How to stay agile while working remotely

 Like most teams across Singapore, M1’s staff members made the shift to working from home during the circuit breaker period. Whilst it was a significant adjustment for all of us, it has been an exercise that has proven the importance of digital tools, cloud technologies and creative collaboration while social distancing.

To support our teams in continuing to work towards our goals, we’ve encouraged them to use a variety of technologies, including online collaborative tools that help staff members stay nimble through cross-team ideation and problem-solving while working remotely, and have provided educational workshops on remote working methods and techniques, such as SCRUM, which encourages teams to “sprint” while working on different aspects of a project together and ensure achievements are seen in weeks rather than numerous months.

In addition, all our teams working from home were equipped with hardware that included the software suite available at the office. Though a critical piece of technology for everyone, few software suites are a perfect fit for every employee and situation – especially when working remotely as a complete organisation for the first time. To bridge the new gaps our teams were experiencing in working from home, they worked together to tackle how best to fill gaps and communicate with each other. Through this, they have found innovative and fun solutions and share them with the wider team.

For example, our Digital Apps & Platforms  team, led by Nicole Cheah, has adopted a hybrid approach to enable her team’s mode of communication, track work progress and drive remote collaboration by using a blend of enterprise suite of software and social apps.

Still, teams are experiencing some challenges while working remotely. “I’ve received feedback that people felt as if they were trapped in a borderless time and space realm where they were unable to logout from work,” Nicole said. “The lack of division of ‘on work’ and ‘off work’ status because people were at home ultimately prolonged their working hours.”

To help her team balance their time more evenly and work sustainably, Nicole has encouraged everyone to work the usual office hours – which includes taking a lunch hour and respecting everyone’s time by not scheduling meetings outside of work hours as much as possible.

Beyond the challenge of balancing work and life when always at home, Nicole’s team also misses the social aspects of the office. “I do miss face-to-face interaction and informal conversations,” Lau Seng Keat, a team member from the Digital Applications and Portals team said. “I feel like in-person communication really helps to uplift the team spirit.”

To recreate the feeling of in-person interaction while social distancing and working remotely, Nicole and her team check-in with each other every morning to chat about work. They also have a dedicated channel for sharing non-work thoughts, articles, and memes, get together virtually on Fridays to wind-down the week, and have held birthday celebrations online.

This is just one example we can share and overall, Nicole and her team feel as if they are working well together and have been able to remain productive while working remotely over the circuit breaker period. “Our team is passionate about digitalization,” Nicole said. “We are adopting a growth mindset, and we believe in being the digital change agent to inspire our M1 teams to develop, grow and win as one team.”

We know there are still aspects we need to improve and therefore we won't be viewing these achievements as completed but merely providing insight for our next steps. Our new objective is that when we are able to all work in the office again many of the collaboration and productivity tools will continue to be used so that we realise a “win-win” outcome of personal interaction with some exciting new digital capabilities to support our team members and realise achievements on a more regular basis for the foreseable future. Our new approach to collaboration and transparency on productivity might have started from being “stuck” at home, however it will be one of the positive new capabilities for our team when we are back collaborating together as physical instead of only virtual teams.

The Achilles’ Heel of the Digital Era is…Us

Wow, so there we all were in early 2020, across the globe, slowly embracing digital (yes, some faster than others) and accepting that every aspect of our lives was going digital. But with the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital is now the “norm’. It’s how we are consuming content, buying products, and ordering meals and “party packs” (apparently these are a thing now!). At a time when physical connection has become impossible in many ways, digital businesses are enabling our lives and our connections in new ways. Though businesses in our global economy have sought to optimise supply chains, many assumed that call centres, and logistics and distribution centre operations were fine as they were. The human dependency for all of these could not be more visible than it is today. Now, people’s lives are impacted by whether or not they can quickly receive the products they order through digital channels, and businesses have had to adopt digital capabilities fast in order to adapt to new ways of working.

I was initially surprised –and later realised I should not have been – when seeing the breadth of this impact even on digital native businesses. Digital native firms were informing customers that the usually responsive customer service they provide would not be available as the call centre locations were closed. Equally laptop demand could not be met because so many firms were looking to specific markets that develop chip sets to keep costs as low as possible, this has impacted the availability of not only laptops, but servers and other digital-supporting infrastructure. Additionally, many businesses rushed to enable staff to work from home to minimise productivity losses whilst also seeking to implement security measures and the ability to measure staff performance. Rapidly doing this in the context of a crisis has proven a significant dilemma that is still ongoing for many businesses even today.

All of this goes to show that the current COVID-19 restrictions have demonstrated for any business looking to “be digital” that the human factor has proven to be the Achilles’ heel as evidenced by degradation in service, the impact on productivity and, in some cases, complete shut downs.

What is interesting to note is this type of global disruption does not usually sit high on the radar for digital transformation, transformation is usually about enabling the next wave of growth, not protecting existing business flows. The likelihood of there being a global pandemic is so rare that the need for a call centre to close, or for a distribution hub to ramp down, or for businesses to diversify their supply chain was near zero – until now. That said, the warnings about global pandemics have been shared with us previously, and particularly in a great 2015 TED Talk presentation by Bill Gates about how the next battle would not be on a field but actually in a Petri dish (yes, I am paraphrasing here). I’m sure the implications of this were never fully appreciated by many of us (me included).

So where are we now? Well, many people are talking about a “new normal”, where we will change the way we connect as humans and where digital enablement of businesses will occur faster than ever before. The diversification of supply chains, the virtualisation of call centres, and the permanent setup for work from home minimises future risks, but also potentially mitigates future costs as many businesses realise large offices may no longer be needed and instead just offer touch down zones when people “visit” from their home office.

I am not sure going to these extremes permanently is the right thing to do. Whilst I do encourage businesses to look at digital holistically so they can be ready for future impactful events, its important that we don’t lose sight of the most valuable aspect of being human: our ability to connect. This human connection is something that is feeling disrupted now and while Video calls are trying to fill the void, in my opinion they can never replace the real world value of connecting with others.

At M1, we had already started our digital transformation journey, though the path we set for ourselves is no longer about preparing for the future but also the new normal. Hence, we need to keep driving our transformation outcomes as fast as we can with the knowledge that the gradual transition we expected is likely to happen a lot faster than we thought. We must become a digital telco so that we can serve our customers, partners and our people in the best possible way. This doesn’t mean everything becomes driven by a machine – it means all our people are in roles that are adding value to our customers and to each other as colleagues. It means we are creating capabilities that strike the right balance between empowering our customers to live in the digital era with the right support tools; and ensuring that we leverage the value of human interaction where it makes sense.

