Tag: employee experience

The technology market in Thailand continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, creating both exciting opportunities and significant challenges for tech leaders in the country. Real-world AI applications and cloud expansion define the future of IT strategies in 2024, as organisations push digital transformation forward. Understanding these trends is crucial for navigating today’s market complexities and achieving exponential growth. Here are the opportunities in the Thailand technology landscape and insights on how to address them effectively.

Tech Modernisation: Breaking Free from Vendor Lock-in

Data centre consolidation and infrastructure modernisation remain top priorities for organisations in Thailand. These processes catalyse the ‘de-requisitioning’ removing outdated or unnecessary technology from an organisation’s infrastructure. But vendor lock-ins pose challenges for organisations, mainly stifling organisational flexibility, hindering innovation, and exposing them to business disruption risks.

44% of organisations in Thailand are focused on consolidating data centres and modernising tech stacks to mitigate vendor lock-ins and enhance operational efficiency.

Modernising infrastructure reduces reliance on single vendors and improves scalability and resilience. Despite the widespread adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, effectively managing these systems remains challenging and requires additional strategic investments.

Over-reliance on a single provider can expose organisations to new risks. This is why CIOs in Thailand are taking decisive steps to combat technology vendor lock-in. They are centralising and modernising their data centres and enhancing cross-platform tools to reduce vendor dependency.

This approach is key to their long-term growth and innovation, allowing them to remain at the forefront of the digital transformation landscape, ready to leverage emerging technologies and adapt to expanding business challenges.

The Hybrid Cloud Labyrinth: Managing Complexity for Success

Nearly 60% of Thailand organisations have embraced hybrid and multi-cloud environments, but the challenges of managing the complexity are often underestimated.

Hybrid strategies offer numerous benefits, such as increased flexibility, optimised performance, and enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. However, managing different cloud providers, each with its unique interface and operational management tools can be challenging.

The challenges of managing a hybrid IT environment are indeed multifaceted. Integration requires harmonising various technology services to work together seamlessly, which can be complex due to differing architectures and protocols. Security is another primary concern, as managing security across on-premises and multiple cloud providers necessitates consistent policies and vigilant monitoring to prevent breaches and ensure compliance. Additionally, efficiently utilising resources across hybrid clouds involves sophisticated monitoring and automation tools to optimise performance and cost-effectiveness. These challenges are real and pressing, and they demand attention and action.

Alarmingly, only 1% of organisations in Thailand plan to increase their investments in hybrid cloud management in 2024.

Organisations can ensure seamless integration, consistent security readiness, and efficient resource utilisation across diverse cloud platforms by investing in robust tools and practices for effective hybrid cloud management. This mitigates operational risks and security vulnerabilities and leads to cost savings due to well-managed cloud environments.

It’s crucial for CIOs in Thailand to urgently prioritise investing in new comprehensive management solutions and developing the necessary skills within their IT teams. This involves training staff on the latest hybrid cloud management technologies and best practices and adopting advanced tools that provide visibility and control over multi-cloud operations. Cracking the hybrid/multi-cloud code empowers CIOs to not only navigate these environments, but also unlock the potential of advanced technologies like AI, ultimately driving superior IT services and expanded business growth. The urgency of this task cannot be overstated, and the sooner you act, the better prepared your organisation will be for the future.

The Future of Work: AI Adoption for Enhanced Productivity

AI is a powerful tool for improving employee productivity and transforming internal operations.

However, only 12% of Thailand’s organisations invest in AI to enhance the employee experience.

This represents a missed opportunity for organisations to utilise AI’s potential to streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and provide personalised support to employees.

AI can significantly enhance operational efficiency by automating routine tasks, enabling staff to focus on strategic initiatives. For instance, AI-driven analytics platforms can process vast amounts of data in real time, providing actionable insights that help businesses make informed decisions quickly. AI frees employees to focus on higher-level tasks like developing innovative solutions and strategies. This empowers them to take on more strategic roles, fostering personal growth and career advancement.

