Our cover story this month focuses on the work of Chief Information Officer Simon Birch and Chief Customer & Transformation…

Our cover story this month focuses on the work of Chief Information Officer Simon Birch and Chief Customer & Transformation Officer Danielle Handley leading Bupa’s digital transformation journey across APAC and delivering a positive impact with its Connected Care strategy.

Welcome to the latest issue of Interface magazine!

Read the latest issue here!

Bupa: Connected Care

“ConnectedCare is our primary mission and we’ve been spearheading time, investment and creativity to reinvent and reinvigorate customer experiences,” says APAC CIO Simon Birch. “Delivering that ConnectedCare proposition to our customers is made possible by the collegiate focus of the organisation. Ultimately, what we’re able to achieve is supporting our most important colleagues, our healthcare practitioners working across our facilities.”

Reflecting on that transformation goal, Chief Customer & Transformation Officer Danielle Handley believes that stakeholder engagement and alignment, while building relationships across the enterprise, have been key to their early success. “We’ve found the champions within the enterprise who are going to form part of the coalition of the willing to start to lead transformation here at Bupa.”

Vodafone: Personalising Embedded Insurance

Halil Teksal, Global Head of Fintech at Vodafone, discusses disruption in insurance, personalisation, and giving customers exactly what they need at the right time. “The main thing we’re aiming for is simplicity. How can we have really easy-to-use personalised solutions? At the end of the day, that’s what customers want. When they buy a smart device, they want to buy the insurance quickly from a reliable provider. It’s important that we satisfy all of those needs.”

Young businessman writing on adhesive notes on glass partition in modern office, ideas, innovation, planning, strategy

Walden Group: Advanced technology for a healthier tomorrow

Denis Connolly, CIO of Walden Group and CEO of Walden Digital, talks about the incredible work the organisation is doing to leverage data and technology for the overall improvement of the world’s health. “We’ve created all these new initiatives just in the last year or so, moving from technology being a cost centre to being an R&D and development-focused organisation.”

Also in this issue, Samer Fouani, Head of Cyber Transformation & Identity Access Management at TAL discusses the cyber journey for colleagues and customers at one of Australia’s leading insurers; Mark Turner, Chief Commercial Officer at Pulsant, explores how medium-sized businesses can best leverage new developments in AI; Martin Hartley, Group Chief Commercial Officer of emagine, examined the role of artificial intelligence in personalising the customer experience for financial services and Marius Stäcker, CEO of ToolTime, shares his four top tips for successfully implementing new software and driving digital transformation.

Enjoy the issue!

Dan Brightmore, Editor

  • Digital Strategy

We’re excited to celebrate the 50th issue of Interface magazine with our readers. During a half century of monthly magazines,…

We’re excited to celebrate the 50th issue of Interface magazine with our readers. During a half century of monthly magazines, we’ve delivered insights from technology leaders representing an array of industries from banking and healthcare to IT and construction. We’re proud to feature a diverse range of companies – from Amazon to Zoom – at the cutting edge of tech and keep lifting the lid on the latest developments in everything from AI and Cybersecurity to CX and Fintech. We’re keen to see what the next 50 issues will bring and hope you’ll join us on that journey…

Welcome to the latest issue of Interface magazine!

Read the latest issue here!

In this month’s issue…

Virgin Media O2 Business:

David Cornwell, Director – Small to Medium Enterprise, talks about the unfolding telco integration journey at Virgin Media O2 Business delivering benefits for Business customers. “There’s been a huge process of rationalisation and requalifying what we need to unlock efficiencies. It’s a technology journey our customers are on too. We understand the challenges inherent in that so, as a customer-first organisation, we’re well placed to support them bringing mobile and fixed connectivity services together in one place.”

Abzena:

CIO David Williamson describes the work Abzena is doing with transformative technology, its use of data, and what the future of health tech looks like… “We’re always trying to use data to help our client achieve more with it. And Abzena is very innovative on the scientific front… Having the opportunity to see things that weren’t possible to see when looked at traditionally is having a dramatic impact on how we’re able to treat diseases.”

