CASHING IN ON CLOUD

SPEAKING EXCLUSIVELY TO CXO INSIGHT MIDDLE EAST, MOHAMMED AL-ENAZI, CIO, ALHOKAIR FASHION RETAIL, EXPLAINS HOW THE REGIONAL RETAILER RAMPED UP INVESTMENTS TO ACCELERATE CLOUD STRATEGIES TO DELIVER ENHANCED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND BETTER COLLABORATION FOR EMPLOYEES WITH GOOGLE WORKSPACE

Customer and employee experiences are two fundamental aspects of any business, especially in the retail sector. Retailers have had to rethink their strategies in both these elements in the new normal by embracing cloud and digitalfirst technologies to meet evolving expectations.

Saudi Arabia-based Alhokair Fashion Retail was swift to identify the changes in the market and embarked on its cloud-led omnichannel strategy for both customers and employees early last year.

Mohammed Al-Enazi, Chief Information Officer at Alhokair Fashion Retail says, “The biggest pillars for success in any organisation are its employees and customers. It is essential to understand their expectations and serve their needs well.

“At Alhokair, we know the value of customer and employee experiences. We make sure to create satisfying and engaging experiences by investing in advanced technologies. We have designed a digital-focused omnichannel strategy for our customers. We do continuous research and use deep analytics to understand their requirements better and deliver on their expectations with speed and quality.”

The retailer has also deployed a cloud-based customer experience platform to enhance customer satisfaction and deliver greater value. Besides a user-friendly website that houses a wide range of product portfolios, Alhokair has established multiple robust channels for quick and easy customer engagement, such as calls, emails, chatbots, and social media platforms. The company is currently in the process of deploying an advanced CRM solution as part of its digital transformation strategy.

He adds, “As a fashion retailer, we have unreservedly adopted a cloud-first strategy and are moving successfully towards realising

our digital transformation goals. As part of these efforts, we have decommissioned our data centre and are in the process of shifting to the cloud. We are also leveraging the benefits of Google Workspace solutions to promote enhanced collaborations and better experiences for our employees.”

Alhokair migrated its old email server to the whole suite of Google Workspace with the help of its implementation partner, iSolutions, an information technology company that specialises in providing high-end, innovative technology solutions.

According to Al-Enazi, the retailer could move workloads without losing any data and with minimum customisations. “Our partner iSolutions played a key role in supporting us with the move to Google Workspace. They helped us increase bandwidth and assign multiple systems to speed up the whole process. We have a detailed evaluation process for selecting partners and iSolutions emerged as the ideal partner for Alhokair.”

Alhokair was able to capitalise on the many advantages of Google Workspace, especially during the peak of the pandemic restrictions.

He says, “Our employees now benefit from accelerated data processing between departments. They can efficiently carry out their day-to-day work by leveraging the agility and flexibility of cloud rather than onpremise servers. Our finance teams are now using online sheets, speeding up the process and achieving greater productivity. Google Workspace is adding immense value to our company, especially for second-level users.”

Al-Enazi emphasises that the biggest driver behind their shift to Google Workspace was the productivity and collaboration benefits it brings. “We assessed several other products in the market, but no other solution came close to Google Workspace in terms of its productivity and collaboration features.”

One of the challenges when introducing a new system or software is getting the workforce to accept and get acquainted with it. However, Alhokair included change management as a part of its project plan when moving to Google Workspace.

Al-Enazi and his team did their due diligence and convinced the management of the immediate need to change its legacy systems for business growth and continuity.

“We engaged with the senior teams and demonstrated the advantages we would have with a cloud-based suite. We distributed handbooks, conducted detailed sessions for each department, and educated all our users to prepare them for the transition,” he explains. “The trainings were conducted professionally under the supervision of our partner iSolutions. Our employees showed a positive response and high receptiveness as they discovered Google Workspace’s unlimited benefits, especially its collaboration and high availability of employee data tools.”

Google Workspace allowed Alhokair employees the freedom and flexibility to efficiently execute their daily tasks without being physically restricted to their desks in the office. They no longer had to print any documents to submit to managers and could easily share large files without dealing with the limitations of email attachments.

The next step in Alhokair’s digital transformation is to complete the transition of its entire infrastructure and applications to the cloud.