When we exit these pandemic restrictions, we need to ensure that we do not end up with a mantra of digitalising all aspects of our lives. Instead, let’s make sure we are ready to respond when disasters strike so that businesses, governments and all of us as individuals can continue to be effective. In fact it is the collaboration across business, government and the public at large that can ensure we are aware, have the right framework to respond and people have the right working environments to continue to support our economy. We must always ensure though that any intervention, preparation or change in working environments, should always be temporary and that human connection is what will ensure digital adds value to our lives rather than meaning we spend the rest of our lives looking at screen(s).

Humans are the reason businesses exist - it's our needs that create demand and markets to serve. While many businesses will see the human factor as the  Achilles’ heel of digital – that is to say a dependency - when we look to the future let’s ensure that the Achilles’ heel  actually becomes the strength that allows us, businesses and the community to leap forward and see the true value of digital through human eyes, not machines. #staysafe #stayhealthy

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31956344

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=en 

When failure takes too long

In a digital world, new ways of working are becoming increasingly common. One of these is Agile, which broadly refers to how we deliver solutions in an iterative and incremental manner, through collaboration between self-organising, cross-functional teams.

This can seem very exciting – an opportunity for rapid development, co-creation and evolving requirements, as the business adapts to learning's and change.

With Agile fast becoming mainstream, this may not be new for those of us already on-board. Nonetheless, where businesses tend to struggle with the introduction of this new way of working is the cultural change that it needs to represent as well.

Now, when I talk about culture here, I’m referring to our fear of failure. In a society that celebrates success, it’s human nature for us to not want to fail.  Failure suggests we didn’t plan, didn’t consider the options and ultimately let down our colleagues, managers, customers or even family.

Consider for a moment the last time you failed, what did that feel like? How much were you willing to share that failure with others? Announce it to the world?

Some brave souls would have stood up straight away and said, “Well got that one wrong, let’s have another go!” Now, think about the idea of failing on a regular basis. No – I don’t mean every day, but how you may have to keep changing directions while working on a project, as you become more knowledgeable on the pertinent challenges, to meet a projects objectives. How long would it take before your manager or even other senior leaders start to question what you’re doing, and wonder whether you’re the right person to be leading the project?

I’ve had some spectacular failures in my career as we sought to try new ways of working, introducing new capabilities or launching new offerings into the market place. However, I’ve also been fortunate enough to have some amazing support from my managers as I sought to pivot, recover or simply stop what we were trying to do and take a different approach (You know who you are and thank you for your belief!).

The biggest thing I have learned from these failures is simply to find my courage and highlight the risk or failure early, however uncomfortable this is, and no matter what the consequence might be. Unfortunately, not everyone has been as fortunate as I have in having some amazing managers – who understand that in the pursuit of some exciting goals, sometimes we get it completely right and other times spectacularly wrong!

It’s not uncommon that when a risk emerges within the business, an early view may be to classify it as “Amber” or even “Green” on the wishful basis that it will probably sort itself out before it becomes an issue. Unfortunately, it’s equally likely that with the passage of time, that initiative may not recover and in fact results in the risk becoming compounded due to collateral impacts.

These compounded risks can reach the point that they start to jeopardise the entire project. Given people’s natural tendency to want to show a project is performing well in its early stage, flagging this as an issue can make many folks nervous. Then one of two things will happen: either they will call out the bigger risk and wait for the bombshell of a response, with everything put on hold while a post-mortem takes place; or break down the main risk into smaller components, with the goal to resolve them individually and show that it is being managed.

I’m sure many managers who read this will say that they’re always supportive of their teams – and that all the team needs to do is raise the concern for the manager to help them solve it.

Now put yourself in your team’s shoe: when you wanted to be successful and prove that you could solve things on your own, how willing were you to call out issues on a regular basis without being seen as incapable of delivering on the outcomes?

At this point, I can anticipate the question many will be asking: what in the world does this have to do with Agile ways of working? Simply put, failure is a core aspect of Agile. In fact, you will meet many Agile coaches who say that the Agile methodology cannot be truly successful without failure.

Agile methodologies can let you achieve outcomes faster, by breaking deliverables down to their smallest component or feature you’re looking to develop. The Agile way of working requires teams to be empowered to define what they should prioritise to build first, to realise new and exciting outcomes without being encumbered by a fear of failure.

Two words leap off the page for me now – empower and failure.  Both are important and intrinsically linked to each other. What level of decision making would you be prepared to cede to someone in your team, who is leading a development project? How often would you insist on them checking in with you?

Insisting that failure is necessary for Agile to work doesn’t mean we simply sit back and watch teams continuously fail. Sometimes, intervention or a change of team member is required. Even as we empower our teams, it’s equally important that they know the standards expected of them –  whether it’s the performance of individuals or the overall team.

In setting the expectations and standards while providing the right coaching, we enable the teams to grow in the direction the business needs. I like to refer to these as the guardrails – giving people the reassurance and sense of security they need in the early days of Agile, that early failure is acceptable in the development of new capabilities. As those teams mature, these guardrails become less necessary as the team knows what is expected, and more importantly start to set their own expectations of the business as well.

To be clear though, giving greater flexibility and autonomy to teams doesn’t mean development paths look more like a bowl of spaghetti, with new capabilities created all over the place. Development teams still work to a roadmap and continue to have a prioritised view of what the sequence should be in the development of features. This lets them achieve an end goal, whether it is a new offer to market, a new system deployment or even customer deployments.

In a nutshell, Agile can be an exciting path for businesses to embark on, but it is merely a set of instructions for business leaders to follow. Simply following the said instructions doesn’t always translate to the desired business changes or accelerated outcome. For this way of working to thrive, it is imperative for business leaders to change their culture by providing the bandwidth for teams to learn, iterate and grow, without the fear of failure.

We need to recognise that without taking on the responsibility ourselves in driving this change in business culture, we will be left with teams that have been asked to embrace a new way of working that will ultimately lead to failure. This comes about when teams try to manage every risk scenario themselves, avoid the “bad news” conversation and try to be all things to all stakeholders. The result?  A workplace fixated on risk avoidance, which eventually leads to demotivated teams, increased cost of change and missed objectives – all because failure took too long.

One million reasons to do business in Indonesia

No, this isn’t going to be a list of the one million things, but as my time in Indonesia comes to an end, I thought I would sit down and provide my perspective as to what it has been like working in the Indonesian market. Well put simply, it has been an amazing experience. Well of course I can’t just leave it at that! It has been an amazing journey and learning experience from both a personal and business perspective, learnings that I expect I will carry with me for some time.

Indonesia is an incredible place with high growth potential both for local businesses, as well as businesses and individuals from overseas looking to invest into Indonesia. There is so much happening in Indonesia and for the joint venture that Telkom and Telstra have established, we have had our own journey in navigating the business environment in this market. Like everything else, (including the traffic), establishing the joint venture in Indonesia was very much a journey, and to understand how best to navigate your path to maximise the opportunity, you need to first understand the market itself.