The early adopters of AI in Thailand are already reaping the benefits, gaining significant competitive edge by enhancing employee productivity and satisfaction.

In Thailand AI adoption is gaining momentum within tech teams – 44% are exploring its potential for various use cases.

However, its capabilities extend far beyond. AI encompasses a wide range of technologies that can generate content, such as text, images, and code, based on input data. These versatile capabilities are not limited to tech teams, but can also be used for content creation, process automation, and product design in various industries. The success of these early adopters should inspire other Thailand organisations to consider AI adoption as a means to stay ahead in the market. 

The enthusiasm for AI has yet to extend beyond tech teams, with only 19% of business units considering its adoption.

This difference highlights an opportunity for CIOs in the country to play a crucial role in advocating for broader AI adoption across the organisation. By demonstrating the tangible benefits, such as increased efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced innovation, CIOs can drive more widespread acceptance and use. Encouraging cross-departmental collaboration and training on AI applications can further support its integration across business operations. CIO leadership is crucial for successful AI adoption.

The Importance of a Collaborative Ecosystem

Together, we can navigate the intricacies of advanced technologies and foster innovation in Thailand organisation. These market trends should guide you on how to establish a resilient and adaptable IT infrastructure that facilitate long-term growth and innovation. Emphasising modernisation and the strategic use of AI will enhance operational efficiency and position your organisation to harness emerging technologies effectively, all while being part of a supportive and collaborative community. 

Stay tuned for more Ecosystm insights and guidance on navigating the Thailand technology landscape, ensuring your organisation remains at the forefront of digital transformation.

The Philippines, renowned as a global contact centre hub, is experiencing heightened pressure on the global stage, leading to intensified competition within the country. Smaller BPOs are driving larger players to innovate, requiring a stronger focus on empowering customer experience (CX) teams, and enhancing employee experience (EX) in organisations in the Philippines.

As the Philippines expands its global footprint, organisations must embrace progressive approaches to outpace rivals in the CX sector.

These priorities can be achieved through a robust data strategy that empowers CX teams and contact centres to glean actionable insights.

Here are 5 ways organisations in the Philippines can achieve their CX objectives.

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Customer teams in Singapore face a complex challenge. Organisations recognise the significance of a distinctive customer experience (CX) and adaptability to market shifts in a competitive landscape. They also prioritise enhancing employee experience (EX) and reducing costs. Balancing these priorities requires recalibrating across people, processes, and technologies.

This underscores the pivotal role of data in CX transformation. When CX teams and contact centres prioritise data in all their initiatives, they gain deep insights into customer journeys, facilitating proactive service delivery, enhancing self-service mechanisms, and fostering genuine innovation in customer engagement.

Here are 5 ways organisations in Singapore can achieve these business objectives.

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It seems for many employees, the benefits of working from home or even adopting a hybrid model are a thing of the past. Employees are returning to the grind of long commutes and losing hours in transit. What is driving this shift in sentiment? CEOs, who once rooted for remote work, have undergone a change of heart – many say that remote work hampers their ability to innovate.

That may not be the real reason, however. There is a good chance that the CEO and/or other managers feel they have lost control or visibility over their employees. Returning to a more traditional management approach, where everyone is within direct sight, might seem like a simpler solution.  

The Myths of Workplace Innovation

I find it ironic that organisations say they want employees to come into the office because they cannot innovate at the same rate. What the last few years have demonstrated – and quite conclusively – is that employees can innovate wherever they are, if they are driven to it and have the right tools. So, organisations need to evaluate whether they have innovated on and evolved their hybrid and remote work solutions effectively, to continue to support hybrid work – and innovation.

What is confusing about this stance that many organisations are taking, is that when an organisation has multiple offices, they are effectively a hybrid business – they have had people working from different locations, but have never felt the need to get all their staff together for 3-5 days every week for organisation-wide innovation that is suddenly so important today.

The CEO of a tech research firm once said – the office used to be considered the place to get together to use the tools we need to innovate; but the reality is that the office is just one of the tools that businesses have, to drive their organisation forward. Ironically, this same CEO has recently called everyone back into the office 3 days a week!

