General
The Future of Business Digitization and Workforce webinar and panel discussion held in July 2020 covered discussion topics from remote work to digital transformation and DevOps. Panelists included Sheila Jordan, Chief Digital Technology Officer of Honeywell, Fran Roshan, CEO of digital identity company Forgerock, and Ralph Loura, CIO for photonics manufacturer Lumentum. Declan Morris acted as a moderator.
This blog summarizes a part of the panel discussion.
CEOs are making big bets that digital transformation is here to stay. Several industries including financial services, public sector, telco, media, and digital retail saw massive spikes in their digital challenges with little notice to prepare. A shift to the cloud, whether public or private, has become necessary.
“Honeywell already had an enormous digital transformation agenda when I walked in, then the decision was made to work from home. We re-architected the entire network and got all 110,000 employees in 83 countries working from home in just eight days. Our key partners and relationships are what pulled that off.
“What excites me is that I don’t see digital going away. People who were holding on tight to their old way of doing work are now seeing what digital can do. Our return to the office is going to be different, and CEOs making big bets on digital transformation are going to be stronger companies for it. Digital is here to stay.
- Sheila Jordon, CDTO at Honeywell
“I agree that this has been a massive shift and it’s here to stay. The customer standpoint is where we saw the biggest impact from these changes. For example, one of our financial services customers saw their traffic to bank branches drops to almost zero while their digital traffic went up 300% in a single day.
“So obviously these organizations had very little notice to prepare for that type of usage spike on their digital channels while also shifting to 100% remote employee workforce. It’s been really fun to meet that challenge with our customers.
“One great example of this is one of our digital retail customers who announced that they're moving to bankruptcy. They came to us and said that the only thing they aren't cutting is their digital channel, even though everything else is being reduced. They know they’ll survive the bankruptcy if their digital channels are strong.”
- Fran Rosch, CEO at Forgerock
“About year and a half ago as we were doing our failure case analysis for a new company we had acquired, we considered what we would do if people couldn’t work or we couldn’t ship products. We modeled scenarios, and when the novel coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, we were able to quickly establish a virtual command center rather than using the planned one in Shenzhen. We triggered our plan and it went smoothly.“We didn’t know it would be global or last so long, but having a plan meant we were prepared. Even then, however, we still struggled with our global supply chain. We learned about resilience and are now using computer algorithms to make sure we’re managing multidimensional risk in that supply chain.”
- Ralph Loura, CIO at Lumentum
Read other parts of the panel discussion:
