The Interface – August 2019

T E C H / T E L C O / F I N T E C H / D I G I TA L I S AT I O N / A I / M A C H I N E L E A R N I N G

Issue 5 / August 2019 / www.theinterface.net

EXCLUSIVE

USAF: REMAINING MISSION-FOCUSED

A digital transformation of the customer experience with Deutsche Telekom

EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS

DELIVERING THE NEXT LEVEL OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE We caught up with Verizon Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience John Walker to discuss the telco’s transformation of its customer journey…

THE UNIVERSITY OF DERBY: AN EDUCATION IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Welcome to the August issue of Interface magazine!

This month’s exclusive cover story is with a telecommunications giant. We caught up with Verizon Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience John Walker to discuss the telco’s transformation of its customer journey…

The largest wireless provider in the US, Verizon, with its 4G LTE network, covers approximately 98% of the States. The company has transformed its customer journey, while boosting revenue in the process, in an omni-channel offering that has reshaped its sales strategy. Verizon Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience across those channels is John Walker and it’s his job to examine the shopping path and the process of shopping in a bid to provide a greater experience for both the customer and the sales team.

“We’re moving on,” Walker explains, “from having a channel-focused distribution strategy to a customerjourney focused one. It’s a big change…”

We also speak to Neil Williams, Director of IT and Digital Transformation at the University of Derby, who has overseen massive changes at this progressive tech powerhouse. Plus, we have an exclusive interview with Frank Konieczny, CTO at the US Air Force and Borislav Tadic, Vice President BMS & Transformation DRC at Deutsche Telekom.

All the best tech events and conferences are also listed, as are the Top 5 companies deploying blockchain.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

EDITOR IN CHIEF Andrew Woods CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Dale Benton Kevin Davies CREATIVE LEAD Mitchell Park SNR. PROJECT DIRECTORS Andy Lloyd Heykel Ouni PRESIDENT & CEO Kiron Chavda

– A ndrew Woods, Editor in chief content@b2e-media.com

PUBLISHED BY

CONTENTS

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CONTENTS

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SIEVO

80 36

5 OF THE BIGGEST COMPANIES DEPLOYING BLOCKCHAIN

UNIVERSITY OF DERBY

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A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WITH DEUTSCHE TELEKOM

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EVENTS

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Frank Vorrath, Executive Partner: Supply Chain for Chief Supply Chain Officers and Chief Operating Officers, Gartner

Rache and M at clo ford G

LIST LAT

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SAM ACHAMPONG REGIONAL HEAD & GENERAL MANAGER, MENA A

el McElroy, Sales Marketing Director oud specialists CranGroup

Dr. Marcell Vollmer, Procurement Influencer and SAP Ariba’s Chief Digital Officer

Mike Dargan, Group CIO, UBS

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Delivering the next level of customer experience WRITTEN BY PRODUCED BY

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Andrew Woods Andy Lloyd

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We caught up with Verizon Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience John Walker to discuss the telco’s transformation of its customer journey… ommunication technology companies exist in highly competitive and increasingly disruptive waters. With the technological landscape constantly shifting, and customer expectation following suit, the journey a company offers both its clients and its staff, has to be smart and agile across all channels of engagement and Verizon is always working to stay ahead of the curve on that front.

The largest wireless provider in the US, Verizon is a telecommunications giant with its 4G LTE network covering approximately 98% of the States. The company has transformed its customer journey, while boosting revenue in the process, in an omni-channel offering that has reshaped its sales strategy.

Verizon Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience across those channels is John Walker and it’s his job to examine the shopping path and the process of shopping in a bid to provide a greater experience for both the customer and the sales team.

“We’re moving on,” Walker explains, “from having a channel-focused distribution strategy to

C

10

VERIZON

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a customer-journey focused strategy. We’re flipping our model. It’s a big change because we’ve operated by channel very successfully for years.

We know that changing our operating model and building our distribution strategy around the customer is the right thing to do, because we’ve seen how customers engage with us. The average sale takes around 9 days and involves 2-3 touch points, often times more. We want to connect those interactions for 12

VERIZON

our customers.”

Walker has been a part of Verizon since the start, beginning at Bell of Pennsylvania, before moving to Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems which later became a joint venture with Vodafone and Verizon (a subsidiary of Verizon Communications). His experience has played witness to dramatic changes across Verizon’s operations and offerings. His latest role is newly established, and directly addresses the ever-shifting

digital landscape and the customer journey it can inspire.

During the fourth quarter of 2016, Verizon made a decision to adopt an omni-channel approach to its retail environment. Salesforce had been successfully adopted for its B2B offerings, and so it was seen as a suitable aid to the consumer customer. “We wanted to see what we could do for the consumer customer and how we could improve the experiences for retail efficiency in

our (2,300 US) stores, to avoid cold calling customers, which was not ideal for our sales reps or customers. We had a practice of pulling sales reps off the floor when it was not very busy and have them call a list of prospects provided by our CRM team. One of the problems was that we didn’t have data about what was happening on those calls, how effective they were, or how a customer responded. It was a black hole. So, we wanted to solve both an operational and experiential problem,” he explains.

The Salesforce system was built around a holistic omni-channel experience that leveraged personalization by tying people together with use cases based on online shopping behavior.

Verizon would see a large number of people start online, only to fail to finish the transaction. They wouldn’t buy. “So, we connected them with a person and an offer to help,” says Walker. “It was an opportunity to tie the digital experience together with a person and to build confidence in the online purchase.

An offer of assistance is a great way to connect a digital and physical shopping experience and a great means of personalization. If that offer makes a customer more confident in their purchase, and our results have shown w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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Welcome

Win subscribers and keep them for life. Deliver a seamless sales, service, marketing, and commerce journey with Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM platform for the communications industry. Learn more at salesforce.com/communications.

We bring customers and companies together.

Unifying the Prospect Journey with Salesforce When Verizon Wireless decided to launch a unified omnichannel customer journey it looked to Salesforce for the solution. We spoke to John Carney, Salesforce’s SVP Industries, Communications and Media, to see how The Salesforce Customer 360 helped the biggest wireless carrier in the US… Telecommunications is a notori-

calls and SMS into those newer

seamless customer experience.

ously competitive and disruptive

services. So, that existential threat

Employees benefit from integrated

industry. “Customer expectations

of being relevant as a brand to a

systems and intelligence gleaned

(in telecom) overall have changed

consumer is real. ‘How do I become

from every interaction. Salesforce’s

dramatically because of their expe-

more relevant to the consumer and

Einstein crunches the data and

riences in a digitally native world,”

build loyalty to that brand?’”

makes recommendations to scale

Carney explains. “In telecom the

Carney continues, “Our Unify

the impact of sales and service representatives.

average net promoter score, which

the Prospect Journey solution

is a key measurement of customer

layers on top of a Service Provid-

“You’ve got those interaction

satisfaction, is in the single digits.

er’s legacy systems to integrate

points saved as data points in

When you look at the digital native

their billing, order management,

Salesforce, that give you an in-

companies like Amazon, you see

and retail systems with customer

credible amount of information and

net promoter scores in the 80s and

data. That helps create a single

insight about how consumers nav-

above. There’s a large gap between

customer profile and experience

igate your company,” Carney says.

customer satisfaction and desired

across all consumer touchpoints.

“That can be used to drive a better

experience in telecom. It’s driving

For example, say you were shop-

experience, drive cross-sell, up-sell,

urgency for them to transform,

ping on a wireless carrier’s web-

improve conversion, improve loyalty,

close the gap, and continue to grow.”

site, looked at a few phones, and

and drive costs out of the business.

