Companies too need to adopt a digital mindset

PEOPLE talk a lot about digital transformation, but they rarely understand what it is or how to achieve it.

A survey of senior executives found that 70 per cent of all digital transformation projects do not reach their goals. Of the US$1.3 trillion that was spent on digital transformation last year, it was estimated that US$900 billion went to waste.

That is because some leaders tend to only focus on the “digital” part, while not giving adequate attention to what underpins a successful digital transformation: a digital mindset.

Researchers Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi proposed that a digital mindset encapsulates a set of attitudes, behaviours and literacies that enable people across an organisation to understand how data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI) may open new possibilities for their functions to chart a path for success for their enterprise in an increasingly technology-intensive world.

And nowhere do we see a keener potential for digital mindsets to be cultivated and applied than in the insurance industry.

Digital transformations start with changing minds

Over the last decade, the global insurance market has been under pressure to change the way they engage with an increasingly selective and price-sensitive customer base.

It is not unusual to hear that once a customer has taken out a policy, they often find their insurance provider offering a limited and outdated digital experience that usually entails customers having to call them to make claims, renew, cancel their policies, or painstakingly be put on hold in the call centre queue.

To make matters worse, such lacklustre customer experiences are compounded in Asia where people tend to view insurance companies rather inauspiciously, as entities associated with circumstances that are negative and untoward for policyholders.

Going against these stereotypes, digital insurer FWD Group launched omne, a new mobile app designed to help people live their best lives through tools that foster micro-habits, achieve daily goals and to meet the evolving demands of Asia’s growing digital and mobile population.

“A critical part of how we’re changing the way people feel about insurance is reimagining how we bring value to, and anticipate, the evolving demands of Asia’s ever more digital and mobile population,” said Troy Barnes, chief transformation officer, FWD Group in August this year.

Through data sharing with its ecosystem of partners and AI-powered data systems, omne has been engineered to deliver a unique app experience that is hyper-personalised to the individual user. To achieve this, FWD applied human-centred design principles to the company’s digital transformation and app development journeys, enabling FWD’s teams to truly empathise with the individual users the app serves by visualising the personas of their customers not just through numbers and spreadsheets.

Instead of being obsessed with the allure of big data and digital platforms, FWD treated these advanced technologies as strategic enablers to adapt their digital operating model to the changing aspirations and needs of their customers in Asia.

And by changing how customers feel and think about insurance, FWD’s omne has earned strong recognition across the region as a platform that empowers users to celebrate life to the fullest.

Cultivating a digital mindset for societal good

Like FWD, Singapore’s Smart Nation and Digital Government Office has embarked on concerted efforts to help public officers acquire a digital mindset too.

By forging training partnerships with industry partners, GovTech enabled these officers to gain access to a bespoke selection of content, learning resources, and subject matter experts where concepts and best practices in digital skills and data analytics were being constantly refreshed.

Fortuitously, it did not take long for some of these officers to apply what they had acquired to good use.

Between August and November 2016, Singapore’s public subway system faced serious disruptions that resulted in multiple delays to its train services. They came on the heels of gargantuan efforts by the Land Transport Authority and train operator SMRT to repair and upgrade the country’s ageing rail network.

Not to be discouraged, GovTech’s officers spared no time in discovering the cause of the multiple disruptions and found that trains were stopping when they lost signal communication with base stations.

By analysing the data of the timing of each train’s stops against distance, represented as stations against traces of trains moving through the system, officers found that the train faults tended to occur in sequence, in the same direction, and at the speed of a moving train. This led the team to the conclusion that the culprit causing trains to lose signal and halt could be a train passing by on the other side of the track, leaving broken-down trains in its wake.

A director at GovTech’s Government Digital Services Data Science Division said in 2017: “We thought we were looking at the boat, but we were actually looking at the waves caused by the boat.” The rogue train was pulled out of service, and the breakdowns that had plagued the system and continued to affect thousands of commuters for months stopped completely.

In a similar way, the officers supporting Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB) have applied analytic skills to better plan apartment blocks. Dr Hee Li Min, director of research at the Centre for Liveable Cities, said: “Parameters such as wind, shading and urban heat effect are modelled and simulated even before the first brick is laid, so that when the buildings are finally constructed, living conditions are more pleasurable.”

These examples show that cultivating a digital mindset is not simply the reserve of the private sector. When mastered by public officers, literacies stemming from a digital mindset can inspire meaningful digital transformations for the broader, societal good.

A constant process of mastery and adaptation 

Today, we are seeing new digital business models increasingly being enabled by emerging technologies such as deep-learning AI, the metaverse, Web3, advanced robotics, and connected devices supported by edge computing and 5G networks.

In this milieu, it would be understandable for many leaders to feel compelled to start digital transformation projects in a bid to manage the changing customer expectations and competitive forces shaped by these digital technologies. In fact, companies are already projected to make investments in digital transformation to the tune of US$1.5 trillion over the next five years.

Yet for these investments to succeed, leaders ought to be guided by a digital mindset that inspires their teams to view digital transformation not merely as something to achieve and then forget, but as a constant process of mastery and adaptation for an uncertain digital future.

The writer is chief executive officer of Temus, a digital transformation company established by Temasek and global digital services firm UST.