York County:

Director of IT Tim Wyatt discusses technology in local government, cybersecurity outreach, and why community is at the heart of his team’s work at York County. “We’ll continue to make smart investments for cybersecurity, work to stay ahead of the new threats to our citizen’s data, and ensure we’re entrusted with and reliably provide services that our citizens and our County can depend on.”

Klamath Health:

Klamath Health Partnership’s CTO Jessica Chastain describes the work she’s done to upgrade the organisation, the challenges that come with rural healthcare, and how she’s using data for good. “Data can show you a lot about the health of your organisation, including how to grow or shrink it to make it the best environment for your clientele.”

Also in this issue, we hear from Global & UK CEO Carlos Jaureguizar about the digital transformation journey helping Bupa become the world’s most customer-centric healthcare company, Mizaic CEO Jon Pickering explains how harnessing data-driven insights at the point of care can be achieved with a new EDMS (electronic document management system) and we re-visit our chat with Lloyds Banking Group’s CIO for Consumer Relationships & Mass Affluent, Martyn Atkinson, to learn how an ambitious FinTech journey, combined with a people-centred culture, is driving change for customers and colleagues across the Group.

Enjoy the issue!

Pat Lynes, Founder & CEO at S&S, explores how the concept of transformation has redefined the workforce economy

Tell us about your background and your career journey prior to S&S…

It started off with telco recruitment, working with some of the big ISP brands in the UK when there was that Internet Service Provider explosion, so I worked with the EZ net board to help them build their capability to try and make a mark in the UK. Of course it did quite successfully, and then Sky bought them out and then that turned into a big integration point programme which I resourced. Fundamentally at the heart of it was always speaking to boards, finding opportunities and problems and then connecting groups of people to solve those problems but with a recruitment angle on it.

Where did S&S come into the equation? 

I was privileged to be headhunted to come over and work for a guy called Simon Fosse. There were four of us around the table. We wanted to do something fundamentally different in the market. We are a collection of senior knowledge workers and senior recruitment. So over a sort of six and a half year period, I grew that particular business, from scratch to an eight figure revenue business and we did really well. We work with boards and help people like Burberry become a digital first organisation, working alongside their CIO and putting in different project teams to deliver their digital programmes. And I love it. That’s exactly what I love doing and I think towards the back end of that

I started to fall out of love with traditional recruitment. I think that the actual model is getting disintermediated. What I was seeing in the market is what not a lot of people are talking about right now, which is this jobs revolution at the senior end of the market. 

So a lot of people talk about the gig economy, and the sort of low end of the gig economy. But there’s absolutely this explosion around this expert revolution, this interim revolution of executives and senior knowledge workers leaving the permanent world to trade via their IP and value and building a service around that and becoming independent experts. So I kind of saw a few things intersecting at once, which was this interim revolution of senior knowledge workers becoming independent experts coming into the market. That’s how I’ve always been successful in my career serving that market. 

The other thing was management consulting fatigue. So if you look at the traditional route to getting consulting advisory and then delivery of big programmes or big digital transformation probes, people traditionally went for the Big Four or the Big 10. And I think fundamentally now what we’re finding is a lot of people are starting to back off from using those channels for a number of reasons. So I kind of had this idea in my mind of what if I brought all of the experts I’ve used over the years into a community based approach to consulting and working with clients. Could it be a challenger service provider to some of the Big Four, the Big 10, larger consulting providers? So it really came from that spirit of uniting my network already into a services business to fundamentally help organisations transform. I’m pleased to say we’re just out of year three coming into year four. We’ve gone from strength to strength and we’ve really hit a tone in the market

What has changed over the course of your career? 

Earlier in my career, transformation was synonymous with a multi-year Big Bang approach. I think the thing that we see around the way that transformation is being perceived is that there’s a lot of fatigue about that kind of word these days. When I go into these big businesses, if you say the word transformation, you can just see the fatigue on their face, or they’ve been through so many different transformations. 

