In any enterprise, digital transformation is not only a technology transformation but enables business transformation itself, driving new products, solutions and innovations. Having an efficient data strategy is critical to any successful digital transformation but requires careful investment into both people and systems.

“To achieve that goal, availability of good data, of the right data, and availability of that to the right people and systems is very, very critical. So that forms the data strategy for any enterprise today,” says chief architect for data and AI services at Kyndryl, Sundar Shanmugam.

Getting the most out of digital transformation investments means evaluating and optimizing agility throughout an enterprise to drive actionable insights, says Shanmugam. A strong data governance framework also goes a long way in keeping data high-quality. Often data governance primarily serves regulatory requirements. But truly effective data governance is holistic, he adds. Data usage, regulations, and the data itself are constantly evolving within an enterprise, effectively making data governance a continuous process.

Although tech teams are often dictating how data should be managed and used, Shanmugam says everyone across the enterprise, including leaders and decision makers, should be data literate.

“End of the day, the people are the ones who design the systems and who develop the systems that consume the data, so the right investment on literacy is paramount in that aspect,” says Shanmugam.

Another key component to digital transformation lies in maximizing investments across business units. The combination of software development and operations to form devOps, AI and machine learning to form MLOps, and finance and operations to form finOps all fall under the broader umbrella of XOps that categorize these merging of IT disciplines with business operations. XOps all come together to deliver value in the most efficient way with each combination focused on maximizing automation, reusability, and agility, says Shanmugam.

“As we say, necessity is the mother of innovation, so that necessity can continuously change,” says Shanmugam. “At the core of that, if we keep that data proper [condition], then it can expand the horizons, not just internally, but even for the other external requirements and use cases.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Kyndryl.

Related reading

Top Trends in Data and Analytics for 2021, Gartner, February 16, 2021

As more business, shopping, and banking is done online and from, well, anywhere, customers increasingly expect high-quality digital-first services that remove the need to go into a physical store or bank.

“People were working from home, shopping from home, banking from home, and are more tech and digital savvy than ever,” says Mike Dargan, group chief digital and information officer for UBS. “And if you look at the financial services industry, the ecosystem is constantly evolving, so it becomes more competitive, open, connected, and location-independent every day.”

Banks like UBS are experiencing a cultural transformation that makes technology itself integral to the business offering. Because technology is often the first—or only—medium via which customers encounter a business, the quality of that digital customer experience is key to the value it provides. To make that digital-first experience a differentiator for a business, Dargan explains, requires strategically and substantially investing in tech throughout the enterprise.

Investing in technology means a targeted focus on the people and platforms behind the customer-facing experiences, not just building out the feature of the month. Dargan’s roadmap begins with engineering excellence—attracting and retaining engineers who want to shape the direction of the industry.

In addition to offering an inclusive culture and opportunities to solve important real-world problems, companies seeking the best engineers must provide cutting-edge platforms and tools to create an industry-leading developer experience. To enable this—as well as to reimagine what they can offer to clients—UBS has made years-long investments in updating legacy systems to new technology, focusing on infrastructure allowing the launch of cloud-native applications on a cloud-native platform.

Internal company processes, though invisible to customers, drive the speed and quality of digital innovation. At UBS, process focus has included training on agile methodologies—teaching employees from all business areas how to get from emerging requirements to high-quality outcomes as quickly and iteratively as possible.

Less obvious longer-term investments in the technology future may also pay dividends both in business terms and in customer experience. In the sustainability space, UBS has partnered with the Green Software Foundation to build software standards and best practices for reducing carbon emissions, and has set a goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions across its operations by 2050.

Says Dargan, “the world is faster, more digital, and more data-driven than ever before, so clients really do demand services that are digital-first, anytime, anywhere, and are underpinned by first-class technologies. In fact, I'd say tech is really how our clients experience us every day.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with UBS.