“The wireless market is being

for some reason you abandon

It’s exciting to see how we are

disrupted by substitutes,” Carney

the cart… What happens when

helping telecom providers reshape

explains. “A big part of the revenue

you walk into the retail store?

the industry. Companies that have a

stream used to be tied to traditional

Most of the time you still have

rich understanding of their custom-

communication services, such as

to start all over again, because

ers, and build their business around

voice and messaging. Today, it’s

there’s no connectivity between

them, are the ones who are likely

shifted from about 70% voice and

the channels or between the

going to become the leaders of

messaging to about 70%-plus data.

staff in the retail environment or

our industry. A platform like Sales-

Services and apps enabled by mo-

customer care environment. This

force helps build true agility into

bile devices, like social media, video

is where we can help.”

the business and reshape what

chat, and messaging apps, have

Salesforce creates a single view

the customer journey looks like

enabled consumers to shift their

of customer activity connecting

from lead to loyalty. We’re here to

usage away from traditional phone

channels together to create a

help you bring it to life.”

that it does, they’ll likely also purchase more, and our results show that too. We didn’t introduce a level of information about the customer or personalization to the reps that was creepy. Customers have grown to expect a company to know what he or she is looking at on the company website. That’s the level of information we share with our reps, nothing more, because we respect our customers’ privacy and at the same time want to meet their expectations that ‘Verizon remembers’ interactions they’ve had with Verizon systems and people.

If you take it too far, people can understandably get uncomfortable with it.”

The Salesforce system was chosen to provide a smoother transition for both customer and rep. “We kept our personalization at a level of ‘Here’s an individual, close to you, that can provide greater confidence to you in what you’re doing digitally or face to face.’ And you know, there are some customers, naturally, that said, ‘No thanks’ or wouldn’t respond. But for the rep, instead of getting a list of 250 people to cold call, he/she would receive a list of people who said they’d like to meet. I mean, that’s a dramatically different experience for that rep and for those customers. Because now when the customer 16

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“ I see us continuing to improve these experiences while increasing convenience for the customer in ways we haven’t even thought of yet” JOHN WALKER Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience Ve r i z o n

comes into the store, instead of saying, ‘Hey, I need help,’ they’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m here to see Samantha because I got a text message from her that said, ‘Hey, Andrew, I saw you left some great things in your cart. I’m free at two o’clock on Thursday or any other time that’s convenient for you. Are you interested in some help?’ We don’t engage any employees until the customer responds.

And then the rep would actually get that information and be anticipating the customer’s arrival. Anytime you can connect a digital experience with a faceto-face experience in a way that makes that customer feel special, is a win. It’s

a win for the customer and it’s a win for the business and it builds trust and ultimately drives sales.”

With large-scale digital transformations, it can be very easy to spend huge amounts of cash on unnecessary systems, software and the implementation thereof, and so expert consultancy is always a must. Verizon pulled Deloitte Digital in to help with the execution of the Salesforce system and to work with its IT teams in order to get the experience they needed. Although Verizon had experience of working closely with Salesforce there were still risks attached.

“There can be a huge gap between what you imagined you could do and what you can effectively implement

and execute against in a given timeframe,” Walker explains. “We were going to have to integrate with a lot of legacy systems, and despite having a truly world-class IT department we had virtually no experience integrating or configuring the modules of Salesforce needed for our consumer implementation. With Deloitte’s expertise, we were able to get the platform up and running and into production in 12 to 15 weeks. It was remarkably fast, and we did that because we said, ‘Look, we can keep working this until it’s perfect and then launch it and find out whether or not our assumptions about customer and rep behavior are right or not. Or we can get something into the hands of the people

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that are going to use it and have them guide us on that development going forward.’ So, it was very much an agile approach, and the decision to operate in this manner turned out to be critical to our success.”

Walker and his team are buoyed by the success of the new system and view it as one of the most successful multi-vendor projects Verizon has done. “We exceeded our business case considerably. One measure of success would be the fact that our close rate grew deep into double digits and the average sale was almost 20% more than the sales closed without our Salesforce.com solution.

Beating the business case was a really good step. Let’s face it, there are a lot of people in any business who propose solutions and build business estimations about the value they’re going to create.

This one outperformed our business case considerably and that’s the most fun.

And you know, having a strategy, executing against it and having success, at the scale that we were able to do it, is not something people often get an opportunity to do in their career. It was incredible.

Just a tremendous team of people.”

Although Verizon’s operations and offerings are deeply rooted in harnessing new technological systems and 18

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innovations, it is still people driving those transformations. “People are everything.

Look, you can have great processes and great technology, but if you don’t have great people willing to roll up their sleeves and just collaborate… That was one of the great things about this team. If you saw this team, working together with Deloitte, you wouldn’t know who worked for Verizon and who worked for Deloitte because it was just one team with a tremendous commitment. They consistently figured out how to get things done in a very tight timeframe with the intended results. We had people on the team that knew our internal systems and how they connected very, very well. They were critical to the implementation. Kathleen Casey, Cynthia O’Dell, Vince Serrano and our field operations leads all played significant roles on the team in our success. Kathleen was our chief innovator, our idea engine, and Cynthia and Vince both brought Salesforce and technical implementation skills that helped us get through some difficult periods. And the folks that Julie Miller, our Deloitte partner brought to the table like Kris Tzankov, Matt Fisher and others, understood Salesforce and what it could do, and understood integration in a way that was special.”

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Verizon’s relationship with Deloitte is ongoing and for good reason. “They just keep adding value for our business,” says Walker rather matter-of-factly. “My expectation would be that we continue to find ways to work with Deloitte because of that. The intent and strategy for the implementation of Salesforce was for them to get us off the ground and on our feet and for us to eventually take over. And we’re working towards that. But again, they’re still involved because they’re continually accelerating our progress. They bring speed, not just to platform operation, but to our team, which is accelerating the value realization from the platform.”

Verizon’s adoption of Salesforce is clearly hitting the right notes for Walker. “Salesforce is a platform that is constantly being developed. You constantly get additional capability that you don’t have to build internally, so you can focus on your business instead.

Because, by the way, it’s an extraordinarily rich platform. You can do just about anything you can imagine on it. And with the new capabilities that are being created, it goes from a scenario where you’re trying to build a platform that does everything your business can do to getting your business to leverage all 20

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the capabilities that are already built in, so it becomes not how fast can your IT department move, but how fast can you move your business.”

With Verizon being the kind of company it is with acquisitions and new revenue streams coming up all the time, the Salesforce system needs to adapt to

John Walker Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience Verizon John Walker is a highly dedicated professional with extensive technology leadership experience in Network, IT, and Omni Marketing Operations and has delivered $3B in Rev Gen and Cost Saving value over the past 4 years. John has built long standing relationships and a reputation based on trust, professionalism and delivery.

He serves as an active mentor and believes in the power of integrated teams.

John promotes world-class collaboration as the key to winning in an environment characterized by change. John loves a challenge and is energized by both creating and optimizing processes. He empowers employees and encourages them to “fly the plane” and take charge of their projects, not look for top-down directives. He has been relentless and incredibly impatient with projects, while being patient and supportive of the people who deliver them.

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“ There can be a huge gap between what you imagined you could do and what you can effectively implement and execute against” JOHN WALKER Consumer Group’s Executive Director of Sales Experience Ve r i z o n

every change in operations. “We haven’t found anything we’ve been unable to adapt to,” Walker enthuses. “In fact, I see it becoming at least an industry standard. But more than that, I see customer experience becoming, as it has already begun to become: a driving factor in how we roll out products and interact with our customers. And how we honor and respect our customers’ time and how we 22

VERIZON

empower them by creating convenience.

“When I hear the term ‘digital transformation’, I cringe, because digital transformation is focused on technology. Whereas the focus needs to be on convenience for the customer. That’s the kind of power technology can deliver. But, if you think, ‘I’m going to create amazing digital transformation’ it will take you to a different place than if you start out

thinking ‘I’m going to create the most amazingly natural, convenient experience I can for this customer’; it will drive you to a fundamentally different solution. Both approaches may well be delivered on a handset because of the power, ubiquity and convenience our network offers. But the team that imagines the customer at every step of the journey is going to deliver better results. With the data speeds

and low latency we’ll deliver with true 5G services, I see Verizon continuing to improve our experiences while increasing convenience for the customer in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.”

