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Insight Prysmian Magazine

Taking digital transformation to the next level with "tech intensity"

Author: Silvia Candiani
Author: Silvia Candiani

 

Recently, our CEO Satya Nadella started the call for the quarterly earnings report of Microsoft to Wall Street saying:

“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything”.

In the pandemic emergency the case for digital transformation has never been more urgent. As we navigate the response, recovery and the reimagine phases, technology is more important than ever. For any organization to succeed in this unchartered time, they will need to empower employees, develop a new culture of hybrid work, engage their customers in new ways, intelligently and virtually, transform products and services with new business models, and optimize operations to keep customers and employees safe and secure. Companies needs also to take make data flow among different systems to be able to make rapid decision and react to the new changing world.  We call this tech intensity and it's key to business resilience as well as transformation.

Tech intensity envisions three elements, that I see strongly aligned with Prysmian’s values:

  • First, how companies adopt the latest technology and integrate it into their organization, with a strong drive to achieve business results.
  • Second, how companies build their own unique digital capability, in a simple and effective way. As today “every company is a digital company”, each organization needs to build a culture where all people are part of the innovation process and are able to learn how to reimagine the business and process with digital innovation.
  • Lastly – but not least – trust: both trust in technology, and trust in business model alignment. No customer wants to depend on a provider that sells them technology on one end and then competes with them on the other.

There are many challenges that businesses face when they want to embrace tech intensity. Interestingly, the root cause of many of the challenges customers face most is also the potential solution – data. Data is generated by virtually limitless sources, and the pace of data growth is only increasing: IDC estimates that by 2025 the world's data will grow to 175 zettabytes - 175 trillion gigabytes. That is also a 9% increase over the same prediction a year ago. When it comes to generating data, we're outpacing even our own expectations. With all of this data, the challenge organizations face is not just how to deal with the volume - it's also finding ways to generate new customer value leveraging that data. That's how organizations become industry leaders.

From my perspective, based on Microsoft’s own digital transformation journey and on what we are observing in the market today, there are also three other areas to consider to become a future ready organization with digital:

Cloud Platform and Artificial Intelligence

To reduce time to market of digital transformation projects, today cloud platforms offer a solid foundation to build on solutions that respond to business needs. Microsoft’s holistic cloud platform spans application infrastructure, data & AI, developer tools and services, security & compliance, business process, productivity, and collaboration. It is the interconnected nature of our cohesive platform and its experiences which enables customers to achieve the key outcomes that make up their organization full engine works accordingly: empowering employees with connected collaboration, engaging customers with connected experience, transforming products with connected innovation and optimizing operations with connected insights.

Security

Cybersecurity is the central challenge of the digital age, especially now that the world counts on technology even more. Without it, the most basic human rights like privacy cannot exist. Every day organizations take precious time and resources away from their core business mission to defend against and recover from cyberattacks. They operate dozens of complex disconnected tools, yet the gaps between those tools remain and threats get through. Their security teams struggle to keep up and skilled expertise is scarce. We are uniquely positioned to help and today we’re empowering IT to unlock the security capabilities of the cloud to tip the scales in the cyber war to protect companies and citizens.

Skilling and Reskilling

Increasingly, one of the key steps needed to foster a safe and successful economic recovery is expanded access to the digital skills needed to fill new jobs. And one of the keys to a genuinely inclusive recovery are programs to provide easier access to digital skills for people hardest hit by job losses, including those with lower incomes, women, and unserved communities. To help address this need, we’re deeply committed with global and local partner to skills initiatives aimed at bringing more digital skills million people worldwide. Our vision for skills extends beyond these immediate steps for job seekers. Employees will also need to skill and reskill through their careers, and we want to make it easier for employers to help. Our vision is a connected “system of learning” that helps empower everyone to pursue lifelong learning.

Recently, in Italy we have announced a $1.5 billion, five-year investment plan in the country, marking a significant commitment to support local innovation and growth, including the intent to bring Microsoft’s first datacenter region to the country. The plan “Ambizione Italia #DigitalRestart” builds on the strategic initiative “Ambizione Italia“ launched in 2018 and will create new opportunities by empowering people and organizations and supporting economic growth. Microsoft will deliver access to local cloud services, launch digital skilling and smart-working programs, accelerate business’ restart by providing access to AI Hubs and programs for SMBs, as well as support the country by launching a Sustainability Alliance. Sustainability is one of main Microsoft commitment for a better future, in Italy and across the world, as technology can help accelerating global progress towards a more sustainable future. Microsoft has been carbon neutral across the world since 2012 and commits to being carbon negative by 2030. Our goal is to promote sustainable development and low-carbon business practices globally through our sustainable business practices and cloud-enabled technologies, and I see this as another great example of values alignment between Microsoft and Prysmian.

We believe technology can and should be a force for good, which is why we aspire for meaningful innovation rather than innovation or innovation’s sake—because the roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself, but in what that innovation enables people to achieve.