Digital Bulletin - Issue 23 - December 2020

DIGITAL BULLETIN Issue 23 | Dec ’20

DESIGNING

IKEA IKEA Retail’s largest franchisee, Ingka Group, has embraced DesignOps to build first-class digital customer journeys. This is how it was done

JAMES HENDERSON Content Director

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s brands go, they don’t come much stronger than IKEA. The Swedish company is known for its innovative approach to furnishings and has become synonymous with the retail experience, with consumers travelling many miles to visit its stores. It has also positioned itself ahead of its competitors when it comes to its approach to sustainability.

When you think of IKEA’s design capabilities, the mind will undoubtedly conjure images of a sleek armchair, an inviting sofa or a sturdy coffee table.

But as buying habits have changed, the design of IKEA’s online channels - its websites, apps and social media - has become just as important.

It is the transformation of IKEA Retail’s (Ingka Group) design approach and its embrace of DesignOps that is our main focus this month. We speak to Karolina Boremalm and a number of other key players in the story to find out how the company’s Digital Experience Design teams are being given the tools they need to imagine and implement worldclass online customer journeys.

Boremalm, Head of Global Digital Experience Design Operations, tells

us: “DesignOps is a buzzword in many cases. In other cases, like for us at IKEA, it is not. We do truly see a need of elevating this part of the craft that is rarely talked about into something different to relieve strain on designers and enable them to do their work.”

It is a story of real teamwork, collaboration and true creative thinking, and it begins on page 22.

ABB is the focus of our second case study this month, where we take an in-depth look into how automation is making the company’s Procurement & Logistics Global Business Services organisation much leaner and more agile. Ben Mouncer spoke with Martin Tomczak and Akshay Nigam to find out about the widescale smart automation and advanced analytics programme they are steering and how it is now surpassing expectations.

We also look at how the UK can fill the Huawei-shaped hole in its 5G network, run the rule over the Gousto, the company looking to become the ‘Spotify for Food’ and speak exclusively to Coupa Software CEO, Rob Bernshteyn.

I hope you enjoy our December issue PUBLISHED BY BULLETIN MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

IKEA’s Adam Keresztes speaks to Digital Bulletin about the company’s new DesignOps approach at its workspace in Malmö, Sweden

INSIDE VIEW

CONTENTS

10

MONTH IN REVIEW NEWS, VIEWS AND ANALYSIS

42 IT SERVICES

COUPA SOFTWARE CEO Rob Bernshteyn on Community Intelligence

22 CASE STUDY

IKEA A DesignOps movement in action

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2

CASE STUDY

ABB An automation success story

66 CONNECTIVITY

SEMTECH Why LoRa is the future of IoT

76 PEOPLE

TELEPERFORMANCE A blueprint for the WFH transition

CONTENTS

1 84 FUTURE

DEBATE Which technology is set for a breakout 2021?

94

DATA INTELLIGENCE

GOUSTO Building the “Spotify for Food”

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104 4 A LIFE IN TECH

MariaDB CEO, Michael Howard, shares his secrets

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CLOSING BULLETIN

An exclusive column from Cheryl Allen, HR Director, Culture and Transformation at Atos

110 EVENTS

The best digital technology events for your diary

MONTH IN REVIEW

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

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NEWS UPDATE

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

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he highest value acquisition this month came in the United States where private equity firm Stonepeak agreed a $8.1bn deal to buy Astound Broadband, the sixth largest U.S. cable operator in the United States. Stonepeak operates regional providers RCN, Grande, Wave and enTouch, serving over one million customers with 23,000 miles of fibre.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.

Microsoft Corp. data partner AvePoint Inc. revealed it is to go public through a SPAC merger with Apex Technology Acquisition Corp. In the deal, AvePoint was valued at $2bn. The agreement will have Apex’s balance of $352m and a $140m additional private investment handed over to AvePoint.

Coupa Software acquired AI-powered analytics firm Llamasoft for around $1.5 billion. Llamasoft’s technology is used by hundreds of enterprise customers, including brands such as Boeing, Danone S.A., Home Depot, and Nestle.

Coupa said the deal will enhance its supply chain capabilities, enabling businesses to drive greater value

through its Business Spend Management platform.

Ericsson completed its $1bn acquisition of Cradlepoint, the U.S.-based provider of wireless WAN Edge 4G and 5G solutions for the enterprise.

The investment is key to Ericsson’s strategy of capturing market share in the rapidly expanding 5G enterprise space. Through Cradlepoint’s solutions, companies can connect sites, vehicles, mobile workforces, and IoT devices using cellular technology.

Cybersecurity outfit Palo Alto Networks agreed an $800 package to acquire attack surface management company Expanse. Its online platform is able to map exposed and untracked assets that comprise customers’ attack surfaces, evaluate and prioritise risk, and provide mitigation. Expanse’s

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platform is to be added to Palo Alto Network’s Cortex product suite once the deal is concluded.

Cisco has signed a deal to buy container security company Banzai Cloud. It is Cisco’s second swoop for a startup focussing on Kubernetes in just a couple of months, after its deal to buy Portshift in October. Cisco’s Liz Centoni said the two agreements “are a testament to the globalisation of the cloud-native ecosystem”. No financial terms were disclosed.

Aeva, a startup developing lidar sensors to enable self-driving cars to be aware of their surroundings is to go public. The listing will be carried out through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) InterPrivate Acquisition Corp. The agreement values Aeva at around $2.1 billion and will include $300 million of fresh funding to be used to develop sensors for consumer devices.

Autodesk is to buy Spacemaker for $240m. Spacemaker uses AI and generative design to help architects, urban designers, and real estate developers make more informed early-stage design decisions faster and enables improved opportunities for sustainability. The deal will help Autodesk to accelerate outcome-based design capabilities for architects.

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FUNDING Los Angeles-based rocket startup Relativity Space has raised $500m as it sets an ambitious plan to industrialise Mars.

Relativity is the first company to print a 3D rocket, the Terran 1, also using AI and autonomous robots, which significantly reduces the time and number of parts it takes to build a rocket. Its long-term vision is to build infrastructure on Mars.

Private equity firm Blackstone poured $400m into security company FireEye. ClearSky, a cybersecurity-focused investment firm, have supported Blackstone with the transaction. FireEye provides hardware, software and services to enterprises and now plans to accelerate its

NEWS UPDATE

growth. It also separately announced the $186m acquisition of Respond Software, a security investigation firm.

Enterprise AI platform DataRobot has raised $270m in what it called a “pre-IPO funding round”, indicating the company will soon go public.

Financing was led by Altimeter Capital, joined by T. Rowe Price, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Tiger Global, Silver Lake Waterman, B Capital Group, Glynn Capital, ClearBridge, NEA, and Sapphire Ventures. The raise values the company at over $2.7bn.

SentinelOne has raised $267m from venture capitalists, taking the endpoint security firm’s value up to $3bn. Tiger Global and Sequoia are the two companies to have made the backing. SentinelOne was valued at $1bn only in February but has seen demand for its services increase during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pony.ai, the self-driving startup backed heavily by Toyota, has raised $267m in new funding. The money will be used to develop tech and expand

its fleet, as the firm looks to grow its presence in the United States and China.

Only eight months ago did Pony.ai net a $462m cash injection, led by Toyota.

This latest raise values Pony.ai at $5.3bn, putting it ahead of rivals Aurora and Nuro.

Secure access service edge platform provider Cato Networks announced its largest funding round to date of $130m. The round was led

by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation of a new investor, Coatue, and existing investors, Greylock, Aspect Ventures / Acrew Capital, Singtel Innov8, and Shlomo Kramer. Before the round, Cato was valued at $1bn.

Menlo Security, a provider of endpoint-free cloud cybersecurity solutions raised $100m in a Series E funding round, achieving a $800m valuation. The round was led by Vista Equity Partners with participation from Neuberger Berman funds, General Catalyst and JP Morgan.

Menlo Security will use the funds to expand its go-to-market, sales, and global expansion efforts.

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MOVERS AND SHAKERS There were a number of eye-catching appointments in the tech world over the last month, none more so than Twitter announcing well-known hacker Peiter Zatko as its head of security.

Zatko, more commonly known by his hacker handle “Mudge”, was one of the leaders of hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow and recently did some work for Google. He will start after a full review of current security measures, reporting into CEO Jack Dorsey.

The creator of the Python programming language Guido van Rossum has come out of retirement to join Microsoft. He will join the company’s Developer Division. In a Twitter post, he revealed: 14

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“I decided that retirement was boring and have joined the Developer Division at Microsoft. To do what? Too many options to say! But it’ll make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows).”

Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was fired after stating that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

President Trump made unsubstantiated claims of “massive” voter fraud in the election, despite being considered by CISA as the “most secure” in American history.

Virgin Galactic appointed Alistair Burns as its new CIO. Burns will be responsible

NEWS UPDATE

for delivering the technology strategy for Virgin Galactic as it seeks to develop and operate the world’s first commercial spaceline. Most recently, Burns spent almost five years as Senior VP and CIO at OSI Systems, having also spent 16 years at Thomson Reuters managing large-scale technology infrastructure.

MetLife announced that Pawan Verma will join the company as EVP and Chief Information Officer. Verma will report to Bill Pappas, Executive Vice President and Head of Global Technology and Operations. Verma joins MetLife from Foot Locker where he was the chief information and customer experience officer.

He previously worked as VP of digital and

marketing technology for Target.

Ford Motor Company announced that Vijay Sankaran has opted not to rejoin the company, citing personal reasons. The company previously announced that Sankaran had accepted an offer to become Ford’s chief software and information officer beginning this week, after serving seven years with TD Ameritrade. Jeff Lemmer will continue as Ford’s chief information officer for the rest of the year.

Stay right up to date with the latest news shaping the enterprise technology sector with The Bulletin, available at digitalbulletin.com ISSUE 23

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Bridging the 5G gap Huawei finds itself frozen out of 5G networks in Europe and the United States. In the UK, the ban has opened the door for smaller vendors and the emergence of OpenRAN architecture but there are multiple challenges to overcome

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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he journey to a Huawei-less 5G future has begun across Europe and the United States. The Chinese telecoms giant has indicated that it will launch legal proceedings to fight banning orders in Europe, but its fortunes in the U.S. - where it has failed to overturn its ban - suggest it faces an uphill challenge to force its way back into 5G proceedings.

It’s difficult not to conclude that Huawei has become a victim of the trade war between the U.S. and China.

The company has long been an established part of telecommunications networks in the UK and Europe, but heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing have effectively forced governments to choose a side.

The UK was one of the first countries to announce a widespread ban of Huawei, in-part driven by its ongoing efforts to broker a trade deal with its old ally across the Pacific. Companies have been told they have until 2027 to tear out Huawei kit

from their networks, but for those hoping 5G will open up significant new revenue streams, there is no time to waste.

Those negotiations will have to be revisited with the change of administration in the United States, but the decision to freeze out Huawei looks likely to prevail, despite the significant expense it represents and delays to the roll-out of the critically important 5G network.

“The decision looks to have a lot of political motivation behind it with the UK government under pressure from the Americans to ban Huawei,” says Martin Courtney, Principal Analyst at advisory firm TechMarketView.

“There are certainly some cybersecurity concerns, but I think some of these could have been addressed by careful network segmentation and being more selective about the removal of Huawei kit from some parts of the network but not others. Replacing, or finding new suppliers, for all of the equipment

xxxxxx Martin Courtney, TechMarketView | Martin Morgan, Openet | Sanjeev Verma, Squire Technologies

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mandated will be expensive and time consuming for UK telcos and may well lead to delays in 5G rollouts.”

As well as the expense, the decision reduces the pool of large-scale 5G equipment suppliers, with the duo of Ericsson and Nokia very well placed to hoover up any number of lucrative contracts. Market estimates from TrendForce show that the market share for 5G base stations in 2020 is led by Huawei at 28% - the Chinese 5G market is arguably the most advanced in the world and will easily sustain the company despite its troubles abroad Ericsson at 26.5% and Nokia at 22%.

“The industry now appears to be seeing the downside of a broader consolidation of 18

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telecommunications equipment suppliers over the last 10-15 years” Courtney comments. “There are very few manufacturers of any network equipment, let alone 5G, left in the world. Given the lack of options, we have now seen European governments (and some in APAC too) start to favour Nokia and Ericsson, with politics again appearing to play a significant role in procurement decisions.”

