A team of business leaders from across APAC recently attended HPE’s CXO Leadership Exchange at INSEAD in Singapore, including AC3 CEO Simon Xistouris. Here, Simon asks HPE’s Simone Filetti, Manager Territory Sales Group, about disruptive transformation in business and the thinking behind the event.
Simon Xistouris: Q - The course was really innovative and different to the normal vendor events that we see. Why did HPE pull together a program like this?
Simone Filetti : Trends on digital transformation impact industries across the landscape; however, not all digital transformation projects succeed.
This collaboration with academia and top global industry analysts created a forum for cross-pollination and knowledge sharing among CXOs (which in this context incorporated different
members of the C-suite – from chief executive officers to chief information officers and other stakeholders) at the forefront of driving change. This consortium was born to create a community of CXOs who learn from each other’s experience and keep the dialogue on DX (digital transformation) open, becoming leaders of innovation transforming their organisations into industries of the future.
The Exchange was attended by leaders from a diverse spectrum of industries in Asia Pacific and the course curriculum and the pre-work were designed on the relevant themes of ‘Customer Experience’ and ‘Value Creation on the Customer Digital Transformation Journey’.
The two-day program was an intensive, multidisciplinary and interactive experience with an aim to ‘Facilitate Digital Transformation’ by:
- broadening participants’ understanding of the digital disruptions and effectively bridging strategy and technology to create value
- benchmarking participants’ digital capabilities
- learning through case studies, and
- strengthening participants’ familiarity with novel frameworks and tools to successfully lead and implement digital transformation with a focus on operational/practical effectiveness.
Q - What value were you trying to create for the participants?
We learned how digital transformation entails driving change within three key pillars of your business: intelligence (competitive insights), integration (organisations’ structure and capability) and impact (value creation). We were introduced to tools and frameworks around each of these pillars, with ideas and case studies that allowed us to test market value, build our business plans and ultimately execute for success. A great example is how you integrate digital data and experiences into your existing process to gain the competitive edge.
We hear about disruption and transformation all the time, but what does disruptive transformation really look like?
As digitisation continues to transform the business landscape, enterprises are facing multiple challenges including the need to move faster, be more nimble, and adapt quickly to market demands. In addition, there is more and more direct competition coming from smaller, more flexible companies that have leveraged modern technologies resulting in a real shake-up across established enterprises that can no longer rely on the value of their brand to ‘save them’. You don’t have to look far to see that across every industry. The winners are those who have embraced innovation and are not afraid of change.
Disrupt or be disrupted, as they say. We continue to learn the value of data driven insights; we need to leverage data at the edge and expand our use of hybrid IT providing technologies that enable organisations to disrupt and create additional value pools for their customers.
Q - Could you give some examples of the disruptive transformation case studies explored at the Exchange?
We saw some fantastic and innovative case studies that really helped everyone think outside of the box. A great example was the digital transformation that followed the merger of two industrial gas suppliers, Air Liquide and Airgas, which was led by Olivier Blachier, the Group Vice-President at Air Liquide.
While heading up Air Liquide’s largest division, Industrial Merchant, Blachier had endeavoured to integrate digital technologies in order to improve the group’s customer centricity.
The merger with Airgas afforded the opportunity to build on this approach, with CEO Benoit Potier aiming to effectively capture the value of digital technologies to reinforce this ‘customer-centric DNA’.
But to capitalise on the momentum of the merger, Air Liquide identified three fundamental stages:
- articulate exactly what customer centricity meant for the group post-merger
- match relevant digital technologies with specific customer types and moments, and
- implement a new culture and interactions developed with the intention of increasing customer centricity.
Blachier was tasked with establishing the steps required to take the company to the next level via its pursuit of digital transformation. The aim was to make Air Liquide the most customer-centric industrial gas company by 2020 and a differentiated leader overall in industrial gas industries by 2025. The acquisition of Airgas was a vital step in this process, as it boosted the group’s presence in the e-commerce arena. Airgas had launched a successful website in 2014 and half of its key accounts were already buying online. As growth slowed, however, Airgas management and Air Liquide’s Digital Customer Experience team put together an ambitious strategy to increase these online transactions.
Key to this strategy was the deployment of a ‘Total Access’ team – a dedicated tele-salesforce of 400 people spread across six US call centres. Combining this highly trained salesforce with six strategically placed distribution centres, the group was able to provide next-day service to 60 percent of the US population.
Air Liquide was also able to learn from and integrate other Airgas initiatives and legacy tools and processes to see its net profits rise significantly by 2017.
We also learned about Telenor and how it revolutionised retail banking in Serbia. This case study revealed how Telenor, a Norwegian multinational telecommunications provider, branched into Serbian mobile banking thanks to the research and efforts of an INSEAD graduate called Martin Navratil.
Then there was the AccorHotels digital transformation case study, which detailed the hotel and accommodation chain’s digital evolution from identifying its typology of online content through to developing a plan for Accor to get its teams to embrace the organisation’s new digital direction.
Q - Learning about those real life examples of real digital transformation, instead of just optimisation was the highlight for me, but what was your most valuable learning?
I would say it was the insights we gained into defining best practices, understanding that customers are at different stages of their journey or path to transformation and aligning the balance between academia, economy, analytics and technology. The course provided the ideal platform to develop a well-rounded view of opportunities and challenges linked to digital transformation.