Indonesia is going through a significant growth phase at the moment, and Indonesia’s demographics are a great starting point to suggest they will continue to see this growth continue through a digital lens. With a population of more than 250 million people, and the average age being 28[i], there is a rapidly growing and eager young working population.

As such, this also means a growing desire to leverage new found purchasing power to determine lifestyles. This has been best represented by the penetration of mobile phones into Indonesia standing at 121%[ii] and Smartphones accounting for almost 1 in 4 of those. Indonesia, as of 2014, was the third largest “Twitting” nation and the second largest Facebook nation[iii]. This to me demonstrates a population that is highly connected and, with only a 21% Internet penetration rate, there is clearly further opportunity for Indonesia to expand the digital aspect of their lives for both public and business services.

The reason why I view these figures as important is that, as for any market to achieve success in our digital era, it needs to be connected and have a population which is digital savvy. Indonesia is clearly rapidly moving in that direction. With the fourth largest GDP in Asia (closing quickly on Japan),[iv] combined with a Government under President Jokowi, which is clearly striving to create a market open to investment and value creation, Indonesia is on its way in positioning itself as a growth centre for many years to come.

So Indonesia is a growth market and becoming highly digital, well pack your bags and head over, right? … Ok, well glad it sounds exciting but before you do head for the airport let me share my journey with you so as hopefully you can realise that success you seeking. Prior to moving to Indonesia, I had travelled to Indonesia many times - and no not just Bali before you ask – I believed I had experience in knowing what Indonesia would be like, the culture, what it meant to do business, and managing the joyous travel times between meetings. I was clearly only scratching the service when it came to understanding what it means to work in Indonesia.

Well one of my first learnings is that “jetting” in to visit and experience the working environment is simply not enough from which to draw experiences.  In fact it comes down to the actual experience of living and breathing the market, and connecting with the people to understand the real opportunity and likewise the challenges faced by the teams on the ground.

In establishing our business in Indonesia we knew there would be challenges, but we had underestimated the breadth of these challenges, as well as the amount we would need to adapt to ensure we established a path for success. As we landed on the ground to establish our business we quickly realized what we had hoped would be a few bumps in the road ended up being some obstacles in the road that would need to be navigated:

      1.       As we were working with the largest telecom provider in Indonesia, doing business would be easier. Of course we all knew it would be different to other markets, but that was why we were there to enter new markets and create new value. Shortly after we arrived however there was a change in Government, which led to a change in our partners’ leadership. This was apparently the norm given it’s a state-owned business.

      

      2.       The supply chain we were familiar with from Australia, or other parts of the world, would already be in place in Indonesia, with the recognition we would need to adjust some terms regarding language and local terms and conditions. The supply chain proved to be very different to our expectations, with vendors engaging with their distributors differently. In addition, the responsibility of managing the hardware supply chain proved to be very much the providers’ responsibility, especially given the proactive service that we were seeking to provide our customers.

      

      3.       Given we already had the support of our joint ventures partners executives, it would simply be a matter of being open for business would immediately start to drive the opportunity. Of course, given we were going to a new element of the partner’s business, there would always be some people not totally happy with our approach but that was ok as “they would simply adapt to us”.  We soon realised as the new kid on the block it was up to us to build those local relationships, establish trust and ultimately demonstrate our value to our partners and customers to encourage those partners to collaborate with us instead of seeing us as a new threat to their existing business models.

      

      4.       Business engagement would be transparent as it would be the same as many other places in Asia. It would simply be a matter of re connecting with the local representatives of our global partners and we would be ready to go. We quickly learned that many of our technology partners already had their own local partnerships established with in country System Integrators and telecom divisions, and in matter of fact, we were disrupting a model that was believed to already be working well.

      Now with all of this said the path to securing our business license took longer than we had expected, but this ended up being a hidden benefit in as it gave us the time to understand these challenges and many others as we were establishing this business. That proved invaluable as the time we gained gave us the window to understand how we could set ourselves up for success. Whether it was building one of the largest stakeholder management maps I have ever seen, or establishing a supply chain across a nation from zero, through to redefining the localised product set we would need to demonstrate relevance, all of these developments helped to shape what our business is today. Through these learnings, and the business’ ability to adapt to them, we have realised the results that I have previously shared in earlier blogs.

      The message I hope you take away from this blog is that there are a few key critical considerations when establishing your business in Indonesia:

      

      1)       Ensure you have a clear target and plan – don’t assume you know what it is as soon as you step off the plane but make sure you understand the environment you are looking to operate in and then start to shape your plan.

      

      2)      Make sure you have a solid partner you can work with who understands the market you are seeking to address and more importantly is able to help you navigate through the challenges, and equally help you to identify new opportunities you may not have originally identified in your plan.

      

      3)      Be agile. Things won’t work out the way you expect them to, so you can sit there and get frustrated, or actually look at what you can do differently to navigate the challenge or incorporate the new challenge into your plans and make it part of the goals you are looking to address.

      

      4)      Lastly, - and in my view this was one of the hardest things I had to do personally - be patient. There is a different sense of urgency in Indonesia, what I learned was that whilst I can get frustrated that things weren’t moving fast enough. I needed to find a different approach, share the goal that I was trying to achieve, and leverage the local team around us to understand how we can best reach that outcome in the fastest time possible without the traditional voice like the kid in the back seat of a car, “Are we ready yet?”

      

      I am sure other people who have worked in Indonesia will share other challenges from their experiences in Indonesia and ultimately some of their own critical considerations but for me this is what gave me increased confidence in our ability to succeed. With these considerations in mind, I believe businesses have a great chance to realise the opportunity that is Indonesia. An opportunity that has over one million registered businesses of different sizes, an opportunity that if approached with eyes open can result in businesses being part of an exciting growth market, all of which surely must be enough of a reason to want to do business in Indonesia … right?

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[i] Source: worldometers.info/world-population/indonesia-population

[ii]  GSMA Intelligence

[iii] Sating Silang & BBh Asia Pacific

[iv] CIA Factbook 2015

Telkomtelstra - We are One!

It’s official. This little joint venture that went live in 2015 is now one year old! The day that we opened our doors to prospective customers, shared with them the immersive experience that they would have using our managed services through our Customer Experience Centre - and activated our first customer, is a day that will stay with me for a long time.