One company that is aggressively pursuing the 5G equipment market is Samsung, having invested billions of dollars into its efforts in its domestic market of South Korea and abroad, most notably in the U.S., where it recently signed a deal worth $6.6 billion to supply

NEWS ANALYSIS

radio access network equipment (RAN) to Verizon.

The contract has been viewed by some industry observers as Samsung joining the RAN big leagues and figures show that its estimated share of the 5G base station market has increased from 6.5% in 2019 to 8.5% in 2020.

“Samsung, NEC and Fujitsu look like the most obvious candidates to muscle in on the market given the sophistication and scale of their research and development and manufacturing resources which should enable them to switch design and production efforts more quickly,” says Courtney.

Sanjeev Verma, founder and MD of Squire Technologies, says: “Samsung has gained significant ground, with a strong 5G offer, but the most interesting aspect is the disaggregation that 5G brings. This means that individual network elements can more easily be obtained from smaller independent

vendors. Yes, the networks will be critical but the most critical will probably be smaller, self-contained private networks.

“In addition, there is a host of new players that have embraced the principles of ‘OpenRAN’, which does not mean ‘open source’ but rather a new model through which new reference designs define open and standardised interfaces.

In turn, this means that it’s easier to build components that can interoperate to deliver RAN functionality.”

Openet’s VP of Marketing, Martin Morgan, concurs: “Operators are not without alternatives, and the removal of the Chinese equipment vendor presents some significant opportunities. The virtualisation of network functions and a shift to cloud-native network architecture has opened the doors for other vendors to enter the market.

“From the RAN down to the core, operators continue to offer contracts to agile, digitally savvy and cloud-ready vendors.

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These companies can reduce the cost of producing and launching new services as well as aggressively accelerate their time to market.”

OpenRAN is seen by many as the method that will bring democratisation to 5G networks and one that is increasingly being embraced by operators and vendors alike. OpenRAN systems are capable of utilising software-defined 5G components that can operate across a range of hardware.

By creating virtualised 5G networks, the hardware within them is not beholden to a particular network system, but instead tied together by various bits of code. And because all 20

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the equipment connects via standard interfaces, carriers can mix and match products from different suppliers.

In November, Vodafone - a key player in the UK’s 5G market - committed to using OpenRAN at approximately 2,600 mobile masts currently served by Huawei - equal to 35% of the Chinese organisation’s footprint within Vodafone’s network. It is one of the most encouraging signs yet that telcos are ready to open up their networks and diversify their providers.

“Operators are beginning to realise that they need to take a leading role in specifying their networks, rather than outsourcing this to single vendor

NEWS ANALYSIS

partners,” Verma says. “They have been locked in and this has also blocked smaller companies from participating.

While in the short term supply choices may be limited, this will change. However, the biggest barrier to this are the procurement teams in operators who have been long-used to favouring single suppliers and scale, over innovation and a more diverse approach.”

Courtney says the emergence of OpenRAN is a welcome one, but questions the readiness of smaller companies to fill the void left by Huawei.

“Even with 5G’s greater use of software defined networking (SDN) and virtual network function (VNF) technology to

reduce reliance on complex, proprietary hardware, it still takes a long time for a company to nurture and develop the requisite IP, design and test products, undergo certification and compatibility checks before they can go into production. And that’s assuming companies can find a sufficient volume of home grown engineering talent quickly and cheaply enough in Europe or elsewhere.”

However the UK moves forward with the creation of its 5G network, Verma says it is impossible to overstate the importance of getting it right the first time around.

“Let’s not forget that 5G is primarily designed to provide more efficient networks and to meet new, industrial use cases, which are expected to unlock new value. We need 5G to happen if we have any chance of negotiating any kind of positive post-EU tech-powered global economic growth, but to get there, creative planning, some imagination and concerted effort at the top of government will be needed.

“At least for now, politicians must take on some responsibility for helping the UK telco market find a new, solid way forward post-Huawei. If the government does not play an active role in supporting new entrants and working with operators to encourage innovation in the supply chain, these benefits will be lost.”

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IKEA

IKEA’S

DESIGNOPS REVOLUTION IKEA Retail’s (Ingka Group) Karolina Boremalm and her digital experience design team have introduced an all-encompassing DesignOps strategy to the company, with a design system at its centre. Here, Digital Bulletin speaks to a number of key stakeholders to find out how the approach is enabling IKEA’s design teams to plot best-in-class digital experiences for customers

PROJECT DIRECTOR: Jack Walsh AUTHOR: James Henderson VIDEOGRAPHY: Fraser Harrop PHOTOGRAPHY: Johan Bävman

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n a truly digital age, the old rulebook has been thrown out of the window, nowhere more so than in the world of commerce. Online is now the true shop window, with consumers expecting seamless digital shopping experiences across a multitude of touch points and devices. Those companies that are not able to match these new expectations find themselves quickly falling by the wayside.

Perhaps more than any other company, IKEA has bucked the trend when it comes to changing behaviours, with a large proportion of its consumer base still wedded to the unique store experience that it offers.

But having redefined what an in-store experience could be, it has proven itself to be just as committed to innovating across 24

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the multitude of digital experiences where it meets many of its customers.

The famous Swedish brand made its name through the power of design, with its iconic furniture sitting proudly in hundreds of millions of homes around the world. But as customers have migrated online, IKEA’s team of digital designers has become integral to the organisation, ensuring customer journeys are fulfilling, easy to navigate and fun. The job of digital experience design, plotting omnichannel experiences to help customers improve and enjoy their homes, is now just as important as the job of designing the company’s next must-have armchair.

IKEA committed to a digital transformation journey three years ago with a root and branch review of the company’s digital

IKEA

strategy, encompassing everything from back-office IT systems to how consumers experienced the buying process on their smart devices. It is a transformation that is by no means over, but IKEA has won praise for a number of its innovations, introducing eye-catching tools such as augmented reality to enable customers to test products in real time through Apple ARKit technology.

Such a comprehensive programme has inevitably put pressure on certain teams, not least IKEA Retail’s (Ingka Group) in-house Digital Experience Design team, which has overhauled its online, mobile, app and checkout platforms. Karolina Boremalm is one of many IKEA employees who left the

company only to return a few years later.

Upon arriving back at IKEA in 2019 Boremalm, took the position of Head of Global Design Operations at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group), where she found a design team just a few months old striving to establish itself, its processes and its approach to increase design maturity amidst a large-scale digital transformation.

“As a design team, we’ve been part of this transformation, but we started with a small team,” Boremalm tells Digital Bulletin when we meet at IKEA Retail Malmö offices. “We’ve been hard pressed to keep up with all of the demands that we had and that we still have.”

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We couldn’t deliver what we wanted to the high quality that we wanted to deliver to, and that is a problem because as a digital department and driving digital transformation we need to deliver worldclass experience” Karolina Boremalm Using her years of experience leading and working in digital design teams, Boremalm canvassed colleagues and designers old and new to dig into where the team could drive process improvements, efficiencies and optimisation.

Those conversations kept coming back to one main issue - that designers were not able to solely focus on the design.

There was a recognition that for digital transformation to be achieved, changes 26

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had to be made to free up IKEA’s Digital Experience Design Team team to do what it does best. And so IKEA’s Design Operations (DesignOps) team was created, with Boremalm taking on the role of Head of Design Operations, Digital Experience Design.

“The business case was the fact that we were in an early phase of growth compared with other teams in IKEA. We have more than 200 product teams that deliver on a daily basis and we found that as we were working and delivering around the clock,” Boremalm comments.

“We couldn’t deliver what we wanted to the high quality that we wanted to deliver to, and that is a problem because as a digital department and driving digital transformation we need to deliver world-class experiences.”

DesignOps has come to the fore in recent years, in part inspired by Development Operations, or DevOps, and are characterised by the optimisation and arrangement of people, processes and systems to get the very best out of a design team and deliver impact and value for the wider company.

Part of the challenge for IKEA was to provide the design team with the right tools to thrive in the digital environment, which is still a relatively new one for the company, and represents a switch in thinking from a customer in a physical store walking around its signature layout to somebody on a digital journey.

IKEA

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I see DesignOps as a way of collectively improving the design process by standardising tools, standardising ways of working and ensuring that our designers have the best possible prerequisites to do their job” Karolina Boremalm

“At that point we were lacking design maturity in terms of digital design; IKEA being a design company, that might seem strange but it is not a digital design company so this is a great shift for us to make. We were product driven and we were trying to adapt the product to the business without a thought of how we cater to users, so digital experience design and human centred design maturity are what we are targeting in terms of working more towards customer needs.”

Of course, while there will be common practices and principles across all 28

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DesignOps programmes, each enterprise will tweak their approach to suit the specific needs of their design teams.

“DesignOps at IKEA does a lot of very different things. We do everything from design maturity work to how we assess skills in our team and it is important to us because we want to be effective, we want to build world-class experiences and we want to build a world-class team,” Boremalm explains.

“I see DesignOps as a way of collectively improving the design process by standardising tools, standardising ways of working

IKEA

and ensuring that our designers have the best possible prerequisites to do their job.”

IKEA’s DesignOps movement is still very much in its infancy having been established in April 2020. A great deal of work has been put in to ensure the right people and are in the right roles, while efforts to build out internal teams are ongoing, with Boremalm and her colleagues recently establishing an internal digital experience design unit.

“This is a brand-new function, it has not been done before at any of the IKEA groups and we are still finding our way,” Boremalm says of DesignOps. It is true that there are

still a number of challenges to overcome, but its positive impact is already being felt across its multiple product teams.

As IKEA Retail’s (Ingka Group) Acting Head of Product UX Design, Adam Keresztes oversees a team of designers tasked with replicating IKEA’s signature in-store identity in an omnichannel world.

As he tells Digital Bulletin, it is a department that is involved in numerous projects at any one time, not all of which it is able to plan for. Capacity can often be stretched by new streams of work coming in from the side.

All of which means his team requires a broad skillset to deal with anything that comes its way. Since the introduction of the DesignOps department, Keresztes and Boremalm have developed a close relationship, often speaking daily, to ensure that the UX team has the resources it needs.

“You have to have the right competences, whether that’s a designer with a strategic background competence, or someone who is more on the detailed UX side of things,” he says. “Having conversations with her and thinking of it more as a team effort, about us as a design team overall, no matter where they work, has been very helpful.”

Having the right skills in the right places is integral to effective DesignOps, meaning design teams have been able to access training and reskilling resources to ensure their designers are armed with the right tools to work on multiple work streams.

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“It’s really helpful to be able to send off designers for training and the same thing there, DesignOps helps with that.

Whether that’s a training or a conference or e-learning course, whatever that might be, Karolina’s team and the DesignOps within their team support us with that very well. And that means I don’t have to,” says Keresztes.

One of the main advantages of working with the DesignOps team is the built-in knowledge of design and a deep understanding of what a design team needs to work seamlessly. That is already paying dividends when it comes to the tooling and technologies.

“From my experience working in other companies, tooling has always been dealt with by the IT department, and it’s always been so hard to explain why we need a certain tool,” he says.

“We have design tools, we have prototyping tools, we have research tools.

These are the things we need and when you explain all of this to an IT owner, you get comments like ‘why can’t you use PowerPoint for that?’ In this set-up, there’s a DesignOps team that knows exactly why we need these tools and, if I need it in my team, there are probably other designers and other teams that need them as well.”

But the jewel in the IKEA DesignOps crown is its design system. For the uninitiated, a design system is a single source of truth that brings together consistent styles, design components, design rules and best practices, design code and workflows that enable teams to create consistently high-quality results.

IKEA has handed over the responsibility to the DesignOps team, which in turn has empowered Boremalm and her colleagues

Chriz Gadegaard, Experience Design Lead, IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)

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IKEA

to build a collaborative system that can support the company’s many design teams. The DesignOps team has begun the process of distributing the design system globally.

“It is something amazing,” she says. “We have not been able to support all the teams before and we are doing that now. It creates not only a positive vibe, but also hope for the future. IKEA has a lot of challenges in terms of ecommerce and digital, but with this system we are actually mitigating a lot of the problems and the risks that we see and people see that and other areas of IKEA see that. They are really, really happy to join in and be part of it, to support it and contribute to it, which is super nice.”