I think the word transformation is just overused. People might be putting the data centre into a cloud, they call it transformation. They might be doing a desktop refresh, they’re calling a transformation. I think the word transformation probably needs to be retired. But back in the decade of 2000 to 2010 transformations were big, multi-year things where benefits were not derived until  three or four years down the line. I saw a lot of businesses that would spend and invest so much money in those big initiatives for it not to work or to not deliver the intended benefits to the board. I think when you look at the decade that came after the first decade of this century, you only need to see the gradual shift in pace. One is the aggressive shift in customer preferences, the unforgiving landscape in business now. If you look at the shift from the first decade, if you said that Toys R Us or Blockbuster would be obsolete in the last decade, you’d have probably laughed. You’d have probably laughed if we said Thomas Cook would be obsolete at the end of the last decade. The other high profile casualty Carillion from a b2b perspective and more recently with Mothercare. I think the trend was absolutely more long term programmes and long term transformation. 

S&S was formed based on this shift, where businesses need to break that down into manageable chunks to keep the business invigorated and aligned and onpoint, where you can actually deliver the sum of a transformation every 90 days by incremental bits of value, that give business benefit to the board, the customers, the internal stakeholders, etc.

The other shift focuses on talent and the changing work in preferences. There was this big thing to build huge permanent workforces. I don’t get that anymore. I just don’t get why you want to own your talent. Is the word permanent? Should that be retired? What does permanent actually mean? I think the new generation coming through doesn’t want to be permanent. Millennials don’t want to be permanent. The generation after that are now starting to want to become executive gigs or you know, experts where they want to have a fractional relationship with their work, they want to do gigs and fluid gigs and go into organisations and not get caught up with the company political drag and just trade value and do the stuff that they love. So they’re starting to design work around what they love doing. Baby boomers are just realising that I don’t want to retire. I think this changing workforce, this changing opportunity, this changing landscape that’s going around from the industrial way of working to the future of work is really going to accelerate this decade. 

When I started, no one really designed anything around the customer. Now the companies that are winning are designing everything around the customer. You hear of great examples like giffgaff using the power of the crowd to get iterations and feedback on their products and services. So using the network effect to enhance and build their products and services right in the sweet spot of what the customer wants.

When I designed S&S I resigned from my former company and resigned as a board director. I spent three months interviewing my executive network, just asking about the current state of affairs and  looking to get a capability. What do you like? What don’t you like? What frustrates you? If you had a magic wand, what would be the ideal solution?  When I launched the business, the first products programme in a box that we were bringing to market was programme management in a box where we come and deliver the outcome – and we tested it first. My network said they didn’t really see themselves on that path – a commodity. I got the feedback,  tweaked it and then came back with ‘teams as a service’. Teams have interim experts designed around an outcome or a problem. So it’s a mission based team to be deployed into an organisation to help them have an innovation capability. Help them have an incumbent change capability, so they can constantly reinvent themselves, turn around a failing programme, align the board, etc.

How does anyone go about defining digital transformation?

Transformation again, is synonymous with trying to transform a legacy laden organisation. So it’s an organisation that probably on the whole was born in the last century. So they’re geared for the Industrial Revolution. They’ve got higher hierarchies. They’ve got an obscene amount of technical debt, they’ve got a vendor lock in with some of the big guys and the big software packages. They’ve got legacy people skills and people in roles that might have been there for a bit too long and legacy leadership and on the whole that causes a lot of ambiguity and confusion. They’re trying to transform soup to nuts in an organisation born in the last century and decentralise it to an organisation that’s fit for purpose or designed around products and services with business agility in the core. This is incredibly hard. Some of the traditional consultancies will go in and sell you a playbook that might work in one of your competitors. But when it’s actually shoved into organisation it will not work because you’ve got cultural nuances and other nuances that are just difficult to decipher unless you’re in there and you’re trying to really get to the bottom of what’s going on.

So invariably, what we see is the older ways of consulting have not solved this problem. Because if they had done, we wouldn’t be having all these companies that are starting to die, or starting to have consecutive years of declining revenues.