To have reached our launch day, it had already been an amazing journey from sitting in the basement of a hotel with a group of Telkom and Telstra folks asking ourselves what exactly this joint venture should look like. From those humble beginnings to get to where we are now is simply amazing.  It’s exciting to consider that since that first activation a year ago we have now contracted over 50 customers, recruited over one hundred employees and developed a suite of services across Managed Networks, Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS. All of this being built on a solely cloud enabled architecture across the operations and business systems, providing us with the ability to scale. However, equally important, was to ensure systems could be integrated and thus avoiding unnecessary rework or risk of inaccurate data.

I remain excited for the customer experience that we have been able to provide and the ongoing self-awareness that we can never stop improving our customer experience. We must always ensure that we hear the voice of our customers clearly.  The introduction of the telkomtelstra Infinity Portal has provided our customers with the first end-to-end view of the real time performance of their ICT services, in the form of an easy access web platform. I look forward to the day where we can leverage the value of Artificial Intelligence to inform customers, in a business language, of proposed actions, that seeks to continually improve their services. This means responding at a pace that will ensure ICT remains a business enabler for companies in an every changing economic landscape.

I am very proud to have been part of this team to establish a culture of collaboration, accelerated innovation and customer centricity. I am excited to see what the future holds for this joint venture – one which has overcome start-up challenges, sought to address customer challenges and provide both of its parents with a view into the possible, when it comes to Managed Services in Indonesia. I look forward to seeing telkomtelstra continue to set the standard on what managed services should be in a growth market like Indonesia. The validation of that is seen in the voice of our customers who remain our best advocates!

As a 1 year old, we have now learned to walk, we have had a few stumbles but we are on our feet. Now we are starting to show what we can do in a dynamic market like Indonesia and hopefully prove our value to both parents. My personal hope is that as managed services in markets like Indonesia over the years to come become more common, the market will continue to look to the likes of telkomtelstra as to what the next evolution of managed services could look like in these rapidly growing markets. So with that, I wish telkomtelstra a Happy Birthday and look forward to seeing it celebrate many more to come.

A Bridge Too Far

If you haven’t seen the film, it’s a classic and although the film is about a group of soldiers being dropped at a bridge further than they are supposed to, the part I relate most to business these days is the scene when they are asking what is on the other side of that bridge. No one knows, but someone is going to have to go over there. Of course no one wants to, but eventually a brave soul takes the steps to cross the bridge ready to try and blow up the bridge but fully expecting to be shot before they get there so he goes in with guns blazing. You will now be asking what does that have to do with people and technology. Put simply, the way we work can sometimes feel like that bridge too far.

In my own journey, I have worked in sales functions, led products and marketing teams and most recently, headed up operations – all disciplines that have a unique view on the business that they are tasked with supporting. From my time in sales, we focused on ensuring we could get the deal done and ask the products team to figure out how we build a product around it. In a products and marketing capacity, our focus was very much on understanding how we could best define the product and throw it over the wall to operations who will figure out how to build it. And in operations, it is the task of figuring out what has been requested and how this is going to actually work with the systems, tools and people a business currently uses. When an operations team then hands it back to sales – proud that they have been able to deliver the customer requirement with a marvelous “Ta-da it’s ready” to which sales may responds with a “That’s not what we asked for”. This is kind of like playing Chinese Whispers as a kid and giggling at how the message became so fragmented when it reached the start of the circle again. But in business we don’t tend to giggle – well not as much anyway!

For those of you familiar with the film “A bridge too far”, and equally familiar with these functions, you may be thinking a bridge crossing a river doesn’t do these differences justice. I would agree in fact that we sometimes view these as worlds apart instead of merely crossing a river. So let’s extrapolate this analogy. You aren’t merely trying to cross a bridge between functions, but actually we are asking people to don a spacesuit, board a rocket and cross a space bridge not knowing how they will be received on the other side or even if they will understand us. But don’t worry we are armed and dangerous with our own knowledge of how things should work in the business in order for us to do our job, right?

Start-up businesses provide a great learning for established businesses, in start-ups you simply don’t have a choice. You have to cross that bridge or otherwise see your start-up fail. And often in start-ups, it requires people who are working across functions in order to keep the business moving at pace. If the business loses momentum, market confidence can rapidly decline and in turn customers may be lost, resulting in a negative position for the business. Employees of a start-up have no fear because there is simply no time to be fearful or worry about how requirements will be misinterpreted. A start-up ensures these worlds overlap so as decisions are made quickly and together to ensure the business is on board with the outcome we are looking for.

I am sure there will be many of you out there thinking, but a start-up is easier they don’t have the scale we do, they don’t have the complexity of services and systems. Well who put that complexity there, or the systems that you are using? What if we could sit together and redefine what that way of working could look like? Forget who was the person who made the decision or who created the complexity, imagine a world where you could change the business model you work in, below are a few of my suggestions on how you can improve that collaboration.

Stop focusing on the customer and think about the one element you have in common no matter what your function is – the customer. It doesn’t matter if you are the lawyer, IT manager, finance manager, marketing manager or sales manager, this is the one aspect that any function will have in common. I would challenge anyone to identify a function that doesn’t impact a customer directly or indirectly. If you are going to say janitor then my answer is first impressions are everything – what if your customer visited a messy office or overflowing bins? What would that perception mean for your initial conversation?

Take a walk in the other team’s shoes – I will always remember a quote from my coach (you know who you are). In any discussion, no matter how much we disagree there will always be at least 10% truth in what the other person is saying. Pause for a moment and reflect on that concept, what could be that 10% from the other function, once you start there you may quickly find there is more truth or more importantly more alignment between your functions you are merely looking from different lenses toward the customer.

Define what is truly important. I am always amazed at the resolute stand we can make between functions to say we can’t change this or this is a deal breaker, with people left scratching their heads wondering where did that come from? Consider as a cross functional team what are key factors for success as well as failure for any activity undertaken. Agreeing these as a group provides guidance to a business and encourages ideation to be brought into a forum seeking to help realise the benefit vs. attending an episode of Dragons Den (Don’t know what it is … watch some of the video’s gulp!)

These are just a few examples based on my experience and I am sure there are many more suggestions from people out there, but the purpose of these examples is to get you thinking, looking out beyond your realm of influence and seize the opportunity.

What I am saying is this is a call for volunteers, volunteers to cross the bridge, unarmed, vulnerable and open to helping the other-side achieve their outcome with the knowledge of not what your world needs but what your world can provide. Take the leap and move to a role where you can challenge yourself to help another function succeed based on your diverse skills. In time, this bridge crossing will be two ways so when you are volunteering you will need to encourage others to follow your example and cross the bridge the other way. This mindset of adding value to encourage collaboration and ultimately drive the outcome the business is looking for namely sustainable growth and serving your customer, all of this resulting in a business realising that no bridge is too far. 