Keresztes’ UX team is one of the early adopters of the design system, and he is

in agreement that its implementation is the DesignOps team’s most significant achievement to-date. There is, he says, sometimes a misconception that design systems are simple guides on fonts or “how certain buttons should look”, but what has been created goes well beyond that into something that can ultimately guide the entirety of IKEA’s digital design function.

“It’s more about the design system as a representation of who we are as a company,” he says. “For example visual identity is baked into it, interaction design is baked into it, motion design is baked into it and, most importantly, accessibility is baked in.

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Karolina Boremalm at IKEA Retail’s Malmö offices

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IKEA

to rethink what the area code should be for each product, but in a design system it’s already there. This is huge because it means that each designer doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.”

Robin Whittleton, Engineering Manager at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group), is equally passionate about putting accessibility at the heart of the design system. “One of the big challenges we have as a major organisation is not just meeting our obligations but exceeding what is required from us, as we care about every user at IKEA throughout

that journey. We want to do the right thing for our users and a large part of that is accessibility and making sure that our site is accessible to as many people as would want to use it regardless of their individual needs.

“And so a design system can really help in that because we’re going to touch every part of the user interface. So if we can bring in high quality components, accessible by default, that gets individual product teams a long way towards meeting and then beating their own obligations from a legal standpoint.”

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A key strand of the design system programme was establishing a consistent tone of voice. Being in an IKEA store is a distinctive experience, and a significant amount of work was, and continues to be, put into recreating that feeling in an online setting. The task is made all the more challenging when the same digital tone has to be recreated across many different markets, cultures and dialects.

Amy Johansson - originally from Brooklyn, New York but now very much settled in Sweden - has been central to that effort, supporting 100+ designers in the Digital Experience Design Team at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group).

“Design systems are usually thought of as just being mostly for visual and digital designers doing details, but in this iteration we wanted to include our own copy toolbox and have text components added to our design system,” she says. “Tone of voice is not normally included in most traditional design systems, but I guess this is not your typical company.

“It’s really exciting, because IKEA has this iconic tone of voice that’s tied up in the brand, we wanted to make it an essential part of the digital customer experience. The way we speak to our customers, the messaging, how we address certain situations that occur only digitally - in the digital realm. So it’s been 36

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We have design tools, we have prototyping tools, we have research tools.

These are the things we need and when you explain all of this to an IT owner, you get comments like ‘why can’t you use PowerPoint for that?’

In this set-up, there’s a DesignOps team that knows exactly why we need these tools” Adam Keresztes incredible, it’s been quite a journey to just incorporate that and really have that freedom to create.”

Throughout the process of implementing DesignOps, Boremalm and the Digital Experience Design Team team has been mindful of the dangers of being too insular and inward looking. In an effort to canvas outside opinion and expertise, IKEA used the help of Idean, a global design studio

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that has worked with a number of global organisations.

The work has built on a long-standing relationship between the two companies, with Idean keen to play its part in helping IKEA become a world-leader in digital experience with design at its core.

“It’s important that we have those types of relationships between local and global agencies because the journey we are on means there is no possibility for us to do it alone,” says Boremalm. “Idean has worked on design systems for other companies that are also as globally vast as IKEA is and we can learn from that and utilise that knowledge to enhance our own operations and design.

“We are trying to ensure that we are developing and modernising without losing our ‘Swedishness’ and our soul and our heart, and still abiding by the values that we have. I think Idean being a glocal [global and local] collaborative partner makes it easier, because they understand our values, they understand IKEA, but they can also broadcast that globally.”

To have made such great strides in such a short time is testament to the work and spirit of collaboration of all stakeholders on the project. But to have continued to progress through a worldwide pandemic makes it all the more impressive.

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across all its global teams. One of the tools it has utilised to keep the project moving is Miro,a collaboration platform that acts as an online whiteboard and which has been used to share ideas by IKEA teams all around the world.

“We can collaboratively work on the same board and make sure that if I start something on a Monday morning at 10am, my U.S. counterparts can continue with the same work when they wake up and go to work. So it actually improves our quality quite a lot because we don’t have to wait for information; we have it accessible at a click,” Boremalm comments. “I don’t feel the need to be anywhere in person, I can do my job anywhere in the world. I can collaborate from anywhere in the world and tools like Miro are enabling me to do that.

“Miro also helps us advocate for customer experience. First of all, Miro as a tool is very easy to use and intuitive - it is a pleasure to use and leaves you with a feeling of ‘hmm, this is pretty cool’. The second part is us utilising Miro to do the advocacy for customer experience. We use the tool in many different aspects; as a DesignOps team, we use it to hold workshops related to what we do in digital design and UX, and customer experience.”

When speaking to just a few of the many people involved in the DesignOps movement at IKEA, what comes through is a real passion and belief that the changes

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We want to do the right thing for our users and a large part of that is accessibility and making sure that our site is accessible to as many people as would want to use it regardless of their individual needs�

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Tone of voice is not normally included in most traditional design systems, but I guess this is not your typical company�

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that have been introduced are making a tangible difference to the company’s design teams.

The DesignOps department may be less than 12 months old, but the team behind it sees it very much as the future when it comes to approaching design - as well as being a philosophy that can be continually refined and improved - and which can become integral to IKEA and its design teams all around the world. Its impact is already being appreciated by many but if deployed at scale, it has the potential to be truly transformational in empowering designers to do what they do best - design.

“DesignOps is a buzzword in many cases. In other cases, like for us at IKEA, it is not,” says Boremalm. “We do truly see a need of elevating this part of the craft that is rarely talked about into something different to relieve strain on designers and enable them to do their work. The future for DesignOps and my vision for it is that I would really love the DesignOps team and department to become a real support channel for all of IKEA. “So, my dream for this department and for this team is to make sure that it is global, that we are supporting everyone and that we are enabling people to do their jobs, and nothing else.

We are not the solution providers, we are enablers.”

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COMMUNITY MINDED Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of global technology giant Coupa Software tells Digital Bulletin about his new book and why Community Intelligence will shape the next wave of business and technology evolution

INTERVIEW: James Henderson

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i Rob, thanks for speaking to Digital Bulletin. You’ve just launched ‘Smarter Together: How Communities are Shaping the Next Revolution in Business’, could you give our readers a flavour of what the book is about?

At the centre of the book is the idea that there’s simply nothing more powerful than Community Intelligence. Put another way, none of us is as smart as all of us.

The idea of Community Intelligence isn’t new. But what is new is the amount of data at our fingertips, the ability and willingness to share it, and the supporting IT 42

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infrastructure and technology that allows for dynamic collaboration. The book is about how we can leverage Community Intelligence to reshape the way we work.

Today, the green shoots of this revolution can be seen all around us. Community Intelligence is already shaping our daily decisions, whether it’s where to go and how to get there, where to eat, what to buy, or how to stay fit. I think it’s something we’ll see companies and industries relying on more and more, and I predict you’ll see Community Intelligence tools getting built into more and more software platforms as a result.

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Community Intelligence is already shaping our daily decisions, whether it’s where to go and how to get there, where to eat, what to buy, or how to stay fit” How long have you been thinking about the topics you cover in the book and how long has it taken to write?

It took about a year to write, but it was the product of about 20 years of hard thinking about what it takes to solve big problems and manage complex systems, and how technology can be leveraged to help. But I was especially motivated to write this book now, in part because I think it serves as a corrective for the way we think about information technology today.

Public perceptions of information technology have taken some wild turns.

I think many of us were swept up by the dream of the internet weaving humanity into a single community. But that was before the misinformation and the disinformation and the trolling and the hate.

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And so, people are a lot more cynical now about it, and I understand that.

But I think there’s something lost in the sweeping generalisations and the legitimate concerns. I think there’s a more nuanced reality, which is that for all its shortcomings, the software now powering our lives has the potential to do incredible good for the whole of humanity.

I think that potential for good is on display in every aspect of our lives, and I think it speaks to a path forward for companies and industries of the future.

What is ‘Community Intelligence’ and why is it important?

Community Intelligence is the wisdom of the collective, which has always played an essential role in the development of societies. We used to pass down this intelligence orally, through stories around a campfire. Then we got the printing press and could fill libraries with the wisdom of generations that could be passed on and built upon. The information age would later transform by incomprehensible orders of magnitude, the amount of information available to the community. And today, we can use artificial intelligence to make sense of all of this data in aggregate, delivering Community Intelligence in instant, actionable, and prescriptive ways. Put another way, we’ve mastered the ability

ROB BERNSHTEYN, COUPA

Bernshteyn oversaw Coupa’s IPO in 2016 to transform information from the many to create insights for the one.

Think about Community Intelligence like a neighborhood watch programme. What you give up, your time to patrol or some money for a service, is outweighed by the value you get in return, which is safety in your neighborhood. The concept of communities sharing and learning together is particularly important for companies navigating an uncertain economic environment. The intensity of competition is accelerating, and by some estimates about half of the S&P 500 will be replaced

in the next decade. Companies need new ways to see around corners, and I think increased applications of Community Intelligence provide the answer.

Coupa manages some $2 trillion of spend data in its ‘Business Spend Management’ system. Could you talk about how many of your clients are embracing ‘Community Intelligence’ and the insights they are able to glean from that approach?

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the numbers are growing by the day - it’s been rewarding to see. We have companies that have cut their workflow cycle times in half by benchmarking themselves against the community. We have companies that have increased their operational efficiencies by as much as 70% by adopting the digital practices of the community with their suppliers. A company recently came to us for advice after it learned that its best-in-class peers had achieved on-catalog spend that was 28 times higher than its own. And these are just a few of the examples.

Let’s get into some of the questions you raise in the book, what sort of insights can businesses expect to have access to if they collaborate on data sharing?

I mentioned some more broadly, but specifically with regard to Business Spend Management, I’d say it comes down to the following four things: • Benchmarking: Data generated by Community Intelligence allows a company to not only see how they stack up against another company but gives them the ability to make real-time adjustments to help them compete.

• Best Practices: Businesses will be able to identify patterns that will help them drive great performance across their organisations.

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• Improved IT: They’ll get direct insights on their product so they can improve them, fine tune them, and make them relevant.

• Spend Smarter: With Community Intelligence, companies will know they are getting the best prices from the best suppliers who deliver what they promise on time. That means their costs should go down, as well as their risks of receiving late deliveries or less than acceptable merchandise.

ROB BERNSHTEYN, COUPA

We have companies that have increased their operational efficiencies by as much as 70% by adopting the digital practices of the community with their suppliers”

You make a strong argument against data privacy in the book, could you outline your objections to many common concerns around data privacy and explain why being open is better?

I definitely wouldn’t say that I’m against data privacy at all. Data privacy is critically important. But let’s be clear about what that means, data privacy means you should have the ability to consent before your data is shared in any way, anonymised or not. I think

that’s a given. The question is, when should you give permission to share that data? And the answer is, you should share it when it provides you with value to do so. At Coupa, nearly all of our customers have agreed to contribute to our Community Intelligence capability, where they share sanitised and anonymised data with us, because they know that what they are getting is more valuable than what they are giving.

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How do you believe employees can harness data to further their careers?

If you’re leveraging data through Community Intelligence, the bottom line is that it’s going to make you smarter. It’s going to make you better at your job.

And it’s going to make the people you work for notice.

A lot of people I talk to in our community describe a familiar problem: They’re not expected to be prescriptive and provide insights to their boss, but they’re not going to be promoted if they

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don’t. So what do you do then if you don’t have the tools to add that value?

Usually the answer is that you stagnate.

Community Intelligence tools give you the ability to become the decision-making force in your company, and to do it with confidence. At the end of the day, that’s going to be good for your career. And frankly, it’s also just good for your quality of life. If you’re leveraging community, it means a lot of headaches you never have to have, and a lot of busy work you never have to do.

ROB BERNSHTEYN, COUPA

Since COVID-19 hit, several companies have realised the value and necessity for sharing data across organisations to achieve breakthroughs more quickly” Which departments of enterprise do you see as already changing because of AI and big data?