Problem number one in organisations is often that the boards are under so much pressure, they’ve got so much operational drag on their time. They might have city pressures. They’ve got issues going on in their business. They’ve got failures, they’ve got burning platforms and they’ve got people issues with miscommunications going on and people leaving people joining. I could go on and, and that’s actually really hard for that level of executive to actually get some time to think about where our business should go.

We start off with getting executive groups to stop and we bring them into our workshop environment.  What does the future look like for your business? Do you have the right strategy? What does the customer of your future look like? Where would you like your company to be in three or five years? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How are your customers? How are your people feeling? How do you constantly iterate in accordance to market conditions? What kind of talent have you got? What is the baggage in the old company that you never want to have again? 

It’s a concept of reverse engin eering the future rather than trying to fix the past? What I find with transformations these days is that a lot of them are trying to fix the past before they can even get to the future and by then they’ve lost two or three or four years and they’ve actually got no value into the business and they’ve wasted a lot of money. The organisation is completely fatigued with transformation and change. They don’t actually have a muscle in the business of how to change after they’ve done it, because they’ve been heavily reliant on the management consulting drug. We try to turn all of that stuff upside down and actually get them to think. So if there is a discovery process, we have our IP of how we do it. At the end, there is a point of view, a solution, a roadmap and a way.

It’s getting them to come together and go through that process. They’ve all got equity in that process and they all feel like it’s their idea, because eventually, invariably it is and we’re adding points of views. We’re adding expertise and we’re facilitating. We also find that’s what actually gets the board and the leadership teams aligned. If I think about some of the problems I see in transformation, digital transformation, business transformation, it might not be the right strategy, the board might not be aligned. We’ve seen it before we get sponsored to go in somewhere and then the sponsorship dies. So the business doesn’t follow through on it. But if you get the board aligned with the right strategy for the right transformation, get them ready for change, execute outcomes every 90 days – then everyone in the business starts to get confidence that it’s moving in the right direction and can visualise the work around the organisation. 

Long gone are the days where you’ve got racks and racks of people where no one’s talking to each other. As a recruiter, you could imagine that I’ve been into thousands and thousands of businesses and most people are dead behind the eyes in the middle of the company. They’re just coming in doing their nine to five, tapping their keyboard, doing a bit of work, finding a bit of politics and falling out with someone. It’s not all doom and gloom on the whole in my experience but there’s a lot of bloated organisations where it is like that. There’s too many people doing too many things. They’re not talking to each other, and then they’re not collaborating. We find if you visualise the work at board and leadership level, and bring the work to the people, and carbonise everything so you’ve got a flow of work going through and there’s collaboration and cross functional teaming that’s delivering value to a customer. Then you have a cross functional team delivering value to an internal customer, cross functional teaming, where the execs and the leaders are working with the staff, and you really get the whole organisation aligned to get into their intended state. 

I have business coaches, and I’ve had life coaches before, so I’m probably the product of coaching. I made a decision when I was 28 to just try and be someone of growth and be an individual who has a growth mindset and I don’t know all the answers and I need help. I need to be on the hook sometimes for improvement and to sustain some of the gains that I’ve made. So why don’t we have that in companies? We’re starting to see now where we’ll put a board coach alongside the board. We have enterprise coaches, we put across the leadership teams can bang coaches and agile coaches and flow coaches working with the organisation. So it’s that kind of coaching concept that we see in the individual market coming into the business world and I’m a massive advocate of it. 

It starts to bring in the concept of continuous improvement and continuous reinvention. And knowing that your last 90 days isn’t gonna be as good as your next 90 days, in terms of you as an individual or you as the business and in terms of how close you are to the customer in terms of the health of the organisation.

Leveraging Radius Networks location technology for curbside pickup, in-store order delivery, and payments.

Technology has and always will be used to solve problems. At the very basic level, technology is developed and used to make things simpler. Just look at our day to day lives and the way that technology has, for the most part, made our experiences simpler and this has changed the way we as consumers engage with retailers and restaurateurs. We now expect and outright demand that the businesses we enter and purchase food and items from offer the same level of seamlessness that we experience in our own homes. The interesting thing however, is that this isn’t necessarily a new challenge for restaurants and retail stores; these businesses have been looking to enable the most seamless and effective customer service since the very beginning. The only real thing that’s changed is the tools that they have at their disposal. 