Ctrl-Alt-Del

We all know what happens when we press ’Ctrl-Alt-Del’ on our keyboards – well, at least I hope you do, otherwise you may find this article rather uninteresting (now, I know a few of you just checked by doing it, so welcome back to the story). When we perform this ‘three button miracle’, we get to see the task manager, i.e all of the active applications we see on our laptop. Imagine for a moment, that you have closed all of those active applications and you are left with a desktop with no activity. Would you continue your work by simply reopening what you closed, or would you think about how you would do things differently?

In today’s “digital world”, we are increasingly comfortable to evolve our collaboration choices, social media, applications for our phone (yes, both for fun and the more serious activities). This is often because there is a better tool for us to use, or the tools we have aren’t working in the right way, or we simply want a change. Interestingly though, most of us don’t do this in our business environments. Think for a minute and ask yourselves, “Why do we do the ‘Ctrl-Alt’Del’ magic combination”? Perhaps our application isn’t working, or our PC or tablet is running slow? Are we worried that our device is stuck within a loop and can’t move forward from? Now, consider the business environments we work in. These reasons can seem very similar, yet our response tends to be a shrug of the shoulders and we continue to push through.

As you read this, consider for a moment that you could ‘Ctrl-Alt Del’ your business. Take a moment to pause and reflect on what is working, and think about whether your processes, systems and tools are doing what you need them to do? Which ones are consuming too much time or resource? As you reflect, you may also sense a glimmer of hope – that idea that pops into your head of the “What if?.

However. then the reality of how complicated or hard it can be leaps to the front again and the hope is gone. I encourage you to force that “What if” concept back to the front just for a moment – let it breathe and consider a minor application or toolset in your business that could be changed with minimal effort and would help your business start to realise the impact a pause and change could have on your organisation.

Of course, many of you will say, “But Nathan, we are already doing this we, are going through significant change as the market evolves”, or “We have tried it before and ended up in the same place”. I tip my hat to those who have not only achieved a rethink, but equally to those who are continuing to try. Without this commitment to change, then businesses will continue to plod through using what they have.

In essence, businesses can’t simply pause and then create a change. It needs to be embraced by the leaders of organisations. Congratulating one another for doing something new, without understanding how to create the right environment for it to be continually successful will simply doom it to failure. One such example was for a start-up business unit which was a business’s efforts to pause and use a fresh approach to change direction for an area of their business where they were being challenged by competitors.

I was fortunate enough to have a discussion with the start-up business unit, working under a large parent company the other day (no, not mine!), where they were being given conflicting direction – “Go forth and conquer this market as a disruptive player!”. Sounds great, right? However, this was followed by the second part of the conversation – “You must of course remain within the architecture and capabilities of the parent business so as we maximise our assets”. Now, after being ready to jump for joy, I was left staring into my coffee cup hoping that my disappointment for their predicament didn’t show. Unfortunately, this is very common for many incumbent businesses seeking to jump on the start-up bandwagon, without truly understanding the changes they need to make in their own thinking when considering what they set out to achieve.

In the case of this business unit start-up, that change from the parent company needs to be in giving them the opportunity to be disruptive or accepting that the goal in establishing the business unit is to disrupt the broader organisation. The latter would require some serious commitment, and a jump off a sizable cliff given the risks it may be perceived to have within the business, particularly as in many large established businesses, the employees are the culture, and they represent the way of working – hence changing this overnight can be challenging.

In this case, providing that new business unit the flexibility to define its market approach, its IT architecture and ultimately its culture will help to define its success. Of course, we can say “But what if it fails?” At least, if it stays within the way of working of the parent company then the assets and people can be reintegrated into the business”. If this is your thinking, then I’m afraid you will never know what success could look like. We don’t see business start-ups wondering about how they might mitigate failure, but how can then create the best chance for success.

“Hackathons” are a great example of how businesses can create the best chance for success, and to date have always been synonymous with technology led businesses, and in particular start-up environments. The idea of throwing a problem into a room with some really bright people to design and develop with a new widget or code to address a bug in a platform is increasingly common. I would however propose that hackathons become the tool of choice for our ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’ moment.

Once we pause our business, what are we going to do? How do we ensure we don’t go back to our old ways of working? How do ensure our staff embrace this change with us? In any organisation, there are lots of bright people in their field who are keen to get more involved and with the right tools, they can have  a phenomenal impact on helping to improve the way a business achieves its objectives. The people that make up an organisation want their business to be successful; it’s what makes it a great place to work, so leveraging their commitment and channeling that willingness to succeed through these types of tools can create a great environment for change.

This for me is why leaders really need to ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’ their businesses and have a serious think about the way they are running their organisations. Can it be done differently? Yes, I hear some of you saying –  it is simply impossible to change your business given how long you have been working in that way, but I say give your teams a chance to embrace change, a change made of their own interest, engagement and outcome. It might start small – from how a team collaborates, or how you engage with your customers, but ultimately if it gets the business thinking about the “possible”, then that can only be a good thing … right?

We built a house!

Ok, so it’s not a physical house but we have built a new business in Indonesia. I can tell you, having previously seen my first home being built, it feels very much the same.  In any construction there are a number of key factors to consider; managing the timelines for the project, ensuring contractors don’t blow out the budget (this is a biggie), adapting to the required changes as we learn what works best and above all ensuring the customer is happy with the outcome. In the case of my first home, my customer was my wife, and in the case of building this business, our customer was the Indonesian market.

When building this business or “digital house” as I call it, we learned there are a lot of great technologies in existence that can be leveraged to build a business’ operations and business systems. And for anyone that knows me, exploring these new technologies was like placing a kid in a candy store and giving them some money to fill a basket – don’t worry I was well behaved, for the most part.

Ironically though, I don’t believe it is the strength of our technology that will drive the right outcome for our digital house, but more so the less predictable elements that will define the successful build of our house - quirky people! Whilst quirky people are not necessarily sought to build a physical house  –in the event the bathroom may end up in the kitchen and a shower in the study – we were fortunate to have some amazing people on this project. It wasn’t just their knowledge that assisted us, but their ability to think outside of the box, and consider the unusual and unconventional ways to approach the deliverables for this unique program. Simply put, they needed to be quirky!

There were a lot of unknowns in the building of this house –  from how we could integrate into the local operator’s business and operating systems and avoiding significant upfront investment to ensuring we were compliant to local market regulatory policies. Importantly we also needed to ensure that whatever we built would support the business’ key goal in serving our customers in a new and differentiated way.

I can appreciate anyone who has worked in a start-up before will be thinking, ”well Nathan, as a start-up that’s pretty straight forward and common”. However, I would ask you to consider that this is a joint venture between two incumbents that were running successful businesses in a prescribed way for a long period of time with clear views on how they felt the business should be established. This isn’t in line with a common start-up model.