Currently, you see a lot happening with the medical industry. Since COVID-19 hit, several companies have realised the value and necessity for sharing data across organisations to achieve breakthroughs more quickly. But I think you can see this across all sorts of categories. In retail, for example, where physical locations are increasingly disappearing, leveraging AI and big data is the core way that retailers are using to personalise their offerings and really get to know their customers. That’s a way to deliver meaningful value that will certainly help them thrive.

How do you see the future being influenced by Community Intelligence?

You outline an interesting scenario in the final chapter of the book?

In the last chapter of the book, I give an

example of what dating could look like in 2025. The whole genesis of the example is that throughout our days, technology is going to give us recommendations based on all the data we create.

So, let’s say you’re going to do a workout class at home in the afternoon.

Your choice app is going to recommend your favorite music to listen to, the best instructor for the workout you want to do, and it’s all going to seamlessly integrate in your calendar, so you have plenty of time to get ready for the date.

Then for the date, a whole new set of recommendations will be presented to you, from where to eat, to how long it will take to get there, to how many calories you might want to stick to based on your workouts. The idea is that all of this is seamlessly integrated into your life so that you’re taking advantage of Community Intelligence without ever even noticing it.

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MEETING AUTOMATION DEMANDS A fresh approach to automation is driving efficiencies and excellence in ABB’s Procurement & Logistics (Global Business Services) organisation. Martin Tomczak and Akshay Nigam give Digital Bulletin the story of a rapid transformation programme, and outline its ambitions to “go big” on intelligent automation

PROJECT DIRECTOR: Jack Walsh AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer VIDEOGRAPHER: Fraser Harrop

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T

echnology is often seen as the silver bullet for businesses, or a magical dust which can be sprinkled freely to solve an organisation’s problems.

The reality, of course, is much more complex. While the technological growth curve has been exponential for a lot of this century, integrating new tech to the point where it delivers positive change is time-consuming and challenging. It can also be a process that tests the resilience of even the most forward-thinking of leaders.

Martin Tomczak is very much aware of the trials faced by technologists. As Head of Strategy, Process Excellence & Digital for ABB’s Procurement & Logistics organisation in Global Business Services, among other responsibilities Tomczak has been steering a wide-scale smart automation 52

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and advanced analytics programme designed to streamline processes and make this area of ABB more efficient.

Today the programme is living up to, and in many ways surpassing, its expectations.

Yet in the early days, Tomczak and his team came across a problem. They had the best technology that money could buy, but there appeared to be little proaction from within the organisation to actually automate many processes.

“The link was missing between the technology and the demand,” Tomczak tells Digital Bulletin. “When you drive a technology-first approach, and this is happening in many companies, the point is you go in and you want to sell a particular technological solution like RPA [robotics process automation] for example. Then you are

ABB

trying to spot opportunities, you go doorto-door and say ‘hello, we are the RPA team, do you have any demands that we could look into?’ You try to sell something that the majority of people are not even aware or educated on, it’s not intrinsic.

“It creates reluctance as well in the service lines and [business] units. This was the challenge – we had a great team, we had capabilities, but we did not really have the demands that we thought we would get.

And that was the starting point, when it was clear that we have to change, we have to do things differently. Not harder, but smarter.”

ABB is a market-leader in industrial technologies with 110,000 people employed worldwide. It is split into four businesses: electrification, industrial automation, motion and robotics & discrete automation, and Global Business Services (GBS) was set up in 2016 to improve the quality and efficiency of the services provided to

these businesses; a nervous system for making the company faster, more agile and more customer-focused.

One of the big goals of GBS has been to standardise and improve ABB’s internal processes. Automation was therefore a natural fit, giving GBS “a big, big opportunity to increase efficiency” according to Tomczak. After the early struggles to fill its pipeline in Procurement & Logistics GBS, Tomczak and Akshay Nigam – Global Programme Manager for Smart Automation & Advanced Analytics – set about creating a new “demand-first” strategy.

“As ABB is approaching a decentralised operating model, making all its divisions more independent and more agile, it was crucial to put the needs of internal customers first and become more entrepreneurial in taking up different kinds of improvement demands,” says Tomczak.

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We had a great team, we had capabilities, but we did not really have the demands that we thought we would get. And that was the starting point, when it was clear that we have to change, we have to do things differently. Not harder, but smarter” Martin Tomczak

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“We could not have a one-size-fits-all situation for everything,” adds Akshay. “So what we basically did was to create a way of measuring the impact of all the problem statements that were coming in from our functions, objectively assess them, and then give them a priority that would allow us to get our solutions delivered on time as well as meet business needs.”

This involved the smart automation team engaging directly with each area of the organisation, gaining a thorough understanding of which processes they could improve, and then making a quantitative assessment on the benefits that could be achieved. Only at the final stage was technology spoken about, with the right technology picked for the right processes, whether that be RPA, cognitive automation, a chatbot or any other technological solution.

They also ensured that every stakeholder was involved, from functional leads through to delivery managers. Altogether, this new process meant that the team could clearly establish improvement demands, attach a business impact value and gain the approvals that were required to drive that demand to execution.

Tomczak likes to use a football analogy to describe the change that has happened.

“At the beginning we were the trainer outside of the field, we were not part of the game,” he says. “We were just screaming into the field, and maybe the players heard

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ABB is working closely with Blue Prism to integrate intelligent automation solutions

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STREAMLINE MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS WITH INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION “We clearly want to move away from RPA and move towards intelligent and cognitive automation, and we see Blue Prism being our partner in doing so.”

AKSHAY NIGAM, JOB TITLE, ABB About Blue PrismBlue Prism is the global leader in intelligent automation for the enterprise, transforming the way work is done. At Blue Prism, we have users in over 170 countries in more than 1,800 businesses, including Fortune 500 and public sector organizations, that are creating value with new ways of working, unlocking efficiencies, and returning millions of hours of in their businesses. Our intelligent digital work back into workforce is smart, secure, scalable and accessible to all; freeing up humans to re-imagine work.

To learn more, visit our website at blueprism.com

STREAMLINE MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS WITH INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION “We clearly want to move away from RPA and move towards intelligent and cognitive automation, and we see Blue Prism being our partner in doing so.”

AKSHAY NIGAM - GLOBAL PROGRAMME MANAGER, SMART AUTOMATION & ADVANCED ANALYTICS, GBS PROCUREMENT & LOGISTICS, ABB

Blue Prism is the global leader in intelligent automation for the enterprise, transforming the way work is done.

At Blue Prism, we have users in over 170 countries in more than 1,800 businesses, including Fortune 500 and public sector organizations, that are creating value with new ways of working, unlocking efficiencies, and returning millions of hours of work back into their Our intelligent digital workforce is smart, businesses. busine secure, scalable and accessible to all; freeing up humans to re-imagine work.

To learn more, visit our website at blueprism.com

CASE STUDY

us or maybe they didn’t. But if a lot of things were happening on the field, they most probably didn’t hear what we were telling them. Don’t misunderstand me, we need trainers as well but now we have moved onto the field, we are now part of the team and we are playing together.

We are playing the ball back and forth and this is how we create the demand, the business case and finally the project delivery in a collaborative way.”

To extend the metaphor, these new tactics have led to Tomczak’s team finding the back of the net with far more regularity than before. In short, the “demand-first” approach has been a triumph - so much so that at the end of September this year, Akshay had to articulate to the 58

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organisation that it could take no new demands until January 2021. This was because of the sheer volume of digitisation demands with which the team were being asked to assist.

Akshay is brimming with success stories from the programme. Global Travel Services, a centralised GBS unit that is responsible for the travel and expenses of ABB staff, wanted to be more efficient in how it was able to answer queries.

After engaging with the smart automation team, a chatbot was developed and has been launched in over 30 countries. That chatbot handles more than 100 enquiries each day, with a confidence level of around 95%. Now only 5% of the queries from staff require human intervention.

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In Indirect Material & Services, another service line in the Procurement & Logistics organisation, the team was faced with the unique challenge of supporting staff in 25 countries around the world, all operating in different time zones and all requiring daily reports sent first thing in the morning.

A brainstorming session led eventually to the development of a bot that can now deliver more than 200 reports every day, each at the right time.

All the while, every use case has been added to a “knowledge database” designed to demonstrate how they could also be applicable for other service lines.

Akshay wants to go one step further and create a “bot store” by the end of the year where anybody in the organisation can

What we basically did was to create a way of measuring the impact of all the problem statements that were coming in from our functions, objectively assess them, and then give them a priority that would allow us to get our solutions delivered on time as well as meet business needs” Akshay Nigam

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visit a portal, look at the bots that have been created and if they see that there’s something that could work for them, they can click on a catalogue and order that bot. Then in the backend the team will make sure the bot is made available in the shortest possible time-frame.

Tomczak is keen to look at the broader benefits too, believing that the process now allows for many employees to gain knowledge about how and where automaton might help deliver positive change.

He believes this can lead only to a net gain for the organisation in the long-run.

“If you go through the demand and business case formulation process one, two or three times with the same people, the next time they have to do it, they can do it much quicker and much more confidently, and they can even coach other colleagues how to do it properly,” he says.

“This is how you can then increase the maturity of the organisation - otherwise you are always dependent and reliant on one particular person, or very few experts. You want to have a sustainable change process and with automation it’s just the same thing. You want to enable the organisation to lead those things from the inside out.”

As this digital maturity continues to grow, Tomczak expects the demands to become more complex. That is why ABB is putting heavy emphasis on data and the 60

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You want to have a sustainable change process and with automation it’s just the same thing. You want to enable the organisation to lead those things from the inside out” Martin Tomczak development of more “cognitive” solutions beyond RPA, which works only on repetitive tasks and with structured data. Intelligent automation sees technologies like computer vision and machine learning brought into the fold, creating a tech ecosystem that can help solve knotty demands.

“We want to go big on intelligent automation,” says Akshay. “Right now we have developed capabilities in AI and machine learning but still most of the projects that we work on are in the domain of RPA. We want to go and study with our functions and businesses on very critical, unstructured data where we can provide solutions using machine learning algorithms, using the data science team that we have, and

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work them along with the normal automation that we already deliver on.

“We are just starting on our journey for cognitive automation, though we have some very interesting projects that we are working on.”

One such project Akshay elaborates on is an exciting collaboration with Blue Prism.

A key partner for ABB since its very first ventures into process automation, Blue Prism has delivered the RPA technology that has enabled so much of the great work overseen

by Tomczak and Akshay in the last year.

Now aligned with ABB’s vision for intelligent automation, Blue Prism has granted the team access to Decipher, its advanced document processing solution that can extract valuable data from invoices, purchase orders and many more documents. Akshay reveals a significant 62

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use case is already being scoped out in Global Travel Services and that he sees the potential for this technology to drive further efficiencies for ABB. “We have tested the Decipher technology in the beta version on some of the invoices that we have had, and we have found very good results out of that,” he says. “In the future we look at Blue Prism not only as our RPA partners but also as our cognitive partners, because a lot of our projects requiring OCR [optical character recognition] and machine learning technology will be run via the Decipher solution.”

Tomczak adds: “It’s not a customer/ vendor relationship, it’s really more a strategic partnership where you share experiences and you want to become better in joint forces. We’re providing information on the demands and challenges you face

ABB

within a big corporation like ABB, and on the other hand, we have transparency from Blue Prism on the upcoming products and technologies that could influence certain roadmaps that we have.”

This transformation programme has required changes to processes and technology to enable people change. As automation deployments have increased and the technologies being introduced have become more sophisticated, Tomczak has enjoyed seeing members of his team grasp the opportunity to grow in human-centric areas.

“The smart automation team was really knowledgeable about RPA and process improvement, but change management and customer centricity are completely different skills that you might or might not have,” he says. “Working in the field of automation, by default you are a change manager. Whether you like it or not, you are a change manager.”

To make smart automation “mainstream” and drive a new digital and

smart automation mindset, Tomczak has created a strong integrated connection between the Continuous Improvement organisation - which is mainly utilising the Lean Six Sigma methodology - to identify, describe and drive improvements across the service lines.

“When I took over the Continuous Improvement team and the responsibility of the global programme, it became clear to me that continuous improvement and the smart automation programme have to go hand in hand, and that smart automation has to become an integral part of how we drive our continuous improvement efforts across all service lines in the future,” he says.

