Tag: ASEAN

Data & AI initiatives are firmly at the core of any organisation’s tech-led transformation efforts. Businesses today realise the value of real-time data insights to deliver the agility that is required to succeed in today’s competitive, and often volatile, market.

But organisations continue to struggle with their data & AI initiatives for a variety of reasons. Organisations in ASEAN report some common challenges in implementing successful data & AI initiatives.

Here are 5 insights to build scalable AI.

1. Data Access a Key Stumbling Block. Many organisations find that they no longer need to rely on centralised data repositories.
2. Organisations Need Data Creativity. A true data-first organisation derives value from their data & AI investments across the entire organisation, cross-leveraging data.
3. Governance Not Built into Organisational Psyche. A data-first organisation needs all employees to have a data-driven mindset. This can only be driven by clear guidelines that are laid out early on and adhered to by data generators, managers, and consumers.
4. Lack of End-to-End Data Lifecycle Management. It is critical to have observability, intelligence, and automation built into the entire data lifecycle.
5. Democratisation of Data & AI Should Be the Goal. The true value of data & AI solutions will be fully realised when the people who benefit from the solutions are the ones managing the solutions and running the queries that will help them deliver better value to the business.

Read below to find out more.

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Organisations are being driven to develop and demonstrate an ESG consciousness and a sustainability commitment in their actions and investments – by their customers, investors and by governments’ sustainability mandates. Early adopter organisations often realise several benefits – from achieving better financial outcomes to creating competitive differentiation. However, more organisations need to get serious about their sustainability journeys – and as regulations firm up, organisations will be forced to report on their sustainability initiatives.  

The Ecosystm Kyndryl ASEAN Digital Transformation Study 2022 was launched earlier this year to understand the pulse of C-level leaders and the business and technology transformation goals of organisations in the ASEAN region. This included a closer look on where organisations stand when it comes to setting sustainability goals and strategies, and their key challenges.
 
Here are 5 insights on the state of the Sustainable Organisation in ASEAN.

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Digital transformation has been a key company objective over the last two years – and more than a third of enterprises in ASEAN have it as their key business priority in 2022-23. They are aiming to be agile and digital organisations – with access to real-time data insights at their core. 

Businesses have learned that their technology systems need to be scalable, accessible, easy to manage, fast to deploy and cost effective. Cloud infrastructure, platforms and software has become key enablers of business agility and innovation.

But the expansion of cloud applications has also seen an infrastructure and applications sprawl – which makes it essential for organisation to re-evaluate their cloud strategy. 

Here are 5 insights that will help you shape your Cloud Strategy.

• Technology Change Management. Your cloud strategy must define the infrastructure and data architecture, security and resiliency measures, the technology environment management model, and IT operations.   
• Building Scalable Enterprises. Focus on seamless access to all organisational data, irrespective of where they are generated (enterprise systems, IoT devices or AI solutions) and where they are stored (public cloud, on-premises, Edge, or co-location facilities).
• A Hybrid Multicloud Environment. For a successful hybrid multi cloud environment, keep a firm eye on hybrid cloud management, a suitable FinOps framework that balances performance and cost, and integration.
• A Technology-Neutral Approach. Partnering with a technology-neutral cloud services provider that leverages the entire tech ecosystem, will be critical.
• “Hybrid Cloud” Can Mean Many Things. Work with a cloud services partner, that has broad and deep capabilities across multiple hyperscalers and is able to address the unique requirements of your organisation.

Read on for more insights

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For the last two years organisations have been forced to invest on digital services for their customers and giving their employees access to the right technologies to allow them to work from home – or from anywhere they choose to. Organisations find that they have to continue to evolve – and are now looking to build a ‘Digital Workplace’ that caters to the hybrid workplace.

As organisations in ASEAN define the work model that works for their business operations, work culture and organisational goals, there are a few areas that they must focus on.

Here are 5 insights from the Ecosystm Voice of the Employee Study that will help you shape your Digital Workplace.

• Evolve the physical workplace. 72% of knowledge workers in ASEAN will work both remotely and from the office.
• Build a true hybrid work culture. As organisations form their Digital Workplace strategy, they will have to ensure that the workplace is as comfortable as home offices!
• Focus on employee wellbeing. Only 25% of organisations in ASEAN have made changes to their HR policies in the last two years.
• Invest in the right technologies. To build that resilient hybrid workplace, organisations will first have to conduct a gap analysis and consolidation of their tech investments over the last two years.
• Continue to monitor employee behaviour patterns. As organisations work towards a ‘Return to Work’ policy, they will see significant changes in employee usage behaviour patterns. If the right cyber practices are not in place, this could leave organisations vulnerable again.

Read on for more insights

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Earlier this month, I had the privilege of attending Oracle’s Executive Leadership Forum, to mark the launch of the Oracle Cloud Singapore Region. Oracle now has 34 cloud regions worldwide across 17 countries and intends to expand their footprint further to 44 regions by the end of 2022. They are clearly aiming for rapid expansion across the globe, leveraging their customers’ need to migrate to the cloud. The new Singapore region aims to support the growing demand for enterprise cloud services in Southeast Asia, as organisations continue to focus on business and digital transformation for recovery and future success.  

Here are my key takeaways from the session:

#1 Enabling the Digital Futures

The theme for the session revolved around Digital Futures. Ecosystm research shows that 77% of enterprises in Southeast Asia are looking at technology to pivot, shift, change and adapt for the Digital Futures. Organisations are re-evaluating and accelerating the use of digital technology for back-end and customer workloads, as well as product development and innovation. Real-time data access lies at the backbone of these technologies. This means that Digital & IT Teams must build the right and scalable infrastructure to empower a digital, data-driven organisation. However, being truly data-driven requires seamless data access, irrespective of where they are generated or stored, to unlock the full value of the data and deliver the insights needed. Oracle Cloud is focused on empowering this data-led economy through data sovereignty, lower latency, and resiliency.

