This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 5, 2021 - July 11, 2021

Since the Covid-19 outbreak, many companies, especially large enterprises, have successfully migrated to the cloud. And if they have not, they are being pressured to do so and catch up with the others. According to its promoters, getting onto the cloud enables companies to reduce their costs as well as become more resilient and efficient in their operations. 

Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) chief digital officer Aadrin Azly, a panellist at the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Asean Summit, says migrating to the cloud helped the company bounce back at a time when the oil and gas industry was going through a cyclical slump.

While most companies were unprepared for the abrupt shift to remote working, Petronas was able to quickly adjust, he shares, adding that the seamless transition was thanks to the work that the national oil company had already done with AWS. And out of necessity, what should have taken two years to implement was compressed into three months.

“When Covid-19 happened, we could [have reacted] within months, even weeks. But this did not happen overnight. In short, I guess everything happened through a mixture of necessity and foresight planning,” says Aadrin.

But it was not just the pandemic and the organisation’s high-level strategy that allowed it to digitally transform its operations so quickly. Aadrin says much of its success came from transforming the culture, mindset and capabilities of its staff, bearing in mind that this industry is not digitally native to begin with.

“You have a lot of processes and artifacts that served well in the past but, moving forward, they need to be disrupted. I think the biggest challenge was trying to get people to change in terms of not only mindset and culture but also processes and policies,” he says.

Undeniably, companies need skilled talent to migrate successfully to the cloud. According to the State of Cloud Learning Report 2020 by online training platform A Cloud Guru, more than 80% of organisation leaders see a lack of internal skills and knowledge as the top barrier to cloud migration. 

Additionally, in the LinkedIn Learning 2020 Workplace Learning Report, cloud computing is listed by employers as the second most difficult to obtain skill. This comes about as migrating to the cloud has become a priority for most companies. Therefore, those that have the resources to do so, such as Petronas, have introduced upskilling efforts for their own staff to speed up the process.

According to the Petronas Sustainability Report 2019, Petronas introduced a microlearning initiative that seamlessly embeds learning within employees’ day-to-day activities. Aadrin also mentions its mobile app SWITCH, which incorporates curated learning content and gamification as part of its microlearning initiative.

Through these methods, Petronas has successfully upskilled some 2,000 employees in areas such as cloud analytics, software engineering and design thinking. 

“Upskilling is critical because, ultimately, it’s about how people embrace and adopt change. It’s a make-or-break [situation] when it comes to transformation,” Aadrin says. “Digitalisation cannot be [solely] driven by a digital team or a chief digital officer.”

How does an organisation manage to keep everyone on the same page in pushing cloud innovation? It depends on the leadership. 

Another panellist at the AWS Summit, Aviva Singlife chief information officer Santosh Gon points out that if an organisation wishes to cultivate trust within its workforce in connection with technology and digitalisation, it needs to set up a digital board, which drives more discussion around these topics. 

The digital board, he says, played a key role in Aviva Singlife’s digital transformation over the last 18 to 24 months. Those on the board frequently asked key questions such as whether the company could change its structure, build a broad digital strategy and leverage its investments in digitalisation within the ecosystem.

“We are now focusing on things that could have been done better. Now we have the board focused on the business strategy in technology,” Santosh says.

With a strategic digital board, Aviva Singlife has cultivated an environment that allows people to fail fast and then succeed. The company gives its employees the freedom to experiment by going through rapid ideations and building minimum viable products (MVPs). Staff are more than welcome to contribute to the overall strategy.

“Managing cloud infrastructure with AWS, we started to encourage the team to leverage this for all the rapid prototyping,” says Santosh, adding that in the past, it could take weeks to properly use any infrastructure. “For example, even before we start to build any platform, a lot of effort goes into focus groups looking at the customer journey. We only build prototypes before starting on the actual product development.”

Besides hands-on experimentation, Santosh also uses AWS certification and training programmes to cultivate a continuous improvement mindset. Apart from technical skills, he focuses on soft skills such as honing the communication capabilities within the team, with special emphasis on preparing them to face other business players without a technical background. 

With the learner mindset, Aviva Singlife was swift to migrate the call centre to the cloud using AWS product Amazon Connect amid the pandemic. Santosh says he has observed a surge in email-related transactions compared with phone calls during the pandemic, and the fixed desks and phone lines may soon be obsolete. He is all for cloud call centres. “The cloud call centre gives our staff more flexibility to handle complicated situations and enables the teams to consistently deliver a great customer experience.”

Santosh adds that cloud infrastructure helps drive a mindset of change and innovation. “Innovation, in another context, is identifying the pain points of customers [and coming up with a solution to address them].”

Petronas’ Aadrin says the sky is the limit when it comes to technological innovation. The caveat, however, is the people. People can drive technology further but they can also limit how far the technology can go, says Aadrin. “At the end of the day, it is about investing in people and empowering them to disrupt and innovate.”

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