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USAF: REMAINING MISSION-FOCUSED Frank Konieczny, Chief Technology Officer at the US Air Force, discusses the importance of remaining mission focused in an ever-evolving technological world.

WRITTEN BY

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Dale Benton

L IST E N TO T H IS P O D C A ST on any of our output c h a n n e l s b e l ow

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F R A N K KO N I E C Z N Y C h i e f Te c h n o l o g y O f f i c e r at the US Air Force

HOW DID YOU FIND YOURSELF WORKING AS CTO FOR THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE (USAF)?

It’s unusual because, moving from industry into government is kind of the opposite way that most people do things. I was the Chief Technology Officer, CIO, and Operations Director at a large government telecommunications contractor. One of my friends was at the Air Force and he was trying to get his technology established. I told him I’d go to the Air Force if he could give me a CTO position, a true CTO position.

They wanted an injection of commercial capabilities and commercial experience into the government. It was kind of a new thing. You see it now more than ever, more people from the industry come into government because they want that injection of talent and capability and difference of opinion.

WHAT WAS MEANT BY A “TRUE CTO” ROLE? I think I was the first in a position described as CTO in any of the 26

USAF: REMAINING MISSION-FOCUSED

departments, the Army, the Navy, the Coast Guard etc. I was already a CTO and kind of knew what we were going to do, but it was a question of the scope of the responsibilities across the Air Force, which is rather large.

Now we talk about me being a Chief Information Technology Officer because there is another CTO for R&D who covers airplane platform development, such as materials and wingspans. I only get involved in the IT part of it. The question was: what should a CTO do and what expanse should they

have? That’s what is unique about it, they had never thought about doing this before. They had technical advisors come in, but they had never had a true CTO across the Air Force.

WHAT DID YOU BRING TO THE ROLE? I had both operational experience and CIO experience as well as technology experience, which was unusual. I could look at it from various viewpoints that would normally be more pigeonholed into their viewpoints.

My role was to bring new technology

into the organisational structure as it was, which was difficult at first because this was brand new to them and we had to convince everybody this was a good idea. That was the big difference. Most of the stuff we do in the Air Force involves written requirements.

You generate a proposal and then a vendor comes in and wins the bid and everybody’s very happy. But they never think about how you inject technology or what technology you want to really go for, because a lot of the stuff was requirements based upon your prior w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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history and your knowledge. I was bringing in new types of capabilities that they hadn’t seen before.

HAVE YOU HAD TO WORK TO OBTAIN AN “OPERATIONAL BUY-IN” FROM MULTIPLE STAKEHOLDERS? I had to set up what we call the target baseline architecture because that’s the only way they could see something. The difficulty comes from them wanting to see some capability. They want to see something on paper. You have to show them that you have the intelligence and capability to do this. You also have to present something that says, “Here’s a problem I know you have and here are some technologies that you should start investigating.”

We put this into a target baseline.

The target baseline for us is identifying what’s going to happen for a particular problem area within two years; what you should be going for and what technologies are available for two years out.

It was a different way of looking at it because most of the planning cycles for the government are 10 years out. We’re in an age where 10 years out isn’t possible or you can’t even determine as we barely what’s going to happen in the next year.

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As an example, early on they were doing some testing on a test platform. When they brought it into the real network, it never worked right. They would say: “I don’t understand. We tested it.” I would tell them that in the industry, you don’t do that. You test it on a test network and you bring it to the real network and then you test it in the real network and you control it. You just have to make sure because the network is so complex. They never did it like that.

They wanted to make sure it was perfect before moving.

I convinced them that they should be testing on the real production network and they should control it in a different

things.. Everybody believes we have to risk, everybody believes we have to do continuous monitoring, everybody believes that anything we feel is going to have a problem is fixed and has to be more agile. It’s just a question of introducing people to the capabilities that are really out there and getting them away from the 10-year plan issue.

way than they were doing it before. A lot of it is a trust issue. They have to be able to trust that you do understand the technology and you do understand some of the problem spaces. I was a duty contractor before, I had worked with all the components and different problem spaces that they have and I was a project manager for a very large system for the Army. I knew what the problem spaces for the components were.

DO YOU THINK YOU’VE BEEN SUCCESSFUL ON THIS FRONT? It’s taken multiple years to get there, but we are doing different experiments in the way the organisation does

HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED A SITUATION WHERE ORGANISATIONS LOOK TO TECHNOLOGY WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING ITS TRUE VALUE? AND JUST IMPLEMENT FOR THE SAKE OF IMPLEMENTING? There are plenty of shiny objects that people want without understanding the ramifications of using that shiny object.

Since the Air Force is distributed across the globe, we get a lot of that coming in the form of “Hey, we want to try this.” A lot of times they do try and they find out that it’s not extendable to the entire Air Force. I have a rapport with the rest of the organisations, so they come back and say, “Hey, we tried this. This may be interesting. Why don’t you consider it for the entire organisation?”

It’s not a question of stopping innovation in the field. It’s a question of how do you look at innovation in the field and w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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determine if it’s applicable to the entire enterprise and how you would move it to the entire enterprise and support it.

HOW IS THE ROLE OF THE CTO CHANGING? What you will find in the field, especially in the Air Force, is that we have a lot of officers moving around every two years or so because that’s the normal pattern.

They are now depending more upon looking at the CTO as the person that understands the mission and what they need to continue with. That’s the way we established it. We have CTOs and all the major commands out in the field and a few of the functional commands as well. We have established a foothold, if you will, throughout the organisation, because that’s a dependency. A lot of 30

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the officers depend upon the CTO to tell them, “Is this a good idea or not?”

ARE YOU BEING FACED BY A NEW GENERATION OF AIR FORCE OFFICER – ONE THAT IS DIGITALLY-LED AND TECH ENABLED? They want everything now. That’s normal. We all do that. Anything new is cool. Then again, it’s just a question of bringing them back into the mission focus, what is really going to support the mission as opposed to anything else. I think we’ve succeeded in that because we do push them back to the missions, and we’re actually encouraging this

“ It’s not a question of stopping innovation in the field. It’s a question of how do you look at innovation in the field and determine if it’s applicable to the entire enterprise and how you would move it to the entire enterprise and support it” F R A N K KO N I E C Z N Y C h i e f Te c h n o l o g y O f f i c e r US Air Force

now, which is kind of interesting because we have competitions from airmen coming in and saying, “Hey, this is a new technology that we want to produce out there.” We’re actually giving them money to do things to support their endeavours and everything else. A lot of times that falls back to me or one of the other CTOs to actually watch them to make sure they’re doing it correctly.

We also have more competition now from small businesses. We actually support research and development of

small businesses to put new technology out into the field and we actually work with people. So, we have turned ourselves into a technology engine looking at various technologies rather than just writing RFPs and sending them out. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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WHAT’S CHANGED ABOUT YOUR ROLE SINCE JOINING THE ORGANISATION? Most CTOs don’t have airplane manufacturing associated with them. In industry, most CTOs are CTOs basically for IT. The only difference is we change the duty title a little bit because we wanted to emphasise that we’re focusing on IT as opposed to anything else, but as opposed to actually doing material testing for new wings and evaluating the capabilities and the vibrations of wings, giving new designs and everything else and the engines associated with it, things like that. We have this way of looking at the R&D effort before it gets into a technology point where you can actually feel it. That’s the R&D piece of it. The IT piece is everything after that, basically.

When you talk to the CTO of most organisations they will tell you they’re all IT because there may be some pieces of manufacturing, but most of them are not in the manufacturing area except for watching, making sure the equipment actually works. That’s not what they’re doing. They’re not designing manufacturing equipment per se, unless again, there’s an IT component of automation, artificial intelligence and everything else.

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“ Everybody has to realise, with new technologies, that it’s difficult at times to get people grounded into the mission that the new technologies are supposed to support” F R A N K KO N I E C Z N Y C h i e f Te c h n o l o g y O f f i c e r US Air Force

It’s not that I don’t work with things on airplanes. I just don’t design airplanes.

