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 

How Fragile is Agile?

I have been reading a lot of articles lately about whether Agile actually works, or whether it’s simply a dream for businesses looking to accelerate business outcomes. Ultimately, the growing view seems to be that Agile doesn’t work – that it is a hype that consulting firms are thriving on, and we’re actually better off going to traditional delivery methods that provide predictability, consistency and the ability to hold someone accountable to get things done.

This debate stems from a need to find the ‘magic answer’ – the silver bullet to take all of our worries away, especially when we are looking to transform. We like Waterfall because we can allocate responsibility to someone else, whereas Agile requires us to get more involved through evolving design, constant prioritisation, showcase presentation, and ultimately owning the outcome (scary stuff). Waterfall means I can document everything I want and then point to someone else to deliver the outcomes. Any delays, errors or increased costs are totally on them, right? (ahem). However, with Waterfall delivery we tend to forget the wonderful concept of change request, where it tends to have a growing number of change requests over time, and then finishes with a resignation of taking what can be delivered with the remaining budget. Now, some might say that if you plan things right you don’t need change requests, but in today’s era of constant change, avoiding it is challenging, to say the least. Historically, in a market where market change was measured in years and for the most part manual (or at best, half yearly) the scale of change was manageable, today however, we are faced with two types of businesses: those that were born digital and those that aspire to become digital. In this dynamic, the extent and scale of change is huge and the challenges this brings to Waterfall delivery means we constantly ask for changes to our delivery plans to evolve with the market.

On the other hand, Agile provides a degree of unpredictability and tends to shift directions based on the priorities set by the business and, more specifically, the product owner themselves. The timing of when a specific capability is completed can be a little vague, as the definition of ‘done’ comes down to when the product owner is actually happy with the capability, and whether they feel it’s fit for purpose. While there can be a desire to go fast with Agile, the concept of minimum viable is always in the eyes of the product owner and thus velocity is determined by the business. For those looking to test in-market quickly, you could achieve a faster launch, but with the knowledge that there might be errors or adjustments to make ongoing. For others who like a capability to be holistic and low risk, it can mean numerous sprints are necessary before it is deemed “done” and as such ready to share with colleagues and / or customers.

I am not going to say that Agile is faster or cheaper – in fact, it can be more ambiguous, frustrating, and lack accountability, which ultimately means there’s no one to point the finger at in pushing toward an outcome. However, this is also why I believe Agile is our future.

Agile represents the cultural change a business needs to go through. We need to be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity and we need to share ownership of the outcome. One aspect that Agile does outperform Waterfall on is the ability to learn faster – and if a business is willing to learn through quick tests and recognises that early failures ensure a program is on the right track overall, then Agile can be a great vehicle to achieve business outcomes. My concern is that Agile has been branded in the tech market as a vehicle to move faster, which means the expectations are wrong from the get-go. Agile will help you learn faster and pivot as the needs of the business evolve or the market drives change, which can create a sense of speed, however it is simply an ingredient in the recipe for broader business agility.

The challenge we keep facing is that our world is not the stable working environment it was before. The predictability of having a three-year outlook that could merely be followed through with minimal disruption is rapidly diminishing, with software that felt more like hardware because it was very much standalone and constant. Today, change doesn’t happen in a two or three-year cycle; it’s happening in months and, if you are really unlucky, in weeks. This is why Waterfall is struggling, as the changes we need to make means we would need to constantly raise change requests and our costs keep going up.

This doesn’t mean I have suddenly prescribed to Agile as being the answer to everything, but it’s about knowing what has the right outcome for your business. If you are doing a migration to the cloud of premise-based applications with fixed scope and deliverables, then Waterfall is likely a better path. On the other hand if you’re developing capability that you know will continue to evolve, then Agile can actually help drive a better outcome.

So, to answer the question in the headline of this article, Agile can appear fragile because it means accepting that we are all accountable for its success. When we struggle to accept ambiguity, the need to change the way we work, or accept joint accountability in partnership of realising outcomes, we make the process fragile.