For Akshay, one of the main objectives now is to cut down the time it takes to deliver each automation project, with a specific focus on reducing the time taken to assess each problem statement on the demand side. But he also wants to continue to push for the programme’s

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We want to go big on intelligent automation. We want to go and study with our functions and businesses on very critical, unstructured data where we can provide solutions using machine learning algorithms, using the data science team that we have�

Akshay Nigam

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ABB

benefits to filter through to the wider business.

“We are in a position to share best practices from our local projects with our businesses, encouraging them to look inwards for solutions rather than engage with external partners,” he says. “We are the prime movers in the digital and the automation space; we are providing our functions with the solutions that previously had not been conceived to exist within ABB. “It has been a very exciting journey.

Every person, when they move up their career, wants to be part of such transformative exercises because it gives them the satisfaction of being part of a change in the organisation, and it’s the same with me. Change is happening around us, and we have two options: either be eliminated by the change, or be part of the change.”

Tomczak agrees, and highlights how it has been a team effort from top to bottom.

“I’m very proud to work for a company that has been supporting digital transformation so much,” he says. “Not just the engagement from ABB as a company, but also the whole senior management across all the service lines within GBS, the great engagement and efforts that they put in to promote this is very important, but of course then as well the sweat and tears and time that has been invested from the people.”

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THE FUTURE OF IOT What if there was a long-range, low-power alternative to Wi-Fi and 5G? Alistair Fulton, Vice-President and General Manager of Semtech, speaks to Digital Bulletin about LoRa’s benefits for IoT networks and connected devices

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

C

urrently, the telecommunication industry has its eyes on one prize: 5G. For better, or worse, 5G is going to change the game. It’s a technology that will allow, not only improved connectivity, but also the necessary bandwidth for Internet of Things (IoT) networks, making smart cities a realistic future possibility. It is also, however, a technology that has prompted a trade war between the world’s most powerful economies: the U.S. and China.

But, what if there was a better alternative?

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Semtech, a U.S.-based supplier of analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors, is the enterprise behind LoRa, a low-power long-range network protocol for IoT. LoRa was originally developed by the French-company Cycleo, later acquired by Semtech, and is based on spread spectrum modulation techniques derived from chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technology.

Alistair Fulton, Semtech’s Vice-President and General Manager, has been in the IoT business since it was called ‘telematics’. Before joining Semtech, he led Hitachi’s Lumada Industrial IoT platform as well as Microsoft’s IoT

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The need was there for a low power solution that would reach a long distance so you wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money on infrastructure and that was super secure.

And that really is what LoRa is” Alistair Fulton

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initiative, including the development of Microsoft’s v1.0 IoT platform - two platforms named by Gartner in its industrial IoT Magic Quadrant.

However, Fulton decided to leave the development of IoT platforms because he kept encountering the same issue, and was determined to solve it.

“The problem with all of those platforms share, without exception, is generating, connecting and ingesting data from millions of low-powered sensors,” he says. “Because the IoT, as we envision it, is dependent upon not necessarily a perfect dataset, but a pretty big data set.”

Fulton explains the challenges of IoT with the example of a factory. Ideally, a company would know exactly how each of the machines in its factory is working and would be able to track the performance of each conveyor belt and each pump.

However, this would only be possible with a wireless, cheap and low-power solution.

“I’ve spent too many hours over the years trying to figure out ‘How are we going to connect all these sensors without shutting down the hot rolling steel mill, which takes two months and costs hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars?’ The need was there for a low power solution that would reach a long distance so you wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money on infra-

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structure and that was super secure.

And that really is what LoRa is.”

LoRa is low-power, as opposed to 5G, and long-range, as opposed to Wi-Fi. It is therefore, its supporters argue, the perfect network to bridge the gap between those two networks.

“I think the differences between Wi-Fi, 5G and LoRa are important, but I think their similarities are even more important,” Fulton says. “All of these tools do different things in their own special way, and they should all work together.”

LoRa is well suited for situations where neither 5G nor Wi-Fi can provide an optimal solution, such as for tracking, for example, when products are sent out of the factory to be delivered or to track when a dispenser needs to be refilled.

LoRa allows companies to have all these data, and for machines to talk to each other in a cost-effective way.

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different slots. This also allows LoRa to be extremely long-range, as it runs on the sub-gigahertz band, and incredibly safe, as the signal cannot, in most cases, be detected.

However, any new technology needs regulation. It is for this reason that Semtech promoted the creation of an organisation that would standardise its protocols: the LoRa Alliance.

The LoRa Alliance defines how LoRa uses the free spectrum band in different countries and is responsible for the interfaces between different components in a system, the certification of LoRa networks, as well as marketing and awareness efforts. Its members include IBM, HP, Cisco, Bosh, Diehl and Mueller.

“Someone said to me years ago ‘Technologies that win are those that do the job well enough and that have a lot of friends’; and the LoRa Alliance really is ‘a lot of friends,’” Fulton says. “It’s about promoting the technology to the broader IoT ecosystem. It’s about those 400 companies using LoRa in the products they’re building.”

If the LoRa Alliance provides the ‘friends’, then LoRa’s challenge is to make sure that it ‘does the job well enough’. To achieve this, Semtech is currently focusing on ensuring interoperability and user-friendliness.

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that is “holding back” the development of IoT, is that systems from different companies are not able to interact with one another. Needing experts in a specific technology to deploy it is, according to him, a “failure” on the part of the provider, who should have been able to create a more user-friendly product. Nonetheless, ensuring this simplicity is also a great challenge.

“The hard bit in any technology is actually making it accessible and easy to use, and this is something I always

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say to my engineering teams: delivering simple is hard,” Fulton says. “Delivering simple requires that we, the provider in this case, absorb all of that complexity and deliver something that’s very easy to use for a developer, which may not be an embedded developer. And that’s what we achieve through a software abstraction layer similar to cellular.”

Similarly to the way that cellular modems drastically changed the use of cellular in the IoT space, Semtech wants to bridge that communication layer by

providing developers with metadata that they can then use to build applications and track the aspects that interest them.

For example, a developer could access information about where a particular package is at any specific time, and use that to track how long it has taken for it to be delivered.

“Location and asset-tracking, in particular, is a very underserved service,” Fulton says. Semtech is jumping into this space by developing LoRa Edge, a system-on-chip platform ISSUE 23

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that introduces, for the first time, a low-power low-cost way of doing Wi-Fi and GPS-based location.

Instead of using all the power needed to calculate GPS location, the LoRa Edge can “sniff satellites”.

The hardware products look at how many satellites can be detected from a certain position, and send that data to a cloud service which makes the location calculations.

“If I wanted to build a tracker device today, not using LoRa Edge, I would have to have a radio chip, a GPS chip

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and a Wi-Fi chip. And both the GPS chip and Wi-Fi chip cost money and they are power-sinks. They sink power. So what LoRa edge does is get away from that.”

To further its commitment to simplification, Semtech has also partnered with ActilityNet and Tago.IO to develop the LoRa Edge Tracking Reference Design. This product allows customers to figure out, in Fulton’s words “what is often the hardest problem in IoT”; the business case by showing how much money and resources the tool would allow a company to save.

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This is something I always say to my engineering teams: delivering simple is hard” “The other thing it does for the industry is it’s an open reference design,” he adds.

“So it is an end-to-end blueprint for how you build a tracker. One of the other challenges in the IoT is that it’s quite hard to build sensors that function at low power.

And the more that we can do to help people out there who are building sensors build a better sensor more quickly, again, that’s our responsibility to do.”

Amazon has been the latest company to jump onto the LoRa train, leveraging the technology for its Amazon Sidewalk project, an expansion of its aim of entering the smart home space.

Sidewalk can be used to automate many parts of your house, from security systems to lights or leak sensors. However, problems arose when Amazon wanted to extend the range of their network beyond that of the house and into the community, for products such as a pet-tracker.

“I say LoRa puts the ‘sidewalk’ in Sidewalk,” Fulton says. “LoRa is what allows that vision to be expanded

beyond the home, beyond the garden, you know, into my local neighbourhood and maybe even beyond.”

Moreover, LoRa allows another fundamental aspect of Amazon Sidewalk: security.

“Security is something that is core to Amazon’s very being, in terms of how they think about smart homes.

And LoRa, along with the way that they’ve implemented Sidewalk overall supports that highly secure model: people don’t even know the signal is going to be there. And if you don’t notice the signal, you can’t intercept it.”

But Sidewalk is only one of the hundreds of possible use-cases of LoRa. In China, for example, a company is leveraging LoRa to automate the tapping of rubber trees. The utility sector could also greatly benefit from LoRa; to track water or electricity usage, with smart metres, or even in the managing and monitoring of electricity grids.

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Monitorisation and tracking logistics are also two huge applications.

“Everything with ‘line’ in it,” says Fulton - pipeline, trainline, truckline - could very successfully utilise LoRa. “Anywhere where things are remote, where you need your own network infrastructure and cellular might not be there.”

Many of these use-cases also have an added benefit: they help reduce a company’s environmental impact, 74

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something that is core to Semtech’s beliefs. “I don’t think we’ve got a whole lot of time when it comes to things like environmental impact,” Fulton says.

“To me, IoT and reducing the impact of humanity on the environment go hand-in-hand. There is a strong commercial component on the business side because companies want to produce more from less. And if you have the right incentive structures, then less means less damage.”

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As a technological company, one of the things that is very strongly ingrained in the way that we see the world is that whatever we think is going to happen next; we’re probably wrong”

For example, Semtech has been using LoRa itself to manage the company’s energy usage, as well as the impact of COVID-19. For Fulton, the advent of the pandemic only exemplifies his philosophy when thinking about the future.

“As a technological company, one of the things that is very strongly ingrained in the way that we see the world is that whatever we think is going to happen next; we’re probably wrong.”

This was already proven, as most companies were wrong on their predictions for 2020. Instead of trying to guess what will happen next, Fulton believes in building a relationship with customers and an agile way of working that will allow Semtech to quickly adapt to any future trends, customer needs, or even pandemics.

“I don’t know what’s coming next, but I know that we’ll be ready for whatever it is,” he says.

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APART BUT TOGETHER

Outsourcing giant Teleperformance has transitioned nearly a quarter of a million staff to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gary Slade, CEO for its UK and South Africa business, discusses the company’s challenges and strategies, and reveals how the perfectly-timed roll out of its new technology platform has helped produce better results in lockdown

AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer

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ach enterprise has faced its own challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. In all businesses, from scaleups to conglomerates, leaders have had to think on their feet and take action that they would never previously have had to consider.

But imagine the scenario for an organisation that employs 330,000 people worldwide, that had a very successful and embedded office-based working approach, and that deals with a multi76

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tude of high-profile clients across pretty much every industry.

You might not have heard of Teleperformance, but there’s a fair chance you would have been served by it at a point in your life. Teleperformance is one of the biggest outsourcing companies in the world, specialising in the customer experience. It operates in more than 170 countries and technology is at its core, with its services built to assist the digital transformation initiatives of its clients.

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We got 80% of our workforce at home within six weeks.

And the staff working from home were amazing. It was very humbling. They said ‘we know it’s not going to be perfect, we know it’s going to be a bit scratchy, but frankly, we’ll make it work, thank you for keeping us employed’. We could have furloughed staff, we could have laid staff off, but we didn’t” When countries around the globe began to lock down earlier this year, Teleperformance had to quickly relocate the majority of its employees to their homes. An unprecedented problem for most businesses, for Teleperformance it represented a significant obstacle; its contact centres were the nervous system of its business, and its people thrived from being together.

“As a leadership team we sensed something ugly was about to happen,” says Gary Slade, who as CEO of Teleperformance’s UK and South Africa business is responsible for 6,000 of the company’s workforce.

Slade and his team got to work. Prior to COVID-19, Teleperformance had approximately 30 employees working remotely in the UK. While having designs to increase that number, its pre-pandemic target was to have 300 operating 78

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from home by the end of 2020. Certainly not the thousands it has now.

“There had been lockdowns in other parts of the globe, so you think ‘we may follow suit’ and then ‘so how do we do that’?” says Slade. “We started about 10 days earlier, understanding what the challenges were to move people home en-masse.

“We got 80% of our workforce at home within six weeks. And the staff working from home were amazing.