Is Remote Work the Next Step in Employee Rights?

It has become clear that remote and hybrid work is the next step in employees getting greater rights. Many organisations fought against the five-day work weeks, claiming they wouldn’t make as much money as they did when employees worked whenever they were told. They fought against the 40-hour work week (in France some fought against the 35-hour work week!) They fight against the introduction of new public holidays, against increases to the minimum wages, against paid parental leave.

Some industries, companies, unions, and countries are looking to (or already have) formalised hybrid and remote work in their policies and regulations. More unions and businesses will do this – and employees will have choice.

People will have the option to work for an employer who wants their employees to come into the office – or work for someone else. And this will depend on preferences and working styles – some employees enjoy the time spent away from home and like the social nature of office environments. But many also like the extra time, money, and flexibility that remote work allows.

There might be many reasons why leadership teams would want employees to come into the office – and establishing and maintaining a common corporate culture would be a leading reason. But what they need to do is stop pretending it is about “innovation”. Innovation is possible while working remotely, as it is when working from separate offices or even different floors within the same building. 

Evolving Employee Experience & Collaboration Needs

Organisations today face a challenge – and it is not the inability to innovate in a hybrid work environment! It is in their ability to deliver the employee experience that their employees want. This is more challenging now because there are more preferences, options, and technologies available. But it is established that organisations need to continue to evolve their employee experience.

Technology does and will continue to play an important role in keeping our employees connected and productive. AI – such as Microsoft Copilot – will continue to improve our productivity. But the management needs to evolve with the technology. If the senior management feels that connecting people will help to solve the current growth challenges in the business, then it becomes the role of managers to better connect people – not just teams in offices, but virtual teams across the entire organisation.

Organisations that have focused their energies on connecting their employees better, regardless of their location (such as REA in Australia), find that productivity and innovation rates are better than when people are physically together. What do they do differently?

• Managers find their roles have moved from supporting individual employees to connecting employees
• Documentation of progress and challenges means that everyone knows where to focus their energies
• Managed virtual (and in-person) meetings mean that everyone has a voice and gets to contribute (not the loudest, most talkative or most senior person)

Remote and hybrid workers are often well-positioned to come up with new and innovative ideas. Senior management can encourage innovation and risk-taking by creating a safe environment for employees to share their ideas and by providing them with the resources they need to develop and implement their ideas. Sometimes these resources are in an office – but they don’t have to be. Manufacturers are quickly moving to complete digital development, prototyping, and testing of their new and improved products and services. Digital is often faster, better, and more innovative than physical – but employees need to be allowed to embrace these new platforms and tools to drive better organisational and customer outcomes.

What the pandemic has taught us is that people are good at solving problems; they are good at innovating irrespective of whether their managers are watching or not.

Organisations have had to transform and innovate to survive over the last two years. However, now when they look at their competitors, they see that everyone has innovated at about the same pace. The 7-year innovation cycle is history in today’s world – organisations need the right strategy and technologies to bring the time to market for innovations down to 1-2 years.

As they continue to innovate to stay ahead of the competition, here are 5 things organisations in India should keep in mind:

• The drivers of innovation will shift rapidly and industry trends need to be monitored continually to adapt to these shifts.
• Their biggest challenge in deploying Data & AI solutions will be identification of the right data for the right purpose – this will require a robust data architecture.
• While customer experience gives them immediate and tangible benefits, employee experience is almost equally – if not more – important.
• Cloud investments have helped build distributed enterprises – but streamlining investments needs a lot of focus now.
• There is a misalignment between organisations’ overall awareness of growing cyber threats and risks and their responses to them. A new cyber approach is urgently needed.

More insights into the India tech market are below.

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Businesses in Australia have come a long way over the past few years in digitising their processes and capabilities. In early 2020 – as the pandemic swept across the globe – nearly every business began to understand the challenges that lay ahead in digitising their organisation to meet the needs of fully remote employees and customers. Teams all across the business started to plug holes, reshape processes and deploy new technology capabilities to quickly meet these changing needs. This work continued over the next few years to the point now that most businesses in Australia have fully digital front-ends.