All of this is simply leading to one key reason - We are the reason why Agile is fragile. We don’t like change, we don’t like being responsible for things which in a traditional IT world was always the ownership of others. In fact, I remember my first project with Agile ways of working, I was constantly asking the delivery partner if this is going to work. My big realisation was when one of the team leads from the delivery partner turned to me and asked me back, “I don’t know, you tell me.” After my heart skipped a couple of beats, I realised this was the difference, and what I didn’t like was that there wasn’t the same clarity that I felt I had before. On the other hand, following our initial delivery, I realised it was that constant ability to keep improving, evolving our tools and external facing systems that was giving us the ability to continue to evolve.

I look at Agile as being a reminder that the business needs to take accountability for the delivery of projects. The time of simply pushing the problem to someone else is over. The introduction of Agile has added another tool to our bag to support our business in become increasingly digital. In doing this, we can enable the business to be less fragile and more adaptable, innovative, disruptive, and, well, agile.

Climbing the transformation mountain

Two years have passed since someone suggested to me to work with them on transforming Telstra’s B2B business.  In those two years we have been on an amazing journey of understanding what it means to perform a heart and lung transplant on a patient running a marathon while also leading the pack.

 

In two years, we have not only established a set of end-to-end integrated systems, from product definition to customer billing, we have also launched what is one of Telstra’s most holistic offers to market as a true paperless proposition –it has been awesome to see the positive impacts to our customers and partners.

To many of the team, delivering all of these aspects in our transformation program has felt like we have climbed a mountain. That said, we have a long way still to go to realise the scale of change that will ensure a sustainable change for the business.

 

There have been many examples of change that our transformation program is bringing, including the automatic flow of information between systems without any human intervention. This might seem obvious, but any business or IT person involved in managing system handoffs, will appreciate that it’s these integrations that are the hardest. Hearing from one of the team how data is now populating automatically between systems without any need to request it is music to my ears.

 

One of our key realisations is that while a digital transformation is enabled by software, it is very much a business transformation and not just a technology transformation.  Digital transformation needs to guide a business to actually change the way it works - the support of all of these new capabilities will be the real validation of a sustainable change.

 

This was reiterated by Telstra’s recent Disruptive Decision-Making report, which found across the globe businesses are too focused on the role of technology in digital transformation programs. 

                                                                
Transformation does not mean only internal business change, but also change in the way a business engages with its customers. It is interesting to see the way we embrace digital interactions for our personal needs, but when it comes to businesses, we are more comfortable in using traditional channels of calling or emailing someone from a service desk. It has been inspiring to see what teams have achieved in the past two years in building our first native business app, co-developed with customers to realise a new digital-first strategy to serve their customers.

Why on earth am I talking about these achievements, though?

Simply put, for us, these achievements were more of a realisation that we tend to be so focused on what is next that we don’t pause to learn from what we have achieved, struggled with, or missed delivering.

It is very easy to forget about accomplishments to date as we reflect on how far we still have to go. Recognising these outcomes both within our program and in the broader organisation are important - it highlights that progress is being made toward the top of the mountain, and acknowledging and reviewing progress, ensures continual learning and improvement as we move closer to the summit.

As we start with the next phase of our climb, there are three key challenges that now arise: scale, customer migrations, and data.

 

Scale in the form of ensuring the majority of the business’s transactions to support B2B customers are enabled on a new digital stack. Without this volume of transactions, the efficiencies targeted to be realised through this new capability won’t materialise. The work to date has demonstrated the scale of change that is possible, but our business won’t feel it until volumes are reached that result in true business change. 

 

Customer migration might sound obvious, but when a business engages with its customers in a certain way for a long period of time, introducing a new way of working can be disruptive - collaborating on that journey with customers to understand the value of the change for their businesses is critical. 

Data is the most critical element of any transformation program. I always find it interesting when people talk about data scientists or big data, but for me personally, I would just be happy with a single source of data that ensures our teams are not having to double or even triple check that data between systems is consistent. As we learned with our first orders, without accurate data we create unnecessary work for ourselves and we lose the value from the integrated systems we have established.

 

On the flipside, where we know data is accurate, teams can quickly focus on high-value tasks with customers. Workflows can become highly automated from opportunity through to in-life service management, driving efficiency to levels previously not seen.