The approach we took therefore may have appeared normal for a tech start-up, but for two incumbents it was a leap of faith to change the approach in addressing these challenges, whist driving the outcome that would enable a new business to grow. It wasn’t possible to simply run through a check list – what we needed was people who would adapt to the changing landscape as we learned more about the market and business environment we were operating in, and challenge what was possible (or equally not viable) and what was needed to adapt to the needs of the local operator.

What was imperative in building this digital house was the need to change our way of thinking, focusing on quick outcomes in small steps, empowering our teams and accepting that failure could and would happen.  It is very easy to slip into an approach of “that’s what we have always done” as a reason as to why we shouldn’t try something different, I can’t count the number of people who were happy to tell us “that won’t work”, or “you can’t do it that way”.

This is where we get to the next critical factor - you need people that are committed, and almost stubborn, to ensure that they stay true to the journey that is being defined. You also need an understanding boss who will give you the flexibility to pull this together without losing faith in what we are able to achieve (thanks Boss!). There were times when we would question ourselves – “are we doing the right thing?”, and “should we back off and simply accept that near enough is good enough”. I am glad we didn’t as the outcomes we have started to realise are down to that commitment to the goal.

Equally, the team knew we would not make all the right bets to address both our current and future requirements. As such, we needed to make sure that we had some flexibility moving forward. By taking a cloud platform approach to all the technologies that we introduced offered us the flexibility to evaluate functionality, without feeling we were committed to the tools that we were using in the long term. Yes, there would be a revised integration effort if we changed out an element of our architecture. However, that was better than being stuck with a physical platform for five to seven years that we would have to keep customising to the point that it could no longer be changed out without a complete new build.

 The cloud approach has also meant that our costs for the platforms are directly correlated with the growth of the business. Yes, there is a case of initial capacity, however this is minor compared with the scale we can grow these platforms to as demand increases. Lastly, the hybrid nature of our cloud environment, which extends from Indonesia across international markets, ensures that we can be compliant to evolving regulatory requirements in Indonesia whilst leveraging the benefits of different cloud platforms.

Another key aspect has been the way that we have engaged our suppliers. Every conversation has started with, “how do you interface into other systems?”, “what use cases can you share about that integration”, and “what best practices have driven the development of your systems?” The reasons for these questions were because we knew that to maximise the value of the technology we were using, it was more important to have systems that would naturally talk to each other and had done so before, versus our own team having to build a system to translate between two systems – as if we were trying to help translate between two completely different languages.

To this end, it became clear to us we were building a “digital ecosystem” or a collection of technology partners that would need to interoperate to ensure we could serve our customers in a valued and differentiated way. This ecosystem may evolve over time as we find different technologies that will help us serve more effectively in the future. Fortunately, by remaining true to the approach the team has taken, will help to ensure all new members of the ecosystem understand the requirement for interoperability.

We have now established a Service Provider in Indonesia with no network assets, nor any voice infrastructure. Admittedly, we have had to build a private cloud to meet local market criteria, however the majority of our technology is cloud based. We are developing a culture where the teams succeed or fail together, and where we do fail, we fail fast, dust ourselves off, understand why we fail and then move forward again – but always as one team.

We are also now serving customers and gearing up to expand our portfolio, but the house is clearly built. To that end, in building our digital house; the operating license is our foundation, our walls are the tools, platforms and processes we have created, the roof is the governance we use to always make sure there are no leaks in what we have built, the windows our experience centre to show customers a view of what we can provide, and the interfaces connecting our systems together is the cabling. We can now see where we need to improve the house - where the walls need finishing and where the roof needs to be maintained, but none the less we now have a house!

However, our digital house is still just a shell. It’s the people who work in it that are making the digital house our digital home, and ultimately will be the ones who welcome our customers and partners in as we seek to change the customer experience and serve the Indonesian market with our version of kopi and thee.

This article is dedicated to the Implementation team from the past year that had the patience to work with us, the passion to drive us to complete our goals and never accept near enough as good enough. We recognized that this success will always be bigger than any one person and that we all should reflect on the role we played in realising the building of this house. I would especially like to thank the team for putting up with my crazy ideas, passionate discussions and occasional singing in the corridor!

Lost in Translation

I love technology, but if there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that it is really irrelevant how much you know about the functionality of a particular widget.   The decision to buy a service is no longer about how “shiny” or “rich” a service is, but how it can be relevant. We have reached a tipping point where the traditional buyers of procurement and IT are no longer front and centre in the buying decisions.  These individuals are being replaced by the Business Unit owners and customer facing functions, a shift which requires a fundamentally different type of conversation and one which is causing many challenges for numerous ICT related industries.

“Big bets”, or big changes, are increasingly a thing of the past, especially as ICT services become more on-demand. This change gives customers the ability to transform much easier than in years past. Therefore, businesses need to evolve their thinking toward a new approach of differentiation…one towards relevance as it pertains to the business and the new decision makers.  We need to shift our language from the bits and bytes to understanding the challenges and opportunities that exist and what it can mean for the business. As businesses start to become more granular and focused, on tracking outcomes from individual initiatives, their expectations from suppliers equally change.

One of the things I love about my job is the opportunity to listen to business owners regarding their ambitions for their business, their key challenges and where they would like help.  In speaking with them, I begin thinking about the role I can play for that person in translation and/or understanding of what he/she is trying to achieve and the solutions out there that could help to solve their business challenges. If you are going to be meeting new business people there are three key tips I would suggest you do ahead of time. First, learn about who you are meeting with, what are their priorities and key goals? Secondly, how do they actually measure success for their business and industry? Finally, how can you help them to bridge from your understanding of feature and functionality with the insights of the above?

Let me be more specific, I am not talking about simply writing a script to accomplish what I’ve suggested above. You need to truly embrace and understand these questions and make them part of your approach to doing business. If you are able to do this and can then change the way you have a conversation, this will leave you feeling like you have had a positive impact on someone’s life and or business. Now this is not to say I will stop talking about technology. I simply love technology, but I love it for the same reason I write these blogs. I want to know the impact technology can have on people and to understand how we as individuals can influence and shape the evolution of technology. Technology plays a growing integral part of our daily lives, from the watch on your wrist to the self driving car; our lives will continue to be impacted hence the need to understand how we want technology to add value versus trying to make the functionality of a new widget work for us.

 I am reminded by a great Simpsons episode (stay with me now) where a techie is attracted by Homer Simpsons offer of fast internet but when the techie asks: “I'm interested in upgrading my twenty eight point eight kilobit internet connection to a one point five megabit fibre-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?” – Now you could be forgiven for thinking and those things are what? - but in basic terms he is looking for an internet upgrade and one that will not require him to change any hardware at his home thus keeping his costs low so as he can visit the comic book store and buy more magazines (seriously!). Now of course the obvious question is, “well then why not say that?” I often find myself having to remind people that functionality is great but unless it has relevance to the person you are trying to sell to (or in the case of this Simpson episode – buy from) then there is not much point in starting a conversation.