How do you ensure that, as a technology professional, you are continuing to learn and remain ahead of the game?

I read a lot. That’s nothing new, but I try to stay abreast of what’s going on.

Our tech vendors keep me abreast of what’s really going on with their push.

I look at what technology is actually happening and where we should be going. It’s just one of those things. I read a lot in the field and see what’s happening so I can see where we’re progressing, and the question then becomes, “How can we best move in that direction?”

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR CURRENT INITIATIVES AS CTO? We’ve been trying to bring mobility to the airman for a while now. The aircraft are mobile but for the airmen, mobility is a big key because what we’re trying to add connectivity to an iPad or whatsoever and send information on it to them because there’s no connectivity out in the field, on the airfield. One of the big pushes right now is pulling LTE and 5G out into the bases to start doing some of this capability.

It forms a broader question as to what are we ultimately looking to do?

We’re trying to make sure that aircraft get maintained quickly, effectively, in a certain way. We want to make sure that the parts that we want can be ordered directly right there when the repairman is there trying to fix the aircraft. It’d be nice if we were sitting at a depot and the part could automatically be automated, being moved out to where the repairman is in some automated vehicle.

That’s one of the ways we look at going forward with the mission because that mission is important.

WHERE DO YOU THINK THE NEXT INDUSTRY SHIFT WILL COME FROM? The next shift is AI. It’s such a buzzword

right now, but we’re starting to see more and more of augmented support via computers, via neural nets and machine learning capabilities. We’re seeing it more and more and we’re seeing some places where we can actually start using it now. I think that the push is how to effectively use AI technologies to enable a mission. Because a lot of people look at it and say they need it, without even knowing what it is.

With new technologies and faster processing speeds we can achieve more results with AI. As the processing has increased capability, we see that there’s some applicability for AI to run in real time. We’ve been doing AI for around 20 years. I was coding expert systems way back when they were just coming out.

Right now, we have processing capabilities that support some of this.

We’re trying to analyse data and be more of a data-driven organization, so long as it supports the mission.

Everybody says, “Hey, I have to have it,” and you’re like, “Great. Give me a problem and I can tell you what applicable AI techniques there are for that problem space”. As we progress, you’re seeing more and more of that occurring, even though it’s still hype.

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HOW IMPORTANT WILL PEOPLE REMAIN? People believe that their job is going to go away because of AI. AI is just an enabler to do your job better. You still have to be there.

We talk about autonomous operations such as autonomous cars. Autonomous cars have a lot of problems with them right now because they have to make decisions really fast and they have to do it correctly.

Then there’s the ethical behaviour of automated entities. We’re going through this right now with AI. AI is just code somebody coded in a particular way. There may be some bias in that code as to conclusions, but you don’t know that. So, you have to understand all this. You just can’t say, “Hey, it’s really great. We’re going to go forward with it and proceed,” because that’s not how it works.

Everybody has to realise, with new technologies that it’s difficult at times to get people grounded into the mission that the new technologies are supposed to support.

You’re solving a problem with these new technologies or you’re helping to solve a problem, but this problem is basically something that you want to enhance in your mission. You have to think of technology as an enabler for your particular mission. A lot of people forget that. They just think, “I want to have new technology because it’s cool.”

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USAF: REMAINING MISSION-FOCUSED

L IST E N TO T H IS P O D C A ST on any of our output c h a n n e l s b e l ow

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THE UNIVERSITY OF DERBY: AN EDUCATION IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WRITTEN BY PRODUCED BY

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Andrew Woods Andy Lloyd

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WE CAUGHT UP WITH NEIL WILLIAMS, DIRECTOR OF IT AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DERBY TO SEE HOW A MASSIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS ENRICHING EVERY ELEMENT OF THIS FORWARD-THINKING EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT…

hese are highly disruptive times in higher education, just as enterprises in many sectors battle it out for points of differentiation while struggling to remove barriers to entry in providing a seamless, 24/7 customer journey. Add to that an increased customer expectation related to a rise in tuition fees and UK universities face a challenging proposition as competition intensifies. Higher educational establishments must be agile in their processes and behaviour to stand any chance of attracting, retaining and successfully teaching the right kind of students whilst also diversifying their income streams and supporting UK growth with business partners, through research and knowledge exchange.

T

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Neil Williams joined the University of Derby, and its 20,781 students, in 2006 and has spent the past 13 years transforming its technological infrastructure and digital strategy. The university’s motto is Experientia docet, which translates as ‘Experience is the best teacher’ and Williams is nothing, if not a highly experienced tech leader, having worked on the product side of software and tech in industry prior to joining. Williams is more than acutely aware of his role in empowering the university to face, head on, its numerous challenges.

T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F D E R B Y: A N E D U C AT I O N I N D I G I TA L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

“In the UK, we've got a lot of policy changes, for example, as the landscape rapidly changes; and that’s a real challenge for us,” he explains. “However, I think the challenge here comes back to partnerships with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. The business is working immensely hard on trying to respond to all of these different changes and implications and it sometimes finds it hard to create the capacity to work with us, although a partnership is actually critical to help us to deliver on what the institution needs.”

It is very, very easy to spend vast amounts of money on new software, architecture and systems, but for a digital transformation to be successful, it has to align with the business. “The main thing around achieving digital transformation is business engagement,” Williams explains. “And of course, there are financial implications and challenges that the business has to understand.

When it says, ‘We need to be more digital,’ does it understand what that's going to cost? And therefore, how do you forecast and plan and help the business w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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understand what it's getting into in terms of these costs especially with modern, subscription-based cloud products? As IT, we’ve got to get better at forecasting those financial implications over the next three to five years because we are now on a ‘pay as you use model’ which needs to be managed.”

When Williams joined the university in 2006 there was no defined strategy with regards to IT and so a plan was formulated and successfully signed off, rewarding Williams and his team with five years of funding for future projects, thus opening up longer-term initiatives.

“That was quite a major breakthrough for us,” says Williams. “That particular strategy was primarily about building a reliable and resilient infrastructure, so it was about networks, servers and data centres. We built a second data centre and put in resilient fibre optic cables between several key sites; it was all the things to do with resilience and reliability. We went heavily virtualised at that time as well which helped to support resilience but also flexibility and speed of deployment.”

“The focus of that first IT strategy was to get the core infrastructure to a high enough quality for the university to operate on and trust especially

given our significant growth in online education. At the same time, there was a focus on building and improving the customer service ethic within the IT department. This is what I love about my role at the University of Derby,” Williams enthuses. “I'm a service provider trying to help people deliver better service to students to achieve better outcomes and high-quality services to business that can create growth and innovation. That first strategy was about resilience and reliability, but also about improving customer service and valuing our customers more and becoming more customer friendly, more understanding of the issues they have. Our customer service feedback has shown us to be in the high 90%s for over ten years now and this remains a key measure of our service.”

In 2013, a second five-year IT strategic plan was put in place building on the work delivered in the previous five years. Williams and his team started to construct a much more externally focused engagement around the IT organisation at the university. “The infrastructure had got to be much better, so in 2012/2013 we started to develop a second IT strategy to look at another five years. That was very similar, but w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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started to move much more into efficiency and the effectiveness of process and data across the organisation and gaps in our digital provision. We started to focus more on compliance and risk-management, business efficiency and agility, and the business value and effectiveness.”

PARTNERSHIPS ARE KEY Partnerships are essential to any successful digital transformation and the University of Derby has been careful to select the right strategic partners who contribute to the relationship and bring market intelligence and insight.

When Williams started work on replacing the university’s entire network with a modern technology to improve performance, reliability and security, he called upon Cisco. “Cisco were supportive and helped us on that journey and now we've got this fantastic new hardware infrastructure in place,” says Williams.

“We have an intention to make it much more software defined, to maximise the investment we have made and the new capabilities now available to us. Cisco and Logicalis are both helping us on our journey and whilst it is still an ongoing programme of work, I am excited about the potential as we achieve our 42

T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F D E R B Y: A N E D U C AT I O N I N D I G I TA L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

aim of an increasing flexible and agile infrastructure.”