It was very humbling. They said ‘we know it’s not going to be perfect, we know it’s going to be a bit scratchy, but frankly, we’ll make it work, thank you for keeping us employed’. We could have furloughed staff, we could have laid staff off, but we didn’t.”

Slade is clearly proud of what was achieved. It took no shortage of effort; computers were bundled into taxis and

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staff were given time slots to collect any belongings. Ahead of them, the leadership team had the task of instilling its working culture while everybody was apart and dealing with the onset of a pandemic. On top of that, they had to ensure Teleperformance continued to service its clients. Slade says he and his senior colleagues didn’t take a day off for two months.

One of the biggest priorities straight away was ensuring client satisfaction.

Slade is candid; a handful of Teleperformance’s customers were unsure about their outsourcer suddenly operating remotely. Even though mindsets

have now largely altered, it meant a few awkward conversations were had in the early days of lockdown.

“We had some clients who were more enthusiastic to get us working from home than others, that’s probably the best way to put it,” says Slade. “It depends on the industry. Sometimes you’re doing heavily-regulated work, so companies were a bit more anxious because they had to get into a formal risk assessment. Others just never got bought into working from home. We’ve been through a journey on that.

“For me, my priority then was very simple: my people. I was not interested

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in my business at the height of the pandemic. It was about our people and doing right by them.”

In Slade’s teams, data has shown some positive trends from remote working this year, with both workforce attrition and absence far lower than before the pandemic. The company has also made efforts to support its employees with the challenges of being on your own, not least around mental health. It has invested in mental health training and wellbeing courses, as well as an open approach to employee feedback.

“We have seen big demands in this area,” says Slade. “A lot of people who

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come to contact centres are young and they like the vibrancy of it, there’s always something going on. Then they’re stuck at home and don’t have that interaction. So we’ve spent a lot of time on what the teams need, and that has involved a lot of communication.

We began doing voice calls three times a week, and we very much opened the doors and said ‘you can ask anything’.”

The transition has also been supported by technology. In the UK, Teleperformance has spent more than £3 million on new kit alone and it has ramped up its network monitoring efforts as thousands log into work from their home offices.

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But the most crucial element has been the accelerated roll out of Cloud Campus, the company’s global virtual workforce platform. Originally due to be introduced steadily over the course of 2020, Teleperformance has had to expedite tech development on Cloud Campus to enable and improve the work-from-home experience for its people.

The platform has allowed Teleperformance to tackle difficulties around onboarding and training - it has hired 3,000 workers in the UK since lockdown, and wants to add 1,000 more before the year is out - while also optimising team performance through its advanced analytics capabilities.

“Cloud Campus was always in the hopper as a strategic investment as a business,” says Slade. “Because of COVID-19, we prioritised that and moved other stuff down. New buildings got de-prioritised, and we prioritised Cloud Campus to get that up and running faster. We’ve been rolling that out and it’s going exceptionally well. The teams are loving it.”

Teleperformance in the UK has certainly found its groove with remote working yet Slade and his colleagues aren’t getting complacent. They know that circumstances are still far from normal, especially with England in the grip of another lockdown at the time of

I was not interested in my business at the height of the pandemic.

It was about our people and doing right by them” Gary Slade

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writing. Work-from-home fatigue is a material concern, especially as winter sets in and any novelty wears off.

In a study conducted during lockdown in July, global online employment platform Monster found that 69% of workers surveyed in the U.S. had experienced burnout symptoms while working from home, and 59% also said they were taking less time off than they normally would have done.

“It’s hard. I don’t think the fatigue is necessarily from WFH really, it’s just thinking about whether this thing is 82

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going to end,” says Slade. “From a fatigue standpoint at Teleperformance, we recently said that no meetings are allowed to be booked between 12 and 1. People still work, but you can’t book a meeting. We’ve shared that with our clients and nearly all of them have agreed. It’s about giving people that time to step away from their desk, because the barriers between work and home have disappeared.”

How does Slade see the future? Are the days of packed contact centres with rows and rows of agents a thing of the

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New buildings got de-prioritised, and we prioritised Cloud Campus [Teleperformance’s new technology platform] to get that up and running faster.

We’ve been rolling that out and it’s going exceptionally well.

The teams are loving it”

past? While Slade certainly envisages a return to offices when living with COVID-19 becomes more manageable, he believes a blend of office and remote working will be the new normal.

“Even before COVID-19, we always knew this was going to be increasingly important. We knew it [offering remote working] was going to be important to attract labour in a labour-scarce market,” he says.

“So I think what we’ll see is a movement back into the office, but not 100%.

Something like 60-65% moving back into

the office and keeping some at home.

Then if you look at the macro level, it also means that the types of people we hire are going to be different over time.”

He concludes: “No-one’s ever had this before. There is no playbook for the situation we’ve found ourselves in.

That’s people in any industry - so everyone’s having to learn. And the one thing I will guarantee you is we haven’t got it perfect. But what does work is communication with everyone. The answers are normally within your team, as long as you’re good at listening.”

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2021 THE FUTURE IS NOW

In every issue, Digital Bulletin picks the brains of experts in a particular sector of the technology world. This month, we ask: Which future technology is set for a breakout year in 2021?

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“ New memory technology is revolutionary”

at the time for making tech like smartphones and USB storage drives possible.

Flash memory doesn’t work so well when it comes to the demands of emerging Dr Steven Schooling, Director of Physical applications like machine learning, which Sciences, Engineering, requires computers to work more like the Built Environment & Social human brain. That often means accessing, Sciences, UCL Business storing and processing the same information all at the same time.

Artificial intelligence and IoT solutions As a result of the inefficiency of have long been positioned as key breakthroughs that will change the technology current technologies in achieving that, flash memory struggles to industry. University spinout companies deliver increased performance while are amongst the leading disruptors in these areas, with the UCL research base consuming greater amounts of power, forming a bottleneck that holds back in London having generated successes machine learning processes and such as Senceive and Hazy. hampers the drive towards smaller In 2021, we hope to see the rise of devices so crucial for edge computing new computer memory technologies and IoT solutions. that can unlock e long-promised revoNext year, we will see the rise of lutions in computing for complex tasks new ‘memristive devices’, which are such as image recognition, speech better at providing memory that’s more synthesis and decision-making, all of dynamic, and more like the human which improve how they interact with brain in how they perform. Memrisand support humans. tive devices store information not as Currently, those emerging applications blocks of ‘on’ or ‘off’ gates, but using are being run on hardware designed resistance levels. This means that for ‘traditional’ computing tasks. That information stored by memristors can includes Flash memory, which stores have a range of different values falling blocks of information for computer between those two points – it becomes systems based on the ‘on’ or ‘off’ state a spectrum, rather than a binary. Ultiof logic gates called ‘NAND’. mately, information can be stored more Developed in the 1980s, Flash memory efficiently, and accessed more quickly, stores blocks of information that might intelligently and flexibly. be called upon later. That was essential ISSUE 23

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The result is that memristors can deliver high performance at a smaller scale, and with lower power consumption.

Until recently, Memristive devices have proven difficult to deliver because the design and manufacturing processes were not ready to deliver them to scale with the reliability we expect from modern computers.

At University College London, spinout Intrinsic Semiconductor Technologies has developed ‘RRAM’, a silicon oxide based memristive technology that is compatible with existing semiconductor fabrication processes, while still providing the performance benefits that memristive devices promise. Using existing fabrication processes simplifies the ability to fabricate the new memory device with a semiconductor fabrication facility, avoiding the need for major investment in new process lines.

In time, the improved performance and efficiency means this type of device has the potential to replace NAND-based flash memory and help computers to ‘think’ more like our brains do.

The demand for machine learning and edge computing means there is demand for hardware that properly supports them. In 2021, we believe that new enterprises such as Intrinsic will have the potential to rise to that challenge.

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“ Supercomputing will star in 2021” Mimi Keshani, VP Operations, Hadean

The tragic impact of COVID-19 and the associated fallout has impacted our lives in a number of ways. The “new normal” will have far reaching consequences - some of which may well be here to stay. Changes in our lifestyles and patterns and behaviour have seen us lean on technology to ease the transition into a remote world, pushing through unprecedented advancement across a number of sectors.

Supercomputers solve problems that are too complex for a conventional computer to handle - and the messy, three-dimensional, multi-scale world of biology is full of such problems. From understanding the shape of proteins, to the behaviour of synapses in the brain, we use supercomputers to try and elucidate the secrets of life. As the pandemic progressed we’ve seen supercomputing underpin a tremendous number of research areas as diverse as critical patient care, drug design, and public health forecasting to plan interventions.

It is important that the unprecedented measures put in place by governments to reduce the spread of the virus are

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based on scientific evidence. However, producing the realistic, high fidelity, models are extremely computationally intensive and require handling vast amounts of disparate data. Scientific funding bodies have mandates to make data from any COVID-19 related research they fund open, and initiatives from the Royal Society like RAMP bring the community together by comparing the results of individual modelling groups to reach a consensus.

A community working together makes progress faster, and the applications we build to handle massive scale high-performance simulations, both in the context of the current pandemic and any future outbreaks, could well be readily available over the next 12 months.

Another consequence of stringent social distancing measures has been

the rapid and large scale movement in routine medical appointments to an online setting. At the peak of the pandemic, around 71% of GP appointments in England were undertaken remotely, compared to 25% the previous year. Institutional barriers to the uptake in technology were effectively abolished overnight with far more being done remotely than ever thought possible. Even after this period of social distancing has passed, it’s likely that some of the observed benefits of remote consultation in terms of convenience, cost and accessibility encourage its continued usage.

The environment that we have been living in for the past six months has understandably made people become more aware of their health and well-

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As the pandemic progressed we’ve seen supercomputing underpin a tremendous number of research areas as diverse as critical patient care, drug design, and public health forecasting to plan interventions”

being. This may drive increased usage in personalised health monitoring.

The proliferation of these items will require new ways of handling vast numbers of interconnected devices and data. Although the user of the device may not realise it, they are likely to be using apps built on new connectivity models.

The increased recognition of our public healthcare system might in turn encourage investment, which will be invaluable in addressing some of the longstanding technological problems.

These include the integration and of patient records across healthcare settings and the formation of collaborative and international research 88

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databases to facilitate research collaborations globally.

All things considered, COVID-19 has certainly changed the world in ways that would have seemed unimaginable a year ago. Considering the enormous death toll and the unquantifiable damage to people’s mental and physical health globally, it’s more important than ever to ensure we can learn whatever we can from these experiences. Technology has been crucial in keeping people connected and enabling some aspects of normal life to continue. Going forward into what is likely to be a challenging few years, technology and in particular supercomputing, is going to be essential in navigating these difficult waters.

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“ Cellular vehicle-toeverything will change the game�

Vishnu Sundaram, Senior Vice President, Telematics Business Unit, HARMAN Automotive

Experts anticipate that by 2025, one third of the world will be covered by 5G, supporting 1.2 billion connections. With it we will see warp speeds of data, reduced data delays and dramatically improved network coverage. However, its potential impact is far greater than many realise.

In mid-2021, the first 5G-enabled cars will come to market, and with

them, advanced safety features powered by new telematics control units. With this launch an important new safety technology will be included called cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X). This peer-to-peer technology will deliver a broad range of safety features as a result of direct data exchange between similarly enabled vehicles and devices within a 1km radius. This new connected community will include vehicles, road infrastructure, services providers and eventually even mobile-phone-equipped pedestrians and cyclists.

Innovative features like Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) alerts will utilise peer-topeer signals and proximity scanning to identify and notify drivers, pedestrians

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In mid-2021, the first 5G-enabled cars will come to market, and with them, advanced safety features powered by new telematics control units� and cyclists that participate in the system of a potential road conflict or accident hazard. This will save lives.

Over 1.35 million people die, and more than 50 million are injured annually as a result of road traffic accidents. The World Health Organization estimates that over half of these accidents involve pedestrians and cyclists. It is expected that V2P will help to reduce these figures substantially.

This sort of system is similar to the technology that is already deployed in aircraft to reduce mid-air collisions.

Every C-V2X enabled vehicle or device transmits a beacon that identifies the current location, speed, direction of travel. These beacons are monitored by all participating devices in proximity. Beacon locations and trends are compared using algorithms to detect potential safety conflicts between the devices. When the system detects a hazard, the affected driver, pedes90

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trians and cyclists would be alerted.