In the case of Homer Simpson and similar for many businesses, there is a need for a new type of translator – one which can help people and businesses translate features and functionality to demonstrable business benefits, in the language of the customer or partner. This is something that I love to do and moreover enjoy seeing that “light go on” when the translation has been successful and everyone around the room gets excited about the outcome they are then working towards. Without these translators of the future, it is going to be akin to a meeting of two foreign countries, where gestures and pictures is all that is able to be used to explain anything which will ultimately result in a loss of translation moment and leave many people with that Homer Simpson expression as their only answer … “Can I have some money now?” 

Fail fast or suffer slow

Telstra recently released its Connecting Countries thought leadership report, which was based on a survey of some 4,100 executives across Asia capturing their views on best practices, challenges and overall business performance in the region. It was exciting to read that there were a number of management lessons that businesses can take with them as they seek to invest into Asia as well as an insight into the profile of an Asia Business Champion – one who doesn't only recognize best practices but also lives and breathes them.  While there were a number of takeaways from the report,  there was one which jumps out at me particularly as it relates to driving success in an Asia market place. One of the key management lessons for success in Asia was looking at the need to move forward with multiple growth strategies concurrently.

Now I have always believed that a person cannot multi-task (despite my numerous attempts to try!) hence this strategy could only ever exist for a large size business and not an individual or SMB. But the need to look at multiple strategies is important for international businesses to consider in order to balance the potential risk of one failing due to internal or market challenges. I must make clear though there are limits to running multiple strategies. A couple of years ago for example, one vendor shared with me their plans to run 25 new initiatives in parallel. Now I don’t care how big you think you are or how mature your strategy execution process is, but when you talk about multiple strategies to this degree it is simply a death warrant for the strategy itself and puts the business at risk of losing its way. I am glad to see that San Francisco based vendor has since realized this and re-evaluated how many initiatives it takes on at the one time.

Now when a business is looking at multiple strategies it needs to understand the levers it can use, for example how quickly a strategy decision can be moved into action and equally, how quickly it can be shut down. These days it is increasingly common place that a strategy is dependent on people, systems and communication. Now, we know we have the ability to redeploy people to other projects and – as hard as it can be at times – sometimes people choose or must move on , however for Systems and communication platforms we often have to make investments that tend to have a pay back only after 3-5 years,. This can cause a challenge as businesses then need to assess how they can mitigate risks to drive a strategy to a positive outcome. For this reason it is important for businesses to adopt what is increasingly being known as a “Fail Fast” principle. The Fail Fast principle looks at prioritizing initiatives that need an investment based on requiring limited capex and leveraging platforms that can be turned up quickly and equally turned off with very little delay post a decision, if it is not working.

Take for example the idea of replicating a solution into a new vertical, which  might require assigning people temporarily, adding  system capacity for marketing campaigns, tracking opportunities and managing customer deployed solutions. But what if all of this could be set up within weeks and taken down even quicker? Would that make you rethink your prioritization of business strategies and equally consider additional initiatives, knowing your investment risk is significantly reduced and not committing the business to years of investment? Well hopefully the answers to both are yes, if not then perhaps a multi path strategy is not for you (either that or you have money and resource to burn).

Historically this would have been a challenge; however the virtualization of IT and communications means that businesses are now more empowered than ever to introduce the Fail Fast principle into their strategy decisions. Now considering the feedback from the Connected Countries survey that businesses need to consider multiple strategies in order to achieve success – at the beginning of this article it would be perfectly normal to think this is only achievable by either very large businesses or for those who have learned through expensive or painful experiences of what strategies work and equally which don’t. However hopefully now you are thinking about how your business could introduce a multiple path strategy by leveraging the advancements of technology that exist today, combined with the key principle in defining which strategies to go after based on their ability to align to a fail fast approach.

We are not talking about transformation or changing the way your business operates. This is very much about understanding how a business can be successful in a market like Asia where the only constant is change. But there are clearly multiple market opportunities and with the right approach –  as demonstrated by the Asia Business Champions – combined with the right principles, businesses can create the environment needed to succeed by failing fast, which ultimately has to be a better approach than suffering slow and not reaping the rewards of a multi path strategy.

You can find the Connected Countries report at the attached link - http://www.telstraglobal.com/connectingcountries/?concountries=tgbanner

Leopards need to change their spots too

We associate Leopards with being fast, agile, and adaptive – something many businesses would love to aspire to or believe they have already achieved. However, think about that Leopard for a moment lacking the ability to maintain a sustainable pace, using up all of its energy in a very short period of time and spending a lot of its time resting to conserve energy.  Now doesn’t that sound more like many organisations you know of, expending large amounts of energy but finding that sustainable pace in a market of change?

In our work environment we increasingly find organisations that need to adapt to the changing market around them. But, I would propose that it is the constant adaption, customisation and “tinkering” of applications and systems that really restrict a business’s ability to do just that.

Consider for a moment how many changes you requested from your supplier to ensure your application or system would operate effectively based on your current ways of working. And now consider how frustrated you were at the supplier’s lack of understanding of your business needs. 

Next, consider what your company did when looking to adapt to market changes or a shift in strategy.  I am guessing – as tends to be the case – you invited in your suppliers and told them there would be a number of change requests required as updates to your applications and systems were needed to ensure they evolved with the needs of your business. What happens next is the response you receive from your suppliers is an extensive program of system changes, which are significantly more expensive than what you had expected. At this point the inevitable happens and we introduce that word that every strategy leader hates … compromise. You are then entering a phase of your business change where you need to balance the necessity of change with the market need to change against the cost. The end result is that the costs continue to increase, you don’t receive the changes you were hoping for and you ultimately end up setting up the business to fail, not fast mind you, just a slow and painful death.

I share this with you because, given the world we live and work in, there is a need for a fresh approach to business.  An approach which actually requires an organisation to change, a change in the way it works and not necessarily by overhauling existing systems and tools. As strange as it may sound it is increasingly crucial for businesses to avoid customisation as much as possible so they can adapt to the market quickly and avoid expensive system overhauls. Of course people will say “well hang on Nathan we need to customise those systems if the market is changing.” Well, I would challenge that there are two approaches businesses need to be taking to ensure sustainable growth in today’s market.

The first is by moving to standard components and interfaces.  With this, you are then able to consider vendor replacements. By forcing the use of API’s, or application interfaces, you can replace components much more easily without the need of a potential full rip and replace of all systems supporting a process.  This equally ensures your business can regularly validate the latest capability from CRM systems to Billing systems and even, dare I say, communication systems. How often have you found yourself frustrated just after launching a new platform, application or system that a capability had just been added that would have benefited your organisation?  Need I say more?