Agility is key to successfully transforming any enterprise, particularly in higher education. “We've got this big estate, this big network, but we don't know necessarily who's going to be on the end of it and why and because the university partners with lots of third-party organisations, we have to be quite agile and flexible to support our Institution. Quality is clearly also important to us given the size of the IT estate we operate and we need reliability of products so we can focus on transformation not operational issues. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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The use of high-quality products from partners like Lenovo is very important to us in achieving our strategic ambitions.”

THE DIGITAL STRATEGY In 2014, the Vice Chancellor at the time asked Williams to do a more focused piece of work on some key lines of digital. “I created a supplementary strategy which focused on business intelligence, supporting income generation, improving planning and academic service,” he explains. Rather than lumping every operation into an IT space, a clear demarcation was formed between IT and digital. An IT strategy is about infrastructure service, PCs, cyber security, which differs from a digital strategy, which is more about business, value, efficiency, effectiveness and the customer. The digital strategy is currently focused on recruitment and conversion, digital learning, apprenticeships, business engagement, compliance, planning and decision support, research support and resource utilisation, which means workforce utilisation but also estate utilisation, communication and collaboration, learning spaces and staff productivity.”

It’s one thing to have the capability and agility to push a business forward but if your staff are not onboard, it’s next to useless. “We may end up delivering this digital capability, but it's not being exploited by the business because they haven't got the time or the resources or the skills to use it.” To counter this, Williams set up a pioneering adoption team. “What we're trying to do with the workforce within IT services now, particularly as we go more to cloud, is focus more on helping 44

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“ I’M A SERVICE PROVIDER TRYING TO HELP PEOPLE TO DELIVER BETTER SERVICE TO STUDENTS, TO ACHIEVE HIGHER GRADES” NEIL WILLIAMS Director of IT Services a n d D i g i t a l Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n University of Derby

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people to adopt and maximise technology. I think we can do more of that now because quite a lot of our services are moving into the cloud naturally because our suppliers are increasingly cloud-based,” Williams explains. “It's now about business engagement, business understanding, and business time, and understanding that just because we have put a new system in place our colleagues haven't necessarily got the time to engage and understand how to exploit the delivered capabilities. A good example of this is Office 365. We've had Office 365 for a while, it's got fantastic capability in it, particularly some of the capabilities around Teams and how people can interact and collaborate. But lots of people just don't find the time to go and play with it and feel comfortable with the features. My adoption team has been spending most of its time working with Microsoft and with other people in my organisation delivering roadshows, videos and various communications on Office 365 adoption. Once we get people on it, they won't come off it, because it's brilliant. However, this is just the start, I need to also help colleagues more to engage with our new Microsoft CRM, our new Oracle Finance system and our new iTrent HR system as well as a 46

myriad of other new capabilities we are establishing.”

“As an IT Department we also make a significant contribution to our regional community and regional partners. An example of this is our partnership with our schools liaison team where we are helping with careers advice in schools.

T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F D E R B Y: A N E D U C AT I O N I N D I G I TA L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

Neil Williams Director of IT Services and Digital Transformation University Of Derby

Neil Williams is the Director of IT Services and Digital Transformation at the University of Derby having joined the University in 2006 from the commercial sector. Neil provides leadership of the digital capabilities of the University which include change management, enterprise systems, analytics, infrastructure, user devices, support and service, governance and security as well as wider data governance and GDPR. Neil has served on multiple advisory boards and HE sector groups and has been listed multiple times in UK top 100 CIO ratings and his team have won several IT Industry awards over recent years for the innovation work they have delivered. Neil’s passion is engaging the IT team with the business to create business value that leads to improved outcomes for students and partners of the University.

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“ WE STARTED TO FOCUS MORE ON COMPLIANCE AND RISK-MANAGEMENT, BUSINESS EFFICIENCY AND AGILITY, AND THE BUSINESS VALUE AND EFFECTIVENESS” NEIL WILLIAMS Director of IT Services a n d D i g i t a l Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n University of Derby

This is our department engaging with the wider university in its civic role where we can hopefully add value to local communities and future generations. Specifically, we are trying to help encourage young people into technology careers as there are so many opportunities and different career paths. We are also doing promotion work in schools encouraging women in IT to try and get a more diverse community interest in technology careers. We 48

also run a work experience programme for local schools and have had over 30 local school children come and spend a week with us where they meet all of our teams – I personally spend two hours with each placement helping them understand the industry, the roles and the opportunities.”

THE NEW OIL Universities amass a lot of precious data and being able to use those insights

T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F D E R B Y: A N E D U C AT I O N I N D I G I TA L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

across the entire business requires an end to the siloed approach that can be a limiting factor in many universities.

“The next phase of the (digital transformation) challenge, is about end-to-end process and data usage rather than compartmentalised thinking, and we are getting better at this, but it is a challenge given the traditional ways of working with HE,” says Williams.

The analysis of data and the tools needed are crucial to universities

wanting to enrich the learning process.

“We're already starting to get a number of benefits from improved analytics and reporting because as you move to cloud, most of the modern cloud systems have much better analytics and reporting in them than their predecessors. By just making that migration, we've already started to deliver better data, reports and analytics for a number of stakeholders, and that's been quite transformational. The embedding of leading edge reporting and analytics in modern systems alongside increasing digitisation of processes is delivering an ever improving data opportunity for the university which I am excited about.

Just in the last 12 months we have digitised numerous processes and created a richer data set which is improving our service to our students.

The University of Derby has an internal planning team and Williams has partnered heavily with them over the past two or three years. “We've created quite a lot of different data sets on students, on students’ satisfaction, on programme data, but also on space utilisation, on our academic workforce allocation, and that all goes into a corporate data repository. The university can then w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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produce a number of different reports and analysis off the back of that and that information is now being used in executive decision-making and planning activities; that's quite a significant shift forward. We have made massive steps forward in terms of extracting data from systems, creating data sets, and all of the logic behind the relationships of those types of sets. There has been improvement in reporting and analytics, but we still have some way to go in terms of visualisation support for our business clients. That's a key strand within our development activity. Another set of analytics we're doing quite a bit of work on with our partner JISC is on student engagement analytics which uses a number of data sources to try and identify if an intervention is required to support a student. We want our students to leave with the best outcomes they can possibly get and sometimes they need a bit of help on that journey. Technology that helps our students reach their aspirations has to be a good thing.”

Williams and his team are also working closely with data scientist partners Elastacloud regarding the analysis of data. “We'll take a subset of our data and we'll provide it to Elastacloud and ask them to see if they can they spot 50

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patterns, data relationships or trends within that data that we didn't know existed. This is the more innovative area of our data strategy and we are currently working on analysis relating to student satisfaction having completed some initial work on resource utilisation a few months ago.

Sitting behind the wheel of a massive digital transformation at the University of Derby, Williams clearly feeds off the energy. “I just think you can do so much good with digital and the really exciting thing that digital transformation is doing, is continually digitising processes and creating more and more data. The more data you create, the more you can analyse, report, and use the data to initiate both manual and automated interventions. My intention is to get to a point where we've got a very data rich environment with processes that are driven off this data which improve the outcomes for our students, our business partners and our staff and then I think we've properly transformed, digitally.”

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A digital transformation of the customer experience with Deutsche Telekom WRITTEN BY

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Dale Benton

L IST E N TO T H IS P O D C A ST on any of our output c h a n n e l s b e l ow

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Borislav Tadic, Vice President BMS & Transformation DRC, explores how a major digital transformation of Deutsche Telekom has enabled greater customer experience and significant technology advancements B O R I S L A V TA D I C Vice President BMS & Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n D R C

TELL US WHAT YOUR ROLE IS AND HOW IT FITS INTO THE WIDER DEUTSCHE TELEKOM STRATEGY? I’m Vice President at Deutsche Telekom, responsible for board member support and transformation of the board area, data privacy, compliance and legal, working here in the Bonn headquarters of Deutsche Telekom Group. We as Deutsche Telekom Group are present in 50 countries and I would say are definitely a leading European telecommunications brand. We hope, after our mergers and acquisitions in the United States that we’ll become an even bigger player on a global level.