Communication between the devices and the car can take as little as a few milliseconds, providing the immediacy required to issue warnings if a pedestrian is about to step into the road.

Another important aspect of C-V2X will be connectivity with nearby road infrastructure to help improve the efficiency of public roadways. Roadside units, such as traffic light controllers, utility poles and traffic metering systems, will become C-V2X equipped. This will permit hyper local communication to cars, including local camera views, traffic light coordination and status, parking availability and dynamic high definition maps.

This new technology’s impact will start to become clear in 2021, and likely accelerate as we approach the end of the decade when more vehicles and devices become 5G enabled, and the resulting waves of technological advancement can occur.

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“ The new mobile edge is ready to break out” Joe Hammer, EVP, Business Development, AlefEdge

This year has seen many enterprises forced to implement remote work policies on a vast scale. All indications are that going forward these policies will remain in place as part of what is widely accepted as the ‘new normal’.

Independent research firm Gartner indicates that 74% of companies plan to permanently shift to more remote work post COVID. This trend has served to massively boost the importance of mobile networking and edge computing as enterprises look for ways to securely enable access to critical workloads and applications for workers wherever they are located.

This is not just a matter of tweaking the old office-based way of doing things to make it a bit more ‘Edge friendly’. It’s about developing dynamic Edge-centric solutions, designed from the ground up to support the way we now work.

It is also about looking for effective ways to deal with the numerous security

threats that are the inevitable result of shifting vital services and data away from the heavily protected center. There’s a name for this innovative way of enablement – the Software-Defined Mobile Edge, or SD-ME. SD-ME has been made possible thanks to advances in edge computing and open mobile software. These advances opened up opportunities for enterprises, and more importantly for the developer community that serves those enterprises, to take advantage of software-defined, zero trust, low latency connectivity that can act as the bedrock for innovative Edge applications.

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What enterprises need if they are going to achieve all this is a platform that brings together a rich set of APIs that empowers developers to create and deliver secure applications for the mobile Edge.

Driving demand for this sort of platform are a number of factors.

Mobile applications are getting faster, and the latency requirements they impose are much tighter. There is also a general push towards greater mobility, not just for people but for things. Then there is the rise of the software-defined network which has shown what is possible. The convergence of all three 92

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of these factors have been a crucial stimulus in the emergence of a software-defined mobile edge.

Any SD-ME platform will be judged on how it handles the issues of security and control. An enterprise looking to build out their network closer to the Edge must deploy mobile solutions to get there. They also need to be sure that they keep control over locally held data and must be certain that the data is kept extremely secure.

These are serious issues in almost any vertical, from financial services, to industrial, to education. The pandemic has

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SD-ME has been made possible thanks to advances in edge computing and open mobile software”

served to amplify what were already very real concerns. Almost overnight, secure connectivity was no longer just a matter of having an SD-WAN to connect head office to branch offices.

It meant, in effect, serving the needs of hundreds or perhaps thousands of ‘branch offices’ as people worked from home. Latencies rose, the cost of bandwidth rose, new security risks opened up causing heartaches for a lot of CIOs. The right SD-ME platform plays right in the middle of all that, providing secure local mobile breakout and in an open and programmable way. By fostering an

open developer ecosystem and Edge APIs, new and interesting services and applications can be created.

With the integration of NetFoundry NaaS, zero trust security can be programmed into applications making sure every session is protected. With zero trust, you are able to control any endpoint and its data flows to and from those endpoints with software based policies orchestrated with a single cloud native control plane. Applications and users are connected to the resources and assets they are entitled to connect to and nothing else.

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CREATING THE “SPOTIFY FOR FOOD” Data intelligence technologies have reached the groceries industry.

Digital Bulletin speaks to Shaun Pearce, Gousto’s Chief Technology Officer, about how the company is leveraging artificial intelligence and data analytics to optimise its supply chain and customer service AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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GOUSTO

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igital transformation, data analytics and automation are revolutionising every sector, and the grocery market is no exception.

The UK groceries market is worth £200 billion annually. And while giants such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s dominate it, the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed other food delivery businesses to thrive, particularly those that have been able to leverage data intelligence capabilities to their advantage.

Gousto is one of the first companies in the food industry to implement new technologies throughout its product management line, from the factories in which its recipe boxes are put together to its website and customer service channels.

The development of these technologies has allowed Gousto to become one of the latest technology unicorns in the UK, after recently raising £25 million from Perwyn and BGF in a funding round. The pandemic has undoubtedly underpinned this success, as Gousto doubled its monthly meal deliveries from 2.5 million to five million over the first lockdown, a figure that is expected to grow further as subsequent measures are taken.

However, according to Gousto’s Chief Technology Officer, Shaun Pearce, the key to the company’s success rests on its utilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics.

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Sourcing and delivering fresh, perishable food is very difficult to do in a cost-effective way.

If you want to provide that kind of convenience to a customer at a price point that works, you have to leverage data technologies” Shaun Pearce

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“Sourcing and delivering fresh, perishable food is very difficult to do in a cost-effective way,” Pearce explains.

“If you want to provide that kind of convenience to a customer at a price point that works, you have to leverage data technologies.”

This use of AI is present from the customer’s first interaction with Gousto, through the first recipe box recommendation engine, the “Spotify for Food”, which recommends menus and recipes.

Moreover, Gousto’s AI also recommends recipes to the company’s chefs based

on client preferences and helps them design weekly menus.

Although these technologies have already been used in ecommerce, those findings cannot always be successfully extrapolated to the groceries market.

“What we found is that selling recipes is very different from selling other things like t-shirts. It’s such an emotional product. You often have a customer not buying just for themselves but for their whole family. And so it wasn’t possible to just take one of these standard techniques and use it; what we had to do ISSUE 23

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Essentially we’ve written a SATNAV for our recipe boxes.

And that’s ultimately helping us lower our costs so that we can pass those costs reductions on to customers”

is combine several of those techniques and configure them in a way that gave us the best results.”

However, the company’s deployment of AI goes far beyond that recommendation service.

“Within our supply chain, we use algorithms to define the best possible layout for our warehouse and decide where we put carrots this week versus next week,” Pearce explains. “These 98

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are decisions that historically would have been made by humans. But, using the data we have, we can process kind of billions of different combinations of these layouts and pick the one that we think is best.”

Moreover, Gousto has also automated its factories and used AI to increase its efficiency. One of the areas where this can be seen is in the automated pick lines that move the company’s recipe

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boxes from one station to the next, lowering congestion.

“Essentially we’ve written a SATNAV for our recipe boxes,” Pearce says.

“And that’s ultimately helping us lower our costs so that we can pass those costs reductions on to customers.”

Nonetheless, the technology that has provided the most value to Gousto has been the automation of decisions, which has increased the company’s

throughput by 80%. “The way that we look at AI is essentially about using the data that we have to gain insights and then automate the decision making across the business,” Pearce says.

But a transformation of this magnitude always comes with challenges, and the deployment of data analytics is no exception. Pearce identifies three main issues: data quantity, data quality and talent acquisition.

“To utilise AI properly, you need large quantities of really high-quality data,” he says. And, although Gousto’s is obtaining increasing amounts of data thanks to its rapid growth, Pearce also underlines the need to ensure its quality.

“Having large amounts of bad quality data means that you will make bad decisions based on that data,” he explains.

“So the other thing that we’ve worked very hard on over the last eight years is data quality. Making sure that we can trust the data is key.”

However, data isn’t everything: talent matters too. “The most important things are people and talent,” Pearce stresses.

“What we have done is build an exceptional data science team that understands the challenges of our customers at Gousto and can build these products in the right way. I think if you’ve got the people and you’ve got the data then you’ll build great AI.” ISSUE 23

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Nonetheless, the automation of Gousto’s production line faces additional challenges which are unique to its industry: the management of perishable items. For this reason, the company is currently working on R&D projects that will use robots to pick fresh perishable food without damaging it.

But the goal is not only to not damage food; it’s also to not waste it.

If food waste was a country, it would be the third-highest emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China, according to the United Nations’ Food

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and Agriculture Organization. “Focusing on that as a problem for the environment is extremely important to us,” Pearce explains.

Gousto has an advantage over traditional grocery stores in that its model naturally reduces food waste for clients, as they only receive the exact ingredients in the exact quantities they need to make each recipe. In addition, the company has recently reduced its use of plastic packaging by 50%. However, Pearce does not think this is enough.

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Having large amounts of bad quality data means that you will make bad decisions based on that data. Making sure that we can trust the data is key” “We can only really stand by that if we lower food waste within our supply chain as well,” he says. “We have used AI and algorithms to do both short-term, medium-term and long-term forecasting; What that allows us to do is to confidently order just enough product from our suppliers and make sure that we lower the amount of waste of our food chain to very low single-digit percentages, which is a fraction of what the supermarket industry would be creating at any point in time.”

However, the technological challenges only increase as a company grows, and Gousto is no exception. After having recently reached a valuation of £1 billion, the company is on its way to open three fulfilment centres in the UK over 2021 and hiring 1,000 new employees.

“As you grow, data, in general, becomes more and more important,” Pearce points out. “The value of the

decisions you’re making is higher and there’s a tendency to want to use data more and more in the making of those decisions, from strategic ones all the way down to the decisions we make on a minute-by-minute basis in the warehouse.”

During this process of scaling-up, Pearce’s team realised that the timeliness of the data they had - updated every four hours - was not good enough. “If we made a decision based on data that was four hours old, potentially we weren’t making the optimal decision,” he says.

For this reason, Pearce’s work over the last year has been focused on improving the data pipelines to be able to provide real-time data to every team across the business, which is now able to make fine-tuning adjustments throughout the day to optimise the supply chain.

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possible decisions,” he says. “But it also informs humans. Humans are a really important part of this, and they will forever be. Our leaders and our managers on the ground in our factories understand how the teams are operating, how the systems are operating, and the data empowers them to make the right decisions as quickly as possible”.

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Gousto’s interest in the human part of their business is also translated to the needs of the whole country, particularly during COVID-19. During the first lock-down, Gousto worked with charities such as Shelter and the Trussell Trust to provide over 8,000 meals to those in need and prioritised deliveries to vulnerable clients and NHS workers. During this second

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lockdown, Gousto has continued to do the same.

“We want to make sure that we’re supporting people that are most in need, both our customers and the wider UK population,” Pearce says.

Moreover, as people get more and more used to working from home, they also keep up with the habit of ordering recipe boxes, and Pearce does not see

this trend dying down anytime soon.

“We believe the recipe box industry as a whole has a lot of space for growth,” he says. “I think customers will continue to adopt online grocery as a whole. And for us, it’s all about choice and convenience. I think that if we keep on listening to customers, we’ve got a huge amount of space to grow within the next five years.”

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A LIFE IN TECH

A LIFE IN TECH MariaDB’s CEO, Michael Howard, tells Digital Bulletin about his decades in leadership roles, during which he has raised $75 million in funding from global strategic investors and led a number of acquisitions

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MICHAEL HOWARD

W

hen I was going through college, we didn’t even use the term ‘technology space’.

At UC Berkeley, they didn’t even have a Computer Science degree when I was there. For me, it was more about taking one’s creativity to the next step. Like writing, sports or painting a picture – programming was another language to be learned in addition to French or Russian. It was another way of expressing myself.

In my case, I didn’t like how Russian was taught at school so I wrote a Russian tutorial system. I didn’t want to wait for a professor to get back a week later after answering questions in a test. I wanted something to immediately affect my understanding of the Russian language.

The first real job I had was as a tech writer helping to produce technical books in college. I wasn’t interested in the commercial aspects of technology, but I had a passion for writing and I had programming experience. Writing was always a centre point for me in technology and is what sparked my interest in pursuing a career in the technology space.

One of the most important people who influenced me in the technology area was the head of sales at Information

Builders, one of the first companies I worked for. He felt I was able to articulate technology in a very unique way to customers and external people. That created some degree of confidence in me to move further into the technology area.