“At the end of the day, I think this goes for business philosophy in general, you really need to understand the problems that your customers have, and then solve them,” explains Marc Wallace, CEO and Cofounder of Radius Networks, a location technology service provider. “In our case, customers are businesses, such as restaurants, grocery stores, retailers or casinos; so we are targeting very specific problems. In most cases, those problems are taking wasted time out of the equation.”

Picture the traditional, and maybe even stereotypical, restaurant environment, where a food order is ready to go to the table and the service staff has to locate and identify the corresponding table to that order. In some instances, more than most, they may even walk throughout the entire restaurant before arriving at the right table with the right customer. Through wireless-enabled location technology, Radius Networks has transformed the customer experience by allowing businesses to track customers, improve profit margins and ultimately increase customer retention. 

Customers have, and will always, vote with their feet, and in order to retain those customers, businesses need to be able to remove the pain points. As Wallace noted, wasted time is one of the single biggest pain points in customer service. Radius Networks offers location-based curbside pickup, in-store and table service solutions, as well as mobile payment technology to remove not only the one pain point, but multiple pain points. “We’re addressing other key problems, such as payments. When you dine-in at a restaurant and are in a hurry to leave, trying to get your server’s attention to pay for your bill can be frustrating for the customer. It leaves a bad taste in their mouth at the end of their dining experience,” says Wallace. 

“We’ve developed solutions for making payments remotely without contacting the server. The server is notified when the bill is paid, and they can focus their attention on real problems that other customers have instead of shuttling credit cards back and forth.”

At the time of writing, the world has been gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic, a truly unprecedented event that has completely devastated lives and economies all over the world. It has also completely ripped up the rulebook when it comes to food and retail, with lockdown restrictions forcing businesses to either close down entirely, or pivot to delivery services. Radius Networks’ FlyBuy curbside pickup solution was actually launched over 12 months ago, but it has fast become a key technology offering that is solving an unforeseen problem. By automating the curbside delivery service for customers, FlyBuy provides a turnkey, end-to-end solution that uses the customer’s location for a faster, easier order pickup experience. “There was already a pre-existing return on investment (ROI) with FlyBuy because we were reducing the wait times for customers when ordering for pickup, which results in more frequent visits” says Wallace. “Throughout this pandemic, curbside delivery has become the only channel that people can do, so the importance of it has risen dramatically. It was once within a business’s top ten things it needed to consider, and has now risen to the very top of their to-do list.” 

Radius Networks is currently offering a free version of both its FlyBuy curbside and buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) software for restaurants, retailers, and non-profits during the COVID-19 crisis.

By its very definition, location tracking technology appears to be very intrusive. It is tracking locations and using that data to inform decision making, after all, and naturally that can cause a little fear and a hesitation. Wallace acknowledges these concerns and understands them wholeheartedly. “We had a decision to make early on in the company whether we were going to harvest data and use it for marketing purposes or whether we were going to be a privacy-centric company and focus on providing a solution,” he says. “We chose to be a privacy-centric company, mostly because all of us as individuals wanted that for ourselves.”

“When it comes to us as a location company, are very transparent with our customers and our businesses, so that they can be transparent with their consumer customers about what we’re doing with their location data, what we’re using it for, and how long we’re keeping it.”

This transparency is built into the very DNA of the company. FlyBuy will only ever use the location data to alert restaurant/retail staff that a customer is on the way and onsite to pick up their order, and only after the customer has opted-in to sharing that information. After a period of time has passed, they will then delete that data entirely. Its policy dictates that it does not, and will never, share that data with any third party, giving customers peace of mind that their data is safe and used only as agreed when they opt-in. Wallace believes that, while the reluctance and fear is understandable, consumers have access to services’ policies and can ‘do some homework’ in order to allay them. “I think, given the amount of options we are given today, customers can no longer just assume every location company is tracking or doing something devious with their information. They need to be aware when they approve location usage and when they don’t,” he says. “If they can be sure that sharing their location brings value to them, whether it be to have a car service come to their exact location, or their groceries meet them at their car immediately upon arriving in the pickup zone, they will happily share their location. Once they have established a level of trust in the people that are requesting location permissions, and see the benefits it brings to their lives, there is no problem.”