HOW IMPORTANT IS IT IN YOUR 54

POSITION TO CONTINUE TO LEARN? That’s a fantastic point. One thing I try to do is constantly improve on an individual level. That includes formal education. I have at least 10 internationally recognised certifications and I’m currently working on my PhD in parallel to my work and I use numerous non-formal opportunities to expand my knowledge, both in the formats offered in the company and outside as well as through reading and keeping up to date with the latest developments every day, every morning.

That attitude is something I try to include in our transformation programs.

For example, during the past two years we’ve up-skilled more than 1000 employees off this board area, both in Germany and internationally, in several ways. First, offering them online learning content on our intranet platform, creating awareness about the different digital courses we have in the context of Deutsche Telekom, which are focused on their profession. We also continue to learn about global technological developments, so they can understand the new trends and developments in the industry so that they can better advise and/or support their customers.

From there we went a step forward

A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WITH DEUTSCHE TELEKOM

and decided not only to offer them in a digital format, which is easy to implement and easy to offer and cost efficient, but also to enable a knowledge transfer. This is through our Digital Future Campuses in Athens and here in Germany. Several hundred people and experts from different functions off our board area were brought together and we educated them in areas such as broadband development, 5G, agile working, international collaboration, diversity and many other topics which directly or indirectly contribute to their performance and to their daily jobs.

Satisfaction rate on the company level was one of the best in the recent history of Deutsche Telekom, with 96 to 99% participant satisfaction with the program.

A TRANSFORMATION OF ANY KIND BREEDS CHALLENGE, WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES YOU HAVE FACED? It is a challenge indeed. The first aspect of the challenge is that you have to give or convey as much knowledge as possible in a relatively short time and of course to make the knowledge current, w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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“ During the last two years we've up-skilled more than 1000 employees off this board area, both in Germany and internationally, in several ways” B O R I S L A V TA D I C Vice President BMS & Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n D R C

because if you prepare a course around blockchain and you prepared it two years ago, today you would need a completely different base. The pace of change with regards to the content, which you create to educate someone, is very high. It’s important that you stay up to date in the preparation and delivery of these courses.

Even that aside, you have a limited budget and this limited budget has to be approved and/or aligned with our human resources area. We are working with them closely because of course 56

they have way more transparency about the needs of every individual employee and we have of course our professional view and vision where we want to be as a group. We basically worked with our colleagues from HR and with our expert groups in identifying which areas we need to focus on because you have hundreds of areas, especially in our fast changing, fast paced business around digitisation and technology.

After we finalised that, we created a program and then the next challenge of course was how to get the best possible

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lecturers and best possible experts to share the knowledge, because of course, their time is limited. There are of course budget limitations and numerous other restrictions including language barriers. We tackle that by trying to find the best in-house experts in some areas and external partners for others. They have more experience in some domains that are relevant for us. Then there is the delivery. Even if you organise a format that consists of online courses as well as the physical presence of a course for several hundred people, that’s not an

easy task. It sounds like an easy task; it’s just an event with a couple of hundred people but no, this is multi-partner, multi-party interactive session with numerous choice options because not everyone gets the same program. The people choose the modules and you have to fit all of that together. These are some of the challenges we’ve hopefully successfully tackled.

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That was the essence of our program and it’s a great question. First, we understood that we cannot only assume what the customer wants, we need to know what the customer wants and the only way to do that is to talk to the customer.

As a governance function we went and talked to the customers. We went out and spoke with actual private customers and business customers of Deutsche Telekom and asked them: what can we, from security, from privacy, from legal, from compliance, do differently in order to make your life better and easier?

We got our feedback. It was extremely good feedback, in the sense of many concrete, actionable points we can implement. For example, one of them was to simplifying terms and conditions.

When you sign a contract anywhere, for any mobile service, TV service or anything else we offer, you need to read through the pages of the contract documentation. This document is written mostly with the small letters, small font, explaining what will happen in case of some emergency escalation or conflict etc. It’s written in a language that no one understands but it was always the intention of Deutsche Telekom to make it fully understandable to our customers.

We were doing our own efforts but when 58

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you speak directly to the customers, he can explain to you, which paragraphs are not easily understood or interpreted.

We used that feedback to simplify the terms and conditions for our major products. We did that within a couple of months and now we have one of the best, if not the best terms and conditions document, which is now standard. This raised the trust with our customers because they know that Telekom is fully transparent and wants them to understand what they are signing and what they are changing with their contract situation. This is only one example of numerous changes we w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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did to the direct discussions with external customers.

HOW IMPORTANT IS TRANSPARENCY TO A COMPANY LIKE DT? When you look at how you can make it more transparent and when you simplify the processes and the policies, the documents, when you’re directly communicating your goals and why you are doing certain things, this raises the trust of the customers. But of course, many digital tools can also help you to raise that transparency. For example, you can 60

do it for ethical reasons. We have been very successful advancing customer demands through a chat bot. It became so good that some of the customers didn’t even know that they were being served by the chat bot. Because it answered all their questions in the manner that they would expect from a live person, but we still, from an ethical perspective, decided to include the sign notification saying: “You’re speaking with our digital assistant, not with a real person.”

We’ve also introduced specialised

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tools both internally and externally. As an example, we have a data privacy cockpit that enables you to log in as a customer of Deutsche Telekom and basically see which data you have approved or are sharing with both Deutsche Telekom and you can also click and approve or disapprove with us sharing that data with other parties. We are very strict with that. This is one of the parts of our unique selling proposition; we’re extremely careful with the data of our customers. What we want to achieve is for customers to no longer need to call

or send an email to understand which data of theirs is in the system and which can be shared, but they also can log in with their mobile or fixed device and look and choose and change the categories at any time, through a very useful and user friendly interface.

Around 10 years ago, through internal experiences, we realised that this could become something we are known and recognised for, and so we decided to really invest internally into data privacy, security, compliance to strengthen our legal functions, to strengthen our audit w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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functions. We did this in order to create a system that not only gives assurance to our shareholders but also to all of our customers. We don’t do it because we must; we believe that there is clear value in data being handled in an ethical and a responsible manner for our customers.

HOW DIFFICULT IS THIS WITH REGARDS TO DT ’S PRESENCE ACROSS 50 COUNTRIES? First is that we look at all of our footprint holistically where, if we have a high standard which is not producing significant change in the product pricing or service pricing, we look to apply it throughout the whole footprint. In the area of compliance, security, privacy and risk management, we are applying the highest standards worldwide.

The challenge there is that you have certain local changes which happen and which of course demand us to stay on the ball in that we are always in contact with our local counterparts which are responsible for these areas where the board area is active and not only upscale them, not only to make them aware of the customer demands both locally and internationally, but also to always make sure that they’re applying the latest, leanest standard and the process to keep the high levels of these services.

HOW WILL YOU CONTINUE TO GROW AND TRANSFORM? CAN A TRANSFORMATIONAL JOURNEY EVER REALLY END? There is no end point. You’re absolutely right; the transformation will never stop and should never stop.

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“ What can we, from security, from privacy, from legal, from compliance, do differently in order to make your life better and easier?”

B O R I S L A V TA D I C Vice President BMS & Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n D R C

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LIST EN TO T H I S PO D C A ST on any of our output c h a n n e l s b e l ow

It’s a process of continuous improvement of the organisations, individuals and customers’ demands. Everything is changing, so we need to keep changing constantly. I think it’s very important to say in the sense of the role you mentioned is that you also lead by example, not only me but also my colleagues and other senior executives.

