It is said that misery loves company, so does change. Change loves, and needs, company because it is definitely less lonely when you see that everyone’s experiencing and muddling through the same set of challenges.
In the past few months, I’ve seen and spoken to an array of companies grappling with the biggest buzzword in the corporate world – digital transformation – as well as the need to create “seamless customer experiences” that blend the virtual and digital world as the two worlds become one.
Singapore Airlines, the bastion of tradition, is hosting its fourth App Challenge in partnership with NUS Enterprise – this one being its biggest and broadest yet to engage new thinking and innovation to solve a core set of problems. It’s set up a physical Innovation Lab and hired a chief of innovation, Jerome Thil who comes with a background in GDSes.
GDSes are themselves in the throes of change – Sabre’s new CEO & President Sean Menke wants to break down the walls in travel and bring verticals together because, at the end, the customer journey is a connected one and yet, the industry is thinking and operating in silos. To do this, he’s having to bring tech and cultural change to an organization that was founded in 1960.
Outside travel, companies like Coca-Cola are also figuring how to blend the virtual and physical world to sell not only more bottles of soft drinks but how to make every customer encounter an experience, using tech and new media to go beyond “the real thing”.
At the Adobe Symposium held in Singapore last month, where companies like Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson spoke about the challenges they face against tech giants, I learnt about the new Adobe Sensei – creative and design tools that use AI to serve personalised images at scale and speed to individual consumers. It made me go “wow” and “arrgh” at the same time – the power I have as a creative and the powerless me as a consumer.
Companies are bringing in futurists – I swear they have the best job – to talk about, well, the future. CEO of Fast Future, Rohit Talwar, speaking at the Sabre Technology Exchange, speaks of the need to build digital literacy throughout the organisation – that literacy should not just sit in a silo called product & engineering, but should be cascaded throughout the organization.
Bidyut Dumra, head of innovation, DBS Bank: “The pace of change is rapid and everyone’s getting into banks, including Grab and AirAsia.
At the Republic Polytechnic Industry Day, which I spoke at last month, I heard Bidyut Dumra, head of innovation at DBS Bank, talk about how digital transformation was almost a near-death experience for Singapore’s leading bank.
Banking, he said, is a sector known for its lack of speed and “where 80% of banks believe their customer service is good while only 8% of customers believe that”.
At the same time, it’s being disrupted in a massive way. In the past year, there’s been 12,000 fintech companies started up, soaking up $65 billion in equity. “Even if only one percent makes it, that’s 120 new competitors,” he said. “The pace of change is rapid and everyone’s getting into banks, including Grab and AirAsia.”
So in 2009, DBS started its digital transformation journey and distilled around 96 concepts into one core idea – RED (Respectful, Easy To Deal With, Dependable). The idea was to make banking joyful by eliminating waste, introducing design thinking and refocusing innovation and data programmes among other new initiatives. Results have been positive – new digital products are introduced at a pace that mirrors that of start-ups, customers experience reduced occurrence of ATMs running out of cash, as well as shortened amount of time (from five days to one) taken to replace their credit cards.
Dumra said, “The aim (of the Innovation Centre) is not to innovate but to create innovators. It’s not to solve problems but to create a problem solving culture.”
And that’s cascaded down into how the bank hires and manages talent. “How do you convince hackers to work for a bank,” he said. It created a 24-hour Challenge and ended up hiring 180 developers who took part.
“It’s messy, and it still is because we are learning new things every day and operating like a 26,000 employee startup,” he said, speaking about the continuing journey of the bank’s digital transformation.
Interestingly, at the same event, Isabel Choo, Insights Analyst at LinkedIn, Singapore, shared data that showed how the hospitality industry in Singapore was lagging behind other industries, in attracting “fast growing occupations” such as user experience designers and specialists in marketing research, marketing communications and social media.
And she said that hospitality companies could look towards Singapore’s banking sector, especially in equipping their workforce. In banking, she said, real estate, market and accounting job functions saw the most decline in workforce share from 2013. “Building a strong employee brand is critical in attracting the engineering professionals you need,” she said.
So beyond building the right tech, it is clear that companies need to attract the right talent – be it tech or other skills – for any transformation to succeed.
Challenge is how do companies nurture and harness talent. (Image credit: TuiPhotoengineer/iStock-Getty Images)
At Tern Travel Careers, as well as at the Republic Polytechnic Industry Day, I observed one common thread, the problem isn’t the hunger and curiosity among talent to learn and adapt to a changing world, the challenge is how do we nurture and harness it.
After my talk at Republic Polytechnic, I was asked a question, what should management do when young people do not want to learn about new tech?
There are several answers I can give to that question – one, you should not have staff who do not want to learn and two, perhaps management is not creating an exciting and inspiring enough environment to learn. Or perhaps it’s just time to stop thinking about “us” and “them” but how “we are all in this together” and embrace the joy of not knowing and muddling it through together.
Yes, from banking to FCMG to travel, we are not alone. Welcome to the Looking Glass.
• Featured image credit: AVIcons/iStock- GettyImages