Of course this is in the future - to achieve these next wave of outcomes we need to climb this mountain, bring all of our people, partners and customers into this new world of integrated and digitised capabilities.

 

Sometimes that new world can seem challenging given how high we need to climb, but it is the diversity and strengths of a team that can achieve the outcomes a business is looking for - just like those climbing the highest mountains. With the right team in place, any peak is possible.  

I want to be an Imagineer

Before you think I am off to Disney to design rides or other attractions – which would be a very cool job, by the way - I am not referring to Disney’s coining of the term, re their designers needing to be able to engineer what they are coming up with in the latest amazing customer or digital experience (interesting side note, whilst Disney own the trademark to Imagineering, it was not the first to use this term[1]). I am instead talking about how this concept is now moving into mainstream digital businesses as they seek to compete in an ever-changing world.

The drive toward Digital is changing our business culture and our business resourcing needs like never before. The era of Digital businesses has provided opportunities to create and evolve internal and external facing business capabilities to improve efficiencies, whilst at the same time as the need for businesses to establish digital capability has become a necessity to compete. Simply outsourcing or partnering the development of digital capabilities is no longer a viable option because the ability for businesses to adapt and evolve within  dynamic market(s) at a cost they can afford means the profile of roles within and equally those outsourced is shifting.

The era of having roles that are specifically shaped as those who define their requirements (business users) and those who implement those requirements (IT) is coming to an end. With rogue IT being greater than ever (Business units looking to establish their own IT capability), the need for the model to shift couldn’t be more important. Why? Well simply put, when each part of a business looks to do its own thing we lose sight of who is accountable for stitching the various components together. Not to mention the impact of competing priorities, insular or siloed benefit realisation and the misalignment of resources not working together to achieve the greater good.

Enter the Imagineer, a new species of employee who not only has a clear vision for the business that he/she works in but also has an understanding of the tools/platforms/software that their business uses now and in the future. This new role profile will not only help to reimagine what a particular part of the business looks like, they will also have an understanding and an accountability to ensure that whatever they create actually works with a business’s broader organisation. For example in this role they make it possible for  marketing tools to work with a Customer management platform, or an ordering system to communicate with billing. This may seem obvious but history tells us our traditional ways of working have created extensive human glue as we seek to create the best widget to solve a particular problem instead of seeking to understand the broader business implications of decisions we may make in isolation from other parts of the business.

The Imagineer has a “T” shaped understanding of the business, an understanding of the end-to-end architecture and business flows combined with an in-depth knowledge on a particular domain with both the business requirements   and expertise on how the software they will use works. The result being a common understanding of how teams can succeed together and realise ownership and innovation in their part of the business at the same time.

I see this in my current role where we are exposing business people to the systems that will form the future of our business with an ask of them to know and manage those systems/tools in the future. It is not as easy a transition as having a traditional define and deliver model (Business vs. IT) for many years and then hope we will change the model overnight. It just doesn’t happen that easily, changing the model requires mindsets and behaviours of those involved to also change. The exciting aspect of this is the journey, partnering with our business owners who are keen to embrace this change and also become Imagineers themselves as we seek to redefine the customer, partner and employee experience in a newly imagined digital world.

Being an Imagineer is merely an example of where the collision of worlds from business and IT will create new opportunities.  These new roles are merely a representation of the shift that all businesses have made, where items are increasingly less about hardware and more about software, where services are no longer bought they are leased. The traditional barrier of business and IT is dissolving rapidly; I am not talking about start-ups but mainstream businesses where those who are going to be successful will need to have a blend of expertise

Imagineers will become a new role in our Digital Era, a role where people are needing to not only understand the technology and tools they are leveraging but also to have the vision of what the future can hold when we reimagine a digital world, a world where the limitations are only defined by our imaginations. It is this world I am excited to work in and bring an understanding to business leaders on the art of the possible through Imagineering^TM, where the knowledge of system and tool capabilities combined with a vision for what the future can hold will empower business to disrupt themselves and remain relevant for the future.

To that end, I will sign off.

