Digitally connecting the future

Photo by Steve Wheeler

I joined the press pack in Paris last week to attend two events sponsored by electronics giant Huawei. The first was European Innovation Day, an event held at the elegant Hotel Salomon de Rothschild building that showcased innovative uses of digital technology in education, health, industry and culture. I'll be reporting on that event in another post.

But first, here's a report on #HCE2019 - otherwise known as Huawei Eco-connect Europe - a mega event held in the Paris Palais de Congres. HCE2019 was attended by around 2000 delegates drawn from a wide spectrum of European society. Many of the sessions focused on the immense task of digitally connecting society, and I was pleased to see that the key emphasis of the conference was on people rather than technology.

One session that epitomised this emphasis was a panel discussion moderated by Jennifer Schenker, editor-in-chief of The Innovator. It featured four CEOs who explored the cultural and human aspects of digital transformation. Transforming organisations and practices is never easy, but the panellists offered some interesting perspectives on how it might be achievable in a time of volatility in the industrial world.

Isabelle Kocher, CEO of the French utility company Engie, argued that digital transformation is not an event, but an ongoing journey. She said: "If you hear a CEO say 'Digital transformation is now complete' the company is in trouble. Transformation is an ongoing, never ending process."

President of Huawei's Enterprise Business Group for Western Europe Ernest Zhang wished to identify the constraints to transformation in organisations and thought that lack of knowledge about technology is one of the biggest barriers to digital transformation in organisations. Structure, traditional IT systems and existing culture are all a part of the problem, he suggested.

Jean Stephane Arcis, CEO of HR and recruitment company Talentsoft focused on the customers, and argued that "the holy grail of today's business (retail sector) is to create mass personalisation of everything. It's transformation of the business model."

Finally, Nicolas Petrovic, CEO of Siemens SAS focused on the learning and development imperative as an important component of strategic transformation. He said that the new challenges of business is to ensure that all employees engage in continuous learning. Companies need to support collaboration across the workforce and break down the silos of isolation, he warned.

Digitally connecting the future by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's