A heritage financial services institution isn’t necessarily the first place a technologist looks to grow their career. But that hasn’t been a problem for JPMorgan Chase, which has made itself an appealing career destination for technologists. “Technology is not an afterthought,” says Gill Haus, chief information officer of consumer and community banking at JPMorgan Chase. “It is in everything we do, from our offices to our branches to our contact centers to our web and mobile applications.”

Haus explains that there’s more to being a technology company than using technology to solve problems. “What really makes a technology company is how you think about the way you hire teams, the way you groom teams, the way you build software, the way you deploy that software,” says Haus. “It's how you organize around products, not around your business units.”

Like a technology startup, the technical teams at JPMorgan Chase solve real-world problems. “Every single day, we are launching new features and products that make it easier for everyone. It's incredibly exciting,” says Haus.

However, unlike a startup, JPMorgan Chase has scale. The financial services institution supports 44 million mobile active customers and 59 million digitally active customers in general. The company spends $12 billion on technology annually. “When we launch a solution or bring a new product to market, we don't bring it to market for 1,000 people. We don't bring it to market for a 100,000 people. We bring it to market for millions of customers immediately, and that is incredible,” says Haus. “There's incredible talent here, as you can imagine, because we have such a technical need. Talent begets talent. It's exciting to go to a place where you know you're going to be challenged.”

The current 5G evolution in network connectivity is expected to drive unprecedented demands for bandwidth, reliability, and security. However, a network of this magnitude and robustness doesn’t pop up overnight and enterprises and consumers are just beginning to realize the myriad use cases a 5G network can support.

For example, consider the increased number of connected devices in a house like smart thermostats, security cameras, tablets, smartwatches, and mobile phones, of course. Raj Savoor, the vice president of network analytics and automation at AT&T Labs explains, “Currently we estimate the average consumer home footprint has about 13 connected devices, including mobile and other devices.” And although that sounds like a large number, he continues to explain the real scale, “That's going to increase to 30 to 40 devices over the next five years, so a really big increase.” And the real challenge he continues to explain is that, “This growth needs advanced network architectures to support, manage and provide fast, secure, and reliable services.”

Bandwidth will also increase five times in the next five years, according to Savoor, as consumers adopt immersive interactive applications. Immersive experiences also require lower latency and jitter, and a lot more security and reliability. For a company like AT&T that supports a large existing network, building the next generation network requires an incremental approach. In fact, AT&T’s 5G network has been years in the making. “We look at it as a journey. There are a lot of steps that we've taken over the past few years to build on it, and we have prepared for the next step,” says Savoor.

And as businesses and consumers transition to a 5G world, AT&T keeps looking ahead. “We are thinking about the next 20 and 50 years. Network investments take a long time, and we want to make those investments with economics in mind, but also very much ensuring the most reliable network offering,” says Savoor.

The skills and capabilities needed to undergo digital transformation are in high demand as every company jockeys to gain a competitive advantage. To address the skills gap, some companies are prioritizing upskilling and reskilling. But to be effective, learning and development itself must undergo a transformation.

According to Daniela Proust, global vice president and head of global people enablement and growth at Siemens, learning and development is at the core of digital transformation. “In light of a major transformation that businesses are facing, either by new business models arising or new innovation and technologies driving a certain business area forward, you see that you need to accompany that structural change, that structural workforce transformation in order to drive business transformation,” she says.

Traditional training methods need to also transform. Given the speed of technological change and need for business agility, multi-day offsite training (some of which may not even apply to the employee’s role) is no longer viable. Fortunately, the same technologies that are driving digital transformation in other areas of the business can also be leveraged to transform learning and development.

“Now people learn more often, for shorter periods of time, but training is much more tailored to what they need in that moment, and that is enabled by technology,” explains Proust.

In addition to delivering just-in-time training, a modern learning and development platform can provide valuable insights. “A platform-based learning ecosystem with a learning experience platform at the core enables you to gain insights that we never had in the past.” says Proust.

This new approach to learning delivers benefits to both the business and its employees as they acquire the skills that help accelerate the company’s digital transformation and fuel their own career growth.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt.