“We will be a 100% cloud retailer over the next three to four months. Digital transformation is the top priority for our organisation. We have defined our IT roadmap based on this priority, and it includes incorporating more advanced technologies such as enhancing our IT service management (ITSM) and implementing analytics, AI, and RPA solutions,” Al-Enazi concludes.

THE LOW-CODE REVOLUTION

MARK ACKERMAN, AREA VICE PRESIDENT, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, AT SERVICENOW, EXPLAINS THE FOUR BENEFITS OF LOW-CODE APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT FOR REGIONAL INNOVATORS.

Code makes the world go round. Today, so many facets of our lives — from healthcare to education and from entertainment to security — are governed by it. An expansion of the device ecosystem from rigid VAX terminals and desktops to pocketable smartphones and sleek tablets has brought with it an app explosion that has cried out for more coders. And some forwardthinking governments are responding.

In July this year, the UAE government announced its plan to train 100,000 coders and build a talent pool from which 1,000 successful digital businesses will emerge. The ambition shown here is backed by tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, and is designed to boost annual investment in tech start-ups from around US$ 400 million to more than US$ 1 billion.

Why low code?

Governments know that more coders are required to satiate a burgeoning appetite for apps. And enterprises know that the release cycle must shrink to accommodate this demand. These two realisations have led very quickly to the increase in popularity of low-code ecosystems.

The UAE’s move to attract and train coders reveals the extent of the skills gap in the country — one that is felt keenly across the region. IT teams cannot fulfil the demand for digital change foisted upon them by corporate visions and circumstances. Low code not only helps these professionals, who may not specialise in software development, but it helps non-technical employees with otherwise strong digital ambitions to add value to the enterprise.

If you still aren’t sold on if your organisation should be investing in low-code, here are four benefits of the technology that should make the decision an easy one. 1 Create faster The concept of a citizen developer has evolved to encompass coding as an implied part of every knowledge-employee’s job description, like emailing customers or filing paperwork. The ability of low-code tools to capture and model business processes granularly is appealing to strategic-minded business leaders who want to be able to extend their fiefdom’s digital capabilities without weeks of requirements gathering and development.

Being first to a commercial market with an innovative customer experience can bring many revenue opportunities. Being first with an enhanced employee experience can help an organisation attract and retain talent in a region replete with skills gaps. And operational efficiencies can be gleaned by automating tasks.

Also, once citizen coders churn out one successful prototype it can be reused by other business units. This means organisations can learn with every low-code project and become more agile.

2Experience first Code reuse is also a bridge to exceptional customer experience. Without low-code, siloed digital transformations can lead to inconsistency at the brand interface. Digital-savvy consumers will notice these inconsistencies, and retention rates will plummet.

If organisations build their digital presences with a platform model in mind — unified cloud, unified data, unified workflows, and a unified interface — they can present a digital ecosystem that is more conducive to recurring usage. Consistency in look and feel across engagement channels and business units is vital to enticing digital natives.

A smooth workflow must be supplemented by individualised experiences that automatically recognise returning users and integrate that recognition seamlessly. And advanced, customisable analytics must allow a rich view of the user and employee journeys to allow for continual improvements.

3Scale, don’t sprawl Hybrid cloud environments have a habit of introducing complexity that encumbers rather than empowers. The platform-of-platforms approach that will deliver consistency and brand loyalty must be built on a low-code environment that abstracts this complexity for citizen developers and end-users, covering every issue from security to latency.

Innovative enterprises need to make sure their low-code toolset will let them scale across their entire ecosystem. They will also need to be mindful of disparate transformation programs creating more technology silos — another source of complexity.

4Noticeable value CIOs and other IT leaders are under pressure to draw a line from their decisions to revenue surges and cost reductions. Once low code is established as the go-to approach for digital extensibility, C-level executives will quickly see how, for example, a major digital development took place without the need for expensive and timeconsuming recruitment drives.

Everything enterprises do, from the back office to the public domain, will be touched by the ability to innovate independently and deploy those innovations securely and efficiently. Automation and analytics, IoT and robotics — nothing is impossible, and imagination will often be the only limitation on business growth. When you throw in cost-efficiency, robust uptime, and increased brand engagement, it is easy to see how low code could become the region’s chosen engine of change in the years ahead. Convinced yet?