But as businesses move to “COVID normal” they are looking to the next opportunity. Digitising existing processes isn’t enough – they are starting to accelerate their innovation to create entirely new digitally native products and services. Growth by selling more of what they make is being replaced by a desire to grow into new markets, new products and new services. Business innovation has leapt back onto the agenda – and the ability to innovate at pace will define success in this new era.

Improving IT Operations is a Major Priority for Tech Leaders in Australia

At the same time, technology leaders and their teams are dealing with technical debt and process complexity brought on by two years of accelerated and unplanned technology implementations. There is an urgent need to modernise IT Operations to better manage the growing number and complexity of digital systems. With the increasing importance of digital services to business, the Service Management and Tech Operations functions need increased investment, better processes, and greater automation to find and fix technology issues to minimise the impact of these issues on customer and employee outages.

The Skills Crisis is Real – and Not Going Away Soon

The challenge today is to drive this important change while faced with the tech skills shortage. IT has not been spared the struggles that come with a low unemployment market – but often many of the Employee Experience initiatives designed to improve employee retention and loyalty are not designed with the tech team in mind. The demand for tech skills is from the lowest to the highest levels – from level 1 helpdesk operators to security, coding, cloud, and system management professionals – tech leaders are finding it very difficult to find and keep good staff.

Hybrid Cloud is Gaining Traction in Australia

As tech leaders design the technology team and architecture that will help to drive their business forward and enable the agile, innovative future that the business leaders imagine, it is becoming clear that the hybrid cloud will play an increasingly important role in this future. While the drive to public cloud is real – there is an increasing recognition that some applications will remain in private cloud environments and therefore they need to manage a multi-cloud world. Australian businesses have embraced hybrid cloud management platforms to manage their many cloud investments – both public and private – and help the business deliver new digital services at pace.

Tech Leaders Need to Perform a Balancing Act

The need to deploy new digital services, continuously improve them, make them always available, ensure they are running in the best environment, deliver automation and AI initiatives using great data – while finding and keeping the skills the tech team needs – are the real challenges that IT leaders face today. Finding the right balance between investment, automation, skills, governance, security, speed and agility (amongst many other factors) is the never-ending job of the CIO – it is just more crucial than ever that they get this right, as the ability of the business to survive and thrive in this new era of innovation and agility is at stake.

In comparison to the golden days of the second half of the 20^th century, the last two decades have been hard hit. The fragility of globalisation and that prosperous economic model so beautifully enabled by a 70-year technology revolution, have tested business continuity and disaster recovery plans like never before.

Looking Back

HR has the biggest role to play in shaping the employee experience that an organisation provides – and it cannot achieve this without a close alliance with the Tech/Digital Team. While this synergy is missing in most organisations, HR teams need to step up by listening to what their employees are saying. Having an understanding of how perspectives change based on employees’ demographic profiles, can help HR teams immensely.

At Ecosystm we pride ourselves in keeping a finger on the pulse of the market. There is a lot of buzz around the ‘Digital Workplace’. For the last two years you have focused on technologies that allow employees to work from home – or from anywhere they choose to. Now the focus of the tech investments is on empowering employees to return to the physical office and creating a true hybrid workplace.

As you define the work model that works for your organisation, now is the time to listen to your employees. The newly launched Ecosystm Voice of the Employee Study aims to do just that.

The study aims to explore the emerging global Future of Work trends from an employee’s point-of-view. In an environment of uncertainty, this is designed to be an ongoing, dynamic study that will be able to track the major shifts in preferences, perceptions, and practices over the year.  

Here are some key findings from the ongoing study.

1. 2022 will be another year of flux – The Great Resignation may well impact you.
2. You may not be giving enough choices to your employees
3. It is time to get your workplace ready – and embrace a hybrid work model
4. Your employees are more tech-savvy than even before
5. Employee Experience will have to remain a priority

Read on to find more about the study findings.

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