Like many banks, National Australia Bank (NAB) decided to outsource a large part of its operations in the 1990s. “We pushed all our operations and a large part of our development capability out to third parties with the intent of lowering costs and making our operations far more process driven,” says Steve Day, the chief technology officer of enterprise technology at National Australia Bank.

Unfortunately, achieving these goals had an unintended consequence. “We froze our operations in time,” says Day. “If you roll forward to 2018, we realized that we were still operating like we're in the 1990s. We were very waterfall driven. Our systems were highly processed driven, but in a very manual way, and it took us a very long time to roll out new products and services that our customers really needed.”

Meanwhile, young financial services companies were coming to market with innovative products and services and NAB was finding it difficult to compete. “Many customers today are expecting an Amazon experience, a Google experience, a Meta experience, but we were still operating in the 1990s,” says Day. “We stood back, and we looked at it, and we decided that our entire culture needed to change.”

What ensued was nothing less than an internal transformation. “Our original teams didn't have a lot of tech skills, so to tell them that they were going to have to take on all of this technical accountability, an operational task that had previously been handed to our outsourcers, was daunting,” says Day.

Day and his team rolled out a number of initiatives to instill confidence across the organization and train people in the necessary technical skills. “We built confidence through education, through a lot of cultural work, a lot of explaining the strategy, a lot of explaining to people what good looked like in 2020, and how we were going to get to that place,” says Day.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt.

With its Emirates Mars Mission, also known as the Hope Probe, the UAE has established itself as only the fifth country in history to reach Mars and the seventh in the world to reach the orbit of another planet. The UAE’s first mission to Mars, Hope’s goal is to provide the first, complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers to help scientists understand the planet’s climate better.

The Emirates Mars Mission is unique in that the troves of data collected by Hope are being released to the public. “This contributes to a more knowledge-based economy and fosters the science community's capabilities as a collective. This step was taken to encourage the science community to break the barriers and work together for the greater good,” says Maryam Yousuf, a data analyst for the Emirates Mars Mission.

The Hope probe has three main objectives, the first is to understand the lower Martian atmosphere and its weather and climate. Yousuf continues, “The second objective is to correlate the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere to explain how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And the final objective that we have is to understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and why Mars is losing them into space.”

The focus on space for the UAE comes at an important time as mapping Mars will contribute to the work of not just the knowledge economy of the UAE, but advance science for the whole world. “The UAE is basically investing in space, as investing in the space sector means investing in the human capital towards a better future for all,” says Yousuf.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with the UAE Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai.

In many areas of the world, environmental conditions are not conducive to traditional farming. As a result, these countries are food dependent. They rely on imported food, which is subject to supply chain issues and nutrient loss during transportation. A company in the United Arab Emirates called Smart Acres is looking to change all that through hydroponic vertical farming.

“Living in a region with a lot of non-arable land and in arid conditions, we're not able to produce a lot of the crops needed for consumption for the nation. The UAE actually imports 90% of the food for consumption,” says Aphisith Phongsavanh, lead project manager of Smart Acres.

Smart Acres is an indoor vertical hydroponic farm that grows pesticide-free leafy greens using 1/10 of the land and 90% less water than traditional farming. The Abu Dhabi-based farm grows 13 cycles of lettuce a year, yielding 20 times more food than traditional farming would on the same square meters of land.

The Smart Acres farm consists of eight shipping containers equipped with modules that use internet of things technology to monitor for humidity, temperature, and the nutrients inside the plants. It’s all in the name of creating an environment that’s optimized for plant growth and high nutritional value. “When we come in, we have air showers built into our facilities. We make sure that our controlled environment is as sterile as possible to protect the plants from external factors,” says Phongsavanh.

Having fine-tuned the process for leafy greens, the team is preparing to expand its crop. First up: strawberries, a local favorite. “There’s no leading vertical farm in the UAE right now that is commercializing strawberries. So, in fact, we would love to be the first one to test it and get it right,” says Phongsavanh.

