Digital after COVID

What do the terms ‘digital’ and ‘digital transformation’ mean to you?

I see digital as a very cultural thing. It's not just about technology, it's about the state of mind you have around technology and the expectations of users; the expectation, for example, that you'll be able to engage with technology in an accessible, real-time and intelligent way. Digital transformation is about outcomes, it's about experiences, and it's about transitioning. Specifically, it's about building a more engaged workforce and a more engaged consumer by transitioning away from legacy processes and ways of working.

In what ways has the pandemic impacted the digital priorities of your clients?

I think that the pandemic has accelerated a lot of our cultural maturity around digital, as a society. Even just on a personal level, it's certainly had a huge impact on my expectations as a consumer. I expect now that if I need something, I'm going to be able to order it online and have it turn up the next day. More than that, I expect that I'll get a text message with my driver’s name, and that I'll have the ability to track my delivery online. And it's not just our expectations as consumers that have been impacted by the pandemic; it's also transformed our expectations of how work should be done. We know now that it's possible to conduct business remotely, and that you can build one-to-one engagement with colleagues, employees and managers even when you're not in the same room as them. Because of these changing expectations, there's more pressure than ever for businesses to invest in their digital capabilities.

At the same time as businesses are trying to create new end user experiences, they're also investing in middle and back-office transformation. In those areas, the focus at the moment is primarily on issues of robustness, resilience and scalability; how, for example, you can scale up your contact centres and your supply chain systems to cope with sudden surges of demand. Cloud has a big role to play in enabling that kind of scalability. And importantly, it also allows businesses to do it in an auditable way—ensuring businesses can meet their regulatory obligations at the same time as coping with the peaks and troughs of life.

You’ve outlined some of the challenges businesses are facing right now in the digital sphere. What role do you see for Sopra Steria in helping your clients respond to those challenges?

I see the role of our digital team within Sopra Steria as twofold. We have to keep half an eye on the horizon, making sure we're aware of bleeding edge technologies and what they mean for the future. But we also need to understand the real-term implications of technology for the here and now, so that we can help our clients tackle their immediate challenges. Ultimately, I see us as facilitators of innovation. There can be many different triggers for innovation; it could be an event in the market, a regulatory change, or just an ambition that the client has. But whatever the trigger is, we need to be able to get under the surface of the challenge, and apply modern, agile ways of addressing it.

As a consultant working in the digital space, you need to know how to work in an agile way and with a 'fail fast' mentality. Whatever the problem statement is, you need to drip feed quick wins to the client so that you're constantly adding value. That means that prototyping, A/B testing and user research are all key components of the modern consultant's toolkit. I don't want to leave my clients with PowerPoints anymore; I want to leave them with outcomes. I want to take them on a journey over the course of an engagement, and prove to them what opportunities can be unlocked with the right technology and the right mindset.

In what ways have you tried to differentiate your digital offering at Sopra Steria from those of your competitors?

At Sopra Steria, we've spent a lot of time and energy developing a compelling digital ethics offer, because we believe that ethics needs to be fully embedded within all the transformation work that we do. If we're implementing robotics, we need to think about the human impact of implementing those machines; if we're developing AI processes, we need to be careful to make sure we're not building unconscious bias into them. We take ethics seriously both because it's the right thing to do, and because we believe it puts us in a better position to win work. Clients these days don't just want their transformations to be economically viable, they want them to be socially viable as well. Very often during bids, we can see that there's an ESG element incorporated into the scoring criteria—with increasing weight and focus.

You mentioned earlier that you see the role for your consultants as revolving around the facilitation of innovation. Has the pandemic—and the shift to remote working—made it harder for you to play that role?

When it comes to the impact of the pandemic on our ability to run workshops with our clients and to help them innovate, there have been both pros and cons. I've been genuinely impressed by how much we've been able to engage in workshops covering complex themes remotely, through tools like Teams and Miro. And the technology itself has come a long way since the start of the pandemic; it's a lot easier now, for example, to host breakout rooms during a virtual workshop. There's a lot you can do digitally in terms of sharing content in advance and setting pre-work for people. And these tools also make it easier to capture the outcomes of a workshop; you don't have to spend hours writing up post-it notes the way you used to. The downside is that you miss out on that level of human contact and human socialisation; it can be harder to stimulate and maintain deep debates and conversations, and it's easier for people to burn out. Good meeting discipline, such as taking breaks and maintaining focus on your workshop goals, become even more important

As we reach a point where digital is embedded within more or less everything that businesses do, do you think that the term ‘digital transformation’ will start to lose some of its relevance?

The term 'digital transformation' is, for me, becoming a bit old news. At Sopra Steria, we don't tend to talk about digital transformation much with our clients; instead, we focus on the outcomes we're going to deliver for them. For us, digital is the default. Typically, we're not spinning up traditional on-premise solutions for our clients—except maybe for a few niche areas of our business where we have to deal with hyper-secure material. Instead, our focus is on building solutions that are cloud-enabled, scalable, robust, secure and resilient. I don't want to spend my time talking to clients about the fact that those solutions are digital; I want to talk to them about how we're going to help them achieve their business ambitions.

The fact that the term 'digital transformation' isn't as relevant as it used to be doesn't mean that there isn't still a lot of digital transformation to be done. Clients still need to adapt to changing customer and employee expectations, and they still need to respond to various external pressures. The tools to tackle those challenges are out there, and many of them—cloud, AI, automation, IoT—are pretty well established at this point. Our job as consultants is to understand the problem statement and then find the right selection of tools to deal with it. Whether the client wants to call that 'digital transformation' or not doesn't matter all that much, but it's the business process and end-user transformation that needs to be the real focus.

How do you see your clients’ digital priorities changing over the next few years?

Over the next two to three years, user-centric design is going to play an increasingly important role in the digital transformations we enable for our clients. I'm not just talking about making sure you have a shiny website; I'm talking about developing a deep understanding of the user, their needs, and their expectations in terms of an engagement experience. I also think that over that timeframe we're going to see some significant developments at the frontiers of RPA and automation. A lot of the RPA vendors we work with are expanding the more intelligent functionalities of their products, and are partnering with cloud providers to embed a level of automation into those platforms. I also see voice as a potentially game-changing next phase for business process automation.

One trend I'm waiting with bated breath for is the advent of screenless, voice-enabled, business process solutions. Indeed, we're already working on these ground-breaking solutions internally and with some customers I think that as people get more comfortable conversing with robots, such as engaging with devices like Alexa in our homes, we'll see a big uptake in those kinds of end-user experiences in the augmented workplace; building on what we've seen with self-service chatbots in recent years. Real time personalisation of these services, coupled with rapid process improvement through machine learning, will ensure those services continuously improve end-user outcomes; quickly meeting or exceeding user expectations. I don't know yet whether it will be something we'll see as fully mainstream in the next two or three years, or whether it's more of a five year timeframe, but I do expect it will happen eventually.