends the day with a data centre whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter. As we move through this fourth industrial revolution our need for bits on the wire and images in the cloud increases. Data centre providers react to that and they're growing their footprint accordingly. At Kohler we want to help them plan their power sources in the most sustainable ways possible. We’re looking at engine technology and operational routines so we can further reduce emissions and diesel fuel consumption.”

Kohler is using sustainability as a platform to drive both its new product development and for the enhancement of existing solutions. It collaborates across the industry within a sphere of knowledge leadership to continue to develop new products with the technologymagazine.com

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“We’re living in a data centred economy…

Everyone starts and ends the day with a data centre whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter. As we move through this fourth industrial revolution our need for bits on the wire and images in the cloud increases” SEAN FARNEY,

DIRECTOR, DATA CENTRE MARKETING, KOHLER

environmental responsibility that reflects global sustainability goals.”

CSR Sustainability is a true north for Kohler and one that aligns with its CSR initiatives worldwide. Globally, it is committed to reducing water consumption and helping developing countries where clean water is not abundant. It is also providing water solutions after natural disasters with filtration systems for purification, portable showering and sanitation all part of Kohler’s efforts. Informing and guiding these efforts are initiatives like Innovation for Good (IfG) which seeks to take Kohler’s associates out of their comfort zone to inspire brainstorming new solutions to global power and water issues.

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of water saved through sales of KOHLER WaterSense labeled products • Impacted the live of over 900,000 people via safe water sanitary initiatives Allied to this, Kohler has implemented a DfE (Design for Environment) program to incorporate environmental impact analyses and metrics into every NPD (New Product Development) project and EPD (Environmental Product Declarations) initiative for disclosure. EPDs are developed by manufacturers based on life cycle inventories and provide quantitative, third-party-certified details of a product's projected environmental impact from cradle to grave. Some manufacturer EPDs use industry averages in their calculations, while Kohler utilises a best-practice approach that compiles company-specific data to calculate the footprint of each product over its complete lifecycle.

Meanwhile, in adherence to tier 4 standards, Kohler has launched diesel generators capable of meeting the

KOHLER CO.

Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) strictest emissions guidelines, utilising the markets most simple system, yet sized up to 3250kW to meet the needs of large and complex installations such as data centres.

Building on history “We’ve got a great story to tell built on 148 years of history,” maintains Farney. “Kohler

is recognised across the world and well positioned as the number three brand in the global generator space. We’ve got the largest generator on the market and we’re serious about making a sustainable contribution to data centre power.”

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