Potatoes are also a priority. “A lot of the countries in the MENA region, Middle East, North Africa, get their potato seeds and their potatoes imported from around the globe, such as Europe and North America. We would really like to reduce and curb that dependence on that system, so if we were to grow the Middle East potato seed, it would do wonders for the local ecosystem in terms of Middle East and North Africa.”

The company also has plans to develop the Smart Acres Institute of Food Security and Agriculture, a localized food security program. “Our long-term goal is actually to be a pioneer within the region to facilitate the research and development of plant propagation,” says Phongsavanh. “We'd really love to look into growing new crops and plants that can be grown efficiently within this harsh environment.”

The future looks promising, as Smart Acres works to increase food production from 11 tons to 155 tons annually.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with the UAE Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai.

For many people, the concept of directed energy, or lasers, conjures images of lightsabers and bank vault security systems—the stuff of Hollywood movies. However, the fact is, lasers are commonly used in everyday life applications, from surgery to optical communications. At Technology Innovation Institute’s (TII) Directed Energy Research Center (DERC), scientists and engineers are using directed energy to solve some of the world’s most complex challenges and make the world a better place.

Directed energy is “the ability to create a high amount of energy in a controlled volume at a given distance in order to trigger physical reactions to study the interaction between the energy and the matter,” says Dr. Chaouki Kasmi, who is the Chief Researcher at DERC, which is part of the Abu Dhabi government's Advanced Technology Research Council.

The research at DERC reflects the multitude of applications that are possible using directed energy, but the research projects have at least one thing in common: the goal of solving real-world scientific or technical challenges. For example, one of DERC’s recent developments is a landmine detection system – the ground-penetrating radar - designed to help developing or previously war-torn countries detect and neutralize unexploded landmines.

However, Dr. Kasmi and the researchers at DERC aren’t just looking down. They have their sights set much higher and further with projects focused on using lasers for communications on land, to the moon, and even underwater—truly making the entire world a better place with directed energy technology.

“The disruptive innovation that we are bringing today is how we can make it affordable for developing countries. The idea is to create a technology that could really help solve a worldwide problem at low cost. And this is very important for us as we would like to have the system deployed at scale,” says Dr. Kasmi.

The research scientists at DERC also look for ways to leverage the solutions they develop beyond the initial application. “The way we work is to really create building blocks and to combine or reuse those building blocks in order to tackle additional challenges,” says Dr. Kasmi.

Since the 1940s scientists have studied ways to increase rainfall with the goal of increasing precipitation in arid and semi-arid climates. Today, that endeavor is making incredible leaps and bounds as scientists and engineers apply nanotechnology to improve the effectiveness of cloud seeding.

“The global water shortage has continuously intensified by rapid population growth and economic development around the world. Conventional water resources such as rivers, lakes, and groundwater have become very limited, which is driving scientists and engineers to look for alternative water resources,” says Dr. Linda Zou, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Khalifa University of Science and Technology.

Dr. Zou leads a groundbreaking research project using nanotechnology to develop cloud seeding materials. Cloud seeding is a form of weather modification that mimics what naturally occurs in clouds but enhances the process by adding particles that can stimulate and accelerate the condensation process. However, Dr. Zou explains that “The cloud seeding materials used today have been around for many decades. The information and techniques are out of date and their effectiveness is not well understood.”

Cloud seeding has strict requirements. To be successful, scientists need the right air temperature, the right humidity, a surface that attracts water and keeps it, and then the correct size material to allow condensation to form on the particle.

“Through the advancement in nanotechnology and nanoscience, nowadays we are working to design and engineer cloud seeding materials with optimal properties to ensure water vapor condensation will occur effectively and maximize the rainfall achieved,” explains Dr. Zou.

Related materials

·      UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science

·      New UAE cloud seeding test in Texas shows 'promising results', The National News, August 15, 2021