Nathan Bell

Dreamer, Technology enthusiast, Digital Imagineer.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagineering

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.

Surviving a Digital Transformation

So let’s cover off the first question; “Why would I say surviving?” Let me put it as simply as this. Anyone that has experienced a digital transformation, or started to build digital capability within a business, will know that realising transformation through a digital lens is like operating on a patient to replace their heart and lungs while they run a marathon at the same time. (There is a building a plane while flying it too but I prefer the marathon analogy!).

Now, anyone in their right mind is going to say “Why on earth would you want to do that?” Again, simply put, it is out of necessity. No one transforms their business simply because they woke up in the morning and thought it was a good idea. It is born from an urgent need to evolve their business either from cost, competition or changing market dynamics.

Likewise, I am intrigued by the fact that many leaders feel going digital is as easy as building a new app or making a website interactive. However, when their shift to digital commences, they quickly realise it is a lot more than this, and actually that shift to digital is more about their own business’ way of working, instead of the technology they decide to deploy.

This is why a digital transformation makes sense. The move to a digital way of working, combined with the need to transform, makes for a common foundation because to realise either goal requires a business to actually change. However, if a business is not willing to change and make the proverbial “leap” into the new world, then the change that a business is embarking on will simply fail. It is irrelevant how much a CEO or business head is eager to change or evolve their business as it will always be the weakest link which will ultimately determine the degree of success. The weakest link could be a business leader who doesn’t support the change, a legacy supplier seeking to latch on worried they will lose their business, or it could also be the business setting guide rails so tight that it gives the program no chance to fail.

Yes that’s right – fail. In my experience, if you don’t fail you won’t learn what works for your business. It doesn’t matter how well you have planned your strategy for digital transformation, part of the excitement is trying new ways of working and new ways of serving customers. Some will work and others won’t, but this is all about designing your business for the future. At this point, there will be many senior executives who are reading this and say “Ah yes Nathan, learning is fine but my business can’t afford to fail. We need to grow and, as such, we will seek to leverage the expertise of consultants and System Integrator’s as they will already have gone through these learnings with other businesses and then my business will simply leverage from those … right”?

Naturally, there are many organisations out there offering to help businesses realise this digital change, with amazing stories on how they can realise the change and all of the places where they have seen it or, for the lucky ones, realised it for another business. Hence, it is an option for you to have someone transform your business and receive the end product, but as any digital native business will tell you, it will come down to your ability to not only go through one transformation, but to actually realise a greater degree of business agility and hence an ability to evolve your organisation to adapt to the true constant in our business world today, change.

It is very hard for any organisation to simply say we will do this on our own, change our way of working, retrain teams, create a new structure and introduce a whole new suite of technology and platforms. Hence, it is reasonable to be asking partners, integrator's and even software partners for support in realising the digital transformation outcome. The important word here is “support”, because the challenging aspect in this transformation is back to the business change that it is targeted to realise.

So what am I saying? Basically when you are embarking on your digital transformation, a) make sure you have identified the leaders in your business who are going to own this change, b) identify partners who can help you make that transition with a clear goal of having the ability to continue on with your transformation, independent of any partner as you establish a greater degree of maturity in the business. The objectives of a transformation will take time to realise. Putting a specific timeline on the deliverable can result in assuming a business has changed, but with a trail of destruction behind and a long tail of capability still in the old world. It’s like having had the heart and lung transplant and thinking everything is fine, but then realising you are bleeding internally which can lead to a slow painful demise.

However, by ensuring you build the capability within your business, the pace of that change can be constant, holistic and ensure no-one and no capability is left behind. Most importantly, that new internal capability will bring you a greater degree of agility as your business and/or the market continue to evolve. Hence, while you go through that heart and lung transplant, it won’t matter if that marathon evolves into a steeple chase or a cross country ski race, you and your business will have the confidence to front into that change, knowing the team has evolved to a new skill set. When I say skill, I am not referring to a digital skill, but an agility skill. To the point at which you may cause other businesses to look at their own heart and lung transplant as you go from being disrupted and merely surviving a transformation, to becoming the disruptor and ultimately start leading the marathon!

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