They need to be aware that if we are promoting a tool to be used or a process to be simplified, we have to start with ourselves. They’re extremely important, these change processes, because it’s not sufficient only to upscale, to implement 64

the customer demands and to digitise and introduce digital tools. If you want the whole organisation to have a sane and a good mix of agile projects and waterfall projects, I need to show that some of my projects in the digitization context are being run agile.

WHAT DOES THE NEXT 12 MONTHS LOOK LIKE FOR DT ?

We’re going to focus on new skills. Let’s say that we are going to further explore what the blockchain is bringing. We are going to further explore what the changes are, not only technologically, but also the

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“ It’s a process of continuous improvement of the organisations, individuals and customers’ demands.

Everything is changing, so we need to keep changing constantly” B O R I S L A V TA D I C Vice President BMS & Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n D R C

society changes related to 5G. We going to further explore AI and also further explore digital ethics. We are going to be active in the corporate digital responsibility domain where we, as Deutsche Telekom, are very much pioneering some of the elements here in Europe, so this is definitely going to happen.

WHAT MAKES A SUCCESSFUL CTO? I would say surround yourself with extremely diverse people, because diversity is not only diversity in the context of having different people with different backgrounds around yourself

or different religions, different genders, different ages, etc., but also diversity in the opinion context, and the context of thoughts. And when you’re surrounded by such people, try to be like a sponge.

Try to take as much input as you can to process this and put it into the context and to continue changing because if I would apply what I learned at let’s say in the university or what I’m learning now for my PhD, that might be okay for a certain period of time, but the world, technology and the market is changing with extreme pace. So, you have to be fully aware that this will continue changing so your adaptability is the key. Your curiosity is the key and if you keep that, I’m sure that you’re basically ensuring that you’ll be successful today and tomorrow. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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Procurement insight delivered through data WRITTEN BY PRODUCED BY 66

Dale Benton Heykel Ouni

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SIEVO IS THE WORLD’S LEADING COMPANY FOCUSED ON PROCUREMENT ANALYTICS. CO-FOUNDER SAMMELI SAMMALKORPI EXPLORES HOW IT ACHIEVES THIS THROUGH AI AND A CLIENT-FOCUSED APPROACH nreliable analytics hold back the potential of digital transformation in procurement.

According to a recent study by Deloitte, most CPOs view analytics as the technology area with the highest impact on business; and yet almost every one in two CPOs considers poor data quality or data integrations as the greatest barriers to effective digital procurement. Few know the challenge of analytics in procurement as well as Sievo. Founded almost two decades ago by Matti Sillanpää and Sammeli Sammalkorpi, Sievo specialises in wrangling up procurement data from a variety of sources to provide reliable and actionable insights.

Data, as we know, is everywhere and there is a seemingly endless supply of it. “Clients have the perception that they have a lot of data that is of bad quality and so they are unable to drive value and create meaningful analytics,” explains Sammalkorpi. “The process with us will start with us capturing all of the data our clients have before we turn it around and translate it into actionable insights. It’s about proving to our clients that even with their most heterogeneous data, value can be created and it’s also about taking a forward-looking view on how analytics can inform

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SIEVO

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STRATEGY GIVES DIRECTION TECHNOLOGY LIGHTS THE WAY

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sourcing for direct/core categories and supplier relationship management and risk strategies.

“ I N THE PAST, ANALYTICS WAS SOMETHING DONE BY FEW AND DONE SELDOM. NOW TRUE ANALYTICS CAN BE SOMETHING THAT’S ACCESSED

BY EVERYBODY ON A CONTINUOUS BASIS” S A M M E L I S A M M A L KO R P I Vice President, Customers Sievo

the best course of action and key business decisions.”

Sievo’s approach transcends merely the creation of data analytics; it enables continuous access to a form of data that allows for long-term forecasting and actions. Sammalkorpi believes that this reflects a shift in the procurement space, moving away from a traditional static view of analytics towards a more fluid understanding of analytics. “We want to provide tools in order for customers to be capable of consuming the data on a day to day basis,” he says. “In the past, analytics was something done by few and done seldom. Now true analytics can be something that’s accessed by

everybody on a continuous basis.”

Sievo’s vast client base spreads across numerous industry sectors and allows the company to see a broader picture as to the current procurement and data landscape; the challenges, trends and opportunities present. To date, the company has worked with the likes of Carlsberg, ISS, Schindler and MTN to name a few and Sammalkorpi believes that no two industries are at the same level of maturity in this data-driven transformation journey but most importantly, there are lessons to be shared across them all. “Regardless of where they are in their journey, it’s important to realise that the journey itself will start with the building of a procurement focused scorecard like spend and savings; a basic reporting on visibility,” he says. “Once that’s in place, you can start looking at forward-looking metrics and be able to forecast and explore different scenarios. This creates a more balanced scorecard that’s not just relevant for the procurement community, but relevant for business stakeholders as well. Instead of speaking solely in procurement lingo, you can now speak in a language that is relevant for different business partners.” This in itself represents a huge change in the w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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perception of analytics in both sales and in procurement and highlights the new order in which for companies to be proactive in their actions and to truly engage with their business partners, they must move beyond a rear mirror view of past spend and savings and look at data analytics on procurement. “This translates to being able to forecast what will happen to your cost base in multiple different scenarios, because a lot of cost is driven by procurement spend,” says Sammalkorpi.

“What will happen to your cost base after a sudden change in international tariffs?

How quickly can you forecast impact across different business units or even regions? A lot of clients are asking us to provide an accurate long-term forecast and I don’t think that’s feasible in this increasingly interconnected, complex world. But what we can help our clients with is providing more agility around that forecasting problem so that you can create a new view in a matter of minutes or hours, not weeks or months.”

The challenge with a constantly evolving technology landscape is that you cannot focus entirely on just the one technology and while data analytics dominates the conversation, there are other key technologies 72

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becoming more present in the market.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are but two of these emerging technologies and Sammalkorpi is not one to fall for hype, rather he believes the hype surrounding these technologies to be well grounded. “AI and machine learning will completely change the way the teams take actions in procurement. So I think it’s well-grounded hype,” he says. He does urge caution however; “At the same time it’s still hype, which also means that nowadays people think it’s the answer to any and all problems and challenges out there.” In this instance, he encourages w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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W E LC O M E TO S I E V O !

clients to look at small, repetitive tasks in the procurement process that create a lot of data as applications ripe for AI or machine learning adoption.

Technology and innovation equals change and opportunity, with Sammalkorpi confessing that right now is an incredible time to be alive thanks to a number of key drivers. These include the increasing number of computations when moving to the cloud, an infrastructural change that Sievo very much plays a part in. Data-driven procurement benchmarking is an example of innovations made possible by recent advances in technology. Sammalkorpi points to a single fundamental change as the biggest key driver. “It’s our capability to leverage our client data in a big data way,” he says. “Historically, we would take data from different systems and combine that data, cleanse that data, and then provide visibility to spend or savings or supply base. The new value creates an opportunity to take data from across our clients and create benchmarks based on over a trillion dollars of procurement transactions.

We can provide supply identification services and suddenly the role of technology providers is not only to provide the technology to clean the data, but 76

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also to provide the content, the benchmark, the supply identification.”

With all the talk of digitisation, machine learning and AI taking over certain elements of procurement, one is forgiven for wondering what will become of the Chief Procurement Officer? Will they get replaced by this technology? Sammalkorpi believes that people fail to realise just how important

Sammeli Sammalkorpi Vice President, Customers Sievo Sammeli Sammalkorpi is the co-founder of Sievo.

His top focus is to help Sievo’s customers turn their procurement data into dollars.

He holds a Master’s degree from the Helsinki University of Technology and has over 15 years’ experience in procurement consulting, leadership and software development. Raised in Arctic Lapland, Sammeli is the father of three, a youth soccer coach and aspiring beatboxer.

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people will continue to be in the future.

As organisations look to automate more and more, removing routine processes such as approvals and invoices, what will remain is a demand for the procurement professionals to think outside the box, creating innovation and managing relationships between internal and external stakeholders as well as suppliers.