By far, the most influential person to me was Larry Ellison. I was, and still am, inspired by his precision of language, the use of correct words, the simplicity that he would require in presentations but the depth of understanding of those presentations, it was ISSUE 23

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unprecedented in my career. There was a point while I was at Information Builders where I had taken on almost every single role possible at a company.

I was a product manager, architect, tech writer, sales engineer, director of sales.

Building all these experiences made me realise I could pull these skills and knowledge together to run a company.

I spearheaded a whole new industry when I worked at Information Builders, which recently sold to TIBCO. I was the first one out there thinking about federating different databases

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together to create a virtual data warehouse and doing analytics on it.

That’s how I got to Oracle. At Oracle, being one of the first leaders in the formal data warehousing market. That was pretty important. My next achievement was democratising machine learning for sales at C9. Now, everyone seems to be doing that.

Leadership demands clarity of thought, clarity of mission, clarity of imagination and the concept to which you want to bring your people to. Good

MICHAEL HOWARD

leaders are capable of capturing the imagination of the people that can make their vision come to life.

Good leaders can communicate a concept in a way that shows how special it is and ultimately how successful you believe it can be, and show focus to that goal. It takes a great amount of strength to maintain clarity of thought and mission without wavering or compromising along the way.

For young CEOs, the closing of a round, the success in raising millions of

dollars, can be breathtaking. It is a hack into one’s ability to gain confidence and stature. Once you realise that the funding game is just a mere means to an end and not an end in and of itself, it decreases in value with regards to what you really think is important.

My advice to aspiring technologists is write well. Speak well. Simplify. Make sure you understand what someone is asking of you.

To make a company attractive for acquisition, you have to be really passionate about your own strategy and you can’t waver from your goals.

Then when you’re having conversations with would-be acquirers, you have to understand their strategy to see where synergies lie.

In my career, I’ve had personal challenges and professional changes.

With COVID-19, I don’t look at it as unique because it affects everyone.

Everyone is in the same box. Sure, some companies have advantages and some don’t. Even with the greatest companies in the world, they are challenged by COVID in some way or the other. Since everyone is in the same morass, it kind of equalises everything.

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I’ve had far greater personal challenges. Such as working at a startup that isn’t getting funded and worrying about payroll, getting fired and worrying about one’s reputation, or when you realise there are different parts of the industry that are against you on a personal level. When it gets personal, that’s when I’ve hit my biggest challenges, rather than when it’s pervasive, as it is with COVID. I think the next big thing in the database world is when the smaller companies 108

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such as MariaDB, MongoDB, Snowflake, Elastic - become the big companies.

How are these new, modern companies going to change things? Will they become another Oracle or will they be different because there will be intrinsically more humility than what came out of the proprietary database era?

It’s amazing the impact MariaDB has already had on the world. Checking your bank account, buying a coffee, shopping online, making a phone call,

MICHEAL HOWARD

listening to music, taking out a loan, ordering takeout. MariaDB enables the applications everyone relies on everyday. Companies small and large, including 75% of the Fortune 500 run MariaDB, touching the lives of billions of people.

Yoga is my primary way to switch off. If there are a lot of challenging things going on in my life, I try to imagine those things on a boat and see the boat sail away from me into the distance. I physically and mentally

detach these things and I’ve compartmentalised them on the boat so they are physically going away. That is how I start my transition to an unburdened practice.

I would like to be remembered as a person who took a renaissance approach to his career in life. It’s not just about making money or being smart. It’s diversifying and understanding different things and different perspectives, whether that’s yoga, jazz, databases and it goes on.

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EVENTS

DIGITAL

EVENTS In-person industry conferences and exhibitions are off the table for now, but there are still many digital events worth making time in your diary for...

AWS RE:INVENT 30 NOVEMBER – 18 DECEMBER, 2020 Having been held in Las Vegas since 2012, Amazon’s showpiece event AWS re:Invent will take place online this year, with an almost three-week schedule planned. AWS re:Invent is a learning conference for the global cloud computing community. The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 500 technical sessions, dive deep with AWS leaders, engage with sponsors and so much 110

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more. Free registration is now open to all. AWS CEO Andy Jassy will take to the stage to share his insights and the latest news about AWS customers, products, and services in the event’s keynote speech.

AUTOMOTIVE LINUX SUMMIT 02–04 DECEMBER, 2020 Automotive Linux Summit connects the most innovative minds from automotive expertise and open-source excellence. This includes automotive system engineers, Linux experts, R&D managers, business executives, open-source

NOVEMBER – FEBRUARY

licensing and compliance specialists, and community developers. Join over 2,000 developers, technologists and industry experts in an exchange of ideas on the latest trends in open source and open collaboration, how to navigate the open source landscape, and how open source is shaping innovation.

DREAMFORCE TO YOU 2020 02–17 DECEMBER, 2020 Dreamforce to You 2020 is a customised, digital experience for our customers, trailblazers and stakeholders to inspire, connect and define the blueprint for how to succeed in this new normal. It consists of three core pillars: Personalised experiences: For its customers, Salesforce will create a personalised event to address its needs and help the business succeed. Dreamforce to You keynote: On December 2, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff will deliver a keynote on its vision for the future, celebrate its customers’ success, unveil new innovations across the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform and more. DreamTX: Salesforce will dedicate four days, from December 14-17, to learning with DreamTX. Attendees will have access to demos, luminary sessions and additional content.

Q2B 2020 08–10 DECEMBER, 2020 Q2B 2020 will showcase an increasing number of companies that are beginning to explore the impact of quantum computing on their operations, have continuing research collaborations with vendor companies, or have deployed full-scale organisations focused on advancing the implementation of quantum computing applications. The list currently includes: Abbvie, Airbus, Aisin Group, BBVA, BMW, Boeing, Bosch, BP, Covestro, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Mitsubishi Chemical, Raytheon, Roche Pharmaceuticals, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Panels will cover increasing the representation of women in quantum computing, quantum machine learning and ethics, quantum computing and environmental sustaina-

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bility, and harnessing quantum computing for pandemic epidemiology.

CES 2021 11–14 JANUARY, 2021 For more than 50 years, CES has been the global stage for innovation, and has become arguably the most important technology event in the calendar And the all-digital CES 2021 will continue to be a platform to launch products, engage with global brands and define the future of the tech industry. An all-digital CES 2021 will allow the entire tech community to safely share ideas and introduce the products that will shape our future. You’ll be able to participate in all the awe-inspiring moments of CES wherever you are in the world.

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INNOVATION@WORK VIRTUAL WEEK 01–05 FEBRUARY, 2021 Innovation@Work is a bold, new, technology-focused event tightly centred on the future of work. With insight from the world’s most respected corporations on how they thrived this year despite disruption, we will host data-driven case studies on leadership, collaboration and productivity. Our speakers will share timely and practical knowledge from recent experiences and transformative experiments across functions and industries. Bridging the gap between technology, people and strategy, this event will inform and inspire like no other to show innovation at work in action.

NOVEMBER – FEBRUARY

DEVELOPERWEEK 17–19 FEBRUARY, 2021 Each year, 8,000+ developers, engineers, software architects, dev teams, managers and executives from 70+ countries gather for DeveloperWeek to discover the latest in developer technologies, languages,

platforms, and tools. DeveloperWeek 2021 is the largest developer conference & event series including the DeveloperWeek 2020 Conference & Expo, 1,000+ attendee hackathon, 800+ attendee tech hiring expo, and a series of workshops, technical talks, and keynotes. This year, the entire DeveloperWeek Events Series will be hosted online.

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THE CLOSING BULLETIN

Writing exclusively for Digital Bulletin, Cheryl Allen, HR Director, Culture and Transformation at Atos, outlines how tech companies can raise their game when it comes to building the digital skills landscape

T

he urgent need to address challenges around diversity and inclusion has come to the fore in recent months, with the Black Lives Matter movement shining a much-needed spotlight on the prevalence of racial inequalities. However, the fact remains that just 5% of leadership positions in the UK technology sector are held by women and only 4% of the UK tech workforce is black, Asian or minority ethnic.

Keeping diversity and inclusion at the top of the business agenda during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is vital in driving real change in the industry.

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employers put diversity and inclusion in their top three HR priorities, compared to just 5% one month into lockdown.

To help the UK ‘build back better’ from this crisis, we need digital skills now more than ever before. A robust approach to diversity and inclusion has a crucial role to play in developing these capabilities, so it’s vital it doesn’t slip down the list of business priorities.

As key nurturers of digital skills, technology companies must raise their game in fostering inclusive cultures to broaden their applicant pool and inspire talent of all ages, genders and ethnicities to pursue a career in the industry. After all, you can’t be what you can’t see.

CHERYL ALLEN

For real progress to be made, it is no longer acceptable for businesses to merely pledge their commitment to tackling the issue; they need to take a multidimensional approach in ensuring that diversity of thought and different skill sets are built into the very foundations of the organisation.

Building Diversity and Inclusion into company culture Diversity has been shown to boost innovation, help remove unconscious bias and give companies wider market awareness - all of which leads to better technology solutions and improved productivity. Although racial and gender disparities exist in a variety of industries, the tech world has shown persistent gaps within its ranks.

The path to creating a diverse company culture begins at the recruitment stage. Organisations need to think differently about how they not only attract and retain employees but how they get access to wider tech talent pools. They need to be viewing recruitment through a different lens, considering factors like: which candidates possess the most transferable skills?

How will they appeal to different audiences? And how will they demonstrate inclusive leadership, especially in a time of crisis?

Fostering a diverse workplace isn’t just about finding new talent; it’s also about developing the talent already within your ranks” This can be achieved by making hiring decisions based on performance data from skills-based assessments as opposed to traditional face-to-face interviews. That way, companies can accurately and fairly assess a candidate’s suitability for a role, and in turn remove unconscious bias from the interview process. According to Indeed, the world’s largest job website, only 13% of job advertisements include diverse and inclusive language. By adopting the right language in job descriptions, organisations can encourage applications from a more varied pool of candidates, creating a more diverse workforce.

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will be more successful in embedding long term cultural change. A holistic inclusive approach might see an organisation implement a menopause policy, a carers’ policy or focus on reducing gendered language in policies. If policies and practices don’t reflect what is embedded in organisational DNA, you risk ending up with a disaffected workforce by failing to evidence that the organisation is creating a welcoming, respectful and non-discriminatory workplace.

Diversify from within Fostering a diverse workplace isn’t just about finding new talent; it’s also about developing the talent already within your ranks. People in different roles and with different experiences can provide unique perspectives when it comes to creative problem-solving.

Plugging existing gaps in a company by offering employees continued education and training opportunities through a reskilling programme can boost employee job satisfaction, help a company retain a competitive edge, and bring out the full potential of its existing workforce. Companies can transfer skilled employees into many non-obvious roles. For example, someone who has the basic understanding of cyber security as a discipline may also find their talents can be 116

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transferred into working on SAP or AI and automation technologies.

Employees should also have access to a platform that provides opportunities to discuss how Diversity and inclusion challenges are being addressed on a company-wide level. Having an open line of communication is vital; one way of ensuring consistency could be to run focus groups with employees to get their feedback on the development of your diversity and inclusion strategy.

Similarly, launching a community programme which encourages employees to demonstrate they’re an advocate by following a few core commitments can provide a way for them to concretely signify their commitment to equality and take action in the workplace to support underrepresented groups.

CHERYL ALLEN

Cultivating future talent Ultimately, if tech companies want to make tangible progress in diversity and inclusion, they need their employees fully on board. Sharing your diversity and inclusion strategy widely, both internally and externally, will help demonstrate key values, foster an inclusive workforce and champion employees that have a diverse range of experiences and profiles. Ultimately, diversity can power innovation, and this innovation is what makes the technology sector thrive.

Employees expect companies to act as ethical and responsible employers, putting their needs first and providing them all with equal opportunities to excel.

Therefore, it’s important that the tech industry continuously strives to cultivate

a work environment in which all individuals are treated fairly and in which differences are recognised and celebrated.

Building back with digital skills As the foundation for a world leading digital transformation strategy, digital skills will be vital to helping the UK’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. We need to generate a pipeline of talent with a range of digital capabilities that accelerate innovation, create pioneering technologies and support the recovery of the most impacted sectors. A strong approach to diversity and inclusion across the technology sector will be integral to creating these skills, so we need a collective will for organisations to raise their game and start putting strategies into action.

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