Home

Digitalisation in a Rapidly Changing Environment

John Ang, Chief Technology Officer, EtonHouse International Education Group

Generative AI (like ChatGPT) has been the buzz word in recent months. I was looking back at AI; when in 2017, we started with AI, machine learning, deep learning but with minimal consumer scale usage like what we have for ChatGPT and Bard. It reminds us of the importance / relevance of putting IT to bite size use case that anyone can possibly use and adopt. This has been the principle of digitalizing IT in a context we can accept.

Taking a few steps back, a company must first take a bold step to understand the importance of digitalization brings into a company as a means of increasing productivities, organization efficiency, possible new digital business ideas and accepting that it is the new way of life. The pace to which how these are rolled out must be quick at the start and moderating the pace to suit a company’s digitalization path.

Second, it is imperative to know that we need to build a core IT team within an organization that can plan, implement, and do end to end solutioning in how IT is going to be used. We need a good hands-on strategic leader in an organization. Resourcing can always be an issue. In Singapore, we have CTO as a service. If we have an IT startup assistance for a good period of time to assist companies to build them up, such initiatives will help companies further.

Third, we need to solve the needs of each company, understand their pain points, resolve the digitalization needs based on their core business (for example , delivering key progress of a child is important at EtonHouse, track it well and communicate to the parents and educators), plan a few steps ahead of possible needs, talk and spark ideas with your colleagues in advance as every colleague is busy in their current matters, involve your key decision maker early of possible digitalization plans and ‘educate’ your team and the whole company of any new digital initiatives, the reason behind the push and helping them aware of using IT to enhance their processes.

For example, if we want to use analytics in a big way, plan of what are the key measures, what are areas that needs constant view/update for decision making, what are certain areas where we can forecast to help? Are there solutions out there that can kickstart this process and we can build on it further? Communication is always key to a success of a project implementation, regardless of the project cost and size.

Fourth, we need to be mindful of cost in every IT adventure. We need to bring out what is essential and good to have cost. If your core business is rapidly changing, do we need to build an inhouse solution (even if it cost much more) vs off the shelf solution to meet our competitive edge? If yes, this cost is essential. IT security is essential in every company but not every IT security product is a must have. It depends on the current IT landscape. At the same time, vendor or IT providers should cater their product to meet varying cost point / needs of that companies. I seriously see SMEs struggling with cost even though the product can be good to have. How can companies assist? How can government step in to bring in subscription cost down to help companies? How can both private and government initiatives be more comprehensive in helping companies move towards digitalization needs? These are hard truths we need to look at seriously.

There is always a company’s bottom line vs adoption of usage by companies. It must be balanced up appropriately in each company among the CXOs. I heard of CFO and CIO/CTO cannot agree on cost vs benefits. Again, we need to know the company status, what can be done later, what can be outsourced or what can be dropped and company’s definition of profit amount.

Lastly, there should be an ecosystem. There are many ecosystems that should interlink to bring IT to the next level. Ecosystem of certain subject expert (like AI as one group), Ecosystem within sectoral (e.g. education group) to share ideas together, Ecosystem that can spark through new technology or startup with existing established tech or business firms, Ecosystem between government and private sectors, across geographical region. Such Ecosystem needs to arise despite company trade secrets, company competitive edge, geo-political tensions. Looking back, there are many efforts over many organizations like Gartner, IMDA Singapore, and Software vendor to bring us forward. Again, within each sectoral, much can still be done or established to bring / spearhead the usage of IT further which can modernize, digitalize and even transform processes to bring us to the next era.