“When you start to have this professional profile, you also need to recognise that the difference you can make in finding the right talent, retaining the right talent and developing the right talent. So the next big challenge for procurement functions is to find the right people who fit the new role of procurement professionals,” he says. So what will this new role of procurement professionals looks like?

“Knowing your procurement stuff is no longer the only crucial part of the job.

A really good CPO can have a dialogue with senior stakeholders and become a true business partner. They must have a desire to embrace digital transformation, seek out the right partners who can take procurement to the next level and leverage learning and digital tools to really make a difference.”

Sievo’s growth as a company has coincided with the shifting nature of the procurement landscape. As procurement 78

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has begun to be perceived as a true business partner, “moving away from being simply procurement” as Sammalkorpi notes, what drives the company to continue to navigate and in some ways steer this shift? “My position is that I want to make procurement more awesome and I believe what Sievo can provide is one vehicle in that transformation, providing analytics and analytical tools that procurement people enjoy using and can be proud of,” he says. “We are the largest and leading company focused on data analytics and we got there by growing with our clients and learning with them.

When we first started, we didn’t know much about procurement and everything we have learned, we’ve learned from our clients and we will continue to operate in this way.”

“ I BELIEVE WHAT SIEVO CAN PROVIDE IS ONE VEHICLE IN THAT TRANSFORMATION, PROVIDING ANALYTICS AND ANALYTICAL TOOLS THAT PROCUREMENT PEOPLE ENJOY USING AND CAN BE PROUD OF ” S A M M E L I S A M M A L KO R P I Vice President, Customers Sievo

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T S E G G I B E H T F O 5 G N I Y O L P E D S E I COMPAN BLOCKCHAIN A S T H E W O R L D C O N T I N U E S T O B E C O M E I N C R E A S I N G LY D I G I TA L , I T WA S O N LY A M AT T E R O F T I M E B E F O R E I T S P R E A D T O T H E V E R Y C U R R E N C Y I N O U R WA L L E T S . J U S T OVER A DECADE SINCE THE ADVENT OF BITCOIN, BLOCKC H A I N ( T H E V E R Y F O U N D AT I O N O F C R Y P T O C U R R E N C Y ) H A S V E R Y M U C H C E M E N T E D I T S E L F A S A N I N D U S T R Y I N I T S E L F. H E R E , W E TA K E A L O O K AT 5 O F T H E B I G G E S T P L AY E R S I N T H E C R Y P T O C U R R E N C Y M A R K E T, A N D T H E B L O C K C H A I N SYSTEM THEY USE AS RANKED BY FORBES WRITTEN BY Dale Benton

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01 SAMSUNG Arguably one of the biggest companies in the world, driven by a vision to “create a better world full of richer digital experiences, through innovative technology and products”. Naturally, Samsung has turned its attention to blockchain and works with the Nexledger platform. Available for enterprises all over the world, Nexledger enables enterprise companies to track their transactions with greater speed and efficiency at scale. One use case for Nexledger is a Digital Payment System, utilising blockchain to support various types of payments in an increasingly cashless world.

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02 VISA In early 2019, the payments giant Visa announced the global launch of its Visa B2B Connect network, a platform designed to transform B2B payments for the digital age. Developed in response to the growing complexity of payments between financial institutions and their corporate clients, Visa B2B Connect uses blockchain technology architecture that allows payments to be made in a simple, flexible and safe way. Visa B2B Connect will look to cover more than 90 markets by the end of 2019. The platform will facilitate transactions from the bank of origin directly to the beneficiary bank, creating a unique digital identity formed of banking details and account numbers that can be used to facilitate transactions on the network. Visa B2B Connect’s digital identity feature has been said that it will “transform the way information is exchanged in business-to-business cross-border transactions”.

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03 ORACLE Known for its database and cloud software, Oracle also has its own blockchain software in the Oracle Blockchain Platform. Described as a “comprehensive distributed ledger cloud platform”, Oracle allows its customers to reliably share data and conduct trusted transactions with suppliers, banks and other trade partners. The Oracle Blockchain Platform is the only enterprise-grade managed blockchain service with 99.95% SLA with enhanced security and through built in identity management, it allows rapid provisioning and simplified management of blockchain networks to reduce costs and setup time from weeks to minutes.

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04 MAERSK In the global logistics industry, tracking shipment and cargo is its bread and butter and so blockchain solutions naturally lend themselves to this space. Through a partnership between Maersk and IBM, TradeLens was born. TradeLens is an open and neutral industry platform, powered by blockchain, to track shipments in real time, improve and encrypt data sharing for over 10 million shipping events every week. The TradeLens ecosystem is a treasure trove of some of the biggest organisations the world over, with more than 100 companies including carriers, ports, terminal operators, 3PLs and freight forwarders. These contribute to one of the most powerful supply chain blockchain ecosystems in the world.

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05 HTC In a world of cashless transactions and data sharing, the mobile phone is the obvious vessel for blockchain deployment. Dubbed as the phone that could “change the internet as we know it”, the HTC Exodus was announced in early 2019. With a secluded area kept separate from the Android operating system, the blockchain-powered phone is the first mobile phone that can only be bought with cryptocurrency. Users will have access to Zion, HTC’s very own cryptocurrency wallet. Running decentralized applications and programs that operate on the blockchain technology; HTC Exodus will represent a “new era” of secure data storage and transactions.

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EVENTS OF 2019

WRITTEN BY Kev i n D av i e s The technology industry can easily be described as the most mercurial and transformative. New ideas and innovations are fundamentally shifting the benchmarks of business performance, skills development and employment, among many other things. These technology conferences provide experts and industry professionals with a much-needed bird’s eye view of what’s happening now and what they can expect tomorrow…

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11.10.19

www

HACKCONF HackConf is Bulgaria’s premier

08.09.19

software development conference, happening in Sofia. Organised “by developers, for developers”,

www

IFA SUMMIT

it covers a wide range of software development topics, regardless of the tech stack. HackConf 2019 will

The IFA Summit is IFA´s think tank

include a full day of workshops on

dedicated to the digital future. Each

11th of October, and two parallel

year the event gathers leading think-

tracks of talks during both confer-

ers, global trendsetters and crea-

ence days - 12th and 13th of October.

tive visionaries who draw inspiration for the next exponential technologies and share their thoughts on the upcoming decade. The IFA⁺ Summit 2019 stands for new visions, disruptive ideas and inspiring entertainment for a data-scripted world.

The event is host to more than 550 international experts and leading professionals. Spend two exciting days at the convention and meet scientists, artists, developers, researchers and digital pioneers within your field. Join one of the most valuable conferences of the year at IFA in Berlin.

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EVENTS

25.10.19

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VEGAS BLOCKCHAIN WEEK The Second annual Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Technology event, World Crypto Conference (WCC), embrace major partnerships with other notable event organisers and work together to deliver Vegas Blockchain Week, from October 25th to October 31st, 2019.

Executives, enthusiasts, and professionals from global enterprise companies, financial service providers, investment firms, traders, advisory & auditing institutions, blockchain focused startups, academic institutions, government policy advisors, and application developers will descend on Las Vegas to discuss the most pressing topics facing our emerging industry.

WCC 2019 will afford 3 days of intense discussions, product demos, expert keynote addresses, panel discussions with industry thought leaders, and announcements from the best and brightest in the industry showcasing new products, ideas, and commercially viable applications of blockchain technology. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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13.11.19

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BIG DATA LDN Big Data LDN (London) is a free to attend conference and exhibition, hosting leading data and analytics experts, ready to arm you with the tools to deliver your most effective data-driven strategy.

Discuss your business requirements with 130 leading technology vendors and consultants. Hear from 150 expert speakers in 9 technical and business-led conference theatres, with realworld use-cases and panel debates.

Network with your peers and view the latest product launches & demos.

Big Data LDN attendees have access to free on-site data consultancy and interactive evening community meetups.

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EVENTS

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THE #1 DIGITAL PROCUREMENT CONFERENCE ON THE PLANET

www.digitalprocurementworld.com