B2BiQ

Jerry Wagner joins us and immediately shares distinctions of what to expect from 'robotics,' "if you're dealing with pen and paper, then there's no way you can actually get into automation unless you actually want to go build the robot and have it actually doing the stuff for you." Meaning you have to actually be a digital enterprise before you can have intelligent automation. At that point, you can dive into what you're trying to solve. "The type of platform that I work with is to come up with those use cases and see if we can actually build some bots to go and do that activity as well as actually educating others within the business so that they way they could potentially build these bots themselves and get into more of a self-service model." From there, Jerry explains how he and the organization are actually dashboarding value to the organization.

An interactive discussion of hospitality executives includes myriad pieces of advice: "One easy thing to do is stop calling it omnichannel, because that is from your perspective as opposed to the customer's perspective." "My main tip would be, be very creative in looking within your own organization, what type of resources you can use as part of your customer services organization." "Flexibility, and agility is key. We have to look at proactivity and a little bit more pragmatism on that front in terms of solving the issue that we currently have." "Be very creative in looking within your own organization, what type of resources you can use as part of your customer services organization. So in our case, we use employees in our travel shops, in our retail shops. When it's quiet in the shop, they log in as customer service agents for the contact center." "Expect the unexpected and make sure you've got robust disruption plans."

Bobby Abraham joins us and gives us a sense of his transformation remit, “be ready for the future, be agile, be ready for it.” He notes that "it's down to individuals and organizations.” With the pace of change in technology intensifying investing in accelerator programs "helps leapfrog the traditional innovation that happens within larger corporations.” As far as geographic growth, using India as an example where they skipped 3G, he asks what countries can skip 3G and 4G and go right to 5G. Bobby is also a decent human, "I'm absolutely humbled by my journey and I'm always, always just glad, delighted, lots of gratitude for the wonderful bosses, the line managers I’ve had. And I think I've made most of every opportunity just out of sheer hard work and perseverance and purposefully curious."

Martin Van Leeuwan joins us and shares his thoughts on how IT can best work with business. "As a dispassionate IT guy, how do you get everybody's mind back onto the uniform goal that we both have? How do you work through that, I guess? Well, transparency is normally what is the key, because you need to open up the reasons why you do things, and you need to understand why it is."

Nadia deVilla joins us and discusses how she kept calm and developed a plan of action in the face of the 'shiny new toy' of robotics. She utilized transparency in leading her teams and reporting to management. She shares the automation journey from PoC to transformation. On the PoC, "We started off with the extreme, so this setup, the environment, and the support, and the production releases. Those are inherently technology, and that was agreed upon by both parties. Where the, I wouldn't say gap, but further discussions were held, were in the ownership of design and configuration. Now, the second part that I wanted to share was more on together we actually were learning from a third party, because both business and technology did not understand what RPA was. That was the historical reason for the proof of concept" Flash forward to transformation, "in addition to accelerating the transformation, it also sustains the transformation because any net new work that gets piled on in this new global model can be absorbed, because you now have a new type of work force that can potentially do it without the heavy lifting in integration, cost, and so forth. The second piece of this is that our key learning is that you are tracking everything they do. You have data that allows you to derive metrics on how long you do a certain type of activity, and therefore you can now measure and potentially apply costs on how you potentially provide a service that these bots can do for you."

Nigel Leppitt joins us and shares that it's tough to ensure process excellence during traditional cycles. But Nigel has been tasked with doing so in a completely new business model and returning the business to profit. With cost considerations being hyper-sensitive, Nigel and the team needed to decide whether to buy platforms or build their own. They decided to build which meant two years of design and development which Nigel preferred to building his organization around the platform.

On generational divides and similarities, Stephen Caulfield returns and shares thoughts on how each generation is starting to gain aspects of their respective colleagues from boomers to millennials, vice versa, and everything in between. And whether it's employees or customers, Stephen shares "it doesn't matter what you tell people about your company in a room at an interview, because they have already researched you online. They have gone to their source of truth to find out what the online world thinks of you. One of the things we've done within Dell EMC or Dell technology is we have a number of social media listening centers that we've put together."

With a rich history in corporate enterprise that stretches back to when managing memory was the key issue of the day, Vijay Bhuavanagiri joins us and shares historically "problems that we were trying to solve in the engineering world were numerical analysis problems, so we had to solve them through the metrics analysis. That required a lot of managing the memory type of thing.” It continued through building “management systems to manage all devices, or IP, voice and  video streaming.” And right up to chjinging business models. “ Our enterprise architecture practice survives module integration because of maturity.” Which leads to his current philosophy and key questions he asks, "you need to have an architecture that can be deployed globally. And also take care of the local constraints like the regulations and other compliance things. And do the customer-centric things. So how do you put that together? What is the architecture? How do you make it happen? What are the shared services that need to be there?"

Ricoh’s VP EMEA Shared Service Centres, Andrea Schaffel join us and discusses the importance of consistency, being customer-centric. She discusses how she’s shifting global centers and global center talent around her regions. Andrea shares how she’s taken in sales order processing work, planning and supply chain, administration and controlling finance activity. She shares that “in addition to the transactional work we were already doing for them, we've now taken on a higher level work.” And how no matter what she’s doing, everything comes down to "trust, emotion, relationship and control."

Ken Goldman joins us a puts on a clinic for business, life, geopolitics and more. He discusses his time as CFO for Yahoo during the Marissa Mayer years. He shares his thoughts on why things were they way the were and turned out the way they did. When the team had to fix everything from product to Board composition- the first thing they looked at was culture. In the grand scheme of things, he discusses AI and the evolution of technology and it's affect on the future of work. He discusses a pillar of each enterprise being good citizenship to a community. He discusses the evolution of balance sheets for global corporations over the past 40 years. And Ken shares his evolution perception of economics- "unfortunately economics is not perfect."