Radius Networks was founded in 2011, and for the best part of a decade, it has grown from strength to strength as a business, working with the likes of McDonald’s, Five Guys, and Coca-Cola, as well as being recognized in the INC 500, the Deloitte Fast 500, and the CIO Magazine’s Most Promising Digital Experience Solution Provider. But none of these successes would have been made possible, without a solid and sound foundation within the business. “I’ve been told by people ‘wow you guys got really lucky.’ Luck had absolutely nothing to do with it. Our mission is to solve problems for businesses, and right now businesses need our help more than ever. There were a lot of really difficult times over the years where we worked hard and earned the right to stay in the game, and we are once-again earning it right now,” says Wallace. 

“Take FlyBuy as an example. I’ve been asked as to whether I thought this piece of technology that we developed over the last few years would ever be as important as it is right now. Yes. Yes I did, and so did everyone else on our team, and that’s key to our success as a company. Every single person at Radius Networks is engaged and believes in what we do.”

In these times of crisis, the spotlight has shifted significantly onto those business fundamentals and Wallace is extremely proud of the business he has built and the people within it. “The business principles that we’ve been practicing over the last few years have paid off. We are a strong company with sound fundamentals and sound financials. We haven’t over extended ourselves, either from an investment perspective or from an expenses perspective and that’s paying off for us now,” he says. 

“It is tough in the current environment to point to positives, because you almost feel ashamed to do so. I think we’ve done a lot as a company to help others; we’ve given our product away for free to hundreds of small businesses, thousands of locations, with no obligation, and it’s a testament to the work we have done to get to this point. A lot of companies are doing a lot of good work to help each other right now and they can do so because they are built on solid foundations.” 

Those foundations start from the very top. Wallace is a key advocate in communication. Much like Radius Networks communicates in an open and transparent way with its customers, the same rules apply from within. He admits that the pandemic has, ironically, made that communication better in some aspects, but it has always been a key part of what makes Radius Networks tick. “We’re talking to our customers all the time. My team is the best team in the world. They’re working in overdrive right now, communicating at such a high level, and listening to customer needs, because their needs have changed dramatically,” he says. 

“As the CEO, I try to have frequent hands-on-deck tag-ups with everybody to give them an update and try to be as transparent as possible about the status of the business and what’s happening. I do this so they can feel comfortable that they have a job today, and they’ll have a job tomorrow. We work together to come up with our team goals, and stay aligned and upfront about everything that may come up along the way.” 

Listening to the customer is key. That much is no secret. But when it comes to technology, listening to customers is absolutely essential when ensuring that what you’re offering is what the customers need and what they want. Wallace’s role as the CEO is not to sit at the top of the business and leave it to everyone else. He is very much active and engaged at every level to ensure that everything Radius Networks is doing is driven by the customer. Wallace is proud of the culture within his business and often finds himself sitting on a call with a major customer and beaming at how well his team listens and understands the customer’s needs and how Radius can successfully address them. “I’m so proud that we, as a team, have a culture that takes so much pride in their work,” he says. “Our people have always been solid employees, pre pandemic, but they have become absolute rockstars today.”

The world as we know it has changed forever and we cannot begin to predict what this new world will look like post pandemic. One thing is for certain, communication, and the way in which businesses engage with their customers, will never be the same again. Radius Networks has enjoyed success after success over the past ten years, and as we all experience great uncertainty, the goal for Wallace is to continue providing valuable location technology for many years to come. The key to succeeding, regardless of such uncertainty, remains the same for Wallace and his team. “Persistence,” he says. “It’s about persisting through the bad times, just like the good times, and trusting your business fundamentals and experience. Being transparent with employees and having a good team around you is key.”