The Oracle Cloud Singapore Region brings to Southeast Asia an integrated suite of applications and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform that aims to help run native applications, migrate, and modernise them onto cloud. There has been a growing interest in hybrid cloud in the region, especially in large enterprises. Oracle’s offering will give companies the flexibility to run their workloads on their cloud and/or on premises. With the disruption that the pandemic has caused, it is likely that Oracle customers will increasingly use the local region for backup and recovery of their on-premises workloads.

#2 Partnering for Success

Oracle has a strong partner ecosystem of collaboration platforms, consulting and advisory firms and co-location providers, that will help them consolidate their global position. To begin with they rely on third-party co-location providers such as Equinix and Digital Realty for many of their data centres. While Oracle will clearly benefit from these partnerships, the benefit that they can bring to their partners is their ability to build a data fabric – the architecture and services. Organisations are looking to build a digital core and layer data and AI solutions on top of the core; Oracle’s ability to handle complex data structures will be important to their tech partners and their route to market.

#3 Customers Benefiting from Oracle’s Core Strengths

On December 18, AWS launched Amazon Connect in ASEAN from the Singapore region. I was invited to the ASEAN launch of Connect in Singapore 3 weeks ago where Pasquale DeMaio, GM of Amazon Connect and Robert Killory, ASEAN Solutions Lead presented to analysts.

Pasquale told the audience that the Amazon Connect solution used today has been built over 10 years ago to serve Amazon’s internal needs of servicing millions of customer interactions for their e-commerce transactions. At that time Amazon could not find a solution that was pure cloud-based, cost-effective, scalable and that was easy to use. Since launching Amazon Connect a few years ago, AWS has seen not just small and medium enterprises using Connect – larger organisations have embraced the solution as well.

Amazon Connect has a list of notable clients – Intuit, Rackspace, John Hancock, CapitalOne, GE Appliances, Subway and many others. Intuit, as an example, has had difficulties running experiments in the past and proofs of concept were expensive, complex and time-consuming.  With Amazon Connect these run on a test environment allowing their engineers to experiment and if they do not work out, it does not cost Intuit a lot of money to spin up a proof of concept. Philippines telecommunications provider, Globe Telecom wanted to automate and improve their services for their broadband and residential services. It was taking about 2-3 days from payment to the restoration of services. Amazon Connect was deployed to solve this problem by understanding the customer data when calls came through to the contact centre and by using APIs and the Connect suite of applications, there was deep integration with the CRM systems and other platforms that held various pools of data. This produced a faster and scalable way of integrating the payment process and customer service.

The demo of the solution showcased how features such as Amazon Lex can build conversational interfaces for an organisation’s applications powered by the same deep learning technologies like Alexa. With Amazon Lex and Polly, organisations can now build a chatbot without knowing or understanding code.

The Amazon Connect Solution – scaling to become more feature-rich

At ReInvent in Las Vegas in December 2019, Andy Jassy the CEO of AWS unveiled a new offering for their contact centre customers called Contact Lens. The solution is a set of machine learning capabilities integrated into Amazon Connect. The service can be activated through a single click in Connect and can analyse, transcribe calls including previously recorded calls. Jassy also talked about how it allows users to determine the sentiment of the call, pick up on long periods of silence, and times when an agent and customer are talking over the top of each other. These additions can help supervisors understand the challenges faced by agents that can then be addressed during training and coaching sessions. The machine learning models that power Contact Lens for Amazon Connect have been trained specifically to understand the nuances of contact centre conversations including multiple languages and custom vocabularies.

Several other announcements have also been made recently:

• Web and Mobile Chat for customers is a single unified contact centre service for voice and chat. Agents have a single user interface for both voice and chat, reducing the number of screens they have to interact with.
• Amazon Transcribe now supports 31 languages including Indonesian, Malay, Japanese, Korean, and several Indian languages. These are important languages as they expand further across ASEAN and the rest of Asia, given the diversity of languages spoken in the region. Contact centres can convert call recordings into text and analyse the data for actionable intelligence.

Deepening their relationship with Salesforce

At Dreamforce 2019 late last year, Salesforce announced that they will be offering AWS telephony and call transcription services with Amazon Connect as part of their Service Cloud call centre solution. The announcement indicates how the CRM world and the contact centre segments are starting to get closer. CRM vendors are starting to realise that whilst they own the agent at the desktop who have access to the CRM solution, the data from the calls and the actual calls are important. Voice/Telephony is also witnessing greater innovation with vendors in the contact centre space applying machine learning and AI to voice so that intelligence is gathered prior to the call coming to the contact centre and the agent is further empowered through prompts that they can apply when speaking to a customer. As CRM integrates deeper with contact centre solutions, the tight integration between these two solutions cannot be ignored. Salesforce is partnering to innovate in the voice space by applying machine learning at the core of all they do. This is a big announcement given the sheer size of both companies and how both companies are innovating in the contact centre space.

Cloud Contact Centre is high on the agenda in Asia Pacific 

Ecosystm’s CX research finds that most organisations in Asia Pacific are at the inflection point of moving from an on-premise environment to a cloud model. Only 1% of CX decision-makers want to keep their contact centres on-premise – many organisations are evaluating which contact centre vendor they should use to migrate to the cloud. Some countries may see higher adoption than others. Australia and New Zealand have higher cloud contact centre adoption. In ASEAN many organisations are starting to build a wider CX strategy beyond the contact centre including areas such as customer journey analytics and data-driven personalised CX.

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