The second key approach is to look in the mirror more often.  Instead of the levers you seek to adjust being limited to third party components, look into your business at the people, processes and ultimately ways of working that you have established and ask yourself, how often have these actually changed over the years?  I am not talking about rearranging the deck chairs, I am referring to real changes in ways of working to ensure 1. that a business can maximise the opportunities that change can bring; 2. to ensure that sustainable growth is understood as the journey.

The first approach is strengthened by the introduction of cloud based architectures, which means you can consume what you need, and equally adjust to new market developments quickly. I appreciate some elements are more difficult to change than others but, by starting with a view that everything can be changed, this will ultimately create the right environment for success. Cloud capabilities have created new avenues for businesses to feel more in control of the risks their business chooses to take and equally the opportunity to leverage the latest technology at each step of the way.

The second approach is a lot more difficult because no one likes change.  Change can cause a stall in business performance and ultimately comes with its own risks. However, people will accept and equally embrace change, as long as you can articulate the benefit to the business. Whatever those change may be, understanding the business need first is the most important element.

Speed and agility are crucial business elements, but without simplifying the tools and ensuring the business adapts to the market change, all that an organisation will achieve is declining profitability and increasingly demoralised employee engagement. I am always intrigued by business leaders who share how confident they are about their business, but it is those businesses who recognise that being as agile as a leopard is not enough. Sometimes you need to change yourself in order to succeed and the tools round you may enable part of that change, but unless you are willing to change your own spots you may find that the speed you have is only enough to spin your wheels  and not to deliver the continued momentum.

Driving Change in 2014

The internet as we once knew it is no more

The worldwide web used to be a “go to” location for all our information needs, where we would consume online content and play games has now become a recognised utility no different to electricity, transport infrastructure or water. Over time however, the internet has also evolved to become a critical delivery platform enabling a raft of new services. Where we once read news or simply sent emails, we now use this “utility” to bank, shop, access business applications hosted in the cloud, watch the latest TV shows and listen to music, as well as interact with our friends, family and peers (ok and for me play the occasional online game!)

APAC is experiencing rapid growth of connected devices. This proliferation of devices – such as smartphones, tablets and laptops – allows us to connect to our networks remotely, highlighting the fundamental alterations in how we use and interact with technology. So much so, many of us haven’t even noticed it has taken place. For instance, consider the younger generation (yes it seems I am no longer part of that group!) who no longer refer to “going online”, they are simply accessing applications and services with little or no regard to how they get there or where they exist.

Given our changing relationship with the online world and its growing importance to our general day-to-day lives, businesses are increasingly looking at how they can maximise its value and the consumer insight it delivers. This is driving significant technological change within IT platforms.

As organisations across APAC embrace the IT transformations that are underway – particularly in cloud, big data and mobile – and embark further along their journeys, there is a significant opportunity for businesses to better serve their customers through technological change while growing the bottom line.

A New Era of Cloud in 2014

We’re entering a really exciting era for cloud technology. Over the past year alone, cloud providers have increasingly discovered their individual and unique cloud plays – whether it’s supplying to specific industries or public, private or hybrid platforms – and have expanded their services accordingly.

One-size no longer fits all, and in 2014 businesses can expect to realise the benefits tailored cloud platforms deliver as providers begin to offer solutions designed to individual customer needs. As providers recognise their strengths, they will also identify partnership opportunities with vendors offering complimentary technology to their existing portfolios.

The progress we’re seeing in the cloud will also filter into the business network itself in 2014, where we’ll increasingly see networks being defined by dynamic needs of business functions and the introduction of business process service level agreements (SLAs). For instance, cloud platforms will be linked with traditional on premise applications, such as a CRM or SCM environment. This will enable the network to reshape itself and categorise its applications based on current activity levels so that network traffic and the needs of remote workers can be easily managed and prioritised.

Innovate in the Cloud

This year we’re also going to see a growing number of applications developed by businesses, a trend enabled by the fail-fast culture of cloud. Today, businesses are more willing to develop their own business applications as they are educated on the flexibility offered by the cloud.  They simply need to buy the relevant computing space to test an idea, and then shut if off again when the idea has run its course. This means less risk and the cost of exposure for the business is greatly reduced when compared to the previous options and methods available.

With the cycle of applications being delivered and created gathering momentum in 2014, the Enterprise App store will arrive on the scene as CIOs provide employees with a selection of applications endorsed and supported by the organisation. Until now this has had limited success, but with widespread adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and publicly hosted secure applications it will be an increasing focus for businesses seeking to enhance productivity.

Collaborate and Share

Businesses that deploy application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing developers to design products based on an organisation’s services, will also achieve success this year. For instance, businesses can build their web conferencing capabilities into another web-based application, such as instant messaging, enabling seamless collaboration and communication between individuals.  

The reality is that organisations rarely use applications in siloes, meaning those vendors offering API solutions this year that increase collaboration with complementary products and markets stand to benefit from increased sales with their customers.

Intelligent Insights Deliver Results

In recent times, big data has been more akin to trying to drink from a fire hydrant - we can access a lot of it but have little time to digest it. In 2014 however, businesses will start applying different lenses to data sets so that they can identify what is relevant to them or impacting upon their business. By focusing on the data that is relevant to them, businesses will be well placed to optimise their services and customer experience, similar to that same fire hydrant being attached to a water dispenser allowing us to choose what type of water, colour, and temperature we are interested in extracting at any point in time.

Looking further ahead into 2015, businesses will start to use the data they are collecting to predict future activity or the impact of unforeseen circumstances.  This will be driven by the ability of Smart Data platforms assessing patterns and delivering forecast and trending data enabling improved business planning. For example, if a customer pays for their movie tickets via near field communication (NFC), the mobile operator could identify the most frequent days the user visits the cinema, and send them discount codes for these dates. Over the coming years, this approach to data analytics will become an extension of who businesses are and their operations.

Drive Change

Today, businesses across APAC have access to an unprecedented amount of tools and services from a variety of IT vendors, which is driving greater confidence in identifying innovative ways to address business challenges. Additionally, businesses are being forced to understand and adapt to the way consumers use and interact with technology from the devices we use to the ways in which we choose to engage with vendors and service providers.

Encouragingly, businesses are being very proactive and the next 12 months will be telling as more and more companies come to grips with the technologies making a real difference to their operations. Ultimately, the approaches being adopted will introduce increased business elasticity which will aid in addressing the two biggest ongoing challenges of business today: risk mitigation and bottom line profitability.

Well that's my view on the world, what's your's? Feel free to share by commenting on this blog!